By Mack Williams
For the Salisbury Post
One morning in November, 1964, when I was 13, I woke up to something moving around and making noises on top of my chest.
The source of this modest amount of commotion was a small puppy. My brother Joe had been driving down the Heilig Road and skirted around something lying there. When he went back, pulled off of the road and got out to examine what he had seen, he found a small puppy wrapped in a towel.
We placed an ad in the Salisbury Post and no one claimed it, so the puppy became ours. In thinking about the circumstances of the puppy’s discovery by my brother Joe, “not wanted” was a much better descriptive term of the puppy than “lost and found.”
The puppy was moving around on my chest and making all of the appropriate “puppy” noises. I remember its breath smelling somewhat reminiscent of smoke, although I don’t think that this was during our family’s annual “leaf burning time.”
The facial markings of the little creature gave it the appearance of having dark circles around ite eyes. Since this was November 1964, and since the presidential election had already taken place, and since presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater wore dark rimmed glasses, and since we were Republicans, I named the puppy “Goldwater.” The puppy was soon discovered to be female, so we named it something more appropriate: “Suzie.”
Some years later, Suzie gave birth to a litter of puppies.
We gave away all of them, except for one that was the same color as saltwater taffy, so we named her “Taffy.”
Sometime around 1970, Suzie ran away while I was at college and we never saw her again, but we still had Taffy. When my mother moved to Salisbury in 1973, a friend, Ada Ruth Beeker adopted Taffy, since pets were not allowed in the apartment where my mother was moving. Many years later, Ada Ruth told my mother that Taffy had died of old age, and that she had buried her in her yard.
Taffy was always a sweet dog, highly excitable, but happily so. Her uncontrollable happiness upon seeing us, when we had been parted from her awhile, always resulted in her leaving a puddle in the wake of her excitement
Most people can only count the number of their true friends on the fingers of one hand, with a few uncounted fingers left over. In reflecting back on Taffy, even until this day I can count on only one finger the number of friends in my life, animal or human, who were so excited to see me that complete bladder control was lost on a regular basis.