Briscoe had a limp for a few weeks and we thought it was a sprain but we found out just Monday it was bone cancer and it was fast spreading. He stopped eating completely, even chicken and peanut butter. It was so fast and unexpected that recently I had purchased a 30 pound bag of dog food and a six month supply of Heartgard. But it's par for the course. He was so low profile that I sometimes forgot he was even in the house, that he even existed. But we loved having a greyhound. We loved learning about their ancient history and going to museums and seeing images of them everywhere.

We were immensely proud of him. Between his height and his stripes and the way his ears stood on end when he was interested in something, people were always asking about him and petting him and saying things like "god bless you for adopting him" which we always thought was funny because he was such a low maintenance dog it wasn't like we were really doing anything. I've had plants that were harder to take care of.

We were most proud of him when he was running. We showed his racing tapes to friends when they came over and if I had it in me I would upload some of them here now but that's too much work. We loved that he had a career and a life before us.

He loved running in the snow. After snowy days we would take him to the playground near our old house and close the gate and he'd fly across it. On the beach he would zoom past all the other dogs and pound the sand and people's heads would turn in awe. He'd splash through the water and then jump into it, hopping up to his chest like some sort of deer. He'd then lay down in the water and it seemed like he tried to rest his head on top of it. He was dumb.

He was a good kind of dumb though. He was simple, and as my dad would say without guile. He never tried to figure out how to take anything that wasn't his (you could leave food on the coffee table and leave the room and he would never stand up to eat it) or how to escape although he did escape our back yard when the gate was open and miraculously survived running across Ridge Avenue and many other streets to be found by a kindly neighbor who called us.

I loved hugging his big neck and using him as a pillow and doing workout videos with him lounging nearby so I had something to look at. I did grow less patient with him and was less doting on him after the boys were born but that I never stopped knowing what a great dog he was. He was a big dog with a pea brain, a patient cow who tolerated children and cats and my parents' barky dog.

I don't think I'd ever get another dog besides a greyhound again. We adopted him from Greyhounds Only, an organization I highly recommend contacting if you think you'd ever like to own a dog like Briscoe, the slowest fastest dog I ever knew.