Where you the reader take over! Photos and blurbs to peter.b.abrahams@gmail.com. And now over to WTAFP, a friend of the blog and of mine.

My Best Friend Casey
A Remembrance
By Wookie Lamb-Mechanick

Casey was my best friend. He died on May 10th this year (2009), which was also Mothers Day. I know it made his mom and my mom very sad, and it made me very sad too. When I was a young dog, Casey taught me everything a young dog needs to know. More importantly, he helped me find my forever home, which just happened to be next door to his forever home. There could be no better best friend than that.
Casey and I are both rescued dogs. That means that our original people gave us up for some reason or another, which is why we had to find our forever homes on our own, or at least with the help of the Golden Retriever Rescue Education and Training League (GRREAT). Casey was about five years older than me (when you are a rescued dog, you don’t always know your exact age), having found his forever home in 1998 about a year and a half after he was born. He told me that he had had a very rough life before that, seriously malnourished with parasites and other problems from neglect and abuse when GRREAT rescued him. I think that is why he was always hungry, even after finding his forever home (my mom sometimes would refer to him as “Hoover” after the vacuum cleaner). That probably also explains his penchant for picking up frogs in his mouth (although he never ate them) when we would go out walking at night sometimes.

I know how much he loved his forever home mom and dad and they loved him very much too. He told me that my mom and dad loved him too, and that they often would take care of him when his mom and dad had to travel. After a while, because they enjoyed taking care of him so much that they wanted to have a dog of their own, my mom and dad contacted GRREAT about adopting a golden retriever. Fortunately, this was just about the time that GRREAT rescued me from a shelter on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where I had been abandoned and was about to be put down. I was only six or seven months old at the time and, as my mom would later describe, probably what one might describe as a little bit of a handful.
When my mom and dad went to their first adoption day, about a month later, at a PetCo in Bel Air Maryland, they brought Casey and his mom along too, because they knew how important it was for Casey to approve of whichever dog they were going to adopt.
After GRREAT rescued me from the shelter, I had spent a number of weeks with different families that fostered dogs for GRREAT before Edie, who was my final foster mom, took me to the adoption day to get tattooed (which is how GRREAT can keep track of you). I was not even ready for placement at that time, but my foster mom Edie still used me as a “meeter and greeter” at the adoption day for all the people who came. That is where I first saw my mom and dad and where I first met Casey. Casey and I immediately became friends and he then told me how wonderful it would be for both of us if they decided to adopt me. Fortunately, they liked me very much, Casey assured them that I was an okay kid, and the rest – as they say – is history.
When I moved into my forever home, I actually did not see him for the first few days while I got settled in, although I could hear him bark greetings to me from across the fence.

Any way, once Casey and I were re-introduced, he immediately took me under his wing and showed me everything that a maturing golden retriever needed to know. I knew that I could always count on him to look after me and show me the ropes. He taught me that it was good form to lift my leg and aim when I needed to pee; nobody had told me that before. He taught me how to wrestle and the importance of making very loud noises when doing so, although he always seemed to be able to beat me, even though I was already as big as he was. In that regard I also now feel compelled to observe that it would be totally unfair to blame him for the unfortunate incident while we were wrestling one day in what used to be mom’s asparagus patch. Casey also taught me about the mailman, and how it very important it was to always alert my parents when the mail arrived and to protect the house from the attack of the mail coming through the mail slot in the door. Casey taught me as well about the neighborhood dogs and in particular who was a good guy and who was a bad guy (‘nough said). But most of all he taught me how important it was to have your best “bud” look out for you and for you to look out for him, as well as always remind me of how lucky we both were to have found such wonderful and loving forever homes.
We would see each other nearly every day, particularly in the first few years that we lived next door to each other. There would be times when he would stay with us and on occasion I stayed with him at his home. We shared our toys and played games. We frequently ate and slept together. We went for walks and ran in the woods and waded in Rock Creek. He even had a special chair in our house, a leather recliner which he claimed as his and frequently laid in while he was here. In the winters we would romp with each other in the snow, although his paws would sometimes get ice caught in them, and then his mom or my mom would brush the ice away and warm his paws in their hands.
As we got older, we didn’t see quite as much of each other, because his mom and dad would take him to their summer home on the West Coast, and, after my granddad came to live with us, we started taking fall vacations to Vermont. But whenever we were together, it was always very special.
One of my best memories was of this past winter when it snowed and my dad did not go into work that day. Casey and his mom and my mom and dad and me walked over to the nearby schoolyard, where we romped and played in the snow and wrestled just like we did when we were both younger (he won again, although it is possible that I helped him just a little bit). Although Casey had gotten considerably older by that time, he had the greatest time that day, just like it had been when we first met.
Over the next several weeks, Casey started slowing down and it became harder for him to go for longer walks, but we would still go for shorter walks together with his mom and my mom. All of the sudden one day he had great difficulty walking at all, and from then things went downhill very quickly. Even so, we spent so much of what were his last few days together, either at his house or mine, as well as at the vet (where I would generally stay in the car when he went inside). Casey tried as hard as he could to get better, but he was increasingly weak and then developed pneumonia. On the day before he died, I was with him much of the day. That evening, he and his mom came over to our house for dinner before taking his mom and my mom took him back to the see the vet. I knew he was very sick and I told him then what a wonderful friend he had been to me over the years. I think he knew he was dying, but he kept up a very brave front to me and to the rest of the world. Even though he was quite weak, he still managed to walk up the steps to the veterinary hospital on his own. I never saw him again, although I did go with his mom and my mom and dad when they rushed to the veterinary hospital to say good bye the following morning. When we got home, I could still smell his smell throughout our house and in his house too when I went there with my mom.
I know that I am a very lucky dog in so many ways. But all the good things that have happened to me in my life are in one way or another attributable to my best friend Casey. I will miss him very much and will never forget him. And I can still hear him barking to me from dog heaven, making sure that I don’t forget about the mailman.