Dog Love

I received an email from my brother a while ago entitled, RIP King Carl Gustav 2002 - 2015. He wrote, “Gus” was a dog, more specifically, a golden retriever who belonged to friends. He was known for his hobby of underwater rock collecting." My brother was obviously distraught over the loss of Gus. He closed by saying, “I was one of his many friends. All who knew Gus are diminished.”

I responded with a quote I’d seen in a room at the vet’s office a couple of years ago. A room where I’d awaited the verdict about my own dog, Zoe. She’d taken a perilous foray into the land of chocolate and gum and deadly artificial sweeteners. Even though they pumped her stomach of the lethal contents, her blood pressure had dropped to dangerous levels and they were keeping a close eye on her. So while my beloved pet teetered between this life and the next, I sat in a room where the walls were stencilled with the quote, “Heaven is where all the dogs you’ve ever loved come to greet you.”

So that’s what I shared with my brother, that lovely quote. And in another paragraph I wrote, “A noble friend… He’ll be there waiting…” And that got me thinking about all the dogs I’ve ever loved and what that slobbery, wriggly, furry reunion will be like from the throng that will greet me. 

The first dog I loved was Maggie. She was a big old black lab who belonged to my Uncle John. He was on the road a lot working construction so Maggie got her room and board with us. She was an outside dog who took shelter in the garage in bad weather and all her meals there. When I loved her, she had a grey muzzle and milky eyes and her body was as broad and flat as a tabletop.  

Maggie was happy to let me use her big soft body as a pillow on the cool grass in Spring and her tail did an aerobic dance when I scraped leftovers in her dish. Maggie died at noon hour one summer’s day. Not from a massive heart attack like Gus, nothing like that. Mom had an errand to run while Dad was home for lunch. Maggie had taken to the shade beneath the car and Mom was unaware. 

The next dog was a chocolate lab Dad got from the pound. We called him “Satan” because he looked like Hell. He’d been abused by his previous owners and his snout was so misshapen we weren’t sure it would ever recover. But miraculously it did, so we renamed him “Jigs”, because he couldn’t keep still. Jigs was high energy and still a pup. He’d grip an old piece of carpet in his teeth and drag me around the yard. It was a jerky ride but I pretended I was sailing over bumpy clouds on a magic carpet like Aladdin. I loved Jigs even though he knocked me to the ground in the dark one night as I scampered home from next door, scaring the life out of me and tearing my good coat. Dad and my brother took him hunting one Autumn day. Jigs didn’t come home with them. He’d found a porcupine. I guess he was so full of quills there was nothing they could do for him. My brother took the killing shot. Dad couldn’t set his sights on him.

So there were intermittent dogs for a while. One stray Dad found wandering across Findlay Bridge. A Jack Russell, all white except for splashes of caramel across its back. He was cute and small, the perfect size for me and I loved that dog. But Mom didn’t. “I don’t want another dog!”, she declared. So its stay with us was short. Too short for a name.

There was another one Dad picked up from the pound.  A cute pup that looked like a miniature German Shepherd. I watched it die in the asparagus patch choking on a chicken bone. It died right at my feet. It’s stay also too short for a name but long enough for me to love it. 

Then at the end of grade two I got a golden lab puppy I named Schultz, after Sergeant Shultz in Hogan’s Heroes. He was so small when we got him the blades of grass on the lawn were up to his knee joints. I fell in love with Schultz instantly and couldn’t get enough of his puppy breath. He grew fast and was always underfoot in the kitchen. One night when Dad came home late from hunting, Mom got up to tend the kill and make Dad something to warm his belly. She put the kettle on the stove to boil. My mother reached for the shrill whistle, a golden flash of fur at her feet. The handle broke. The kettle tipped. The scalding water found his flank. When the pain found him, Schultz yelped a terrible yelp and ran circles around trying to escape it. That night, none could console him but me. He slept fitfully beside me. I could smell singed flesh. He recovered but would always have a scar. It became an identifying feature, like the diamond-shaped mole on my sister’s neck. 

He was a lovely dog. There were no magic carpet rides but he liked to drink from the bathroom tap. He also liked to haul a ten pound  bowling ball around the yard in his teeth, as though daring us to throw it. 

Schultz was just a year and a half on Christmas Eve of my grade four year. Someone was poisoning dogs in our remote neighbourhood, lacing raw meat with strychnine. Schultz ran until the convulsions caught up with him. He was found not far from our vet’s office. The vet knew him by the scar. There was nothing they could do to save him. So the new leather collar hung on the tree and the rawhide bone was left untouched. I have never again, given gifts to a dog at Christmas. 

So we were without a dog for a time until my sister decided to get a beagle pup from Breezy Point Kennels. Her pedigree said her name was Indiana Bell. We called her ‘Dolly’. She was deathly afraid of men and very high strung. She even had an hysterical pregnancy, during which she was hit by a car, which seemed to cause her to lose her litter of hysterical pups. Then she began to have fits. I remember hearing her feet scratch uncontrollably on the tiled floor. The sound sickened me. Anti-convulsant meds worked for a time. But on the day she went outside to do her business and the wind toppled her, Mom had her put down. I missed her in my bed. 

In my grade six year, dad brought home a puppy that looked like a cross between a Corgie, a Cocker, and a Collie. People would ask us what kind of breed he was and dad would reply, “He’s a hardware dog.” 

  “A hardware dog! What kind of dog is that?”

“Well”, my dad would say, “if you kick him in the ass he makes a bolt for the door.”  

Dad got a lot of miles out of that joke. The dog had belonged to a police constable by the name of Rinkey. The dog was his namesake. None of us cared for that name. So we decided to call him, ‘Mr. Smith’, Smith or Smithy for short. He was a gentle beast, known to rescue baby birds in Spring. He’d find them cowering in the caragana hedge, pick them up delicately in his mouth and drop them at the feet of one of his humans. It was as if he was trying to tell us, “Here, fix this.” He survived the loss of a leg in a vehicular mishap, and a fall off a train bridge. He lived long enough to steal an ice cream cone from the unsuspecting hands of my first toddler. Both of my children were old enough to mourn his passing and see their grandfather cry. Mr. Smith left a big hole in the heart of our family. He was our last dog.

In August of 2008 Hubby and I got Zoe. She’s a pug/terrier cross. Smart as a whip. She was five months old, raised by a military family with a vast repertoire of commands she obeyed. We haven't been as diligent about the commands. We both like the way she cocks her head when we speak, like she understands us and hangs on our every word. I love to watch her run because she goes so fast her behind gets ahead of her. She loves to hunt. Everything from birds to voles. She’s even overcome her fear of water and loves to fish. And although she shouldn’t, she loves chocolate. Hubby and I never had children together, so Zoe has become our dog/child. She even sleeps between us, under the covers. I hate to think of losing her. I don’t know how we’ll cope with such a loss. I don’t know who will console us. 

So I can understand how Gus’s humans and all who knew Gus would be diminished at his passing. In this temporal realm, dogs are love in its purest form. I wonder, when it comes to that heavenly greeting, who will be first at the pearly gates? Will it be God? Or will He let loose the dogs? 

Ode to all the dogs I've owned and loved and all the dogs I know and love.
And to those who are waiting and wagging, RIP - Hershey, Oscar, Reba, Pebbles, Tasha, Megan, Venus, Sam, Suzie, Snuffy, and Piddles.