David and I got married with a passel of children already in tow so we didn’t ever have what I referred to as a “common denominator child,” one that would be related to everyone in the house. Instead, after we’d been married 14 years, and our kids were all grown and gone, David started talking about a dog.
He scoured the internet and all the shelters in the surrounding counties and found “Jet,” a black hound mix in Caswell County. We traveled there to look at him and while he laid his little puppy head on David’s shoulder, I picked up others and said, “How about this one? This one?” But he was certain. Jet was the one. It was then that we found out she was actually Jetta…a girl, not a boy. And she was ours.
We placed her in a crate in the back of the car, one we had purchased along with a collar, a leash, and a ton of toys…and off we went. We were barely out of the parking lot when she started…HOWLING…howling like a wolf.
I tried talking to her to calm her, including having a conversation about her name – I wasn’t a fan of Jetta, and David said she needed a “country” name since she was a coonhound…”like a flower,” he said. We gave “Daisy” a try, but decided that wasn’t right. I called my sister to ask her how she named her dog. She said, “Just talk to her…you’ll figure it out. It’ll just come out in your conversation.” So I turned around and said, “We’re gonna have fun with you! We’re gonna go for walks and go to dog parks. I’ve never even been to a dog park! You’re gonna open up a whole new world for us. Wait! A whole new world! That’s it. You’re Princess Jasmine from Aladdin…Jasmine is a flower name, too…we’ll call you Jazzy…or Jazz.”
Well, Jazz never happened, and I don’t know that we ever really called her Jasmine, but Jazzy stuck. Taylor called her “Shazzy” when she was two, and Shazzy Gull (she couldn’t say Jazzy or girl), and Jazzy Girl she was. I didn’t notice it at first, but one time Taylor spent the night with me, and she sat straight up in the bed at 3AM and said, “Hey! You call her PupPup!” And I realized that I had, indeed, been calling her that. “Jazzy Girl” became “Jazzy Girl Best in the World” which became her social media hashtag. She liked it when I posted her pictures.
We had to spell them around her.
Also, she always looked like she was smiling.
Maybe because she was.
Jazzy was a hyper girl who LOVED children. When the grandkids would come over, she would jump on them and chase them. We would have to get her wigglies out so I would grab up the kids on my hips and run around the yard, screaming, “RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!” The kids would squeal, and Jazzy would chase, and once she was tired, we could all come back in the house and get back to normal. We could also yell, “Rub your belly” and she would drop, waiting for the kids to rub her.
would send her running in circles.
We taught Jazzy to give us “five” – put up her paw – for a treat. Most of my meals for eleven years included, as I called it, getting “five-ten-fifteen-twenty” from Jazzy while I was eating. Even as she got sicker, she still sat beside me during meals. I’ll be looking for her when I eat popcorn for the rest of my life. She had her own bowl.
But she was David’s girl, our Caswell County Coon Dawg, and she loved him so much. When he was still working, she would go to the window at 5:00, like she could tell time, and wait for him. Once he had surgery, and she continued to bring her toys and lay them on his pillow all day to comfort him.
She was our Princess Jasmine of the Kingdom Rigsbee, Jazzy Girl, Jazzy Belle, Shazzy, and as I recently told her – she will always be my PupPup.
She did important things there.
Somewhere just across the Rainbow Bridge, Chance (BuddyBuddy), Boomer (BooMan), Ramsey (Ramselina), Lucky (LuckLuck), and Mike (who didn’t live long enough to get a nickname) are all running alongside her, and they’re all barking, “Run for your life!”
We’ll miss you, sweet girl.
