A Girlfriend's Dog

At what point do you forget the name of an old girlfriend’s dog? Not the one that bit you on the arm (dog, not girlfriend), but just an ordinary dog that occasionally trotted past you in their living room or slept in front of you as you picked her locks on the sofa. I had a girlfriend years ago—when I was nineteen—whom I thought I loved deeply, and I thought of her day and night. We went out for a year before we broke up. For a while after we broke up, I thought of everything about her, including the warmth of her family home, and the faces and names of her family members, and among these I placed her dog, since they treated him like a family member (they even fed him turkey during the holidays).
A few months ago I thought of this girlfriend, and I recalled the holiday meals at her house, and the faces and name of her family. But I could not for the life of me recall the name of her dog. I can picture its size and coloring, and I think that its name began with the letter “C.” But at what moment did I lose the dog’s complete name? There must have been a moment when you might have asked me, “Just what was the name of that dog of an old girlfriend?” And to this I would have replied with full confidence, “Charlie.” But had you waited another moment to pose the same question, I might have answered with, ‘Corky’? or was it ‘Cortense’?” And if you had waited yet another measure of time to ask me, I might have responded with “Callie”, or “Canover.” But more time has passed since those hypothetical questions, and now my answer has been reduced to “C-------.”
Soon, no telling when, I will refer to the dog as “Bernie”, and then soon thereafter I will deny that my old girlfriend even had a dog, or even a name of her own, and then I will forget that I had a girlfriend.
And all those little moments that my old girlfriend and I shared together, like the time we escaped from the rain into an old baseball dugout in a field where I had played little league ball or the time when we got stranded in a snowstorm together on Christmas Eve and missed Christmas with our families---all of that will vanish.