He's gone.
My baby boy -- my only boy -- just drifted off.
This is mostly for me, but my man has a few stories worth telling.
I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing
When he was not much bigger than the pup in the attached picture he found a big wooden paintbrush on the floor. He ate everything but the metal strip that held the bristles on. For days he crapped wood pulp. So we decided that if we left him alone, we needed to put him in the closet in the den and we put one of those wooden gates in front of hit so he couldn't get out.
Should have known. He ate through the wooden bars. From there he climbed up onto the couch I used to have (stress used to have) and ate both arms completely down to the wooden frame. When we got home he had opened a gash in the middle of one of the cushions and was gleefully yanking stuffing out of it and hurling it into the air.
I was pretty pissed off and I yelled at him. Pointed at the mess he made and told him he was bad. He was mortified. I swear I saw tears in his eyes. The dog never tore up anything else as long as he lived. He didn't even tear his stuffed toys up. Never even nibbled on a shoe or any of the furniture or anything else. In retrospect, that was pretty amazing.
You Go Get It, Dumbass
Tucker loved to play fetch. Once. Throw a ball or a stick or a frisbee or anything and he would haul ass to go get it. And he'd bring it right back to you. He was a little hesitant about handing it over and you'd have to coax him to put it down, but he'd eventually do it, and he'd grin happily.
Throw it again?
He'd look at you like you were the biggest moron on the planet. "I already went and got that damn thing one time. If you want it, you go get it you dumbass."
And then he'd trot off and go sit in a chair. If you were stupid enough to go get it from where you'd thrown it, he'd sit there and watch you play your own game of fetch for his amusement.
Yes, Officer, That's the Man
When we first moved to Baldwin County, we moved into a subdivision that was just being built. He had a big fenced back yard where he stayed most of the time.
Tucker didn't bark much, but one night he kept on no matter what we did to get him to be quiet. Woke the neighbors up. As I'm on the back porch trying to figure out what had him stirred up I saw motion over next to my neighbor's house.
Long story short, I ended up watching out an upstairs window, on the phone with the Sheriff's Office, while a crackhead pried open my garage and tried to break into my car. In order to try to quiet Tucker, he was scooping up handfuls of Tuck's food and flinging it over the fence. Tucker wasn't having any of his shenanigans.
The guy eventually fled, got cornered by the sheriff and they captured him and his accomplice. They also recovered an asston of stuff these jackholes had stolen from other garages in the neighborhood. So my new neighbors got their possessions back thanks to Tucker's insistent barking.
For several weeks people would leave gift baskets on the porch for Tucker. He didn't want their thanks, he didn't like dog treats, He would only hold them politely in his mouth until he could dispose of them.
He was a good boy. He was MY dog. Why is all this motherfucking dust in the air?