Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [53]
She said, “I’m going home, back to Tennessee. I’m flying, and I can’t take my little dog with me. It’s so young they won’t take it on the airplane.”
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked her.
“I’m going to give it to you.” And she handed me the dog.
I was absolutely astonished. All I could say was “OK.”
I had never seen the girl before in my life, and I have never seen her since. But she handed me this baby dog. It had fleas, it was underweight, and the first thing I did was take it to the veterinarian. I asked him, “What kind of dog do you think this is?”
“I think it’s probably a Chihuahua,” he said. We named her Lupe, and she lived with Dorothy Jo and me for many years.
As Lupe began to grow—and she did grow considerably larger—it became apparent that she was more likely part whippet and maybe greyhound. After a few months, I took her back to the same vet and said, “Here’s that Chihuahua that you identified for me when she was a puppy.”
He looked at her and scratched his head and admitted, “Bob, I really missed on that one.”
She actually grew so large that several times she jumped the six-foot fence behind my pool. She was graceful and beautiful to watch. As she bounded across the yard, she looked like a canine version of Bambi.
Another time, Dorothy Jo found a pair of little kittens in a brown paper bag in front of our house. Whoever left them at our door probably knew we loved animals. She brought them in the house and showed them to me.
“Aren’t they darling?” she said.
And I said, “They certainly are. I’ll see if I can’t find them a home with someone at The Price Is Right.”
She said, “Too late. They already have a home right here.”
They lived with us from then on. Dorothy Jo named them Gato and Tomas.
There was a time when we gave all of our animals Spanish names because we lived in this old Spanish house. One morning early, Dorothy Jo went out to get the paper, and there was Carlos. He was a long-legged German shepherd mix. He wasn’t a puppy, but he was a young dog. Soon we discovered that he had seizures, which may have been why someone abandoned him. When he felt a seizure coming on, he would go to Dorothy Jo. He loved Dorothy Jo. She had a little desk in the utility room where she used to sit, and he would put his head on her lap while she was writing. She saved his life and he never forgot it. For the first few weeks he wouldn’t leave her side. He followed her all over the house. When he started to have a seizure, he came to her and she would hold him.
We already had Carlos when that little girl delivered Lupe to us. Carlos loved Lupe from day one, and he never had another seizure after she arrived. It was totally inexplicable and totally fascinating. Carlos was having these seizures regularly until Lupe came into his life, and after he had her to take care of, he never had another seizure. The veterinarian had no explanation as to why that should have happened.
Carlos was unique in another respect. He liked to get up on top of the house. I talked with him several times about the dangers of his hobby, but he persisted. His MO was as follows: he went up the steps to the padre’s walk that runs the length of the house, stepped up on a low built-in bench, and went out on the roof of our living room. The roof, typical of a Spanish home, is tile, rather steeply slanted, and the tile is definitely unsteady underfoot. Carlos, free spirit that he was, insisted on climbing up on the roof of the living room, sitting on his haunches, and surveying the neighborhood over the twelve-foot fence that surrounds our yard. Actually, he looked rather grand, even serene, on our rooftop, and he became a topic of conversation for the neighbors.
One day Carlos was on the roof and the doorbell rang. I went to the door and found a friendly-looking stranger standing there with a look of utter amazement on his face. “Did you know that there is a dog sitting on your roof?”
“Certainly,” I answered.
The stranger looked at me warily and said, “OK, I just wanted to be sure you knew that he was up there,” as