Remembrances of a great canine

I was reading the comic strip For Better or For Worse this morning, and I saw that Elizabeth might be getting a cat.. for some reason, that made me think about a dog that my grandmother once owned... Her name was Lisa, she was a terrior of some kind.. I think she was mixed with beagle and poodle, but I'm not sure..... she wasn't a big dog.. she was 15 when we had to put her down.. Gram got her in 1987, and I remember the first time I saw her... I knew that there was a dog at my grandmother's, but I didn't know how big, or what color, or anything like that... At that time, my cousins were babies, and there was a playpen set up for them when they came to visit... now, this was one of those older playpens... the ones with the clear plastic windows on each end, and if you hit them hard enough in the right spot, they would collapse.. and so they were banned.. but we had one..... I remember walking around the house, looking for this dog.... and all of a sudden, this little pipsqueak of a thing, about the size of a rat, jumped out from under the playpen and on to my foot... and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.. My brother and I were the only 2 out of all my cousins who paid any attention to her, and so she bonded with us more than any of the other kids... she used to follow me to school... she'd follow me when I went shopping downtown, and sit patiently outside the store for me to come out again... how many dogs will do that?? When my brother and I moved away to PEI, where we live now, she never missed a beat.... somehow she always knew when we were coming to visit... Even if Gram didn't know we were coming, Lisa did... As soon as the car turned onto the street, she knew we were coming, and would start scratching at the door to get out.... she even growled at my mother once when she arrived at the house without me and my brother... we were her kids, and that's all there was to it.. She was always very close to my grandmother as well... my uncle had a boxer, named Jesse, who he treated as his child until he had one... and he used to bring Jesse over to visit... Jesse would lay his head or his paw on Gram's knee... and Lisa would get jealous, and jump up on her knee.. When my grandmother got sick in 2002, she was in hospital for a few months... and Lisa was already in her old age, and we knew she didn't have much time left... I moved in with my cat.. and it was like something sparked in her... Lisa seemed to get a little bit more life.... especially keeping my cat away from Gram when she came home for visits from the hospital... We knew the end had come when Gram bent down to pet Lisa one day, and she growled and backed away... She didn't recognize Gram anymore.. We had her from the fall of 1987 till the summer of 2002... a great life span for any dog...