Rachel wanted me to write about my pets as a child/growing up and I will always try to oblige her requests as I'm sure that she doesn't read many of the posts here and I'm happy that she is participating!
The lovely picture to the right is yours truly around eleven (That's my guess, could be wrong) years old as my dad was beginning to have goats around the premises.
The goats weren't really pets but weren't contributing animals either.
Dad just wanted to have some around and as a result, we did.
I don't remember either taking this picture or much about this particular goat either, but there was one goat that I liked a lot and was tame enough to come up to you for attention and even when Dad's goat phase was gone, "Timmy" was still around.
He wasn't over the top tame, but not nasty either.
He'd lick your hand and come up to the people that he knew but was pretty laid back towards others.
I think Timmy arrived as a baby from our first goat a year or so before this picture was taken and he was around all through high school.
One day, I came home and Dad said he had given him away to someone he worked with (I knew the lady, so it wasn't one of those "ran away" stories).
My dad was like that with things, he would get into something really big for a few years and then lose interest.
I was bothered with not getting to say goodbye, but not enough to throw a fit as he was getting older and overweight and I thought it might be better to be at a place with more room to roam.
A few days later, Dad said Timmy had dropped over at the new place and died.
Dad talked about that in one of my last visits there and mentioned that he thought Timmy had died of a "broken heart" away from his family.
30 plus years later, I learned a lesson- don't separate older pets (and people) from their family, no matter the reason.
Real Families (and not all families have this, so I'm not judging) stick together.
Cats were always around as a kid, but we didn't really have them inside.
There were always 'wild' cats around, but not really in the house as the neighbors fed the cats outside, so they were always around.
There were two that might have made the cut with luck.
The first was a small gold-colored cat that was around when I was in kindergarten.
I'm not sure if it had a name, but when I would come home from school for my post-school batting practice with Edna (really, I came home every day and hit Wiffle balls from her pitching) and this cat would chase the ball, and try to stop it.
One day, the cat was gone and in a house across the street where it would live its life for years as I would see her in a window getting fat and hopefully happy.
I always wondered what she thought as she looked out the window.
Did she remember the little boy with the ball and bat that she used to chase and did she know me from anyone else that she gazed at through her window?
My parents' house was a tough place for animals as the Sharpsburg Pike may not have had a large number of people, but the cars that flew through at fifty-plus MPH were deadly to any animal that dared to cross its path.
"The Pike" was the main reason that I understood why the cat without a name was adopted, it was not uncommon to see animals splayed across the asphalt.
It was never pleasant to see and you never got used to it, but fortunately, I never had to see a personal pet hit by a car.
The second cat avoided that fate, but he was coming around often and was quite tame for an outdoor cat, after a while, he quit coming around until one day he was clearly ill before I went to school.
When I came home from school, Edna told me that he must have gotten into something poisonous as he was very sick and then passed away on the porch.
I had three dogs when I was a child, Mikki was an all-white Eskimo that we brought home when we lived in Ohio.
She lived with us inside when I lived there, but Dad moved her outside when we moved back here.
Mikki was an affectionate dog that didn't seem to mind being outside, she grew blind through the years but never got nasty.
After we had been in Maryland for a few years, Dad decided to get a second dog- this one was another white dog a German Shepard mix named Diabolo.
While I know the meaning of the name, I'm not really sure why Dad named him that.
Diabolo tried to be an inside dog, but he was always trying to get over the gate to separate rooms and he broke his leg once in an attempt.
Dad allowed him to stay inside until his leg healed and then he became an outdoor dog as well.
Both dogs had large outdoor enclosures and weren't chained up, but I always felt bad for outdoor dogs and if I couldn't keep one inside, I wouldn't have one.
When both were older, Dad decided to send both of them away.
I'm sure with Mikki's age and sight she was euthanized, but I've always had some hope that Diabolo was adopted by someone.
He wasn't young, so that may not have happened, but he was five or six years younger than Mikki so it was possible.
I missed not saying goodbye which sadly happened to me once again with a beloved pet.
When I was a senior in high school and dating Cherie, someone dumped two puppies out at the Valley Mall and left them there.
When we walked into the mall, Mall employees were trying to find them a home, and when we left the mall only one remained.
I couldn't stand seeing him sent to the pound, so I took him home where my parents weren't exactly thrilled.
Named after Livingstone Bramble who was the lightweight champion of the time, Bramble was likely a hound dog of some kind, and in our early apartments, we weren't allowed dogs.
I cleaned up a large old shed ( where the cows and goats lived in their day) and gave Bramble as good of an outdoor home as I could make for him.
Edna took care of Bramble most of his life after I married Cherie and moved out, but I loved that dog dearly and hated seeing him away from me.
My dad thought that Bramble didn't know me from anyone else and one day he took him out when I saw him visiting and when I called to him, Bramble ran to me with such joy that even Dad was surprised.
I would have been more than happy to take him in when dogs were finally approved, but after many years outdoors in a rural environment, I thought it would have been a difficult adjustment for him to move inside a town.
What hurts me most to this day is how I lost Bramble, who must have been nine or ten when he somehow got out of his area and found his way to my grandmother, six houses down the road.
A relative found him, but amazingly no one was smart enough to say that looks like Shawn's dog and call up to ask if he had gotten out.
Instead, they called the ASPCA and by the time all of this reached my ears days later, Bramble was gone, either adopted or euthanized as my checking for him in those times was fruitless.
I've always hoped he was adopted, but I'll never know really what happened to him after he was sent there.
I have never really gotten past not being able to say goodbye to Bramble and I also admit that I have held it against those relatives through the years.
That's not the best way to handle it, but I've never been able to figure out why no one called to ask if he had gotten out or even mentioned it until well past the time that I could have done anything about it and I'm not sure it'll ever stop bothering me.
There's a look at my childhood pets.
I hope you know a little more about me and my childhood with pets.
I'll be back next time with another version of Friends and Family.
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