Ty

Hey, look at these old pictures Pops found while cleaning out his man cave! This is Ty. His full name was Tyrone but he was usually called Ty... and then Mom's started calling him "Tybone" and that kinda stuck. 

Tybone was adopted from the SPCA back in '95. Moms and Pops went there to look for a cat... a CAT! WTF! Moms doesn't like cats (Yay Moms!) but she relented when Pops wouldn't stop moaning and groaning about it. Then, for some reason they decided to look at dogs while they were there and Pops fell in love with the dog.

"It was those big brown eyes," Pops said. "I've never seen such soulful eyes on a dog or a human!"

Tybone was the sweetest dog with people, Pops said, but he had real issues with other dogs. He just went berserko every time he saw another dog, so walking him was very hard, although in those days there weren't that many dogs in the neighborhood. They never knew why or how he got that way. The SPCA folks even warned Moms and Pops about this but they decided to take him anyway. You know Poops was in love with that dog! "We'll deal with it," he said.

Tybone was real smart. Pops said it didn't take but once for him to say, "Your name is 'Ty'  for him to understand. (Took me a while to get used to being called "Nikki!") Then, when Pops and Moms were talking and didn't want Ty to know they were saying the word, "treat,'" they would spell it out. After just that one time, Ty knew what "T-R-E-A-T" meant! But... poor Ty, Moms and Pops didn't know much about dogs back then. He was Pops' first dog. And with Ty's hate-other-dogs problem, he could never be let off leash. Ty didn't get to run around like I do. 

Pops was heart-broken when Ty died. They didn't knw he had a tumor in him, but one night, it got so big it burst his spleen. Moms and Pops woke up to a real sick dog. Ty went into the garden and hid under some bushes way in the back of the garden.  Pops said he kinda panicked. He dug Tybone out from under the bush and carried him upstairs through the house and into the car and drove him to the vet. The vet was dealing with another emergency, so he put Ty in a crate in the back for observation. At that point no one knew what was wrong. There was nothing for Pops to do but go home and wait. Then, a phone call came. The vet said, "Ty passed."

Pops was not only sad that he lost Ty but he was sorry that he didn't just sit with Ty by the bush and waited with him. Instead, Ty was left to die all alone in a strange place. If he only knew that Ty was going to die anyway he wouldn't have put poor Ty through all that trauma in his last moments. Pops vowed to never let any dog of his go like that again.

A few months later, on Valentine's Day in 2002, Moms and Pops brought Trina home. I'll let him tell you that story.