Ode to Spike

My grandmother and great-grandmother used to tell me about Spike, the family pet.  My great grandfather was away during WWII – he was stationed off in the Pacific, leaving his wife and 4 children to move to his mother’s homestead property on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona.  Their new home was a clapboard house with an outhouse in the middle of the desert – no neighbors to be seen, and they shared this desolate home with Spike, the first male Staffordshire terrier in the State of Arizona. 

Spike was well loved, with four kids in a new place that they were not fond of, bored out of their minds, he put up with their hugs, loving, dragging him everywhere with them, he made a great impression on those kids – he was their one and only best friend until school started. 

This dog was trained to kill anything non-human, so because of this, Spike never left any progeny.  The female pit bull was of no interest to him, he only had interest in hunting snakes, lizards and vermin. 

One time a man showed up in a truck with a small poodle.  Spike literally had to be stunned by a smack on the head with a shovel to save the poodle’s life…. It wasn’t Spike’s fault, he was only doing his job… and the man was warned before this incident…not to open his car door and get out – but he refused to listen…

Spike’s other fun activities made him seem very human with a wicked sense of humor, such as escorting the children in the pitch black of night to the outhouse, and then…. Leaving them!  Or, leaving presents, such as a 6 foot dead rattle snake on the floor beside their beds in the morning.

All the stories about Spike, he even became my beloved dog, yet he passed away a long time before I was even a glimmer in my mother’s eye, before my mother was even a glimmer in my grandmother’s eye for that matter. 

R.I.P Spike!!!!!