A dog named mini-Cooper

Happy birthday, Hobie.  Today, you are thirteen years old, and it hardly seems possible that I have known you this long.  You’re the Millennium Dog, you know — born in January of 2000, and you’ll live on forever as the inspiration behind Millennium Dog Productions and k2k9.com.  If it wasn’t for you, I may not have started writing about you, and Hector, Charlie Brown, Cooper and Timba (and of course, the cats… the many, many, many cats).

My parents, Frank and Marion Mueller, were married in a secret, rushed wedding ceremony, on December 19, 1942, in Chicago, when my father was on leave between State-side assignments with the U.S. Army during WWII, prior to his deployment to the European theatre of war.

My mother was a nurse in training at the time, just 22 years old, and was able to keep living at nurse’s housing if she remained unmarried.  So, they kept their marriage secret until March 19, 1943 after she had graduated.

The two lived apart during the first three years of their marriage, except for a brief stint in San Antonio,Texas during the summer of 1944.  Other than the San Antonio period, my mother lived with her parents in Evanston, Illinois, and my father was stationed at various training camps in the United States, then deployed to England, France, Belgium and eventually Germany until December of 1945.

In late 1945, when it became clear that he would probably be home for the holidays, his main goal was to get home in time to celebrate their third wedding anniversary together on December 19, 1945.  It is unclear, from his letters, if this actually did occur, but there’s a good chance it did — his letters home ended in November of 1945.  It would have taken him a month to return home by ship across the Atlantic, through New York, and back to Chicago.  Whether or not he actually made it home before that day is a mystery, but I like to think that he did, so I maintain that that’s exactly what transpired.

Dad didn’t realize that he was writing a diary that his daughter would find nearly 70 years later, and publish as a set of books, but that’s exactly what he did by writing to my mom each and every day of those three years, without fail.  On the very rare occasions that he missed a day of writing, he would apologetically recount his experiences in the next letter to Mom.  He wanted his grandchildren to know about his life (he wrote that in an incomplete auto-biography).

Today marks 70 years since this young couple went to City Hall in Chicago and secretly tied the knot that would result in our little family.  In honor and memory of my parents, we are offering a free Kindle download (today only) of both volumes of “More Than Anything in the World”, a set of books I recently self-published.  (Volume 3, 1945, will be available in 2013 or 2014.)

Join us in celebrating this remarkable couple’s love story — download your free copy of both books today:  70th anniversary special, download both volumes of MTAITW FREE for Kindle

                                                     (The couple’s formal wedding photo)

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I’m inspired by my dogs.  All three of them bring something unique to the table.  Hobie is now almost 13 years old, and so arthritic it is actually painful to watch.  He has some other health issues which have been rather exasperating lately (nothing serious, just little annoyances).  Where once we could patch things up in a day or two, it takes longer and longer for the little annoying things to heal, or they recur, which is maddening.  Charlie Brown and Cooper turn a year old in less than a week!  I can hardly believe they are all grown up already, time goes by so fast.  Charlie Brown is still a little devil (hey, he’s bored, I’ve been too sick to deal with an oversized puppy!), but he is SO smart.  No offense to his predecessors Timba, Hector, and Hobie each of whom I claimed were “the smartest dog on the planet”.  But Charlie is showing remarkable smarts that I never saw in any of them at this young age.  Maybe I’m just getting better at training, yeah, yeah, that’s it!  And then there’s Cooper — ah, The Coop.  The three-legged wonder dog.  This remarkable creature is so inspirational an entire book could be dedicated to him (and most likely will be in the future).  Every time I think of how I’m in pain and having a hard time going up or down stairs or any other physical activity I used to be able to do easily, I begin to whine about it, and then I see Cooper, out of the corner of my eye, doing something remarkable like beating Charlie to the tennis ball I just threw across the yard, like reaching the top of the flight of stairs faster than anyone (he hops like a kangaroo), like coming into the house and saying “I am here now, everything will be fine” and bringing absolute and complete balance to the entire household (when we thought adding a third dog would be a challenge, instead it actually SOLVED problems!).

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My guest post on From the Dog’s Paw

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