by Larry Levin
When Oogy plays with other dogs, they run and run in circles, wrestle, flop around. Watching Oogy barrel along makes me think of the films I have seen of old-time locomotives, the big black ones, pistoning forward. Oogy is nothing but power, all muscle and moving mass. He will run for the sheer joy of running. He has some regular friends, dogs he will invariably interact with, but on any given day there is no way to predict who will be there when we are. He has also earned the nickname “the sheriff.” When a couple of dogs start mixing it up, Oogy will invariably run to the altercation and check it out, and more than once he has started backing off the aggressor dog with barks and shoves. Then, once peace has been restored, he will return to what he had been doing before.
Allowing Oogy the autonomy to wander off leash has proved to be beneficial to his sense of himself as well as to our relationship. He wanders, explores, and sniffs at things I cannot see. He will dawdle along, sheer strength and ferocity gone gentle, smelling flowers, meandering without a care under the canopy of trees and amid the tang of honeysuckle. At the park, he is very independent, while at home, he seems always to need to be around one of us.
Oogy has appreciated the confidence shown in him to be off leash and on his own. He revels in the opportunity to interact with other dogs. By letting Oogy run free and mingle, and allowing him to wander in the stillness of the woods, where the only sounds are the creek and the occasional bird, the thrumming of a frog like some bass Jew’s harp, the whine of insects, we have been able to step out of and beyond the routine of our lives and in so doing have grown closer together. The trust I have placed in him and the independence he experiences have confirmed that, as with so many things, I was very, very wrong: He will never leave me.
I have told Jennifer and the boys that after I die, this is where I want my memorial service held and my ashes scattered. It is a scene of great peacefulness, happiness, and love. I have asked that Oogy’s ashes accompany mine. Just the other day, when I told the boys, Noah asked if instead I wanted to be buried next to our old pets just to the left of the front door. “I don’t know if we’ll own our house then,” I said. “And anyway,” I added, “with Oogy, it’s different. He and I are connected on a different plane.”
They said that they understood.
CHAPTER 10
The Rescuer
the boys’ impending departure for college will bring both big and small changes. The fundamentals of our lives will have been altered. My daily schedule now that I will not have to awaken and make the boys breakfast, the grocery list, the laundry demands, what Jennifer and I will do with the time we are not spending at games and wrestling matches each week and on weekends, all represent change. Everything will become different, some in ways I can envision and others in ways that will surprise and, no doubt, tug at me.
Although both Dan and Noah were accepted into several of the same colleges, in the end they made choices that took them thousands of miles apart. Noah received an academic scholarship to a local, highly rated college, which also has a strong lacrosse program; he will play on the team, and major in business and minor in coaching so he can coach lacrosse upon graduation. Dan decided that he wanted a different cultural experience than offered by the East Coast, and went out west. His sense of challenge and adventure has led him to declare a major in criminal justice.
How the boys will deal with the separation — from Oogy and from each other — remains to be seen.
As for me, since I will have a lot more free time than I have had in the past eighteen years (none, for the most part), I recently began the process to have Oogy certified so that he can become a therapy dog. My hope is that he will be licensed as a companion dog for hospitalized children and wounded veterans. Beyond the ordinary benefits that companion dogs provide, it makes sense to me that young people in the midst of personal struggle — battling pain, depression, and anxiety and daunted by the future before them, what they will look like, how people will react to what they look like — will be encouraged by and take some inspiration from Oogy. They will see in front of them living proof that the most agonizing and horrific events can be overcome without any lasting damage to the spirit, without harm to the ability to give and receive love. I believe that Oogy will be able to help those in need to understand that scarring, disfigurement, and trauma, whether physical or emotional, do not have to define who they are. That what is on the inside counts more than what is on the outside. That no matter what has been inflicted upon them, love and dignity are attainable.
I was talking to a nurse at the dog park and allowed that I was not sure I was ready for these encounters. She told me that I would quickly adjust. I have my doubts, but it made me feel better to defer to her expertise.
Before an animal receives certification as a therapy pet, he (or she) must undergo hours of obedience training, following which the dog is tested by the sponsoring organization (and in some cases the particular facility itself has more stringent standards) to prove that the candidate is calm and under his or her master’s control. There are simple sit and stay tests, tests for walking on command, and one that I anticipate will be hardest for Oogy: sitting while I walk away and not moving toward me until he hears the appropriate verbal command. Some of the tests are administered while rolling carts rattle, pans are dropped, glass breaks, or other dogs pass by. Ardmore recommended a man with decades of experience who is also the author of several well-received books on training dogs. He came to the house and we spent a number of hours together, much of it just talking about people-dog relationships.
He conceded that he had not anticipated the level of disfigurement on Oogy’s face. “I knew that his ear was missing,” he said, “but I never would have guessed that the damage to his facial structure was so extensive.”
We started the training with some game playing using a tennis ball on a knotted piece of rope. The trainer had me throw the ball and give Oogy a treat when he brought it back and gave it to me. The next two times I tried this on my own, Oogy quickly lost interest in anything but the treats in my shirt pocket and would simply stand there and stare at them. The trainer and I have not had a second session yet.
Before he left, though, the trainer said something that made me feel rewarded. He said that Oogy and I have a relationship based on mutual love and respect, a confidence that each will be there for the other. “You’re one hundred percent bonded with your dog,” he said. “There’s no distinction between this dog and the rest of your life. You’re in a place that we try to take dog owners to, but very few of them ever get to.”
I have never felt that my family did anything special or unusual in adopting Oogy. We just happened to be there when the opportunity presented itself. We didn’t do it so we could feel good about ourselves for having done it — although we have felt good about ourselves for being able to help him. We did it without thinking (well, Jennifer did the thinking for us). We met and fell completely and instantaneously in love with a dog who had had unimaginable horror inflicted upon him. We did it for the dog, a dog who was obviously special. What he had endured seemed to have put him on a different plane. And in our naïveté, we did not know that we might not be able to do what we did; that the odds were very much against allowing us to take an abused fighting dog and help him unlock the love in his heart for all living creatures.
I have heard it said that you can tell a lot about a person from his or her pet. I do not know what Oogy ends up saying about us. We do not operate on some elevated level of kindness. It is not uncommon to encounter dogs that have been adopted after they have been injured. I know several three-legged dogs from the dog parks: One was shot in a hunting accident; a car hit another; the third, a fighting dog, was found on the streets of Philadelphia with half his left rear leg missing and the bone jutting out. The owner of another dog who lost some facial structure to cancer had plastic surgery performed on it to restore his face and ability to eat properly. I know a Jack Russell terrier whose hind legs do not work: His owners place him
in a little two-wheeled cart so that he can get around and call him “the million-dollar dog.” I know a family who found a stray who had cigarette burns all over her body and took her in; another family adopted a dog from a breeder who planned on killing him simply because he was a runt. A woman I recently met adopts strays with major medical problems, takes out a mortgage on her house to pay for treatment, and, when she has paid off the mortgage, takes out another one for different animals.
And these are only the very small number of people whom I have come to know within my own community. They speak for a collective experience of vast proportions. At the same time, I have come to understand that what Oogy went through — the unspeakable torture he was subjected to as part of some barbaric cultural exercise — and the odds that he had to overcome to have survived at all make his story, and therefore our experience, somewhat unique. He is not the product of accidental injury, but a living symbol of an epidemic that kills thousands of dogs each year. And if there is a reason this story has a happy ending, a large part of that is because every day I think about how it began.
I also think that because they are adopted, the boys relate to Oogy on another level as well. On their eighteenth birthday, I asked Noah and Dan several more of those questions I had no way of knowing the answer to. I wondered if the fact that they are adopted had influenced their lives, and if so, how. Did they feel rescued or saved in the manner in which Oogy had been rescued? Did they think that the fact they were adopted had influenced the way they related to Oogy?
I told them I was not expecting immediate answers, to take as much time as they needed, and that whatever they wanted to say would be fine. I was not looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to know. I actually wasn’t sure they would be able to answer the questions — I know I couldn’t have done it when I was their age.
But they could.
Dan said that he does not sit around and think about the fact that he is adopted. “I’m aware of it, of course, but I don’t dwell on it,” he said. He considers it to be a component of his identity, “the same as the fact that I’m a Caucasian male. I don’t sit around and think about how my life would be different if I weren’t a Caucasian male. I don’t think about what effect it’s had on my life, either. It’s who I am.” He told me that he never thinks in terms of Jennifer and me not being his parents. “I mean, for the last eighteen years, except for three days, which I have no memory of, you’ve been my mom and dad.”
Dan understands that the fact that his birth parents placed him for adoption does not mean they rejected him. He appreciates that it represents an incomparable sacrifice, an act of love not only for his benefit, but also for the benefit of total strangers. At the same time, Dan does feel that he was “in a way” saved. Not in the sense that he was in any kind of danger, the way Oogy had been, but because he has never wanted for anything and has been provided with a loving, supportive home environment and significant developmental advantages, both intellectually and athletically, that he feels certain would otherwise have been unavailable to him. Dan also thinks that this sense of feeling lucky and advantaged is related to why he is so crazed about saving animals. “I can’t know how I’d have related to Oogy were I not adopted,” Dan explains. “But I have to think it has affected how I feel about him. We share the same experience. We both have better lives for it. I want to help him and love him the way I have been loved and guided.”
In the end, it is not the fact that he is adopted that has affected Noah, it is the act of adoption itself. “I mean,” he said, “for all the things that had to have happened to get me here, to have in fact happened, I find that pretty amazing.”
Just like Dan, Noah has a sincere sense of appreciation for the quality of life he has enjoyed. The friendships he has been able to develop, the academic opportunities he has been offered, the fact that we were always able to somehow pay for lacrosse camps and basketball camps and overnight camps and lacrosse clubs and individual coaching, the occasional vacations, even a trip to Paris we took when they turned thirteen — all represent advantages and experiences that he is the better for and which he feels in all likelihood he would otherwise never have had. Because of that, he thinks he is more thankful for what he has been offered than someone who is not adopted but has had similar opportunities.
Noah agrees with Dan that he has never felt that he was rescued or saved. “I think things would have turned out a lot differently, but, really, how can I speculate about how things would have turned out? I’m very happy with what happened to my life. That’s all that matters. And I definitely think the fact that Danny and I are adopted has affected my relationship with Oogy. We all arrived here through circumstance. Maybe it’s fate. Danny and I weren’t born here. You didn’t even know we existed till Golden Cradle called you. Well, that’s what happened with Oogy. We didn’t know he existed, but he was alive before he ever became part of our family. What would have happened to us if you had not adopted us? I mean, me and Danny and Oogy. We all come from some place else and now we’re here and who knows how that happened?” Noah grinned. “Oogy’s my brother,” he said.
When he told me this, Noah knew nothing of my belief in the role fate had played in bringing Oogy to us. This is but one of the common elements that tie the boys and Oogy together. There are remarkable similarities in their stories. Perhaps this is why Oogy’s integration into our lives has been seamless and complete.
The magnificent and wholly unanticipated rewards that have come our way from Oogy make it difficult for me to believe that anyone could have made a different decision than we did. On many occasions, I have somewhat glibly told people that I did not rescue Oogy, the police did. I simply brought him home. The truth is, I tell them, that Oogy rescued me.
Finally, I started to think about the implications of that statement.
Even though I was not conscious of it — and in fact, mirroring what my parents had taught me, pushed it down to the bottom of my being so that it seemed as if it had never happened — my sister’s death and my parents’ reaction to it understandably, inevitably, and irrevocably reverberated down the passage of the rest of my life.
Perhaps as a child, unable to understand the dynamics involved, I wished I had died instead of my sister so as to spare my parents their grief. I know that until I became a father and saw the value of life, I used to think that the moments in which I could feel most alive and could most appreciate the experience of being alive were in the proximity of danger and death. No doubt as a result, I spent several years with the U.S.D.A. Forest Service on an interregional Hotshot crew fighting forest fires. Hotshot crews perform the initial attack on large fires, flying and busing from one to another for weeks at a time. My friends on the crew and I treated it as a unique experience, full of laughs, but really we were willfully ignorant of the dangers we encountered on a regular basis. That did not mean, of course, that they were not there. We simply disregarded them: falling timber, crashing limbs, hurtling boulders, poisonous snakes, tons of slurry dropped from planes that could crush you and explode the fire around you, helicopters that could fall from the sky at any moment, fire waiting just on the other side of everything we did.
But I think that all of this may also explain my immediate attraction to Oogy. I saw myself in him. I saw the burning of the metaphoric fire that almost consumed him resonate in the way that fire had made me feel alive. I saw how death had had its way with both of us. Proximity to death had shaped us. For me, raising the boys had carried an element of self-doubt, which is why I have always told people that I think the boys turned out as well as they did despite me, not because of me. But with Oogy, with this dog, there was never a moment’s doubt that all the returns would be positive. And I raised him as I tried to raise the boys, as I wish I had been raised: a full-contact relationship free of ambiguity as to their central place of importance to the family.
And Oogy had come back from the dead to be with me. Neither my sister nor my parents had been able to acc
omplish that. I could keep him alive. I knew how to make him happy. I had been unable to do that before. I could not keep my sister alive or bring joy and a sense of fulfillment to my parents.
But I could do it for Oogy.
EPILOGUE
The Journey Boats
We wanted to get the boys something unique for high school graduation gifts and were lucky enough to find hand-carved sculptures that the artist calls Journey Boats. The Journey Boats are symbols intended to represent exploration and passage.
The boats themselves are the long, flat-bottomed type the pharaohs used for hunting the marshes, an experience they considered to be sacred in nature. On the prow of each boat, a protective eye guides.
Based on photographs we supplied to the artist, she carved likenesses of both boys and Oogy in each of the boats. In Noah’s boat, he wears a red shirt; Dan, wearing a blue shirt, sits behind him with his right hand on Noah’s shoulder. These positions are reversed in Dan’s boat. They are looking confidently ahead, ready for whatever it is they are going to encounter. They have always covered each other’s back, so their positioning and the supportive hands on each other’s shoulder represents that. While they are about to embark on separate explorations, their steadfastness and physical contact have an additional meaning: We know that because of the special bonds they have with each other, they will make the journeys loving and supporting each other along the way.
