A Life Lesson from Churchill

I recently lost my 17-year-old lifelong companion Churchill, an apricot poodle. With Churchill it was love at first sight -- in a pet store in Hopkins, Minnesota, where he looked at me with coffee-colored eyes, demanding that I get him out of there. Churchill was an outrageous puppy. He tugged and chewed at everything (hence his nickname 'Chu') untying my older son's shoelaces and nipping at his pea jacket so enthusiastically that he said to the clerk in astonishment, 'this is the dog my mother wants to buy?' I hadn't planned on having a dog at that point in our lives; we were living in a townhouse complex where pets were forbidden, but moving to our own place in a month. But there Churchill was, a force unto himself -- and nothing was quite the same after that moment.