arge wp-image-15627″ /> What did Grace Kelly say? “She was yar.”

Took my parents a long time to learn their lesson. Don’t follow a great example of the breed with another of the same breed. They got another German Shephard after Mattie. Well, that worked out. Give me a minute. It didn’t work out in the Irish Setter category.

Maggie was everything Katie was not. Huge, gorgeous in fact, headstrong, not unintelligent but frankly untrainable. Only had her two years. Thinking somebody hijacked her. She was that perfect a specimen. But we kids loved her.

Before she was two, she weighed eighty pounds. I used to wrestle with her with all my might, and she never even bruised me.

And God how she could run. We lived in the country, as I’ve said, and her passion was to chase cars. Ours, the neighbors’, total strangers, she had it in her blood. We were afraid she’d get killed. My mother consulted the Hines’s handyman Nelson. He said, “Get a rope, a long rope, attach it to her collar, and when she gets to the end of it, it will jerk her up short. She’ll learn.”

So we attached the rope to Maggie’s collar and the other end to a giant Sycamore tree. We waited. A pickup truck went by, rattling but hardly speeding. Maggie took off. The rope parted like — no, it didn’t part, it burst — like a 4th of July firecracker. Pop! And it was done. She always came back. Winning was the thing. She wasn’t trying to hitch a ride to San Francisco.

So my mother consulted Nelson again. He said, “Go to Hitchners Hardware. They got chains.” She got a chain. Attach to Maggie, sycamore.

Not even a pop this time. Parted without a sound.

Second chain, heavier. You know. Serious this time. Maggie through it like butter.

Third chain. Real links this time. Like you’d use on a winch, a tractor, a truck. Buuuuuttttteeeeerrrrr! Done.

So the guy at Hitchners says, “What kinda animal you got, lady? Don’t got a bigger chain.”

We gave up on the car chasing. My last beautiful memory of Maggie. Huge snowstorm. No power at all in Greenwich Township. So we had to make a run for it to Salem, home of impervious grandparents. We load the four of us and supplies in the car, reserving space for Maggie.

No. She’d prefer to chase.

One, two, three, four miles of icy roads she chased us at about 40 mph. We could look back and see her, beautiful and bent on her mission the whole way. Nobody loves greyhounds more than I do, but no grey could have kept up with Maggie that day. My dad was stubborn. But even he knew when to quit. There was a crossroad ahead of us we needed to go through. He turned right and waited. One minute, two. Maggie went galloping through on three legs without ever seeing us.

The intersection was the crest of a shallow hill. When Maggie hit the crest, she could see she had lost us and she stopped. She turned around. When dad restarted the motor and beckoned her in, she came like a lamb.

Only months later that she disappeared without a trace. We looked and looked and looked, but they don’t put Irish Setters on milk cartons. Wish they did. To this day. Loved that girl.