Goodbye, Fergus

This is going to take a while to write, so I'm going to do installments. Here's the first one. Oh yeah, this is about my dog, Fergus, who died Sunday morning, at the age of 15.

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Once upon a time there was a girl. Well, she was really a young lady, as she was 18, soon to be 19, years old. She was a rising junior in college, enjoying her summer vacation at home with her mother and stepfather. She worked during the week at a day camp, as the ropes course counselor, although she much preferred to sit and do beading, or to go on creek walks. She worked with some friends from high school, and she hung out with these friends and her best girl friend from high school in the evenings and on weekends. They went to movies, or rented movies or played pool and video games at the arcade, and were generally carefree, staying up too late on work nights, but it didn't matter so much as it was only a summer job.

The girl was going to be moving into a house off campus with her college friends when she returned to college in a few months, and they had spoken about getting a dog, since they could finally get one, as they weren't in dorms anymore. Everyone was excited to be living together, though technically this constituted a brothel in the town, since it was more than three unrelated women living together in a house. (Only three were listed on their lease, though, so they could get away with it.) So, over the summer, the girl thought about dogs, and started reading about puppies, and decided on which kind she wanted, though she'd had a chosen breed in her head for a long time. She looked in the local paper, and one day saw in ad for the type of dog she wanted. Her two best friends went with her to get the puppy. They drove to a town about thirty miles away, where the puppies lived. The man who was selling them owned a Brittany as a hunting dog, and this was the mother of the litter of puppies.

The girl wanted to get a liver and white dog, as she liked the color, and the fact that she and her dog would have the same color hair. (Yes, she was a bit odd.) There were three liver and white dogs in the litter, and the breeder wanted to keep the female of the three, so that left two dogs to choose from. The girl, of course, chose the feistiest of the two, a little puppy the breeder called "Ace" though of course, the girl had no intention of keeping that name. She already had a perfect name picked out for her dog: Fergus. She'd found several names she liked in a baby name book, and once she picked her puppy, Fergus seemed to suit him best.

The girl took Fergus home to her mother and stepfather's home, where he had many accidents while becoming house-trained, though he was cute enough that even her neat-freak stepfather didn't mind. In the afternoons after work, the girl would play with Fergus, and many times they would nap together on the floor, though soon Fergus would graduate to sleeping on the bed with her.

Then, the summer drew to a close, and the girl packed up her car to return to college, with Fergus riding shotgun as they drove the eight hours to the college town, stopping at every rest stop along the way.

When they pulled into the house, the girl's housemates were very excited to meet Fergus, their new pet. Everyone loved him almost instantly, and who could blame them? Look at how cute he was!