Reesa: The Past And The Future

Aww is filled with doggies!

And kitties!

I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Aww recently, a subreddit dedicated to the cutest things on the Internet - dogs and cats and occasionally other animals. Thanks to +Abhilash Bingi , this is my latest time sink joining others such as YouTube and Wikipedia.

I’ve always wanted my own dog and at one point in my life, I did have one. For my first birthday on 24 March 1987, I got the best gift a girl could ever get, although I didn’t know it at that time: A puppy. To be more precise a Dalmatian puppy, part of the litter of five puppies born to my maternal grandparents’ pet Dalmatian. I imagine one-year-old me was really happy but my mother? Not so much. We called her Reesa.

All things considered, I was really too young to have a pet dog. I couldn’t take her for walks until I was old enough to do so myself and by then she was too big to be handled by a puny four-year-old. As anyone can guess I wasn’t much good at feeding her either! And then when it came to things like grooming or giving her a bath, I would’ve ended up making a much bigger mess than the dog :D.

Even my memories of her are a little fuzzy: feeding (occasionally) and petting her (all the time), giving her a bath in a tub on the terrace or rather watching as someone else did and my grandfather taking her for walks. Although taking her for a walk is a bit of a misnomer. She was so fast and my grandfather was so slow that we were forced to use my grandfather’s scooter! We would tie her leash to the handlebar and my grandfather would drive slowly around the neighborhood. Dalmatians are really fast runners it turns out. She had her own little kennel in the garden and a bunch of us would often climb on top to play (it was made of cement).

Sadly, Reesa died at the age of six before I could grow up enough to fully appreciate her. I don’t exactly remember what happened but there were a lot of vet visits towards the end IIRC. Ever since then I’ve been pestering my parents to let me get another dog. But my mom had just one reply: “two monkeys in the house are plenty enough!”

Now that I’m all grown up and living on my own, I promised myself that I would have at least two dogs one day. And lucky for me, +Abhilash Bingi is as much a dog lover as I am!
So Step 1: Go get a puppy.

No, wait. I live in an apartment that does not allow pet dogs. So here's my modified plan:

Step 1: Get a house with a nice yard.
Step 2: Then go get a puppy. Or two. ;)

One of them is definitely going to be called Reesa, if she doesn't already have a name that is...

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