I got my beautiful, showstopper mastiff. At the same time, I got a white, ragtop Jeep Wrangler, circa 1990, where she reigned supreme in the backseat with the top down. Cars would speed past — and then slam on the brakes — trying to get a look at the crazy, tongue-lolling monster in my back seat. People in Port St. Lucie, Fla., started calling me “The Dog Lady.”

I took her everywhere. On long walks along Fort Pierce Inlet State Park, on all kinds of interviews at my first-ever reporting/photography job for the weekly Port St. Lucie Mirror, and jaunts along the North Fork of St. Lucie River where she woofed — mastiffs don’t bark — at otters. Eventually — when she was about 5 — I took her to a video store called Groovy Movies A Go-Go in Stuart.

That store was owned by my future husband, Zane. I did a story on his store. But it wasn’t until I pulled up with Tara — his words, “the giant-est dog I’d ever seen, and you with the giant-est sunglasses I’d ever seen” — that he took notice.

Me — and Tara — spent more and more time at Zane’s store. Tara then became a fixture in downtown Stuart, Zane walking her proudly among the admirers as if he owned her. After a time, she became more than fixture. She became a Stuart legend. The dog you saw at Luna’s Pizza or along the riverside boardwalk. The one that hated skateboarding boys with a vengeance and scared the "cool" right out of them. More people knew Tara than knew me, which was an odd experience when I walked her in Stuart. “Tara! We love you!” followed by lots of petting. Then, “And, who are you?”

She was the Marilyn Monroe of downtown Stuart dogs, a pinup gracing the cover promo spot and Accent page of The Stuart News wearing “reindeer ears” for a Christmas photo shoot. Then she was the wild-art centerpiece of a Palm Beach Post Local cover, drinking from a fountain in a Stuart park (somebody complained because they immediately reduced the water flow at that fountain to where a large dog couldn’t drink out of it). Eventually, she would make the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Sunday Lifestyle Family page, and — even posthumously (same photo, re-run) — the South Florida Parenting magazine, her fiercesome, near-200-pound bulk being petted by a delicate little baby, my then-10-month-old daughter Hayley.

Dash that Herald, she was never in it.

Tara, who barked viciously at piles of sod, but welcomed strangers enigmatically. Tara, who honestly considered herself a little dog, and always tried to hang with the quaking Chihuahuas. When my friend Sunny came home all bruised and bloody after a walk with Tara, she explained how Tara had heard a Chihuahua bark and instantly “gone to her people,” forcing my friend to execute an inadvertent, perfect Starsky & Hutch roll over real concrete.

When Tara went somewhere, you did too. Choke collar or not.
Tara, my gorgeous girl, my sad-eyed beauty, who was so indescribably graceful in her constant gracelessness. Who sat and stared at me lovingly — and so forgivingly — during my lengthy video addiction to The X-Files. And my Quentin Tarantino phase, and my Chinese melodrama phase.

She seemingly slept 23 hours a day. So I called her my big orange speed bump in the middle of my living room.

“She lays like a log, but she never takes her eyes off you wherever you go,” remarked one particularly observant reporter after a party at my house. (Zane was madly jealous — he wanted Tara to look at him.) She was my guardian in my single years. The living, breathing alarm — and admittedly, it was a loud, labored, foul-smelling, drool-soaked breath — that made me feel safe at night.

My poor, deprived husband-to-be, Zane. Who had never had a dog in his entire life — he hadn’t been allowed to have one by his parents. He fell so hard for her — insisted she be with us at our wedding and wear a ring of baby’s breath around her humongous, muscular neck.

She became our Tara, not my Tara. Zane and I sobbed openly and held her forever after watching the DVD of the movie My Dog Skip. We knew she didn’t have much time left. And we loved her so fiercely — maybe even more than we loved each other.
She was our baby before we had had any babies. And to this day, seven years later, Zane and I talk about her — and cry about her — as if she only died yesterday.

Even the vet cried when he put her down — bone cancer, so painful. And she never let on, such an obedient girl to the very end.

I had my Tara from the ages of 26 to 38. Newly broken up with a fiancé, I got her for protection. But she gave me my husband (Zane was around for seven of those years). And, accordingly, because she gave me my husband, that means she gave me my children, Hayley and Zany. Which means she gave me my entire life.

How do you thank a dog for that?
I still love you, Tara.

R.I.P.
1989-2001