Our dog Hildy or Hilde (Hildegard, my wife and I disagree on the diminutive form) was part Black Labrador and part Dachshund.  Amazingly enough her mother is the Dachshund side.  She was the oldest dog of which I have any personal memory.  She turned seventeen in the Spring of ’01.  She was all the great things you can say about a dog.  Friend, Companion, Nursemaid and Guardian.  She got pretty long in the tooth and gray in the muzzle.
I thought of her while taking a Java class.   One of the assignments was to design an applet that would display some text when the including HTML document loaded.  The instructor off-handedly suggested a poem.  Maybe it was because he was French, who knows?  Anyway I decided on the Haiku form because my youngest son was an East Asian Studies scholar.  Those are his arms around Hildy.   The following is my Haiku honoring Hildy while she was still around to be honored. 

Old Dog

Your slow painful steps
The love in your cloudy eyes
Your time nears old friend