The rescue had named her Cookie, because her face looked a little like a chocolate chip cookie, which it did.
We changed it. Neither of us wanted to spend the next decade calling out a dessert every time we opened the back door. She became Sabrina — half basset, half beagle, picked up because our dachshund needed a friend and we’d decided one dog wasn’t enough dog.
I drove out to get her by myself. On the way home I stopped to pick up photos from the photographer and left her sitting in the cab of our Honda Accord for about ten minutes.
She threw up in the cup holders.
First day. We learned right then that she did not care for riding in a car, and she never revised that position in her entire life.
She was one of the sweetest dogs we’ve had, and she never stopped being a hunting dog underneath it.
There was a house we lived in when my son was five or six with mice living under the shed out back. Sabrina was up there by then. Arthritic. She hobbled everywhere she went and had to think about getting up.
I was outside and saw a mouse running along the fence line, and that old broken-down dog lifted her head and took two hops and had it in her mouth.
Two hops. I don’t know where they came from.
Then she looked up at me, completely satisfied with herself, and went hobbling off across the yard with it, briefly about four years old again.
The day we took her to the vet for the last time, she threw up in the car.
Same as the first ride. Same problem, all the way at the other end of it.
I don’t know how to describe what that does to you. You’re already driving somewhere you don’t want to go, and the dog does the exact thing she did the day you brought her home, and for one second you’re twenty-two again in the Honda Accord with a dog you’ve had for four hours.
She never did figure out the car.
Thirteen years of it, and she never got any better at riding, and I have never once wished she had.
David Willis 