Bootsie and Murphy and What You Don't Know about Your Friends

Bootsie was our first dog. She was a Boston Bull and she moved with us from the house pictured here (in Overland, MO) to our house in Florissant. We had a fenced in back yard, but a big dog jumped the fence and, well, you know what happened. Bootsie was five or six years old by then, had never had puppies, and the vet said that delivering the pups would be a big risk to her. We all decided that we wanted Bootsie to be safe. So the vet aborted the puppies. The sad thing was that Bootsie died on the operating table. We were so upset. I remember mom telling us when we came home from school that day. I walked down to the end of the street and sat on the curb, crying for a long time. Funny, as I'm telling the story, it's the first time I've wondered why I left the house to go cry on the curb.

I was relating this story to my good college friend and comedy partner, Kris, and she disclosed that she, too, had a Boston Bull Terrier when she was a child. We have known each other now for close to 40 years, have laughed and cried together, been roommates for a time, even did some amateur detective work to bring to justice the man who slammed his car into the side of my car and fled. Once we took a trip to Riverside, California to visit Kris's mom and dad. I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time and nearly drown in it as Kris stood on the shore laughing at me. We have both always been dog lovers and when we graduated from college, we shared a little apartment in Abilene, TX with her beautiful Irish Setter, Shawn. And yet, we were amazed to find out that we did not know that we both had Boston Bulls as our first family pet. Here's a picture of Kris with her dog, Murphy. Cute, huh? I'm thinking it's Eastertime and Kris is going to have to fight Murphy off from her basket with that big lollipop in her hand.