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          I miss her.  I surely miss her.

          Molly was only six.  She and I had lived together for more than five of those years.  And for the last year of her life we had been traveling, just the two of us, side-by-side, to places alien to both of us, where the only familiar faces were each other’s.

          I lost my first dog, Coggie, many years ago, while in school.  Her loss still hurts, too.  But time and memories have provided soothing antidotes to grief.

         Once before Molly and I had stopped by Yana’s Ye Olde Drugstore cafe on Front Street in the little arty town of Swansboro, which sits along the Intracoastal Waterway, just off one of North Carolina’s barrier islands.  But on that first trip, we were too rushed to hang out for a while.

          And Yana’s surely was a place to hang out for a while.

          While Molly and I were driving through Richmond heading for Moon, Virginia (I love the name), I was thinking about things that Molly would be experiencing for the first time.

          Little did I know.

          Molly was a city dog.  She lived on the fourth floor of a downtown cooperative.  She had to ride the freight elevator to visit the sand pile, or to play with her canine friends in the doggie park a couple of blocks away.

          Molly and Maggie weren’t friends.  They weren’t enemies, either.  They just tolerated each other, most of the time.

          Maggie was Molly’s neighbor on the Town Circle in Atlantic Beach.  She was a strong and assertive mix of more than a breed or two.  So was Molly.  And both were equally docile and sweet if they knew you and liked you.  The latter being the most important.

          As soon as Molly and I climbed aboard, Molly headed straight for the passenger’s seat.  She sat erect, lengthening her head as high as possible to look down at bathers on the beach, down on the rest of the outside world.

          She reminded me of Snoopy, his ace-pilot scarf flapping in the wind, as he sat atop his doghouse waiting for the Red Baron to attack from behind the sun.

          One of my favorite songs is Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler.

          “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em … and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”

          Remember that last line?  It used to be true, I thought.

         The Ugly American was a million-copy best seller that was published about the time I graduated from high school, an impressionable time.

          The title itself created a shameful image that stayed with me during three years of steaming to foreign ports of call with Uncle Sam’s Navy and during my later working days in London and Diyarbakir.

It was time for Molly to make some new friends.

I was sure she continued to miss her Foggy Bottom buddies -- Boomer, Bijou, Bernie, Hondo, Frazier and Shasha. She’d been away from them for six months.

Dogs don’t forget old friends any more than we do.

When Molly and I drove into Charleston, pulling our camper across the spanking new Cooper River bridge, we were returning to an old friend.

I had worked there a year or so in the early seventies. And Molly and I had visited for a couple of days a year before. Both of us had memories.

          Molly and I had slowly camped our way from the northern end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks to inland Florida. 

          That’s where we were, in Lady Lake, when my youngest son called to say that he, my sweet daughter-in-law, and my on-track-to-be-president, two-year-old grandson would be in Nags Head in a month or so.