Month: June 2018

In his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, the author Truman Capote observed that neither Perry Smith nor Dick Hickok could have murdered the Clutter family alone but together they formed third personality.

The same was true of Buster and Casey as the roamed both the Harrigan property and ours.

Casey was a sweet little chocolate lab who wanted to be liked by everyone.

Buster, more aloof and a bit of a loudmouth, was really a nice dog that never bit anyone.

That said, if you were walking by the properties, one would sound the alarm and the other would start barking and this racket would continue until you traversed both properties.

It was particularly loud if you were wearing a mail uniform.

Despite their apparently different dispositions, it became clear, over time that Casey was in charge of this two dog pack.

She would periodically reassert this dominance by suddenly charging at Buster growling and snarling, chasing him through the electric fence and out into Strathmore Drive.

Buster would then be the recipient of a shock once he went through the fence and, again, when he returned.

When she got bored, Casey would steal a sneaker, shoe or some other object and make you chase her around the yard to get it back. She knew enough about frustration and torment to periodically drop it and then snatch it away as soon as you went to get it.

Occasionally, these episodes could result in a truly painful encounter.

I once stepped out into the yard as she came barreling around the garage with a golf club in her mouth which got me squarely on the knee.

I joined the long list of Irishmen who knew what it was to be “kneecapped.”

Buster had superb instincts and speed.

He could run like the wind, turn on a dime and would chase anything that moved or flew.

I often wondered what the neighbors watching from afar thought when they saw him charge out the door snapping at bees that they couldn’t see.

On one of their early morning walks behind Corcoran High School, he suddenly dove at a squirrel, causing it to leap up on Terri’s leg before trying to get away.

All before her morning cup of tea.

We ultimately learned, that despite his superb conditioning, Buster suffered from some of the congenital conditions common to pure-bred German Shepherds.

It first manifested itself when Terri noticed he wasn’t getting up either quickly or easily and seemed to lack his usual enthusiasm for his morning walk.

We took him to the Veterinary School at Cornell where they did a thorough work-up on him, including x-rays, and told us that he had a deteriorating disc in his back that was causing him discomfort.

The good news was that it could be surgically repaired.

Buster was required to stay there for a couple weeks after the surgery, which allowed me to tell the world that “there was finally a Fahey at Cornell.”

Once he came home, he was confined to the house for a couple of months and could only be taken outside for bathroom breaks on a dog sling.

Once the vet cleared him to return to everyday activities, he raced out the door and promptly blew out his ACL.

It was back to Cornell for a graduate degree.

All was well for a few more years until one morning he began to yelp in pain as he got up and down from the floor.

We took him back to Cornell for an evaluation and the vet called us while he was sedated on the x-ray table to tell us that bony scar tissue had grown through the spinal canal and was pressing on the nerves in his back.

He said that they could repair it, but it was only a matter of time before the condition repeated itself and caused the excruciating pain that he was in.

We both agreed that he was too nice a companion to put him through that again and again.

We enjoyed him for a good and memorable decade and still miss him.

I’ve been posting a piece here each week since January 2016 without a break.

I hope you have enjoyed reading them.

I’ve decided to step away from a weekly blog post for a while to concentrate on a couple of other writing projects that I’ve been neglecting.

I intend to post from time to time while concentrating on those projects and will alert in the usual way on Sunday night.

Thanks for reading and sharing my thoughts and experiences these past two and a half years,

It has been fun sharing them with you.

One of the things we discovered about Buster was that his protective instinct was constant whether it was in the yard, in the car or in the house.

My daughter, Meghan, loves to recount how he would happily get in the car to do errands with her and then hang out the window barking at everyone who passed by.

On one occasion, she was driving down Glenwood Avenue when she passes a woman jogging with earphones on, which kept her from hearing the car’s approach. As they came abreast of the jogger, Buster leaned out the window and let out a large bark near her ear. The poor woman jumped a foot into the ear, letting out a scream that almost caused Meghan to drive into the retaining wall next to the road.

When he was young, doing errands with him was a challenge. If you left him for a few minutes in Wegman’s parking lot, his separation anxiety would kick in and he’d hang out the window whining and crying loudly. On more than one occasion I came out of the store to find a crowd gathered around the car convinced that he was being tortured.

His sense of protection extended particularly to Terri, Meghan and Kate. If somebody came in the house and gave one of them a hug, he’d jump up on them to push them away. Very few people ignored this or pushed back. Ultimately, I was able to use this to my advantage.

Terri and I were reading in bed one night, when one of the girls came upstairs and asked if she could watch a movie downstairs with her boyfriend.

“Sure,” I replied, “make yourselves at home but don’t stay up too late.”

After she went back downstairs, Terri said to me, “Aren’t you concerned about them being downstairs alone?”

“They’re not alone,” I replied, “Buster is down there with them.”

I was dead certain that my boy would climb up on the couch across from them and the first time the guy put his arm around her, he’d be met with a low growl that would cause him to re-think the wisdom of that move or any others.

Buster never disappointed me in that situation.

Later, I would have to resort to introducing myself to a prospective boyfriend by declaring, “I want you to know that I used to represent people that killed people for a living.”

That introduction had the same effect as Buster’s growl but caused my daughters to take a dim view of me for a few days.

Buster could be somewhat discriminating about who he would let into the house.

One summer my elderly aunt, who lived in Canada, stayed with us while she attended a reunion.

Terri and I had plans for the evening of her reunion and gave her a key to the house in the event she came home ahead of us.

“I hope you’re not afraid of dogs, Aunt Margie,” I told her, “Buster can be territorial.”

“I’ll be fine,” she told me.

When we got home, we discovered that she had no problem getting into the house and going to sleep.

At the next family gathering, Margie’s visit came up and one of my cousins asked her if she wasn’t nervous trying to get into the house with a dog that size and that protective.

She waved away any concern telling the group, “it’s easy if you just reach in and pet him.”

My sense of security began to wane.

After Kate and Meghan went off to college, Terri, Buster and I continued to live in the six bedroom house on Strathmore Drive.

With the girls gone, sleeping arrangements shuffled somewhat and Buster now had a bedroom with a queen size bed at the end of the hall over the driveway.

For some reason that I never quite figured out, he also had the telephone in his room.

I am a pretty sound sleeper and I didn’t hear it ring one night when the police called to see if they could bring a search warrant over for me to review.

When I didn’t answer the call, they pulled into the driveway and knocked on the driveway door.

This resulted in Buster charging down the stairs, barking, which woke me up?

I threw some clothes on, went downstairs and let them in while I reviewed the warrant.

A few weeks later, they called with another warrant and, as usual, I didn’t hear the phone ring.

They pulled into the driveway and called the house again.

I later learned that after the second call, they called their superior for instructions about what to do.

“Go knock on Fahey’s door,” he told them, “that will wake the dog up and he’ll answer the door.

The cops and I had found our rhythm.

I was later recounting this tale to my friend, Larry Hackett, while Kate Fahey listened.

When I was done, she asked Larry, “Do you think Buster is a police dog?”

He thought about it for a minute and replied, “I think he’s more like a crossing guard dog.”

I wouldn’t argue with that.

More next week

When we agreed to take Buster, we really didn’t have a complete sense of what his personality was.

He was a year old and the couple who was giving him up assured us that he wasn’t mean or vicious and this seemed borne out by the way he interacted with their children when we were there.

We quickly discovered that he was a dominant dog as evidenced by the way he would try and herd Terri and the girls downstairs each morning by nipping at their ankles.

It became increasingly annoying for them and although they told him “no” or “stop” it continued.

It all came to a head one Sunday evening when he started it and I happened to be on the landing with Terri between the first and second floor.

I raised my voice and firmly told him “no,” only to be met with loud barking. I repeated the word louder and the barking got louder.

I swallowed hard reached down, grabbed him by the collar and pinned him on his back and repeated the word loudly.

I held him on the floor for a minute and repeated “no” again before letting him up.

Little did he know how nervous I was about this show down.

We had one more encounter like this and then he accepted the fact that I was leader of the pack.

From that day forward, he would, for the most part, obey when I gave a command…….unless I let him off the leash and he went stone deaf.

He was also very territorial and protective.

For the first couple of weeks, he wouldn’t let the Harrigans cleaning lady come up the driveway to get to their house. Eventually, he decided she was part of the pack and relented.

A more complicated situation involved deliveries to their house.

Denny did much of her writing at home and was the recipient of occasional FedEx deliveries.

Since we didn’t know when the FedEx deliveries were scheduled, whether the package was delivered might depend on whether Buster and Casey were outside.

Although we later discovered that Casey held the upper hand between them, she was only too happy to back Buster up when it came to preventing deliveries.

All of this was minor compared to the situation that shortly unfolded after Buster’s arrival.

Terri and I were standing in our kitchen one Saturday morning, when we heard a loud male voice repeatedly shout, ” How do you like that?”

We opened the door onto the driveway and found the mailman spraying Buster with a can of “Halt.”

Buster had backed up, out of range and was barking loudly.

Apparently, the mailman had come up the driveway and was trying to put the mail in the box, which squeaked loudly, resulting in Buster racing around the house from the back yard barking.

I tried to calm the mailman down by telling him that Buster had never bitten anyone which seemed to give him little comfort or reassurance.

Over time, I would give this same assurance to visitors that he barked at until Terri told me that it didn’t have the desired effect.

The mailman left after uttering a few choice curse words and I had the vague realization that I had seen this movie before.

I quickly got into the car and drove to the Post Office on South Ave, where I rented a post office box.

The ghost of my sister’s dog, Lucky, had returned.

A month or two after we started picking up the mail at the post office, our mailman went on vacation and his substitute made a friend of Buster, by providing him with dog treats.

Mail deliveries resumed for two weeks until our regular mailman returned.

He would march past the house, glaring at Buster with his can of “Halt” in his outstretched hand.

Buster and Casey dutifully ignored him.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the workings of an invisible fence, I’ll try and explain it.

I should warn you that my knowledge of all things scientific is primitive and my primitive explanation could be wrong.

A wire is buried several inches in the ground which looped around both properties at their rear and side perimeters and then across a portion of the front yard.

A unit with a transmitter mounted in Kevin’s garage sent electricity to make the wire hot and also, depending on the strength of the signal, caused the dog collar to beep at a certain distance from the fence and delivered a shock to the collar if the wire was crossed.

The distance between when the beeping started and the wire could be increased or decreased by raising or lowering the frequency.

The first time we turned the fence on, the frequency was so high the dogs wouldn’t leave the house.

Buster and Kevin’s dog, Casey, a small female chocolate lab looked forlornly at each other across the driveway from kitchen doors that faced each other.

Once we got the frequency lowered to an appropriate level, we had to walk the dogs around the yard so that they would get familiar with the beeping.

There were a few draw backs to the invisible fence.

If the power went out the fence was useless. This happened a couple of times allowing Buster to wander freely throughout the neighborhood.

Another drawback was the battery in the collar getting low.

I could usually tell that was occurring when Buster would venture further and further down the driveway and ever closer to the line in the driveway under which the wire was buried.

The sales representative that sold us the fence advised us that we could tell if the collar or the fence was in operation by walking down the driveway holding the collar and listening for the beep.

He neglected to tell me that you shouldn’t hold it with your fingers on the prongs that delivered the electric shock.

I learned that lesson the hard way.

The third and most complicated was a break in the wire.

On one occasion an adjacent property owner took it upon himself to clear weeds and brush along the rear property line.

He dutifully dug up the wire, thinking it was a root, he cut it.

I didn’t have much of a challenge finding that break and was able to shut the fence down while I spliced it back together with heavy duty electrical tape.

The challenge in finding other breaks came when the wire was cut while mowing the grass or doing yard work.

On the occasions when that occurred, it was necessary to get down on hands and knees and follow the wire around the property until the break appeared. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in the hay stack.

For whatever reason, we were always able to locate the break and splice it back together.

As Otto Von Bismarck once observed, “God smiles on fools, drunkards and the United States.”

While the fence kept the dogs in most of the time, it didn’t keep anything out.

Buster and Casey would lay in the front yard and watch the world go by.

Another neighbor’s cat, Olive, learned that she could inflict extreme emotional distress on both dogs by running into the yard and then scampering outside the fence as both dogs charged at her full speed while the collars beeped.

That led to a discussion with my daughter Kate, who asked what she could get Buster for Christmas.

“Well,” I said after a minute, “I’d bet he’d like his very own cat.”

“You’re awful Dad,” was the only reply.

In due time, history would repeat itself.

More to come next week.