In writing last week about Bill Gill and his annual Yuletide brain-bending puzzles, I mentioned that he is often seen walking his border collie rescues through downtown Mystic.
I, too, once welcomed a border collie into my home, and to this day I rarely stop thinking about, or dearly missing, him.
I will say upfront that whenever I come across stories about dogs by other folk I routinely skip them, trusting they will be written as wistful eulogies and properly maudlin. What follows is no different. But this dog was our dog.
In 1993, when my son, Sam, was heading off to college, his younger sister, Maaike, began agitating for us to get a dog, perhaps as a surrogate for her much-admired older brother. She wanted a golden retriever, and because she was who she is, she began posting pictures of that breed on the refrigerator, on the door to her room and elsewhere in the house.
But, as it happened, a decade or more earlier a colleague of mine at The Day, the late Dan Stets, raised in Mystic and a formidable reporter who went on to international postings for top newspapers, mentioned at dinner one night that among dogs he liked the border collie. I was not familiar with them but I remembered what he said.
Maaike kept persisting. Then, in early 1995, we learned that friends of friends in Madison were just presented with a litter of three border collie pups fathered by their neighbor’s purebred male and birthed by their registered female. By great good fortune, and we would soon learn how much, we were offered one of the males, and at no cost.
This little guy, whom Maaike would name Marley because he did, indeed, have dreadlocks, was the son of Cooper Lane Booke, the male whose lineage traced to Wales and Scotland, and Murphy Girl, whose ancestry included sheep dogs in Scotland, Iowa and North Dakota. I still have their papers.
Marley was the familiar black-and-white border,with a white collar, medium-sized, a handsome fellow with black spots on his white snout, an athlete’s spectacular agility and, praise be, a gentle disposition. He was not much of a herder, but in chasing Frisbees or birds on the beach, or bounding through woodlands, he rode the wind.
We didn’t breed him, and I regret not passing along his nature. I like to say he was our dog, but early on, when my wife, Liesbeth, was convalescing from back woes brought on by years of intensely dedicated gardening and harvesting dried flowers, he would lie at her feet as she rested for several weeks on a couch, and they bonded.
Eventually he would work the gardens with her, always around, busying himself, or not, as she poked around more than two-dozen raised flower beds and vegetable plots. One spring and summer, she routinely cursed a resident woodchuck who was causing havoc, always telling Marley about him. The day came, and I witnessed this from 20 yards away, when the woodchuck appeared and Marley pounced and got him. He was never more proud.
I read up on border collies, particularly the mischief the antsier ones would get into if they were not worked or kept active. I read the novels of Donald McCaig (“Nop’s Trials” and “Nop’s Hopes”), his chronicle of world-class herders and their trainers in the United Kingdom (“Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men”) and, during the years I reviewed books for The New York Times, his “American Homeplace,” a collection of essays about raising sheep on a farm in western Virginia.
Each July, we watched Sylvia Murray put her sheep dogs through their paces at the annual North Stonington Fair.
I was first in line to see the film “Babe” when it showed up here.
Public television broadcast programs about herding trials in England and Scotland. Agility competitions were also broadcast. I’d never heard of the Westminister Dog Show, but I became a faithful viewer, knowing the border collie, however mortified by grooming or perfuming it was, not to mention being entered, would never win despite being the Best in Show.
Marley, as I still tell people, was the only breathing being in my house listening to me. He had a vocabulary of maybe 50 words. He knew which among his five Frisbees we wanted to throw to him. On walks, usually at Barn Island or Napatree Point or Haley Farm or the Paffard Preserve on North Main Street in Stonington, he rarely bothered with other dogs, preferring to keep focused on the road ahead and countless side ventures. He covered 10 times the distance we did. He never tired. He came when he was called.
In 2007, just shy of his 13th year, he began bleeding from his nose. A large tumor was detected on his brain. We agreed to put him down, and wept through that weekend. The night he died, in October, I walked outside and wished him well as he made his way across the sky. We buried his ashes in the backyard, under a small tree, and placed a jolly Buddha above him, for company.
I haven’t replaced him, and doubt that I will. It wouldn’t be fair to him or any other dog.
(Answer to Bill Gill’s latest Yuletide Puzzle: “And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap” from “A Visit by Saint Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore.)
Steven Slosberg lives in Stonington and was a longtime reporter and columnist. He may be reached at maayan72@aol.com.
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January 12, 2020 at 11:30AM
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Postscripts: Remembrances of a loyal border collie that will never be forgotten ... or replaced - The Westerly Sun
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