After a lot of Geoff and I asking when Inky was going to wake up, Mom and Dad brought home two new dogs. After an incredible name experience like Inky, my parents had decided they would name our pets from now on , and no sooner had they said this, then entered our new Corgies, Tia and Maria. I guess you’ve figured out my Dad’s favorite drink by now. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Corgi before, but there the same dogs as the Queen of England is often seen with…assuming they are still alive, the dogs, not the Queen. This means nothing in the states, but growing up in Canada, people were always saying, “Hey, those are the same dogs as the Queen”. As a kid I had to grasp onto anything I could. Picture the shape of a basset hound , you know, the type of dog Roscow P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard had. You know, Flash? That kind of shape, with the head of a German shepherd, except much smaller, and in there cases, brown and white. They also had there tails snipped at birth, which I think sucks. Imagine if you had your ass snipped when you were born, or any other parts…
Now at this time, we were living in Mississauga, a city on the outskirts of Toronto.
We lived on a dead end road wedged between a major freeway and a 200 foot drop down to the Port Credit river. So if at any time, Tia or Maria got out of the house, we didn’t have long to find them. And they got out quite often. Remember, this was back when dogs roamed their communities freely and leash laws didn’t exist. Its also a time when alot more kids came home with scars from wandering neighbourhood dogs… It also didn’t help that nobody would ever take us seriously when we told them the names of our dogs. If me or Geoff told somebody, they would think we made it up, and if it was parents searching for the lost puppy, strangers would just assume they were drunk. Our lost dog posters were laughed at and almost always torn down as a joke. Eventually our dangerous living situation got the better of us…or should I say, Maria.
Maria has the distinction of being the only Edgecombe dog to be hit by a car, and killed! Now on this sad day I was not allowed out to see what happened so I felt very left out and lost as to what exactly had happened, but Geoff changed all that as any good older brother would. He decided he would show me exactly what happened to Maria. He went to the fridge and grabbed the biggest tomato he could find and led me down to the basement, a place we seldom went alone. He then pulled our deep freeze out a little from the wall, and wedged the tomato between the wall and the fridge. At this point he pushed the freezer with all his might and squished the tomato sending red guts everywhere and said, “That’s what happened to Maria.” To this day I can see that squashed tomato perfectly and that was the image I had of Maria being hit by a car for my entire childhood. When I eventually saw a dog get hit by a car I realized Geoff had painted a pretty accurate picture…It wasn’t Geoff’s best work as an older brother but it must have sunk pretty deep as I still can’t eat tomatos.
