Frankie Weiss and Her Magic

Frankie Weiss and Her Magic
Chapter Eleven

Chapter 10 ends with the following words:

            “By adopting you have performed, perhaps, the greatest glory life has to offer in human values. You have given yourself over to the care of another living being.”

             No matter that living being is… human, canine or feline.                                     

            There were more cats and dogs in the Weiss-Goodman-Smith families than it’s possible to remember over the ensuing past 75 or more years. One brother, my sister and two nephews all had their share of these loving animals. As a child, I remember we had a pet cat; this cat found a place to have her kittens in an open door in a chifferobe that today may be called a sideboard. I remember nothing of what happened to that cat or its kittens. That was my total involvement with pets in the Weiss home.

            Some years later, my earliest recollection is of Blackie (Starry Night III), she came from a line of champions. I do not know where my brother got the dog and neither does anyone else; his son, Marty, my nephew, remains from that time so long ago. Blackie was a Cocker Spaniel with long shaggy ears, she had the sweetest disposition of any dog I ever knew, and she was as beautiful as she was gentle. Sadly, photographs showing this wonderful animal, in all her beauty are not to be found, it’s too bad.

While at dinner tonight with my sister and friends, I learned Blackie was buried in an Animal Cemetery with a headstone denoting her name, birth and death. She was loved and returned that love without reservation. Marty’s parents had other dogs, Marty was kind enough to remind me and email some pictures of his dogs, more about Marty and his family later in this narrative.

 In those years while we were a family living in close residence, I was on my own and living away from the main Weiss family residence. These were the times when families and many relatives including aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and most children all lived within close proximity of one another.     

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