Taro

So many pleasant and engrossing things to do today, but when the muse strikes, she strikes.

Taro has been on my mind, the large, ballsy, cocky Pekinese of my adolescence. My mother brought him home from her school and we tried to find his owners but couldn't, so he stayed. He was jaunty and handsome, and strutted along with the rolling gait of a sailor, glossy black and gold, and with an eye for the ladies. We began to realise there were pekinese crosses all along Old South Head Road for miles - probably in a radius in fact, stopped only by the sea. It was a wonder he wasn't run over, we were more lax back then.

As he grew older he lost part of one eye to an angry cat, he became grizzled and less glossy and very snappish, and subject to embarrassing priapism: he who lives by the sword... Eventually, after I had eloped to England, my father took him to the vet to be put down: very old, very creaky, with only a glimmer of his chutzpah left.

Maybe there is a name for Pekinese crosses as there are for Poodle crosses. Certainly Taro did his best to work his way through the combinations. More than one Pekador.