Migo

Patty is actually our second dog. Our first dog was Migo. His story is a little hard for me to tell so just bear with me.
Back in the day, when I only had one baby, I used to load her up in the backpack and take a morning walk. We'd walk around the neighborhood nearly every morning and stretch my legs and let her see the world. There were always loose dogs in the neighborhood and we got to know which ones were nice and which ones weren't. One day we met a new one, and he was really nice. He loved us. He followed us home and sat by the front door waiting for us to come out again. He looked hungry so I gave him some cat food. He loved us more. He decided to live with us. Just like that, he decided that our house was a good one and he'd live here now. Even though our yard wasn't fenced in at the time he stayed by the house. He came inside and laid around and just made himself at home. We had a dog.
We found his real home a few days later while walking around the neighborhood again. A nice guy came out on his porch and yelled that we had his dog. We chatted for a bit and told him the story of his dog deciding to live with us for a few days. He confided that he couldn't really afford to feed a dog this big and we could keep him if we wanted. We weren't sure if we should just take his dog, but he insisted. To show us how much he appreciated it, he invited us in to smoke a joint with him. We declined but were happy he no longer had to spend his weed money on dog food. Priorities man.
The dog was so friendly that were just calling him The Friendly Dog. His old owner told us his real name was Lug Nuts. It was clearly time for a new name to go with his new life. We settled on Amigo, Spanish for friend. That name very quickly mutated to just Migo and it stuck through his whole time with us. There were variations of course, such as Meegs, Eeegs, Eeger, and so on, but he was Migo. He stayed fantastically friendly for his whole stay with us. He was happy to see you every day when you came home. He was thrilled to just lay inside on the floor. He was great with the kids and the cat, letting either of them pet him or lay on him or generally harass him with no repercussions. He was as nice a dog as you could hope to have, especially with small children.
He wasn't perfect, he had a bit of a larceny problem. Anything left unattended in the yard he'd steal and bury. Work gloves, shoes, toys, tools, if he could grab it without you seeing he'd be off to put it in a shallow grave. One time he stole our daughters favorite stuffed duck and we had to kick at every fresh looking patch of soil in the yard until we found where it was. He stole a pair of gloves from my father in law and one of my wife's shoes that we never did find. It was kind of maddening, and we never could figure out why he did it. I think he was just born a thief. He was also had some sort of herding dog in his genetics somewhere and compulsively herded people. You could't run down the driveway without getting bumped off course.
He was a good dog, he was healthy (after we killed the heart worms that he came with) and happy and just good. He might still be with us, but I made a mistake. A horrible mistake. It's hot in Texas and Migo used to sleep under the car in the shade. I knew this. He'd be under the car and would climb out while I buckled the children in. It got so I didn't think about it. If he was there, he got out, if I didn't see him climb out it was because he was somewhere else. Except one time he didn't. I don't know why. I don't even know if I saw him under there and ignored it, I might have. I was heading off to pick up kids from preschool and I immediately knew what happened. I didn't run him over with a tire, I pinned him between the car and the ground. I raced to the garage and got a jack and lifted the car until there was enough room to get him out. The damage was done. We brought him to the vet and an x-ray showed that his hips, which were  horrible due to genetics anyway, had been smushed around and displaced. He was hurt badly. He couldn't stand. In the vet's opinion, he didn't have the natural structure in his hips to be able to fix things. Had we brought him in healthy we would have been having a discussion about how long he was going to be able to stand on his own. Like this, the choice was clear.
My parents are vets and I spent my childhood helping to hold old sick dogs and cats as their owners spent their last moments with them. I did that for Migo too. He was a very big dog, so I carried him back behind the house and dug a very big hole and said goodbye.
That moment of inattention is something that I can't really forgive myself for. I am consoled by the fact that for the years he lived with us, he had a good life. We cured his heart worms that would have killed him slowly years before. He always had food and people that cared about him. He had kids around him, and he truly loved kids. He was a good boy.