Katie Scarlett, English Springer Spaniel, ready for bed
Well, I posted my new companion Delta Dawn (See TroysArt Dog on Monday, September 15, 2014), but today’s Dog on Monday is my former four-legged friend, Katie Scarlett, also an English Springer Spaniel.
She was gorgeous, sweet, athletic, and extremely intelligent. She enjoyed travel (was great in the car until she ate the inside of my red Mercedes) and we went across the USA together (we did Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah), she liked to rollerblade, swim, camp out, climb mountains, and she always loved a party. But she was also quite the devil. In fact she was a window breaker and a door knob eater. She was happiest with me but when she wasn’t, then bar the door!
She had a groomer, psychiatrists, behaviorists, vets, drugs, therapy, sitters, and most of all love… but nothing kept her from her usual tricks. And not a crate known to Christendom could hold her–each and every one reminded me of that scene from Jaws. In fact, as time went by she became adept at the art of escape, a pane of glass was no more effective than hot butter within her last years–she may have been reincarnated from Harry Houdini. A crate reinforced with zip-ties bought me almost an hour away from home…
Katie Scarlett napping, sketch by Troy Broussard
I recall exhibiting oil paintings in Lafayette at Gallery 549 and naturally had an entourage with me. At some point during the night a friend got a call from my father. He heard something or someone beating on his garden gate. He went out to the patio and it was Katie Scarlett. She was very upset. I got home and all my windows were destroyed; she had busted glass and made her way to father’s. See, not just one window that night, she was particularly angry.
Katie Scarlett drawing manipulate by computer, by Troy Broussard
I knew she was capable. A few years before, I came home to a broken window and a busted iron patio gate. I looked all over for that rascal. Finally I got a call from the lady to whom I sold my house; Katie Scarlett was tearing down her front door, 4 miles away through Houston traffic.
At my latest residence I met my sweet new neighbors when I got a call during lunch one day. She had busted out a second story window and waited on the ledge until the unsuspecting ladies heard the ruckus and came out of their home. Seeing her from above, Jacki and Mary Verbeck were panicked–poor dears. That’s when she took the plunge to the cement below. I got home and had the glass and screen fixed before my landlord found out…
She’d busted more than a tooth or two from taking second story dives in her history.
I was afraid to leave her alone, and I always tried to either hire a dog sitter or would drop her at John Andrew‘s Pet Salon & Day Spa (that was expensive). And don’t ask John about the time he kept her when I went to Europe, please… but that is how he came to own my favorite painting.
There were many instances…I was usually very furious about it. She made my life hell. But I still loved her.
She died at age 10 in 2013. She fought a valiant effort against cancer for many years, from her boobies and ovaries, but the tumors in her intestines killed her. She is buried beneath a memorial scarlet glazed bird bath in John Sherman and Skip Mercier‘s back garden. If she’s not waiting at Rainbow Bridge for me then I guess she’s already busting out windows in Heaven. I expect to be hit by a shard of glass when it rains…