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Twister, a unique family member

May 4, 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Tom Claridge

I’ve never understood why it is that some families never adopt a pet. Maybe it’s because they aren’t prepared to deal with things like house-training or cleaning up Nature’s messes.

Whatever the case, pets have been around my own families most of my life. One of my earliest recollections is of a day spent at Mono Cliffs long before it became a provincial park. It was a warm summer day and we’d gone there for a family picnic, but it ended tragically when the family pet, Scotty, suffered a heart attack climbing from the caves area.

My mother declared that was the last time we’d have a dog, and she stuck to that pledge until I was about eight years old, when we adopted Pal, a black mongrel who became somewhat famed by daily accompanying my Granddad, T.F.E. Claridge, as he walked past our home on First Avenue on the six blocks to his job as owner/publisher of the Shelburne Free Press and Economist. As I recall it, Pal spent most of the morning at the FP&E office, returning home on his own about noon.

Pal lived a long life, despite his habit of chasing cars and sometimes bouncing off them.

Over the years, wife Pam and I have had quite few pets, all but one of them dogs. The exception was a car we called Whiskers who soon became friends with our two dogs at the time and would join them curling up on the parents’ bed.

But of all the dogs we’ve had, I’ve never become as attached as I was to one that wasn’t really ours.

Twister was a black British lab (smaller than the American ones) that daughter Nancy selected over a sibling when their eyes first met, it being a form of love at first sight.

A prize-winning show dog, Twister had been spayed after having a six-pup litter and had spent her first years at her farm home in Amaranth, where the owners specialized in breeding Labs.

The owner agreed to part with Twister only on getting assurances from Nancy that she wouldn’t be left alone all day because Pam and I had agreed to care for her while Nancy was pursuing her career in law.

Most days, that meant a routine transfer between Nancy’s car and ours at the Leaders lot, the most convenient meeting point which was close to her job at Carters’ and roughly the same driving time between our homes.

I never did hear how Twister got her name, but it surely wasn’t because she in any way resembled a tornado, far from it.

In many ways, Twister was unique as a family pet. Not only was she our first Labrador, she was also our first purebred and by far the most “laid-back” of all we’d ever known – never barking or growling, and never showing any desire to wander off. She was the perfect family pet.

Born on April 13, 2001, Twister lived precisely 16 years – a long life for a Lab, but one that would likely have continued for months or even years had it not been for a traumatic occurrence in the form of a Grand Mal seizure on her bed in our family room on her birthday.

We called Nancy immediately and she was there within minutes. She and I carried Twister to Nancy’s car on her bed and took her to the Orangeville Animal Hospital, which had always been her caregivers.

By the time we arrived there Twister seemed to be recovering, but a careful examination disclosed that she had little or no hope of being able to stand again and there was every likelihood of her suffering another seizure, so there was no alternative but to let her slip away with two injections, one to calm her and the other to end her life.

Obviously, she is being missed in both households, and I haven’t a clue as to whether Nancy will opt to adopt another dog. However, she has passed along a note she received the other day from the animal hospital which shows we weren’t alone in seeing Twister as someone special. It read:

Below a standard message of solace was a hand-written entry: “Twister was a perfect dog and she enjoyed a wonderful, incredibly long life. Someone once wrote that grief is like a giant hole in the middle of the room; at first you keep falling in, but eventually you learn to walk along the edges. With all our sympathy, Dr. Sharon, Dr. Kristin and all of us at Orangeville Animal Hospital.”

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