By Mickey Dunaway

This story cannot be told any shorter than I have written it. Because this is the third version and is filed under “Sandy and the Boys-short short short version.docx.” It is Chloe and Sandy’s special story, but to get to that climax, you must know how Sandy and I got there during almost 54 years of married life! I hope you enjoy the journey along the way because we sure did! – MD 

My patient wife, Sandy, has been dogged (pun intended) with boys of various ages and species her entire life until four years ago.  Actually, this is a story, not of all the boys in Sandy’s life over the years, but one little girl—Chloe, who entered our lives in 2019. 

To give proper drama to Chloe’s entrance, I need to set the stage with seventy-two years of history of males testing Sandy’s patience over those years. 

Sandy was born on April 21, 1947, into a family of two all-boy-older-brothers—one to become a U.S. Army cigar-chewing Sergeant who served two tours in Vietnam.  The other—a Civil War metal detectorist, historian, and carpenter.  When Sandy turned eleven, a younger brother who was part cowboy, part shrimper, part carpenter, and foremost boat builder entered her life.

Sandy and I differ on when we first met.  Things remembered fade a bit after 56 years of memories—with 55 of those in the state of marriage.  So, what follows is a compilation of how we both remember that first meeting. 

In the summer of 1967, I first met Sandy through her friend, Cheryl Ballard, who was also from Spanish Fort, Alabama.  In today’s terminology, they were BFFs.  I met Cheryl while attending (and sometimes studying) at Auburn University.  Cheryl—pronounced her name “Churl”—and I became close friends through Baptist Student Union.  The summer after I met Cheryl, I was working for Coca-Cola, Inc. in Mobile and making frequent trips across Mobile Bay driving a truck full of Cokes to the small agricultural town of Robertsdale (BTW: the home of Tim Cooke, Auburn grad and CEO of Apple, Inc.).  On the way home from Robertsdale, it seemed natural to stop by Spanish Fort and visit with my friend Cheryl and maybe have a Coke.  So, I did.  I promised Cheryl I would stop by again in two weeks when I made another Robertsdale run.

The next time I stopped that summer at Ballard’s Furniture, Cheryl had arranged for her friend Sandy to have a Coke with us at the store.

I don’t remember much about that second meeting with Cheryl except that Cheryl’s friend was the cutest cutie I had ever seen.  Shiny dark black hair in a pixie cut.  One could get lost in her dark brown eyes, surrounded by the longest natural lashes I had ever seen.  She was elfin in every way, except she had the biggest full-bodied laugh I had ever heard from a Southern female.  It came deep from her South Alabama country roots.  No genteel tee-hee-hee from this cutie who stood before me.  I was smitten with that face and that laugh that weakened me at my knees.

At Spanish Fort Baptist Church on a rainy Sunday afternoon, December 22, 1968, I became the fourth boy in Sandy’s life after her three brothers.

PART 2

In 1971, after three years of married life, we started looking for a dog and found an adult Bassett hound looking for a home.  We were that family.  The hound’s name was Napoleon, and it was perfect.  Like Napoleon, his namesake, the dog was short, stubborn, and smart.  

Napoleon became the fifth boy in Sandy’s life.

On July 30, 1973, Christian Patrick Dunaway was born as Sandy’s sixth boy.

When Christian reached ten pounds, he began sleeping all night.  He was never sick.  Christian saw his first high school football game at six weeks, and each of my varsity basketball games that same year.  He would come home after being held and tossed by cheerleaders and go right to sleep.  So much fun as new parents.

Heaven was surely found in Mobile County, Alabama, in 1973!  Almost. But, Napoleon had become jealous of Christian, the intruder in his world, and took to eating the baseboards and mattresses.  So, we gifted him to a childless fellow coach and his wife. 

We were dogless for a short while—until Christian was two.

Max became the seventh boy in Sandy’s life.

Max was a silver-haired white, under-coated Shepard from a litter of my brother’s female.  The pup was, of course, a male, too. 

Max had one flaw running with the dogs on either side of our chain-link backyard.  When he slid to a stop at the ends of each side of the fence, he piled up mountains of dirt so ugly in Mobile weather.  With much sadness, Max had to find another home. 

On June 12, 1977, Adam Flynn Dunaway was born, the eighth boy in Sandy’s life.

Adam was born with cerebral palsy—obviously a significant change for the family, but like most everything else in our young lives, we faced it head-on and positively.  Christian prospered in elementary school, and Adam’s challenges filled us with learning new ways of living as a complete family and new ways of looking at faith through the lives of our different family. 

In 1978, I was appointed as an assistant principal at Baker High School and spent five years enjoying the new educational challenges.  Adam enrolled in public school at three, and we saw him make great leaps.  His style was to go long periods without change, then suddenly, things would come together!  Patience was our primary parenting skill during these years.

1984, we made our first move away from our home turf to the small milltown of Alexander City, Alabama, where I would be principal of Benjamin Russell HS and where we would reside for 11 years. 

We had built two houses in Alex City—the second one on beautiful Lake Martin—and we found it had been far too long without the yelps of a canine in our lives.  We found a Labrador ready for adoption from a family in Birmingham. 

Yellow Labrador, Major, became the ninth boy in Sandy’s life. 

Major was a big boy—so big that my assistant principal said he should have at least been a Colonel!

While in Alex City, Adam had three major surgeries on his legs at Children’s’ Hospital in Birmingham—all aimed at walking and independence.  Major, our giant lab, was a great nurse for Adam during the many days he spent in bed during his recovery.

PART 3

In 1995, we moved again—this time a significant move to Louisville, Kentucky, where I was a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, and  Sandy worked in the Department of Cardiology at the University of Louisville.  Major came with us, and my oldest son, Christian, soon joined us and brought his Chocolate Lab, Snickers.

We only stayed in Louisville for a year—a most strange year.  That is a story for another time.

So, we moved back to Fairhope, Alabama, and I accepted a principalship at Daphne High School.  We brought Major with us and Christian’s Chocolate Lab—Snickers—who we had semi-adopted when Christian enrolled in Auburn.

Chocolate Lab Snickers became the tenth boy in Sandy’s life. 

Soon after returning to Alabama, Snickers died of a virulent, untreatable liver disorder.  Such a sweet boy.  Such a short life.

In March 1997 (another strange year for another story), we moved from Daphne to Owensboro, KY, where I was hired as Deputy Superintendent for Instruction.  We rented the first year in Owensboro, but the landlord didn’t allow dogs, and we found Major a nice home in Fairhope before we left.

After a year, our landlord agreed to let us bring a dog into the family of Sandy, Adam, and me.  And what a dog he turned out to be. 

Kentucky Coal Dust (COAL) became the eleventh boy in Sandy’s life.

Coal topped out at 120 pounds at three with not an ounce of fat.  The gentle giant, Coal, went with me to read stories to kindergarten classes in my Owensboro.  It was like it was what he was meant to do.

After a year or two in Owensboro, we expanded our retriever family and found a beautiful Golden Retriever, Khaki.

Kentucky Gold Dust (KHAKI) became the twelfth boy in Sandy’s life.

In 2002, I was hired as superintendent in Gibson County, Indiana, and Coal and Khaki went with us to farm country and again three years later when we moved to Charlotte, where I joined the faculty of the Department of Educational Leadership in the College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  My last job and a good one.

I would retire in 2018—the longest time I spent in a single job in my 49-year career in education.  Soon after arriving in Charlotte, we adopted another Chocolate Labrador, Rufus, from my son in Huntsville, Alabama.

Rufus became the thirteenth boy in Sandy’s life.

Not the sharpest tool in the dog shed, but what Rufus did not have in retriever-intelligence, he made up in love and loyalty.

We lived ten years in our house in Charlotte—the longest we had ever lived in a house.  During this time, we lost Coal at 10 with a heart attack.  We lost Rufus and Khaki within a few months of each other.  Both were 14.

We loved every dog we owned (if you can actually own a dog) unconditionally because of their dogginess.  The three walnut boxes containing their ashes remain prized artifacts of our life with our dogs.  And we know there will be at least two more.

But the story doesn’t end there.

With Khaki’s passing so soon after Rufus, we were lonely in ways that only a dog can fill.  We were moving for good one last time and building our seventh house in our marriage in Cornelius, North Carolina. 

We rented a house in a nice older subdivision in Huntersville, just a few miles south of where our new home would be.  It came with a fenced-in half-acre backyard that only increased our desire for another retriever.

Knowing that our new house was to be downsized by half from our home in Charlotte, we knew we needed a smaller dog, but not a miniature or toy.  Only a retriever would do.  I had two friends with Brittanys who loved them like we loved our dogs.  So, we settled on finding a Brittany pup.

Soon, I found a breeder who had a five-month-old—you guessed it, again—male orange and white pup.  He didn’t fit in with his family, who had a new baby, so the breeder accepted the puppy’s return.  The pup’s mother, Chloe, raised him until he was five months old when we came searching.

We met the breeder and the pup on a Sunday afternoon at a nearby dog park, and we fell for this rocket-fueled orange blur of a Brittany.  We brought him into our lives a couple of weeks later, having agreed on the name Boomer with our grandkids.

Boomer became the fourteenth boy in Sandy’s life.

AKC Registration: SOLI DEO’S ATHOS THE ARISTOCRAT

Call Name: BOOMER

Boomer is now nine.  His rocket engines have slowed only slightly, and he is as faithful a dog companion as I have ever owned.  As I write this, he is on the floor at my feet in his froggy pose—his favorite.

We have dozens and dozens of Boomer stories.  Here is one of my favorites.

Boomer was very new.  Maybe six months old.  Sandy and I drove to Panda Express to get a pickup supper.  Sandy ran in, and I kept the car running.  Boomer put his foot on the left rear window button and leapt out with his leash flying, sprinting toward the six-lane highway at rush hour.  I panicked.  Couldn’t get my seat belt off or turn the car off.  I panicked again.  Finally, I tumbled out the driver’s side door and ran toward the street, yelling, “BOOOMER!” He kept running, and I pulled my left hammy but kept running, yelling, “DAMMIT BOOMER.  COME HERE.” I then pulled my other hammy and BOOM!  Down I went.  But Boomer turned around for some unknown reason, saw me on the ground, and ran to check on me.  Since that day, he has been my dog.

PART 4

This entire story, including the beginning to this point, is about how Boomer’s mother, Chloe, became Sandy’s first girl.

When Boomer was five, and we were amid the pandemic, his breeder, Dawn, called me to ask if we would consider adopting Chloe.  The pandemic had hit her family hard, and they were giving up the breeding as a sideline and could not keep all their “family dogs.”

Dawn had read all of Boomer’s stories on Facebook and occasionally asked me to write another to brighten her day.  Therefore, she knew just how much we had fallen for this species of retriever with which we had no experience. 

A day or two before Labor Day, our breeder, Dawn, asked if we would consider adopting an older dog, Boomer’s mother, 9-year-old Chloe.  There was only one answer—an exuberant YES!

___________________________________________________________________________

AKC Registration: CH RIVAL’S SHAMROCK AT SOLI DEO JH

Call Name: CHLOE

Remember when I fell in love at first sight with Sandy, the pixie?  Chloe was as elfin as Sandy was a pixie. Emotions filled our den that day after Labor Day, 2019.  Dawn left our house with tears in her eyes.  Chloe and Sandy snuggled up with a blanket.

When we discovered Boomer, we learned that he was a pup in Chloe’s second litter—her last.  She was a show ring champion.  Dawn’s husband, Mark, described Chloe’s movement in the ring, “She moved like butter.” He was not wrong.  To see her run to our backyard is like watching a ballerina dance.  Four years later, she still makes us smile to see our Champion Chloe strut to the backdoor.  To see her stalk birds in our backyard is to see her during her Field Trial Championship Days. 

We love the duality of Chloe—show dog and hunting dog in equal measures—but she has also become Sandy’s dog.  Occasionally, Chloe will throw me “a bone” and come and snuggle with me watching TV, but only sometimes.  She has this mannerism of tucking her head under my chin when she comes to show me love.  My knees melt like they did the first time I met Sandy Mills in Ballard’s Furniture store in Spanish Fort.  It happens only rarely because she is a diva and a champion and dispenses her love on her terms.  That is what makes her so damn special as our second Brittany and Sandy’s first girl.

I once asked our breeder, Dawn, if she thought Chloe and Boomer would remember each other.  She said, “Absolutely.” 

We see it often in the backyard when they go out to laze in the early morning cool.  I must have dozens of pictures that appear to have posed, sitting beside each other.  Nope.  Just mama and son.  Blessings from the Almighty.

Chloe is not hearing well these days, but a few phrases still stand out for her.  Ask her if she is hungry, and she begins her elfin dance, tempting Boomer to race her to the food bowl.  Or ask if she wants to “Go Out,” she leaps off her spot on the sofa and runs to beat Boomer to the backdoor.  Ask, “Chloe, do you want a treat?” you have never seen such a pretty pair of ears perk up like she has scented a bird in the bush.

Sandy and I are “sleeping divorced,” as they call it these days.  And you guessed it, Chloe sleeps on Sandy’s bed and Boomer on his special blanket next to me.

Brittanys are everything you could want in a dog and more.  Chloe is 30 pounds, and Boomer is 40.  They are pointers and are not Spaniels.  Like most bird dogs, they are exceptionally intelligent, inquisitive of the world around them, and faithful and loving to their masters and mistresses.  They will be wherever we are and hunt the entire house until they track us down.  Hearing the tick, tick, tick of Brittany nails on the hardwood is their call sign.  If Boomer wants to go out, he will sit at the footrest of the sofa for 15 minutes, giving me the evil eye until I cannot stand it anymore. 

I was warned that Brittanys always win in battles of will.  They are not for every dog lover unless you are willing to accept that they consider themselves smarter than you.  I am not arguing. 

Brittanys are the most unique of bird dog breeds we shared our homes with during our marriage.  Loved them all.  None more than our Brittanys, who love us every day. 

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Napoleon Max Major Snickers Coal Khaki Rufus Boomer and Chloe