This page is a tribute to our past Borzoi that we have loved
and lost and wish to honor.
If a Dog Be Well
Remembered
by Ben Hur Lampman
from the 1925 Portland Oregonian
We are thinking now of a dog, whose coat was flame in the sunshine and who, so far as
we are aware, never entertained a mean or unworthy thought. This dog is buried beneath a
cherry tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry strews
petals on the green lawn of his grave.
Beneath a cherry tree or an apple or any flowering shrub of the garden is an excellent
place to bury a good dog.
Beneath such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer or gnawed at a flavorous
bone or lifted head to challenge some strange intruder. These are good places, in life or
in death. Yet it is a small matter.
For if the dog be well-remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as in
life, eyes kindling, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where the dog sleeps. On a
hill where the wind is unrebuked and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream he knew in
puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pastureland, where most exhilarating cattle
graze. It is all one to the dog and all one to you, and nothing is gained and nothing is
lost -- if memory lives.
But there is one best place to bury a dog. If you bury him in this spot, he will come to
you when you call -- come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the
well-remembered path, and to your side again.
And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they shall not growl at him, nor resent
his coming, for he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of
grass bent by his footfall, who hear no whimper, people who may never really have had a
dog. Smile at them, for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is
well worth knowing.
The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of his master.
BOB FC Kelcrest Feel the Heat SC
"Brandi" (4/13/98 - 10/12/06)
