Charlie's Dog, Smokey

If you have been reading my blog on a regular basis, you will have found several posts about Charlie. He is my mother-in-law's brother. He was in the Navy for over twenty years. He and his wife, Nancy, and their children had the chance of a life time to experience life all over he world. Charlie, or Uncle Charlie, as a lot of his family call him was at our house to help celebrate his sister's 103rd birthday. He also got involved in repairing his sister's granddaughter's car. She lives in Texas and that is a long ways away without a running car 90+ degree heat, two small grandsons, plus the air went out on the way here.
 Most of the relatives had for the most part settled down for the evening. Charlie and Fran and I, however, were just sitting in the living room visiting. We hadn't seen him for three years. I love to listen to his stories. Once again, I messed up and did not record this story. He is a great story teller and uses hand gestures to  make the story even more fun.
This is Charlie's story, not mine. For the most part it will be in quotes just the way Charlie told it to us that hot evening in July 2018.
"Smokey was a dog we added to our family when we were stationed in Spain. He was a Wire Haired Terrier, the runt of the litter, but that's what the kids wanted so that was that.
Nan and I started teaching him easy tricks such as sit up, roll over, and turn around. Then we started to try more difficult tricks such as speak on command and progressed to counting by barking to hand signals and voice commands. Like 1 finger is one bark,  2 fingers is two barks etc. He could count to 3 and subtract from 3 to 1 at first with voice commands then to just hand commands.
Nan taught him to close doors because the kids would run into the house and fail to close the door. One day I came home from shopping and I had my arms full. I told Smokey to close the car door. Little did I know that our neighbor was in the front yard watching this. He (Smokey) jumped up and pushed the door but it did not close so I told Smokey to go back and close the door which he did. My neighbor came over and said that if he had not seen this with his own eyes that he would not have believed it. He said, "I wish I could train my children to do what he just did."
Smokey did not like to be penned up in the back yard and would dig his way out of the fenced back yard. I finally took two pickets off the fence at the bottom so that he had a way out. When I did that, he stayed in the back yard until one of us came home; then he would greet us in the FRONT yard. (I capitalized Front not Charlie. This story just amazed me.)
We were moving to Dallas from Austin and put the house up for sale and put it in a realtor's hand. We told the realtors to leave the dog in the back yard when they left the house. They put him in the back yard and proceeded to lock the house and put the key in their lock box on the door handle. She looked down and there was Smokey. She was sure that she had left him in the back yard, but she unlocked the door and went in the house. She opened the sliding door and put Smokey back in the back yard. She left the house, locked the door, put the key in the lock box and lo and behold there was Smokey! She proceeded to call me and swore that she had left him in the back yard. I told her that it was ok because he had his own key!
We used to play hide and seek with him and the kids would go hide. He would go find them. He sometimes would cheat by peeking to see where they were going. So I would have him cover his eyes with his paws til they were hidden. Then I would tell him to go find them. He would always go to the last place he found them and then would search the rest of the house and as always found them all.
All of the things that we taught him were done without treats after each trick. He would do them for anyone as long as they spoke clearly.
He loved to play games that the kids played and tried to do everything that they did. We lived across from a playground and there was a slide that the kids were using. He would climb the slide ladder and slide down with them just like it was a natural thing that dogs did.
When it was bedtime, the family would say prayers before going to bed. We taught Smokey to lay his head in my lap and cover his eyes while we prayed. Every once in a while he would uncover his eyes to see what was going on and I would scold him and tell him to pray. He would cover his eyes until we were done."
In his email he said at the end " to be continued."

Charles and Nancy Aubin

I can't wait to hear the rest of the story again. Hopefully Charlie will send pictures of Smokey with his family.
I hope you enjoyed this story as much as Fran and I did. I shared it to Marie's Memories also.