When Chester brought me a little dog

At one point in my life I was living in a wonderful house on an acre of land, and the front windows looked out to the mailbox. Chester Burnette (a Great Dane mix) was there, and so was Hoover (a Malamute). They had strong feelings about looking out that front window. We had put a couch against the front window, a big couch, but they moved it out of the way so many times we gave up and moved it against the other wall.

There was a woman in the neighborhood who had two tiny dogs, and she walked them with her sweatband and sock tassels matching. Every day, she walked them up to our mailbox, which our dogs could see, and let them shit there. And then she walked away. On weekends, Chester alerted me to this, and I knew he wanted me to do something about it, but, like unstable people who study psychology, I’m a scholar of rhetoric because I’m terrible at it. How do you say to someone, “Um, your dogs’ shitting here everyday is not chance. Dogs shit to send a message. You shouldn’t let them do that. And, by the way, pick that shit up.”? Well, you say it by saying it. But I was raised in a barn by wolves, and I’ll admit I was so gerfuddled by her matching tassel and headband and appalling bad manners that I just wasn’t dealing.

So, one day, when she brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, Chester jumped a six-foot fence, and brought me one of her dogs.

He was saying, very clearly, deal with this.

At that point, things were complicated. She was freaking out, and I loaded her and her dogs into my car, and took them to the vet. And on the way she told me about how her marriage was disintegrating. It is a condition of my family that total strangers unload on us about their lives, and I’m usually okay with that. I like hearing about the lives of checkers, people on the bus, salespeople, but I was not prepared for this. Her husband, a dentist, was leaving her for one of his assistants, and I heard way more about their marriage and him than I ever want to know about anyone. Way, way more.

When we got to the vet, the vet pointed out that Chester hadn’t actually broken the skin of her dog, and I paid the bill, and I took her home, and heard a lot more about her very vexed relationship with an apparently awful person. As far as I could tell, though, she was fine with his being awful till he wanted to bang an assistant openly. Once his awfulness was open, she was claiming victimhood and shock and all sorts of things. But the story she had told me on the way to and from the vet was that he was an awful person she was enabling. She only cared now because his behavior might hurt her.

And I could only intermittently care about the fact that she was willing to enable awful behavior until it hurt her. I just cared that I had fucked up by not earlier objecting to her dogs shitting at my mailbox. And I’m convinced she learned nothing from that whole episode. She thought the problem was Chester fetching her dog, but it really wasn’t. Chester, and my mailbox, and even her dogs had nothing to do with her being in a really toxic relationship with her husband.

I sometimes wonder whether I should have tried to talk to her about her own enabling and toxic relationship with the awful dentist? I didn’t. I just paid the vet bill and drove her home.

She no longer brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, so I guess there’s that. I guess Chester did the right thing. I’d like to think that she stopped wearing sweat bands and matching tassels to walk her dogs, but that’s probably hoping for too much.

How we got Pearl Bailey

When Marquis died, I thought I didn’t want a dog for several weeks, but, it is summer, and I’m home more (so Jim isn’t entirely in charge of doggie daycare), and Jacob said he’d like us to get a dog while he’s home, and Clarence cannot be left alone. Jim and I, having been through so many health and behavioral problems with rescue dogs (although some, like Chester, George, and Marquis, were fine) thought we might reward ourselves for almost thirty years of rescue with one dog from a reputable breeder. That would take months.

And, I thought, we could look.

Because Clarence can get grumpy with other dogs, we were clear we needed a puppy. We planned out a day of looking at puppies—there were four sites that we found had adoptions going on. So, Jacob, Jim, and I planned out our route and, as we were heading out, the idea came up of stopping off at Phydeaux (a nearby independently owned pet store). They often have adoption events on weekends, and they might have good advice for where we should go (or if there are reputable backyard breeders in the area—a true unicorn). We walked in and there were some people with puppies!

They were all small breeds—way too small for Clarence (who genuinely doesn’t know what his back end is doing). We told the person  in charge that our fifteen year old dog had died the previous week, that we are good with big dogs, and that we couldn’t take a little one because we had a rescue mastiff at home. And she pulled out her phone and showed us an Anatolian Shepherd/Great Pyrenees mix that was, at that point on the south side of Austin. Each of us looked at the picture, looked at each other, and then looked at the woman. She persuaded us to fill out an adoption form immediately, called that location, discovered there was someone there who wanted the puppy, and said, “Tell them they’re fallback.”

She wanted us to have that puppy. So, we filled out the form, and she was talking about how she could get us the dog today if we had proof of various things (such as our dogs’ being spayed or neutered). And we drove to the south of Austin, and went into the store that had Pearl, and explained we were the people Theresa (who turned out to be the owner of that location) had called about. And we held her, and, yeah, that was that.

She showed up at that moment; we promised to send her the proof; she delivered Pearl a couple of hours later. And she hung out (I still wish I had invited her to have tea, coffee, a glass of wine, or something—she’s awesome). But I kept wondering, Pearl is adorable—why did she decide so quickly that we should have this dog?

She told us that Pearl came from Lockhart (Austin is so good about no-kill that various rescue groups draw from other cities), and that ranchers in that area really like the Anatolian Shepherd/Great Pyrenees mix because they’re great guard dogs for cattle or goats. And, she said, that’s what Pearl is. She knew this because, first, she’s seen a lot of dogs like this (they don’t spay or neuter their dogs in that area), and, second, Pearl was found in the area that has a lot of Anatolian Pyrenees.

But, still, why was she so certain we were the right owners for this puppy? When we saw Pearl, there was another person who wanted her. She’s adorable. Anyone walking into that store would want her. Why us?

So, today, I looked up Anatolian Pyrenees, and I think I figured out why she immediately decided we were the owners for this dog. Information about that mix says:

“[T]hey are not suitable dogs for inexperienced dog owners. You need to have a lot of patience to effectively train an Anatolian Pyrenees… Dog owners who don’t have a lot of experience controlling this dog’s powerful instincts should just go for another breed. Anatolian Pyrenees dogs are not casual pets. They are dominant, self-reliant dogs who will try to manage everyone and everything unless you are an assertive leader who knows how to instill respect… The Anatolian Pyrenees is a hybrid of two very energetic dogs. If you keep the Anatolian Pyrenees in a fenced-in yard at any time, be sure that the fence is at least six feet high… Owners of Anatolian Pyrenees must socialize the dogs to turn them into well-behaved companions. Even though they are intelligent and independent, they can still choose not to obey.”

We told her we have a rescue mastiff. We said one of us works from home.

Well, this will be an interesting journey.

On losing the Marquis de Lafayette

 

Elsewhere I described how the Marquis de Lafayette came to live with us.

He and George remained soul-mates, although Jacob was clearly part of their pack. When we first got him, he did NOT like affection of any kind. (It also turns out that he had bb pellets in him—we only found this out yesterday.) But everyone loved him, and loved loving on him. He was just too cute not to cuddle. Sometimes he tolerated the affection, and sometimes he enjoyed it.

He always adored Jacob, and I sometimes think that Jacob was his gateway to accepting affection.

He went from being grumpy about other beings to allowing a cat, Winston Churchill (who fawned on Marquis–they do say that Churchill was a bit of a Francophile), to eat out of his bowl and to snuggle with him.

Marquis had rules. He and George took turns in the living room at night—one would be in our bedroom, and the other in the living room, and they’d swap at various points. I think one of his biggest disappointments is that Ella wouldn’t do that. (Ella, who has good hearing, sleeps on our bed and leaps up barking if there is a weird noise in the house.)

Marquis was a worrier. He worried too much about smoke alarms, but his concerns about other things were usually justified. He was the first to figure out we were going on a trip. He told on the other dogs when they were doing something they shouldn’t.

He worried about me. A lot. When I would write at home, he would settle in under my desk, often resting his head on one of my feet. (Seriously, how do any of y’all get anything written without a cat you can scratch and a dog resting his head on your foot?) That was fine till I was having trouble with a passage, when I tend to talk to myself, trying them out loud. That really bothered him, and he’d go and get a dog toy, and then try to lure me away. He’d lure me to the porch or to an arbor outside.

[One of the signs of his aging was that it was uncomfortable to get under the desk. It broke my heart.]

Marquis and I spent a lot of time on the chaise in that arbor and on a couch on the porch (or on its predecessor, a screened-in porch). He was a BIG believer in naps, and I’m not saying he’s wrong, and he often persuaded me that I needed to stop working on that passage and take a nap, or lie with him in the backyard.

He was determined (or pig-headed, or stubborn, depending on how inconvenient his intransigence was). He sailed through obedience school, and was generally reliable but some things were too tempting. For instance, we have Gulf Coast toads in our yard, a relative of cane toads, and (supposedly) they exude something that gets dogs a little high. Marquis loved holding them in his mouth. I sometimes wonder if anyone was walking by when I was yelling things like, “STOP SUCKING TOADS!” or “LEAVE THE FUCKING TOADS ALONE!”

He was a ratter par excellence. George and Duke were basically rat archeologists, and they were fascinated by places rats had been, and so (more than once) frantically examined a rat place while the rat ran between their legs to get away. While Marquis fell for that a few times, in general, he could be counted on to get the rat. But he wasn’t a predator. He loved strange cats, most other dogs, and all people. But I really think he often pretended he didn’t. He didn’t leap on people or sniff crotches the way George did. He just let himself be scratched.

At one point, we were headed on vacation for a couple of weeks, just at the moment that a friend’s house (they were remodeling) had the main beam develop a crack. They stayed in our house—we told them they could board the dogs, but they didn’t. They had a little bitty munchkin, and George was not great with little bitty anythings (because he was exuberant). They decided the solution was to run George and Marquis every day for miles to exhaust them so they wouldn’t bug the munchkin. Every day, Marquis would suddenly charge across the path, so my friend still has a scar on one of his ankles from the leash burns. Marquis had rules.

 

I’m a big believer in the idea that you have to give dogs a job. And, so we tried to interest Marquis in fetching a tennis ball. We live near a set of tennis courts, and so picked up a bunch of tennis balls that ended up in the creek. Marquis had no interest in chasing tennis balls. But, there are tennis balls in every room in the house. I’ve sometimes found tennis balls in luggage when I’ve left a bag out for packing, and I’ve seen Marquis place a dog toy in my baggage. There is always a tennis ball in my closet. I’ve tried moving the tennis ball, and another appears.

For several years, Jacob was running with Marquis, and Marquis has never forgotten the joy of those days. Even to the last, when Marquis (who always insisted on a walk) could only walk two or three houses up the street, he would harumph and walk faster (or trot a bit) if a dog ran past, as though he was saying, “I could do that, you punk.”

Marquis had sensitive hearing, and smoke alarms were hell to him. The only thing that could comfort him was Jacob taking him on a walk. He was smart, and so he knew that my turning on the fan while I was cooking was potentially a problem. This all made cooking once Jacob went off to college a bit problematic.

I sometimes joke that Jim married me because Chester was such a great dog, since we had such wildly different politics, but I think there is something to our bonding over a rational love for cats and dogs—a love that is about the pets themselves and not about the satisfaction we get from pets loving us. And so, when a pet gets a certain level of illness, you have to stop thinking about how much you love the pet—you have to take that right out of the equation—and instead try to think entirely about how the dog or cat is feeling. But, of course, no one knows what it’s like to be a bat.

I don’t know why Marquis put a tennis ball in every room; I don’t know when he did it. But it warms my heart every time I see one. When we got the information from the vet, we knew that our love for him meant that we had to love him more than we loved his being with us.

And we made the decision we made. And we try not to think about a life that doesn’t involve finding a tennis ball in every room. But I do think about his getting to run with George again.

 

What Duke Ellington taught me (no, not *that* Duke Ellington)

I never wanted to own a Dane. I have always loved dogs, big dogs. I think every useful lesson I learned about love was from dogs, dogs who followed me into places they didn’t really want to go, who brought me presents I had to assess in terms of the value of their intention, who managed conflicts (including forgiveness) in a way far healthier than any humans with whom I had contact, and who taught me about being astonished in the wonder of the moment. And who saved my life at moments.

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But, I didn’t want a Dane because they have health problems, and they die too young. And then a neighbor found a Dane-mix puppy abandoned at a gas station, and I took him just till we found him a home. Well, all you dog people know how quickly he found a home, but that’s a different story. And he was wonderful, but a bit complicated, and then he saved my ass a few times (including a couple of times that involved the whole I’m not really clear on the “how to identify a rattlesnake” thing but he was, and the “while walking late at night places I shouldn’t have and a man stepped out of the darkness and saw Chester and stepped back”) and he had the best temperament of any dog I’ve ever known, and, well, I was sold on Danes. I named him Chester Burnette.

When Jim and I were in a position stable enough to have two big dogs, we got Hubert Sumlin. When Chester died, and Hubert almost did, we got George Washington (a Shepherd/ridgeback/black-mouthed cur mix—that story is elsewhere) and then took in a foster (Marquis de Lafayette, also a story told elsewhere). When Hubert died, George and Marquis mourned by not barking at the mail carrier for four days (a pretty significant demonstration of grief).

We worked with a big dog rescue group, and asked to adopt a 9 month old Dane puppy. His life had been pretty rough. Although a purebred, and therefore the owner had spent a lot of money to get him, the puppy was neglected enough to get Animal Control involved. This is unhappily common—people are enamored with a big breed, and decide to get one, and haven’t really thought through what a big breed means.

Sometimes they give them up, and sometimes they stick them in a backyard. Duke’s owner was the latter. Of course, a shithead who buys a big dog and doesn’t actually want to own a big dog hasn’t generally done the work of finding a good breeder (see: shithead) so a rescue Dane is often a mistreated dog with a bad genetic line. And Duke was a dog who was so underfed that he had taken to eating everything in the backyard that wouldn’t kill him. A neighbor had repeatedly reported his situation to Animal Control, who, when Duke was nine months, told the owner he had two choices: hand over the dog, or pay a fine. The owner handed over the dog, and a rescue group got him.

The next part is kind of ugly, but I mean no criticism of the sort of people who engage in rescue. As far as we understand, Duke was brought to a really good home with a whole bunch of Danes, some of whom had only recently been neutered (and maybe some who hadn’t yet?) and a female was brought in. She went into heat, and no one expected that. Duke was restrained, and every male went nuts, and he got mauled. So, for the rest of his life, he flipped his shit if he saw another dog and he was on leash.

We went and picked him up, and then spent the hour-long drive home discussing what to name him. We’d named our previous Danes after blues singers, and he was a fawn, so I suggested Delbert McClinton. It was pointed out that would sound like Dilbert, and Jacob suggested Duke Ellington. You just had to look at that dog and see he was a “Duke.” And, of course, he looked so elegant and intelligent. We didn’t really know that was just a pose. So, we named him Duke Ellington.

George and Marquis were wonderful with him, although, having been alone in a backyard for nine months, Duke knew nothing. He didn’t know how to play, and he would watch the two of them play with a heart-breaking confusion. Eventually, George was indulgent enough to rough-house with Duke, and George, being George, managed Duke well and kept him in line in the backyard, but that was because George was pretty near his weight, and had more skill.

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So, George did something extraordinary—he got Duke to understand something entirely new, and it had to do with how to relate to another being. I walked Duke through four doggy obedience classes, but between us, neither George nor I taught Duke how to “play” with someone. George taught him to match aggression. George tried, but never managed to teach Duke what play is, when you rely on limits. The difference between play and aggression is that you let someone else win, you hold back, you laugh when you are threatened. Duke played too rough.

Jim took the three of them to the dog park for over a year before Duke’s inability to understand play resulted in his fetching a little dog, and that was that. Then it was walking the dogs, and Duke’s leash-fear was triggered by seeing another dog. We did all the things that you do under those circumstances, and he did get much better, but it always started with crossing the street when you saw another dog.

Here’s the thing: Duke was dumb.

Everything about him has to start there. He meant well, he was incredibly sweet, he responded to love with love, he was frightened by various things, he tried really hard to do the right thing, but he had trouble when a situation had more than two factors to consider.

[This is a trivial part of the narrative, but he made me a better person.]

When we got Duke, we promptly started doggy kindergarten. He failed. The first task in doggy kindergarten is “watch me.” It really is pretty simple. You take a treat, put it at the dog’s nose, say “Watch me,” and pull the treat toward your nose. The idea is that you teach the dog to look at you when you say that. Duke never learned that. I mean, never. He took doggy kindergarten twice, and he didn’t learn it. And Duke was more treat-oriented than any dog I have ever known. He would pay attention to the treat at his nose, and then lose track of it because ZOMGSOMANYTHINGSATPETSMART!!!11!!!

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He passed doggy kindergarten because the teacher fell in love with him. And, let’s be honest, every person who met him did that. Because Duke.

I don’t know how to explain it. Jacob said that the dumber Duke was, the more I loved him, and he was probably right. But everyone responded that way. [Except for two assholes at the dog park, but whatevs. They owned the dog that Duke fetched. I ran into them later while walking down the street with George (who loved all dogs) and they were whining that they had to stop going to the dog park because everyone hated their dog, so maybe Duke was right?] Duke managed to get out three or four times and wander the neighborhood and people brought him to us as though we had done them a favor by letting them bring him home. There was a little girl I sometimes saw at the bus transfer station, very very early in the morning, who petted his ears and told me about him—he loved her, and we took a few moments with her when we saw her. I like to think he made her obviously complicated day just a little bit better.

He ate everything. He never got over having been a starving dog in a yard. There are certain things that are native invasives in Texas—native, but they grow whether or not you want them to, and Duke learned to eat them to keep from starving. We learned that we had to give him some food first thing in the morning before letting him into the backyard or he would eat horseherb till he barfed. In seven years of good treatment, he never learned that we would feed him. I empathize with the principle that it is hard to unlearn early lessons about starvation, so I gave him part of a piece of bread every morning as soon as I got out of bed.

He turned up his nose at roadkill, unless it was really, really nasty. Jim would pull things out of Duke’s mouth that even Jim didn’t want to identify because then he might feel obliged to cut off his hand. The rule of thumb was: if Duke wanted it, you didn’t want to know what it was.

Duke was just Duke. He worried about a lot of things. He was terrified of thunder; eventually he decided that trash trucks were related to thunder—perhaps he was right, I’m not a meteorologist, but I’m obviously not a rhetorician enough to talk him out of that belief, although I tried. He came to believe that busses were not really to be trusted either. Again, I think he was wrong, but I failed to persuade him, so I think we can conclude that either he was right or I suck as a rhetorician. Compliance-gaining has never been my métier, but that’s a fairly lame defense here.

As many people have pointed out, Duke’s worries are not unreasonable concerns: thunder and trash trucks are both pretty untrustworthy. Since George shared his terror of thunderstorms, there were a lot of nights of makeshift beds in closets. The little girl at the transfer station noticed his concern about trash trucks, and she tried to persuade him they were okay, but Duke was unconvinced. He did, however, lick her nose, so that made his disagreement pretty polite. I get weepy when I think about how she’ll respond to knowing that he’s died—Duke was like that. A lot of people loved him.

Early on, we had a horrible weekend (emergency vet visit) when we determined that he had Addison’s. After that, Jim was giving monthly injections, carefully moderating Duke’s steroids, and taking Duke in for various tests. There was also the discovery that Duke was allergic to the rabies vaccination (which resulted in additional work for Jim), and the skin allergy issue which meant one more pill in the morning. Jim cheerfully arranged his life around this dog’s medical needs, loaded a hundred plus-pound dog in and out of the car, and philosophically cleaned up evidence that meds were not quite right. I can’t say enough about what Jim did for Duke.

In other words, this was a complicated dog. On the other hand, he was a really simple dog. He had rules. He wanted to sleep by me. He got confused (he never figured it out) when I moved from one side of the bed to the other, but he did compromise by discovering the dog bed on my (new) side of the bed. He liked chasing squirrels. He liked eating things he found on walks—whether those things were covered in fire ants seemed to him a trivial issue. He didn’t like having a massive Addisonian/allergic reaction, but whatevs.

He kept me in the moment. He loved the moment. This horseherb tastes good; the sun is warm; that water is tasty.

When he was dying from pain, he licked my hand. I think he was, even in tremendous pain, worried that I was unhappy. I was.

He had been limping, on and off, and so Jim took him to the vet. They did whatever x-rays they could do without sedating him (not much). So, they said we need to see a specialist. That appointment was for Monday, February 8th. On February 7th, after a normal walk, Duke ran into the backyard (as he did) to chase squirrels, pivoted on his leg, and went down. And then there was a noise that, Jim and I have agreed, if the Lord is merciful, we will never hear (or remember) again.

Various quick decisions resulted in asking neighbors for help, and getting Duke in the car, a long drive on a windy road, and an emergency vet place that was clear how bad it all was. And, so, we said goodbye to a dog who was in tremendous pain, and needed to leave this world. Any desire for more time came from our desire to want this not to be true, and for him not to be in pain. But, just as Duke had always been the dog to say, this is the moment, so this was the moment.

And, now, we go on without him. Without his eating the wrong things, farting more than you would thing possible, telling us that trash trucks are scary, dragging us out of comfortable beds because he needs to pee or bark at something, pointing out that squirrels are probably awful, drawing attention to the beauteous wonder of a mail carrier, engaging in world-class snuggling, getting confused about parked cars and poles, wandering underfoot while I’m trying to cook, taking up a large part of my side of the bed, and saying those squirrels are BAD. And squirrels. Because squirrels. (And the cardinals are pretty dodgy too.)

Dogs teach you that love, in this moment, is what matters. And they’re right. But what they don’t teach you is what to do when that moment needs to go.

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