An elegy for Mister Happy
Winslow Gwynn Garcia Buxton, perhaps the only dog in northern Illinois named after two San Diego sports hall of famers, died peacefully over the weekend. He was roughly 16 years old.
We brought Winslow home about a week after my firstborn dog, Weederman, died around the same age. The bouncy Bichon-Shih tzu mix went by Mister Happy at first, and seemed like a relatively low-maintenance puppy when we first got him – until we discovered on the way home that he got carsick easily and threw up on my Diet Coke, which was tucked into the car console.
Except for the carsickness and a dislike of thunderstorms, during which he would insist on sleeping in one’s armpit or atop one’s head overnight, he generally was an easygoing sort. And until recently, he never passed up an opportunity to mooch at the dinner table. He demonstrated his freeloading skills most notably maybe a year after he joined our household, when we discovered a pound of taco meat had disappeared one evening from our kitchen table. The bellowing moans deep in the night when he was let out in the yard to do his business made it clear which dog stole the heavily spiced pork, plastic container and all.
We’ll miss the mooching, the pilfering of stuffed toys from Frannie’s room, his running starts across the backyard to launch himself into flight over snowdrifts onto the deck. We’ll even miss his uncanny ability to slip through fencing out of the backyard, forcing us to retrieve him down the block or have a neighbor drop him off. We’ll miss all of it.
Winslow outlasted several other animals in our household – two dogs and two cats – during his long lifetime. He is survived by two cats, a neurotic greyhound mix, and three heartbroken humans.
