we be jaminSeptember 9, 2005 10:12 am
Today I lost my best friend - Asha (29 March 1995 – 9 September 2005)
Asha was a wilful, disobedient dog and, as such, fit in perfectly with the rest of the family. The kids in our family didn’t teach her the normal tricks of sitting, begging, or playing dead. Instead, we taught her how to open the door and come inside when she wasn’t allowed, knock down the make-shift gate erected later to prevent her from opening the door, and come over and sit next to us when our mum and dad were commanding her out of the house.
Since she joined our family, all the flowers, plants, trees and bushes in our backyard were destroyed by Asha either digging them up or running into/through them. She was impervious to being disciplined from destroying the garden, whether discipline took the form of being sprayed with a hose or buried up to her neck in the holes she had dug.
Over the years she graduated from being an outside dog to being allowed in the house pretty much whenever she wanted (the kids’ training had paid off). She liked to lie in the front entrance and look out the front door. We figured she liked to look at activity out on the street, but this theory was debunked the last time she got loose – we found her lying outside the front door, looking in – it turns out she just liked staring at the flyscreen.
There are so many special memories that I have of her - she slashed my chest with her claws as she climbed up my body and onto my shoulders when I took her into rough surf at the beach, she held the neighbour’s cat’s head in her mouth after it took a swipe at her, she peed on the porch when us kids came around the house with cereal boxes covering our heads pretending to be prowlers, she’d occasionally emit loud howls in her sleep and scare me awake, she would sit/stand/sleep in ‘her chair’ next to the back door and let out a noise akin to a yawn every now and then to make sure we had not forgotten her. But my most treasured memories are mundane - just those of sitting next to her and patting her – she liked the area around her ears being rubbed especially. She mellowed out during the second half of her life and will be remembered as a gentle and affectionate dog by all.
Asha was a dog with a big heart. In fact, it was four-and-a-half times the normal size of a heart thanks to cardiomyopathy. She slowed down a lot over the last six months of her life, eventually developing breathing problems due to the cardiomyopathy and cancer, but she was still chasing after birds in the backyard less than a week before her condition made it necessary to have her put down. She came damn close to catching one too.
