According to family legend and at least one photo, I learned to walk by clinging to the back of an immense farm dog named Nicky. As a first grader in Bisbee’s Greenway School, I found a stray puppy, an ugly little mixed-breed mutt, on the street after school. I took it home, telling my mother that the dog had “followed” me there. The truth is I carried it for much of the way. My mother looked at the dog and said, “No. Absolutely not! We are not keeping it.” It happened that my mother’s parents, Grandpa and Grandma Anderson, were visiting at the time and staying in our downstairs apartment. The next morning, at breakfast, I noticed that Grandma was taking bits of bacon off her plate and holding them under her very loose green sweater. My mother may have said no, but Grandma Anderson overruled her. That’s how Daisy came into our lives and stayed for the next dozen years. As newlyweds living in a barrio in Tucson and later out on the reservation, my first husband and I had several dogs.
