We adopted Snookie when I was 14. There was a hard and fast rule for the new dog: We were not going to get attached to him the way we did to his predecessor, Blazer. When Blazer died unexpectedly at 8 years old, he triggered a miserable family-wide crying jag that lasted for days. Even Dad teared up a little bit, and Dad never teared up at anything.

We didn’t have a dog for a while after that, and we had a round of family soul-searching before we got a replacement. We decided that the new dog would be treated like…a dog. He wouldn’t get to claim a living room chair as his own, like Blazer did, and we were not going to get attached to him so strongly that we were all soul-crushed when he died. He was a pet, and we were going to treat him like a pet, and that was that.

This mandate lasted for about two weeks after Snookie came home from the pound. It turned out that Snookie was much, much more adorable than even Blazer.  Snookie arrived with a bossy attitude, a puppy’s energy and the worst case of worms I’d ever seen. Deworming him almost killed him, but he got over it soon enough, and he proceeded to quickly train the family to serve his needs and wishes.

Snookie was a beagle/basset hound mix, and his attitude and endurance makes me think there was some terrier in there as well. He could outrun any human and most much larger dogs, could jump and even walk sideways (which was infuriating when you were trying to catch him) and basically wanted to do nothing but play, sleep and eat. He eventually started sleeping on peoples’ beds — an action that was unimaginable in our house until he conned everyone into going along — and eventually we realized that we were there to serve him. You had to admire the audacity of a small dog who had decided he would head up a nine-person household. It  still makes me laugh, and it was a good preparation for the Jack Russell terrier I now own.

Snookie was my bud all the way from junior high into adulthood. We’d goof off together, and he’d hang out with me when I was watching TV. When I got homesick at college, it was often Snookie I missed the most (an embarrassing recollection and no reflection on my family, and I guarantee you that they understand).  Once I moved out of the house and eventually away from my home town, my dog would always be there to greet me every time I returned home.

And he just kept living and living. I had been brought up to believe that most dogs die at ages 10 to 12. But some smaller dogs live a lot longer, and Snookie made it to 15 before he passed. That happened less than two weeks after my mother died. I still don’t know how my dad handled it all.

You only get one Snookie. You can have other dogs — my current dog has me wrapped around his front paw and makes me laugh all of the time —  but there’s going to be only one capo dei capi in a dog-lover’s life. It’s the dog you still remember fondly, 22 years after he passed.  For me, Snookie was that dog.