Tom Boggs/columnist

What do you really cherish in a best friend?

Isn’t it having somebody who will be glad to see..anytime?

Somebody who doesn’t expect anything from you, but accepts you for whatever you are?

I really think those are true tests of best friends.

So the next part of our quiz this week is…what best friend never changes?

The ones of you, young, old and in between, who have owned a dog.

You know they never change.

As I write about some old time memories of dogs, pause from your schedule, and think back to the time, maybe when you were so much younger, that a dog made your day…day after day.

I still love to read a poem my daddy wrote about his Airedale, Rover.

The dog that saved his life one day in a swollen Creek in Dallas County so many years ago.

My first memory of a dog is of a Cocker Spaniel named Mickey Red that Mrs. Mac McQueen gave me when I was born.

Mickey was a puppy himself.

There was a picture I used in a column several months ago of Kenneth Gunter, Jimmy Glass and me, sitting on the grass in South Linden next to Mickey Red.

Then came another Cocker Spaniel.

A female named Dolly that was given to us by Christine Cates, who had roomed at our house during World War II.

That Dolly knew how to have puppies, and as I’ve written before, those pups usually turned out to be the offspring of that gallivanting old dog of Jane Drinkard’s by the name of Blackie.

Then our last Codker was Little Man, and he was a sho nuff part of the family.

He’s strut out in the road to pick a fight with a bigger dog, or maybe two…but he always looked back to be sure Daddy’s big bird-dog, Indy, was lying around somewhere, because Man knew Indy would, without fail, rush out and rescue Man if the going got rough.

He always would.

I even loved an old mixed bird dog and German Shepherd we named Mutt, and another tough ol’ bird -dog we named Coon, on account of he had a liver spot on is back that looked like a cookskin cap.

Now, Coon would take on any number of hounds at a deer skinning after a deer drive.

He was fearless when it came to getting his share of something to eat.

My brother had the most fantastic German Shepherd named Lobo.

Shoot, Billy could tell that dog to go fetch a certain kind of dog food off the shelf in the store Billy used to run.

That particular can is just exactly what Lobo would get.

About that same time, in the middle sixties, we had a German Shepherd by the name of True Scout.

Not good for much of anything.

I remember when kids would come by the house on Halloween night to roll the yard.

True never got up, and some boy even tied a bow around his neck one Halloween.

There’s the picture for today.

That’s my son, Tadd, sitting there with the ‘cross the street best buddy, Craig Seale, with Ol’ True Scout perched right in between ’em.

A boy and his dog.

One could do worse than have such a friend.