When I said I wanted a dog, Bootsie was not what I had in mind.

I like to think of myself as a person who is as free of prejudice as anyone can be. And I extend this liberality to dogs. I've known too many dogs in my lifetime to write off any one breed or type as inferior, superior, or even possessed of a specific and predictable set of personality traits or character.

One has preferences. I like a dog that isn't in danger of being killed outright if I should accidentally tread on it. I like a dog you can pet, without having to get down on the floor. But that's not to suggest that small or even tiny dogs are less possessed of those virtues that make dogs admirable.

All of which is by way of stating that dogs are as varied as human beings and individually as deserving of our respect. To generalize is to display ignorance, and I like to believe I'm not ignorant. And yet . . . if I had to pick a single breed of dog for the existence of which I would be hard put to think up an excuse . . . if I had to pick one breed with no conceivable purpose on Earth other than to demonstrate the fecklessness and folly of Man in the person of dog breeders . . . if I had to pick a breed of dog with which I'd less rather consort than with parrots . . . I'd pick the Boston terrier.

The Boston terrier was originally a cross between a bulldog and a white English terrier, created by a subspecies of humans that takes pleasure in organizing dogfights. It is a flat-faced, bug-eyed, wheezing, snorting, snoring, flatulent little excrescence, almost always delivered by Caesarian section because of its ugly, outsize knob of a head.

I need hardly tell the reader that it was a Boston terrier that my father chose for me.

This was an outstanding expression of my father's eccentricity, and dominance. I had brought up the possibility of a dog—I remember suggesting a collie or a husky—in conversation with my father, which prompted him to begin scouring the classifieds and circling ads for pomeranians, papillons, teacup poodles and Japanese spaniels. It's no trick for a grown man to coerce a 10-year-old boy in the matter of the choice of a dog. All puppies are cute, and compared with the caprices and grotesques he favored, the Boston terrier appeared to be a very serviceable sort of dog.

We visited various dealers in dog flesh he had located, all in out-of-the-way places with prisonlike backrooms in which puppies were arrayed in cages. We both had misgivings about Bootsie. Mine were the obvious ones. His, I believe, had to do with the fear that she might not grow up to be sufficiently outlandish and repulsive. I was partially and temporarily mollified by the assurance that she could grow up to weigh all of 20 pounds. And my father need not have worried ˜ what Bootsie lacked in the way of deformity and hideousness (not much, really) would be more than made up for by her many quirks of personality.

Bootsie made a good deal of noise when sleeping. She had a delicate stomach, and my mother had to cook special food for her—sheep hearts and kidneys, stewed. This was prescribed, and the raw organs supplied, by my father's animal medical adviser, an unqualified vet who ran a combination clinic and butcher shop and had sold us the dog in the first place.

That Bootsie was an embarrassment around the neighborhood is, of course, an understatement. The image of the loyal dog bounding along beside the bike evaporated before very long. Bootsie was not the bounding sort, let alone loyal. In no time, reality set in. Already I was an outsize kid, similar to a blimp in shape. A nervous, wheezing little dog, looking like a trained flea at the end of its leash, was all I needed to emphasize my awkwardness, and my attempt to convince passers-by that I was walking her for someone else only served to mark me as a feebleminded boy who talked to himself.

Bootsie was terrified of my father and wet the carpet whenever he spoke to her. And although she allowed me to leash her up and drag her outdoors, where she found nothing of interest, Bootsie never indicated in any way that she recognized me from one encounter to the next. She spent most of time in the kitchen, sitting motionless, her little gargoyle face and bat ears directed toward the gas range, where, come 4 o'clock, my mother would begin to stew her offal.

Even in those days it had dawned on me that we were not a lovable family—but dogs are supposed to love you, even if you're not. Although we'd had Bootsie since her puppyhood, she simply failed to take a liking to any of us. I knew this from a hundred signs but principally because she would leave home every chance she got.

She'd burrow under the fence and disappear. Two or three days would pass, and we'd get a call from miles away. Someone would have found Bootsie and read our phone number off the tag on her collar. My mother didn't drive, and Bootsie would usually come home in the backseat of a taxi. She'd hang around for a couple of weeks and then run off again. One day she left and never came back. In a year or two, the redolence of sheep's kidneys in our house faded enough so that visitors ceased to comment on it.

~ Daniel Pinkwater