Prada, my golden retriever, was my christmas gift my senior year of college. Pick of the litter. A story I’d tell about her from time to time was how she got her name. It wan’t that I had any interest or awareness of fashion. I was in my fall Art History class. We were viewing dozens of slides of a beautiful woman depicted in Vedic visual art and literature. She was the epitome of beauty and earthly love in Indian folk art, and was always rendered with a golden light radiating from her. I named my dog after her. At the end of the college quarter, with puppy in tow, I checked my final exam. I had a red X on the question regarding Prada. I thumbed through my tome of an Art History textbook. Turns out I had her name wrong. It was Rahda. But Prada was named and I stuck with it.
Prada, my first dog, and most prized possession died at the end of June. She was twelve years old. She spent her last days as he did her first, on the family farm. There are too many stories in the layers of my memory to list them all, let alone recall them. It’s been hard without her. I was spoiled, I know. More than once I’ve been told my most redeeming quality was my dog. No leash and seldom a scolding was ever earned or given, even in her unpredictable puppy years. She was always by my side. She traveled too many miles – silently watching the miles tick past, her head out the back window of my jeep for me to calculate. She’s had more hands pet her soft head than I could ever estimate. She was always there throughout the winding trails of my twenties. From the first lonely and exciting days of moving west the day after college graduation as a 6 month old puppy, she was my steadfast companion. She was with me without hesitation nor question as we lived quite literally from coast to coast. She’s swam in the Pacific, Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, Cape Cod Bay, Lake Champlain, Keuka Lake, Lake Erie, the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Platte, Green, Arkansas, Colorado, and New Rivers. She’s trotted down Madison Avenue in Manhattan and Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. She’s been on mountain tops, and lecture halls, deserts and barrooms. She’s been part of the formative years of my adult life and the times I’ve had. Her passing is a recognition of my own life and a look back on the part whose getting has gotten gone.
I still look down every time I open the door when I get home, and expect to see a stick, a sock, a stuffed fox, attached to her gentle mouth in front of tentative eyes, followed by her oscillating body, all swinging from her wagging tail. She was always there at any hour and in any season, with something in her mouth to give me as her sincere and humble daily offering. I still get nervous for her when the thunder comes preceding these summer storms. She never liked thunder, or firecrackers – that is about the only incompatibly I think we ever had. I miss not hearing her particular rhythm of softly lapping the water our of her bowl in the corner of the room after the lights go out at bed time, or her funny groan she’d release when she thought I couldn’t hear as she plopped to the hardwood floor in the hallway. Sleeping in tents, looking in my rearview mirror, campfires, walking in the fields and streets at night all feel lacking with out her.
She was love. She was steady. She was true – at least in everything but her name. But now that she is gone, it’s fitting; there is no name that can be given to that animal that would have suited her anyways. She had golden light radiating from her.
