So this year, we have a Halloween that’s, to put it mildly, not going to be like any Halloween that any of us can recall. (If you remember the Halloween that occurred during the 1918 flu pandemic, then you may be some manner of cyborg. And you’re almost certainly not reading this blog.) Around here, during Dennis’s tenure, we stopped greeting trick-or-treaters at the door, because all the doorbell-ringing and apparitions loudly shouting “Trick or treat!” really freaked the poor boy out, even when he was in the back bedroom; instead, we would put out a box of candy on the front windowsill, and operate on the honor system, whereby nobody took the box and just dumped the entire thing into their bag. Most years that worked out fine. I have no idea what to expect in the way of trick-or-treaters this year, but we’ll be putting the box out again, and probably leaving it there until the sun has a chance to disinfect it the next day.

For us, though, Halloween is mainly associated with two things: Tucker’s birthday in 1998, and the day Dennis had to go to the Rainbow Bridge in 2018: Two events, exactly 20 years apart, that, for now at least, mark the bookends of our experience as vizsla owners. So this year I thought it would be nice to have a couple of little retrospectives of Tucker and Dennis to mark these two very different sorts of anniversaries.