November 2026 - Pet of the Month - Charlie
Charlie - The Buoy Lane Greeter
by Sue Leonard & Sandy Wertime
“My husband said he would never have a small dog,” Sandy Wertime remembers.
Then Charlie came along.
In June 2012, Sandy and Tom lost their beloved Springer Spaniel, also named Charlie.
That September, their daughter gave them a small puppy. Tom may not have thought he was a small-dog person, but Charlie apparently had other ideas. He quickly won Tom over.
Charlie had an unusual beginning. The Wertimes live on the shore of Lake Michigan in Traverse City, Michigan. Their son Matt was caring for Charlie’s mother when she gave birth to her puppies on the beach. They named one of the puppies Charlie after the Springer Spaniel they had recently lost, little knowing that Charlie would eventually become theirs.
For most of his life, Charlie has been a snowbird, traveling between Traverse City and Naples. He’s a wonderful traveler, as long as the vehicle has four wheels and stays on the ground. Charlie loves riding in the car.
Airplanes are another matter.
Sandy and Tom have even tried medication, but nothing seems to convince Charlie that air travel is a good idea. He whined and cried through the flight. Apparently Charlie believes that if dogs were intended to fly, they would have been given wings.
He does have one other objection to car travel: the veterinarian. Somehow Charlie knows when that’s the destination, and he shakes and whines all the way there.
But Florida? Charlie loves Florida, especially his winter neighborhood on Buoy Lane in an RV park in Naples.
Friendly and outgoing, he became such a familiar figure around the RV park that we called him the Buoy Lane Greeter. In his younger days, he made the rounds from lot to lot, visiting neighbors and, not coincidentally, checking out their treat supplies.
Our RV was only one lot away, and Charlie was a frequent visitor. He’d come running to our door, knowing he had a good chance of getting one of his favorite treats—snap peas. I ate them as a healthy snack, and once I discovered Charlie loved them too, I always shared.
One day we invited him inside to meet our cat, Casey. After the obligatory sniffing of rear ends, the two apparently decided neither was particularly interesting. Casey went his way, while Charlie headed straight for Casey’s food bowl. Casey didn’t seem to mind. Charlie had simply discovered another reason to visit the Leonards.
Charlie also loves golf carts. Sandy and Tom have one at home, and Charlie apparently assumes every golf cart he sees belongs to them. Our Buoy Lane neighbors, Ken and Gloria Miller, were happy to accommodate him. Ken would pull up in front of Charlie’s RV and wait for his passenger to hop aboard.
Of course, being the neighborhood greeter occasionally got Charlie into trouble.
One year the RV park had a large population of feral cats, and management set humane traps baited with food. One day Charlie disappeared. After he’d been missing for a while, a neighbor said she could hear whimpering.
Sure enough, there was Charlie, inside one of the cat traps. The lure of a free snack had apparently been stronger than his sense of caution. Charlie had walked in after the treat, tripped the mechanism, and slammed the door behind himself. Charlie learned his lesson. He never went into a trap again, no matter how tempting the treat.
Charlie was also an entertainer. Point a finger at him and say, “Bang, you’re dead,” and he would drop over and play dead. Ask him to dance, and he’d stand on his hind legs and twirl around.
And he loved to shake hands. He’d extend his right paw for a shake and, after a couple of pumps, present his left.
One Christmas, Sandy and Tom flew home to Michigan and decided to spare Charlie the dreaded airplane trip. Friends at the RV park agreed to keep him while Tom and Sandy were gone. They had once owned a dog similar to Charlie and apparently took their temporary dog-parenting responsibilities seriously, including grooming.
During the holidays, several neighbors gathered for drinks. One of our Buoy Lane neighbors saw a beautifully groomed little white dog repeatedly coming over to greet him.
Finally, he looked down at the dog.
“Who are you? You’re friendly like Charlie, and you look like Charlie, but you are so white!”
His sitters replied, “That IS Charlie!”
No wonder he seemed so friendly.
His sitters had groomed him so impeccably that his coat was soft, fluffy, and pure white. Normally, Charlie was far too busy making his rounds through the neighborhood to stay that way for long. Whatever the groomer accomplished soon reverted to Charlie’s more familiar curly, slightly disheveled look.
Today Charlie is 14, and the Greeter of Buoy Lane is slowing down. Sandy says Charlie still loves a ride on any golf cart and still assumes every cart is theirs.
These days, Charlie loves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he’ll let you know when it’s time for each. He sleeps a lot, but he still loves going down to the beach in his beloved golf cart.
His hearing has gotten very bad, so they have to yell loudly for him to come. “But then, so has Tom’s,” Sandy adds.
Buoy Lane has changed over the years. Many of the neighbors who knew Charlie best have moved away or no longer spend their winters there. But Sandy and Tom still return to their RV, and so does Charlie. At 14, he may make his rounds a little more slowly, but he’s still the Greeter of Buoy Lane.
He rode our golf carts, visited our lots, entertained us with his tricks, got himself caught in a cat trap, and happily helped me dispose of excess snap peas. For those of us who shared Buoy Lane with him, Charlie was part of what made the neighborhood feel like home.
Tom once said he would never have a small dog.
Charlie proved him wrong.
And the rest of us were pretty happy he did.
by Sue Leonard and Sandy Wertime
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