Remembering Buddy

 About the time I started writing this column in 2009, my wife and I adopted a tri-color Pembroke Corgi that we named Buddy.  We had pets over the years when raising our children, but I wanted my own dog and my wife finally gave in.  We found him at Corgi rescue.  He was picked up by animal control on the streets of Fort Worth, skinny and sick.  How a dog like Buddy could be lost for that long was a mystery to me until he told me his story.  I wrote it down just the way he told it to me and published it as a children’s book, Buddy the Floppy Ear Corgi.  

 I wrote my first column about Buddy on October 29, 2009.  Each year I wrote at least one column about Buddy and what he was teaching me.  We traveled to many places together: Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Colorado and places in between.  We walked hundreds of miles. 

 Once we left him with our daughter who lived 2 miles from our house.  He escaped their backyard and tied up traffic on a busy intersection trying to make his way home.  I was on the road in Nebraska when I got the call from a stranger who rescued him from the frantic drivers who were trying to avoid hitting him.

 When we went fishing Buddy sat in the front of my fishing boat, sniffing the wind, trying to locate the fish.  He fell in once.  We discovered Corgi’s can’t swim.  Fortunately, I was able to pull him b. ack in the boat.

 Several times he went with me to sit by the graveside of my college roommate who was buried in Farmersville, Texas in 1999.  Afterward we would go for long walks in the open fields where he could run free, leaping through the long grass (as much as Corgi’s can leap). We explored the beaches in Galveston.

  Buddy didn’t do any work.   He couldn’t open doors, couldn’t carry anything or hold anything with his paws (beyond a bone or a chew toy).  He wasn’t Buck like Call of the Wild. He couldn’t pull a sled.  But he worked his way into our hearts just by being there, jumping in my lap when I was sad, jumping between us on the couch to make us glad, following me from room to room, introducing me to strangers who wanted to pet him, playing with my grandchildren.

 But Buddy grew old.  His muzzle turned gray.  He couldn’t take long walks anymore. After 14 years, Buddy developed spinal myelopathy.  He lost the use of his legs, and we lost Buddy in January 2022.   We grieved his death as much as we grieved a friend or family member.  We still miss him.

 We loved Buddy, not for what he could do for us, but just because he “was.” 

 Maybe that was his final lesson about God. Maybe that is the way God looks at me.  I can’t do anything for God.  He doesn’t really need me, but He loves me just the same, just because He made me; just because He is and I am.  “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us” (1 John 1:10).  God has declared His love for me, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3).  God loves you.