Henry

My favorite Henry picture, taken right after we moved into our first house--June 2007.

 April.  This is the month, 6 years ago, that we brought Henry home.  If you're a pet owner, you know, deep down, that there's one pet you've had in all your years of pet ownership that is your favorite.  Not that you don't love the others, but there's that one...you know.  Well, Henry was ours.

If you're like me, you avoid reading stories or watching movies where you know the dog (or cat, or horse, or whatever) dies at the end.  I can't even think about Homeward Bound without getting choked up and they all live!  Don't even get me started on Marley and Me.  I read the book and had to keep leaving the room so Chad wouldn't notice my inconsolable sobbing once Marley got old.  It's out of control.  My point with all this is that this story is bittersweet.  Anyone who reads this blog knows that Howard is the only dog in our house now, so I'll get the bitter part out of the way now so you can enjoy the sweet.  Henry passed away on September 26, 2011 of old age and kidney problems.  He was 11(ish).  He died in his sleep, on the way to the vet, with his best friend at his side.

Ok, that part's over, on to the good stuff.

May 2010

We heard about Henry through Chad's mom.  She has always loved Corgis, and someone she worked with contacted her about one who was staying in a foster home and was free to a good home.  She was not able to take him but she knew Chad and I were looking to adopt a dog, preferably an adult who was house-broken and out of the puppy stage.  She called me with the details she had: 4 or 5 year old tri-colored Corgi who had just been retired and put up for adoption by the breeder who owned him previously.  Over the weekend Chad and I drove out to the farm where he was staying.  He was living in the office of a big barn on a horse farm about an hour away.  When we walked in he ran to Chad and sat in his lap.  The rest is history.  We left half an hour later with Henry in the backseat, though his name was not yet Henry.  It was Zaire, which did not suit him at ALL.  He didn't even respond to it, so we started trying out new names.  He answered to Henry immediately, as though it were meant to be. 

This is the first picture I took of Henry--he scored himself a Liberty Tax necklace at the parade.

When we first got Henry, he was really skittish about almost everything: wind, leaves rustling, clapping, quick movements, pretty much everything sent him scurrying a few feet until he recovered.  We'd had him a little over a month when our city had its annual Memorial Day Parade.  It just so happened that the house we were living in at the time was around the corner from part of the parade route.  We grabbed some chairs and walked down to the corner with Henry to watch the parade.  Henry was happy as a clam getting all sorts of attention and pets from kids and other admirers.  Soon we could see the parade rounding the corner, with the high school marching band close to the front, playing away.  As they passed, someone noticed that Henry was missing.  Uh oh.  We called his name, looked around, no Henry.  All of a sudden my dad started laughing and pointing at our house--Henry was sitting on the porch.  In all of the commotion with the marching band, he'd gotten nervous and high-tailed it home.  I was relieved for two reasons: he didn't get trampled in the parade and he actually knew where home was!

My boy and his dog. (July 2007)

Henry racked up quite a few stories involving him eating bizarre things.  Henry was a scavenger and loved, loved to eat.  When it came to eating, he did not discriminate.  Here are a few of his greatest hits, none of which resulted in A) immediate death or B) a vet visit:

Shortly after we moved to Bay Village we walked up to the ice cream stand at the beach.  As we sat on a bench eating our ice cream cones, Henry lied happily underneath on his leash.  We looked down to check on him and noticed that he had been busy licking up an entire scoop of vanilla ice cream someone had dropped.  Henry was thorough in his ice cream clean-up, so he not only licked up every visible speck of ice cream but also went all out and licked up every piece of sand and gravel the ice cream was laying on.  All told, he probably ate about a cup of gravel.  I won't share how I know this.

One of his favorite spots--under the Christmas tree.  (December 2010).

 My grandpa has a strawberry patch in his backyard.  A couple summers ago, when Henry was a little older and not interested in running around like a maniac with Howard, he sauntered over to the patch and investigated.  Soon after he was laying down next to it.  Next he tugged a strawberry off the patch.  I shooed him away.  He was dedicated to this new treat and was not to be deterred.  Several minutes went by when we heard loud crunching and looked over to see Henry laying in the patch eating bunches of strawberries.  I have no idea how many he actually ate, but my best guess is in the dozens.  He never showed any signs of sickness, shockingly.

In the late summer, we usually have little frogs in our yard that we see in the evening.  Henry and Howard were fascinated, but we thought the interest stopped there.  One night, Henry did not feel well.  It was not pretty, and Chad and I were in separate rooms on clean-up duty.  I was cleaning up one mess in the spare bedroom and heard Chad in the next room gagging and saying "Oh nooo, gross"  I yelled back "just hold your nose and breathe thru your mouth!" and he shouted back "there's a frog!".  Pause.  Silence.  Me: "What?"  Chad: "A frog. Henry ate a &*%^#*! frog.  The whole thing.  He didn't even chew."  More silence.  "And peach pits.  He ate about a thousand whole peach pits."  After we cleaned up the crime scene, we shuffled Henry into the bathroom and made him sleep in there the rest of the night.  He was fine, until morning came and he looked at us like we were crazy and abusive when we didn't give him breakfast.

Where's Henry?

 Toward the end of Henry's life his eating parties got even stranger.  I came home from work one day when I was pregnant to find a family size box of white rice torn and mostly empty.  Even though Howard was still a puppy I knew he wasn't too blame.  Henry was napping, with a belly so hard and bulging with rice that I was sure he would just explode any moment.  He never became sick, and he deflated by the next morning.  Several days later I came home and practically flew across the floor as if I were practicing an ice dancing routine in the kitchen.  I looked down and saw an empty bottle of vegetable oil and a very shiny Henry.  "Oh no, you did NOT do that!" I said to him, hoping that by saying it I could reverse what had happened.  He was a little ill after that one, but mildly.  I did have a large oil stain on my living room rug after that from a vegetable oil laden dog lying on it, then proceeding to lick it later.  It never really dried, not matter how hard I worked at it.

Look closely...where's Henry?

Henry's final crazy eating moment came when my parents watched him while I was in the hospital after having Charlotte.  He figured out how to get into their pantry and learned that the pantry = food.  My mom keeps the potatoes in a bag on the bottom of one of the shelves.  She heard some rustling and went in to find Henry standing in a pile of potatoes that he had peeled.  He peeled about half of her potatoes.  He hadn't yet eaten any whole potatoes (which he had in the past, and enjoyed them), but was standing in a pile of peels and bald potatoes.

Teaching Howard how to walk on a leash...

...and having patience when the leash became a chew toy.

Little brothers make good pillows (January 2009)

 Those are the highlights, but among other things, in no particular order: cherries, buckeyes, sticks, worms, a bird nest, a dryer sheet, newspaper, several buttons, and an ant trap.  He looked forward to winter because he LOVED to eat snow.  It was funny, until he would eat so much he would chill his body to the point of shivering for about 30 minutes post-walk.  The first time this happened I panicked, thinking he was about to die in my arms of some sort of seizure.  Nope.  We Googled his symptoms and determined he was chilled.  We wrapped him in a blanket and petted him until he stopped--he was unfazed the entire time.  I think he was just happy to be allowed on the bed that long and wrapped in the fleece blanket he wasn't allowed to sleep in.

Eating snow.

Howard eats sticks, Henry eats snow.  Sigh.

 Besides eating, Henry's favorite thing was getting pets and attention from anyone.  He never met a person he didn't like.  It was not unusual for him to stop on a walk when people passed us and just sit, waiting for pets.  Once, I was walking him down the street when school had just let out.  A group of kids walked toward us and they were interested in Henry.  He knew it to, because he pulled on his leash to make his way over to them and laid down in the middle of the road, flipped onto his back, and waited for belly pets.  On Halloween, he would sit outside and slowly migrate farther and farther away from the porch so he could catch as much pets as possible from all the kids.  I bought him a Superman costume to wear but the legs never fit because his were too short, so he just wore the cape every year.  One side would always end up wet and dirty because he spent so much time lying in the grass, belly up, getting pets.

October 2010.

Anxiously awaiting the first Trick-or-Treaters.  Halloween 2010.

 Henry's favorite things were eating, Chad, going on car rides, napping and laying in the sun in just about that order.  He would find the sunniest, warmest spot on the deck and lay there until his fur was scalding hot.  I would bring him water then eventually drag him inside because he refused to move and I was worried he would die of heat stroke.  He was just that laid back.

We used to joke that if you could listen to what's going on in a dog's head, Henry's would sound like a soft woooosh of air moving around.  He was not known for his smarts.  He was...sweet :)

February 2008, protesting our trip to Florida.

 We were newlyweds when we brought Henry home.  We got him right before we both graduated college, he moved with us into our first home and was there when we changed jobs (and careers).  It was Henry we came home to every day after work and who eagerly waited for us back here when we went on vacations.  Those huge Henry ears heard about all of our hopes and plans for the future, all of our disappointments, all of our celebrations, and all of the dramatic changes that happened in our 20s.  He was the first one to find out I was pregnant (Chad was at work) and he was here when we brought Charlotte home.  He saw us through a lot and even though he wasn't with us for very long it was long enough to know that he was the greatest dog we've ever known.

Henry meets Charlotte (June 2011)

His new napping buddy.

Maybe one of the reasons we haven't gotten much snow this winter is because he's up there eating it all before it falls.  Hey, it's better than frogs.  Or rice.  Or...you get the picture.

~Stacy