Jenga
Knowing what we do now, we would have named her Oliver, as in "Oliver Twist." Instead we named her Jenga, after a game that challenges you to stacking small blocks as high as possible before they tumble.
Jenga, who passed away recently (March 2010) was typically terrier-like, behaving more like a cat than dog; that is, she seldom came when called, when loose almost always ran from us, but would leap into the arms of strangers. Unlike Ginger (above), who didn't warm to anyone who wasn't a family member, Jenga enjoyed meeting people.
A few months after we got Jenga, she escaped through a front door that had briefly been left open. She ran several blocks in a zig-zag pattern, visiting every lawn along the way. When we caught up with her she was in the arms of a young man who had just gotten out of his car. She seemed content to stay with him, and the guy eyed us suspiciously when we told him she was our dog.
"Then why doesn't she go to you?" he asked.
"We just got her," we lied ... because se thought that, in time, Jenga would respond when we shouted for her. But she never did, except a few times we tricked her by using food or our automobile. (She loved to get into the car, then almost immediately started whining like she realized she had made a terrible mistake and was probably headed for the vet's office.)
There's a woman in Cranston who's probably still shaking her head about the idiot strangers who flagged her down on Mayfield Avenue and asked her to call out, "Jenga!!" But she got out of her car and did as requested, and damn if Jenga didn't turn around and run right up to her.
Jenga loved the sound of her own voice. When she was loose, she wanted our neighbors to know it.
I never paid much attention to terriers before Linda and our daughter Meridith decided they wanted to have one. Until then my experience had mainly been with Irish setters, Weimaraners and Ginger, the Shetland sheepdog.
Jenga was a cairn terrier – that's CAIRN, which I spell out in capital letters because in this font the word cairn can look like calm, and if there's one thing Jenga was not, it was calm. Some referred to her as the Toto dog in "The Wizard of Oz." Toto also was a cairn, but I saw little resemblance between Dorothy's dog and ours. For that matter, Toto was only one of several cairn terriers used in movies in the 1930s and '40s. All of them looked rather unkept compared with Jenga.
She remained puppy-like most of her life and when agitated or excited she would race around the house, out of control, an excercise we called "the zoomies." She was bred to kill mice, but had few opportunities. I saw her in action once and almost felt sorry for the mouse. The whole thing was over in a couple of seconds.
In Rhode Island Jenga had the freedom of a good-sized, fenced in backyard. The fence kept her in – most of the time; she did, on two occasions,, tunnel out and make The Great Escape – but allowed a host of critters to invade our property. Thus Jenga's most memorable confrontations up north were with skunks, who always had the last laugh – on Jenga and the person who went outside to fetch her. Well, who am I kidding? That person was always Linda.
About eight years ago we moved to Bluffton, South Carolina. One of the advantages here in the Lowcountry: no skunks. Also, we could no longer turn Jenga loose outside; a fence was not an option. Being on a leash kept her from going after any mice who might be living in the woods next door, so she had to settle for hunting lizards that sneaked into the house, but they almost always managed to elude her.
As Jenga approached double digits, age-wise, she became obsessed with food, racing down the stairs from the second floor whenever she heard the refrigerator or a certain closet door open. She chowed down food even faster than did my father, Buster Major, which I previously thought was impossible.
Jenga also perfected the pitiful, steady stare of a beggar. Sometimes it was annoying, especially when she sat and gave me that stare while I was gobbling down something I shouldn't have been eating in the first place. But mostly she was irresistibly cute.
Since she's been gone ... well, you know what's coming ... it's those moments that I miss the most.
