July 18, 2026
I was cleaning out my digital files today and came across an unpublished column (I pretended was) written by my dog Casey. Casey died in 2019. I miss him still. I dated and then married my wife Gosia. Before Casey, she had been afraid of dogs. Before long, Casey won her heart.
Where to start my tale? With my near-death experience, my intestines neatly sawed in five parts?
No, too grim.
But I have no heroic rescue to tell you about. No climactic moment when by barking I saved a baby in its crib from a fire or plunged through deep snows to save a master or mistress who had fallen through ice into a creek.
No, I am an ordinary dog in so many ways. The American Kennel Club papers say I am pure Labrador Retriever, and those papers have been boxed with old tax receipts and shoved into a dark crevice in the garage.
My given name was long and dignified, given to me by a breeder in Rushville, Indiana, who raised me a mere four weeks before placing an ad in Craigslist. She wanted $50 more for my sisters than my brothers and me, a fact that played no part in my selection.
My parents were also AKC registered, but I’m sure you care nothing for that lineage of mine. My daddy was big, 110 pounds, and yellow-white, the color of an ancient professor’s summer sport coat. My mother was dark and black and about 90 pounds. My sisters and brothers still suckled from her milk the night we six pups were taken from her kennel and placed in a ring atop the concrete floor of a big and proper Indiana barn. The stalls smelled of squirrel corn, hay and straw.
I weighed only four or five pounds, a toy in the hands of the couple who fondled, poked, and inspected me and my siblings. The farmer who had raised me listened to their tale of why they had phoned ahead on their cell phone to say they would be an hour late. They had come across a carload of teenagers in a family car that had left the road and come to a stop in a corn field. They were a silly and defiant crew when they flagged down the green Subaru SUV of my owners-to-be. But a piece of chain attached to a trailer ball on the Subaru soon saved the bacon of the teens. The chain went beneath the bumper and on a solid bit of undercarriage and finally came free, bumping and twisting as it again landed on an asphalt road. The teens were free to continue to their various homes, and their rescuers were fairly sure no parents would learn about the mishap.
The owner kept looking at her watch as the couple caressed and played with me. The male even dangled a set of keys at me as if I were a cat. She explained that this was a working farm, and she had to get up at dawn. The couple asked if the owner might go away for ten minutes to let them talk. This wish was granted, and when she returned, the male handed over $350 in tens and twenties, and the breeder solemnly copied down their personal data in a ledger. She dated the transaction September 30, 2006, and she said I was exactly 30 days old.
I wanted to ride in the front of the Subaru with the female after I was separated, but the male insisted I ride in a box atop a rubber mat in case I had an accident. Well, I went once or twice on the thirty-minute drive to the couple’s brick home in Waldron, Indiana, but it really was no accident. I had to pee and so I did.
Inside the house the couple fluffed up an old blanket in a box for me. I cried and whimpered all that night, and the two took turns picking me up and reassuring me I was wanted. I was only four weeks, perhaps too young to leave home, and I missed my siblings and mother, although I never did have any contact with my sire. The breeder kept him away lest he try to impregnate my mother again too soon for her health’s sake.
The next morning the male who brought me home took me to pee in the ivy and grass. He snapped a photo of me with his Canon digital camera. He also started right away to teach me commands. “Where’s Hank?” he would say. “Where’s Liz?” he would ask, and since I was smart I soon recognized that he was telling me their two names. He also lifted my paw and repeated the words “shake” over and over, while holding out a piece of kibble as a bribe.
Hank and Liz debated name after name. Perhaps three days after I arrived they put on a Grateful Dead CD, and they looked at each other questioningly as “Casey Jones” played. Thus, I was named after some cocaine freak, although I guess it could have been a worse name choice. I’m glad they hadn’t been listening to “My Sherona.”
Perhaps a month after my couple took me home I started pulling out shoes out of closets and finding ways to get at my bag of puppy chow. Hank asked Liz if he could change my name to “Jesse James” since I was a born thief, but she said a name change might confuse me. So Casey has stuck to this day, although the last name of “Jones” rarely comes up again, and after Liz left Waldron for good to return to New York City I was given a rather silly additional nickname which also has stuck. Yes, because of my big butt and clumsiness, Hank also referred to me as Dogzilla.
I soon learned that their Florida room with a wooden floor was to be my new permanent home. The couple couldn’t decide which doghouse they wanted and so I had a brand new huge metal crate and a used Igloo doghouse, both of which to this day I use, depending upon my mood.
Like my master Hank when he was young, I had a knack for getting in trouble. I won’t rationalize my acts. I crashed through a plate glass window in the Florida room in pursuit of a teasing rabbit, ending up in the veterinarian’s office in Shelbyville with deep shard wounds. Hank replaced the glass with pieces of wood and then new glass. That dang rabbit or on like him came back around and darned if I didn’t go crashing through a second plate glass window. Ever hence the barrier has been wood instead of glass.
Liz took a liking to me, especially when my wounds were healing and brought me into the house. I liked this very much. One night while Hank and Liz were sleeping I helped myself to an entire woolen throw mat and an empty plastic bottle of water. The long and the short of it was that the combination settled in my intestines and was kind of like the twisted threads you see tangled up in the roller of a vacuum cleaner.
Getting this out of me was impossible for the vet in Shelbyville, and he transferred me to a female vet with surgeon skills in Franklin. She did some preliminary probing while Liz cried and cried as I whimpered so. The vet suggested that my couple leave and find a movie, and I guess they selected some brainless Toby Keith chase movie. Just as the movie ended she called Hank on the cell phone and said that she had cut my intestines into five pieces and that I was a real mess with other parts clear into my anus and others yet in my throat. It would take her all night to work on me, and by the way it would cost $1200. She took Hank’s Visa card number over the phone, but warned him I might not survive.
This, of course, was the grim scene I described at the beginning of my essay. When I returned to Waldron it was touch and go for maybe ten days. I was on more antibiotics than one can count, was swabbed constantly with antiseptics, and fed by the couple with eye droppers some sort of liquid food. Crazily, when I was such a mess, I really bonded with Liz and Hank. Liz was the huggy type, and Hank the scratch your chest and rump type, not as affectionate with dogs as Liz was. Unfortunately, the huggy stuff really appealed to me, and I climb all over visitors to the house, hoping to reclaim a set of arms around me as I once had.
I had no way of knowing it, but the episode where I ate the rug set something off in Liz who had been moping for her beloved New York City all my short time at the house. Even though eating the rug was all my own idea, Liz blamed herself for my near-death and concluded that her getting lost in cornfields, losing all contact with her flashy New York friends, and inability to regulate a high spirited Lab was a sign that she had to return to her roots. To this day I recognize her voice when she calls, which was often for a while and now occasional, and I whine or get agitated if Hank tests my memory and asks, “Where’s Liz.”
Sad, but life goes on, right? Oh, and the vet recommended I be neutered during the operation, and so there went any chance I’ll ever have progeny. Snip, snip. Nice knowing you, body parts.
Hank’s had some visitors here, but I’ll respect his privacy and just tell you about two. One was Hank’s friend Big Dave who came with his son Ethan to live with us after Dave split with his long-time girlfriend next door. I loved those two dearly, and Dave was an occasional hugger, as was Ethan, so I had my “hug fix” the four months or two they stayed. More recently Hank’s twenty-year-old friend Kim and her baby Lilly (Hank calls her “Little Bit”) stayed after a divorce, and they kept me company on the porch quite a bit while Hank was away at school. They are gone now, but I can still smell the jalapeno poppers and popcorn that Hank and Kim were always making as a midnight snack. I can tell that Hank looks at Kim and Little Bit as the daughters he never had.
Somewhere along the way I learned tricks. Lots of them. You can roll a ball in front of me and I won’t chase it until you say “OK.” I sometimes can roll over on command, always will stay when you ask, chase batted balls (my neighbor Ed Myers taught me that), make an effort to snag frisbees, fetch, retrieve and what not. I stayed away from a bat that was aerodynamically challenged and ran into a fan in the Florida room after Hank yelled “Stay.” I grabbed a dove that ran into a glass window and put her down gently after Hank yelled release.
But I still have discipline problems. Waldron is lousy with stray cats, wandering dogs, and taunting rabbits and chipmunks. I run away about once a week and have to be taken to potty on a leash. Franklin College administrators said dogs are no longer welcome on campus, and I lost one of my favorite places to visit. (Now there are two professors who flout this rule, but I won’t bust them here by telling because Hank secretly is happy they are disobeying this edict).
My favorite places are the Flat Rock River banks, a couple lakes in southern Indiana where Hank and I fish, and the ballfields where I retrieve softballs until Hank wears out.
Life is not bad, although I won’t say it is ideal, and you never know. I may have heroic, human-saving qualities in me. I just haven’t been tested yet.