In the beginning, we did everything wrong.

I always wanted a dog, even when we occasionally had one.

Maybe because he knew he wouldn’t give her kids of her own, dad gave his first girlfriend (after the divorce from mom) a Samoyed named Yukon. Mom coached us kids to call the dog Pukon. That’s all I remember about Pukey; the relationship didn’t make it past house-training.

Later, when dad re-married, we acquired Rocky: a German Sheppard who ate rocks. Rocky, like everything else nice in our lives (the BMW, the electric piano, the yogurt in the fridge), had the distinct feeling of belonging exclusively to Nancy, evidenced by the disappearance of all of the above after the divorce.

By the time I had a Driver’s License we were again dogless and newly living in the house dad had grown up in. He bought the house from his parents, having sold The Bar, and not a minute too soon. I had already stolen my first Zima, which I sipped, alone, in my attic bedroom, while watching of all things: Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments.

One afternoon, dad came home with a puppy that was meant to be a purebred, only the breeder’s stud Labrador literally ate through a kennel to mount the breeder’s German Sheppard, an animal instinct my sister and I confused for romantic.

For no memorable reason, we named the puppy Hobie. Being a weekend we then did what teenagers and single 30-somethings do: we each went Out, only to return, hours later, disheartened. It was non-negotiable: the dog could not be named Hobie.

It was the ‘90s and everyone on planet Earth was watching Baywatch. We learned that night, as so many people were compelled to talk about it, one of the show’s stars was named (and I bet you knew this) Hobie. We weren’t a Baywatch house we were a Sci-Fi house, damn it! So, and hardly believing this wasn’t our first instinct, renamed our dog we did: Obi-Wan Kenobi.

In the beginning, we did everything wrong. There was no kennel and hardly a leash. We invited Obi onto furniture (OK I did). Our favorite party trick was a demonstration of how gingerly Obi would take a tortilla chip hanging from my teen-aged mouth.

Dad likes to say, “Plant potatoes. Get Potatoes.” Well, for what we lacked in discipline, we might as well have moved to Idaho. Every day after school, I’d hold my breath as I opened the front door, afraid to learn what shoes he’d destroyed, what door he managed to scratch through, basically, what hell he’d unleashed.

On one particularly motivated day for Obi, I opened the front door and the first words that popped into my head surprised me almost as much as the scene before me. Of course, I’d heard the words before, but I never put them together in my own mind: Home Invasion. I honestly thought, at least briefly, that someone had ransacked our house, like you hear about in big cities and in movies.

How could a dog pull carpet back 35 feet from the front door? How could a puppy move furniture across different rooms? How could Obi, our dog without thumbs, pull up iron grates from the floor?

We had a cat, a witness to it all. She too looked shocked as she navigated Obi’s interior musings. Note: there are entire websites devoted to emotional looking cats, in case you question that detail.

On this morning, 13 years later, dad choked back tears as he told me, over the phone, only the facts: Obi needs to be put down. Maybe as soon as tomorrow. His hind legs can’t hold him up anymore. He’s in pain.

In that first year we had Obi, the dog not only ushered in an era of new shoes, carpet, stone tile at the front door (try to dig that up!) and furniture; he also demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we were not ready to have a dog.

But alas, Obi grew to be protective like a German Sheppard and playful like the best Lab. He’d leap through an open window into the front seat of the car the moment you even thought: ride. He’d fetch his own leash and never hesitated to bark madly for help whenever I locked myself out of the house. Obi was the dog that would easily win the affection of dad’s third wife and keep them company when I went off to college and later when I left Pennsylvania for Colorado.

With the same duplicity demonstrated by dad’s affinity for pouring scotch on top of beer, he managed both hot-headed infuriation and undying affection for Obi. Despite being unprepared, inconvenienced, challenged, taxed emotionally and tapped economically, dad loved Obi unconditionally; without hesitation. Not at all unlike the way my young, occasionally-single, father found himself loving his kids.

Maybe the ability to pull that off is as prepared as anyone can be for this life. And, maybe, this is an Ode to Dad as much as it is an Ode to Obi.