Sweet Quincy, Rest In Peace

Old man Quincy

When we lived in Temecula, Travis played Snout the Tinker in A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of his lines in a roll-call scene was "Here, Peter Quince."

That line inspired my decision to change Leon's name to Quincy.

We were still living in our tiny cabin on McWhinney in 2001 and Travis had just started working for the city. He was inspecting a deck when a bouncy German Shorthaired Pointer came over to greet him. The owner kicked the dog in the ribs.

"That wasn't necessary." Travis said, shocked at the blatant abuse. "He's not bothering me."

Before Travis left, the dog approached and was kicked again. "If that's the way you treat your dog, I will take him."

And my phone rang. Travis gave me directions to the house so I went to look and knew that we had to take him. We didn't have a fenced yard but within a couple of weeks, we had gotten that covered and Leon had a new name and a new home.

He loved to fetch and swim in the lake, chase ducks and birds, go on hikes and snowshoeing, and even followed me on a couple of horseback rides when we moved to the ranch. But as he aged, he just couldn't tag along anymore.

When we got Jaeger, Quincy brought the whimpering little pup into his own doghouse on the first night. And as Jaeger grew, they still shared a doghouse, cramming their leggy bodies together. They were best friends.

In the last couple of years, Quincy's hips started to go. We put him on supplements like glucosamine and Cetyl-M that really seemed to give him a couple of extra years. More recently, he had been falling. He was slow to get up. I joked around that he needed a walker, but then he would bound around the yard like a puppy. We decided that he would let us know when it was time.

Wednesday night, Quincy was hobbling around. We brought him in by the fire. Thursday morning, he barely was able to get up to go to the bathroom, and somehow managed to pull himself back up on the deck. I let him in our bedroom to lay on a blanket so Tramp and Jaeger wouldn't knock him over.

I had to go check in at work, but left early to spend time with Quincy. He hadn't moved from the blanket. I had to touch him to wake him.

He gave me a little wag but didn't get up.

I took him to the lake so he could watch the ducks and smell the lake air. We sat in the truck and he rested his head to look out the window at the lake he loved to swim in.

And then it was time to go.