Domino was a border collie. When we first met him he was a fistful of dog, puppy face all bright eyes and wet nose and open mouth. The Ogwife was pregnant for the Oglet and as she picked him up his teeny tail wagged furiously and he peed on her big belly. “we’re his now” the Ogwife said, “he’s marked his territory”.

As he grew, he became a little less border collie-ish and more like an ambitious lab. He was naturally gregarious, and loved everyone and everything. he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He would lick you soggy rather than bite you. And he loved to play.

In those days the Ogwife and i slept in a full size mattress, and Domino and Cooney slept with us. Cooney was, at the time, a fat orange cat, who made Garfield look like Callista Flockheart. The routine went like this: I’d climb in bed and lay on my right side, and cooney would curl up between my legs, and Domino would hump my left hip from the north, then from the south, and then the east and west. This wasn’t apparentl;y dominance behavior, because the dog was clearly submissive to everyone, I never did understand it, but he had to do it before he could fall asleep every night. Then he would eat Cooney a little, and nod off. SOmetimes he’d wake up in the night and have minor skirmishes with Cooney, and big as I am and with the Ogwife pregnant with the Oglet, a dog and a cat fighting in a full size bed was like trying to sleep in an insurrection. Towards the end of the pregnancy I would have to get out of bed to turn over if I wanted to.

When the Oglet came along he was enthralled. He loved to smell her and sniff her and lick milk drool off her face, and when she took her first tottering steps, she did so with his fur gripped in her tiny fists, and he led her around. She loved to squeeze and rub his ears, and often pulled them with some enthusiasm, which he never seemed to mind.

One day as he lay sleeping at my feet while I watched TV, he had a seizure. I was scared but it seemed to be an isolated incident. We went months before we saw another one. Then one week he had four, and we took him to the vet. The vet tried several medications over the course of the next couple months, and we never did have any idea what was causing them nor if the medication was helping. Finally one day he lay on the floor and seized almost continuously for an hour, stopping for a few brief seconds here and there, gasping for air, tongue lolling out of his mouth, drool and shit and piss, and looking at me as if to say, why is this happening? please make it stop, I am afraid, and it hurts so…

Shit, Domino died some twelve years ago, and this still hurts pretty bad.

Anyway, we took him to an emergency vet clinic close by, and the vet, unable to do anything else, put him down. We donated his body for research at the request of the vet, so someone else could be spared the same thing, maybe. The Ogwife and I cried in each other’s arms for several hours that night.

If Domino doesn’t greet me, wagging his tail and licking my face, when I pass over, the Creator and I are going to have some words.