Paws and Reflect

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Nearly a year passed with the two of us maintaining our “landlord/tenant” relationship. Then one night while I was reading in bed, I had the sensation of being watched. I lowered my book and saw Babe staring at me. She was sitting up between my legs about three feet away. She cocked her head in each direction, and then, after another moment of intense staring, she leaped up and licked me—once.

  It was as if a light bulb had gone on in her head: “Oh, I get it. I’m here to stay. You’re not going to get rid of me like the people before you did.”And from that moment on, Babe was a different dog. We had finally bonded. We were best buds.

  But every relationship endures some bad times. I thought my health issues would be the stumbling block in Babe’s and my lives. One day, however, while stroking Babe’s fur I felt a lump on her back just behind her head. This motivated me to intently examine the rest of her body and I found another lump—smaller than the first—right near the joint where her front left leg connected to her torso. The next day I took her to my vet who X-rayed her. The films revealed that the tumors were malignant.

  Thus began the battle that was to last for nearly a year. Tumors popped out on Babe’s body like toadstools on a tree stump. At first some were excised, but when the wounds didn’t heal and her hair grew back at a rate so slow that it was hardly visible, injections of toxins to kill the malignant cells became the procedure of choice.

  Then came the day when the dreaded word “amputation” was used in conversation for the first time. Following its initial excision, the tumor on the joint on her front leg had grown back. Since the tumor was now the size of a plum, it was decided that a repeat surgery would be a futile gesture.”The leg should go, ” the vet said quietly and emphatically. I thought of all the dogs and cats I had seen getting around just fine with only three legs. I was sure Babe would overcome such a limitation, but when I saw the bandaged bloody stump after the surgery, I confess I questioned my agreement to the surgery. However, within a couple of days Babe was hopping around the house, just as curious as ever about what was going on in her little world. As for her appetite, her motto was still, “Eat first and ask questions later.”

  Meanwhile I was falling into a dark pit both physically and spiritually. My eighty-four-year-old mother was slipping away into the world of dementia, and I, an only child, remained her primary caregiver. Living two lives 24/7 is exhausting, and when the other party does nothing but complain about her aches and pains—while you remain silent about your own—your nerves become like slabs of beef hanging from hooks in a meat locker. Then add the problem of being asked the same handful of questions over and over, and there’s nowhere to go but down.

  Thankfully, after each one of those dreadful days with my mother, I had Babe to come home to. First she would howl her displeasure about being left alone and not getting her dinner at the usual time. But after I had waited on Her Majesty and taken her for a walk, all was forgiven and we would curl up on the bed reading and listening to the classical music station.

  And if I woke up the next morning knowing I was going to have one of those “AIDS days” rushing from bed to bathroom, Babe was always there to give me a compassionate look that said, “I know, my friend. The world has done its worst, but we’re still able to sniff the grass and feel the wind blowing on our backs. We can still hear the beauty of birds chirping in the morning and shoo that annoying cat next door off our fence. We can still snuggle together and crawl under the electric blanket when it’s cold. (Remember, I like it set on six. ) And then there are all those lovely scraps you mix in with my kibble for dinner, which you usually remember to warm up in the microwave. So with all that, we can’t really complain too much, can we?”

  And so we pushed on—two battered warriors going into battle day after day, determined not to miss out on any fun that life had to offer.

  Inevitably, however, the day came when Babe could battle no longer. I found her one early morning on the kitchen floor near her bowls, which wasn’t unusual since they were her most precious possessions. But her food bowl still contained the two biscuits I always put there in case she got the munchies during the night. She was lying on one side, breathing heavily.

  At that hour—it was still dark outside—I knew the vet’s office wouldn’t be open, and if this was her time to leave me, I didn’t want it to be in a strange environment. I bundled her up and laid her on the pillow on her side of the bed. As I crawled into bed next to her, I hoped that our combined smells would bring her comfort.

  The sun was shining when I woke up. I looked over and saw that Babe was still alive and that her breathing had become calmer. I called the vet on his cell phone, and he said he was at his second office in Davis, about an hour and a half’s drive away. I carried Babe, still wrapped in the blanket, out to the car and set her on the floor on the passenger side, which was warmer than the seat. It was then that I realized I had fallen asleep while still wearing my clothes from the day before. To hell with smelling fresh, I thought.

  As I headed for Davis, thoughts of Babe filled my mind. I recalled all the silly adventures and little dramas we had shared. She had been in my life for 22 months, but it seemed like only a few weeks. Then I was hit by the realization that Christmas was only two weeks away, and I lost my composure. We weren’t going to have a second Christmas together.

  I became angry at God and through my tears I kept asking Him why He couldn’t have given my brave little dog one more Christmas with me. I looked down at Babe and saw that her eyes were open. She was staring at me, but this time I couldn’t see the words in her eyes. Maybe she was studying my face so that she’d remember what I looked like when she had to eventually pick me out from the crowd after I got to heaven: unshaven, wrinkled clothes, hair askew, tear stains on my glasses and cheeks-—oh, that was a picture I wanted her to retain.

  It was around ten-thirty when we arrived at the vet’s office. He made a wonderful suggestion.”Why don’t you take her out to our garden?”he asked.”There’s a fountain and pots of poinsettias and the final crop of roses is in bloom. That’s a much nicer place to say goodbye than on a metal table under fluorescent lighting. After you’ve had some time together, I’ll come out and we’ll say goodbye to her there.”

  I laid Babe’s blanket-wrapped body near the fountain. With the sound of water trickling in the background, I told her how much I loved her and how much I had enjoyed our time together. I also told her that in heaven she’d have four legs again just like all the other dogs. I told her how she had been my hero; how inspired I had been by her tenacity to get on with the business of living despite the obstacles placed in her path; how she had never had any use for self-pity. And finally I said that I’d be joining her in a few years and then we would be able to chase balls and play tug-of-war whenever we wanted.

  The vet and an assistant came into the garden and prepared Babe for the end. I looked away when they inserted the needle into her remaining front leg, but a second later I looked back.

  “She’s gone, ”the vet said almost immediately. Her eyes were open, but they focused on nothing. The assistant removed the needle. Then for the first time since I had known him, I saw tears in the vet’s eyes.”It never gets any easier, ” he explained, “but it’s such a privilege to free them from pain.”

  I was given the option of leaving the body for cremation or taking it back with me. I chose the latter because a local shelter offered a cremation service that included the return of the ashes in a red wood box; I already had three little boxes on the bookshelf in my bedroom. (Maude was buried in the backyard of the house I owned when she died. ) Several days later a fourth box was added to the collection. In a week I would be facing Christmas with no dog dragging ribbon around the room or tearing apart a stocking filled with chew bones and toys.

  The holiday was truly the worst I could recall as an adult. Besides not having a Beagle around, I had to endure the presence of my mother sitting on a sofa surrounded by unopened presents that she had no interes
t in. And to top it off, I had diarrhea all day. Fortunately I had made a breakfast casserole the night before, so all I had to do was put it into the oven to bake while I went back and forth between the living room and the bathroom.

  It is now over a month into the new year. After my dogs before Babe had gone, friends always asked me when I was going to get the next one. Now they are asking me if I am going to get another dog. They know that any new dog will very likely outlive me.

  I got my first Beagle when I was twenty-five, which means I have been “hounded” for thirty-six years. The thought of finishing my life without another Beagle around to goad me into taking her for walks, harass me because I’m not opening a can of Alpo fast enough, or press twenty toenails into my back while I’m trying to sleep depresses the hell out of me.

  Last night, as I lay on my bed, I had an image of Babe lying with me. She was her young, happy self, before the troubles with tumors set in. She was whispering, “You will never find another Beagle as wonderful as I was, but you will find one who will love you as much as I did and who will try to be the best dog she can be. Now go and find her!”

  My hero had found a way to guide me, even after her death. And so the quest begins.

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  Ron Nyswaner: KEEPING SAFE AT HOME

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  Ron Nyswaner likes dogs to be dogs. They guard his property and greet visitors, they run off the deer and keep rabbits out of the garden, they work out their place in the pack and sleep in the barn. Ron does not look on his dogs as substitutes for children. He loves and cares for them, but he does not coddle them. They are dogs.

  Nyswaner is a screenwriter with an astonishing resume. He wrote Smithereens, Mrs. Soffel, the groundbreaking AIDS drama Philadelphia, the Peabody Award-winning Soldier’s Girl, and The Painted Veil, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton.

  Those impressive credentials allowed him to buy a country home in Woodstock, New York, where he became a dog owner. His adventures in the canine world included a badly-behaved dog, a wonderful dog, and many good dogs, but what all the dogs allowed him to see was their steady good nature and their willingness to love and accept him no matter what else was going on in his life.

  Quite a lot was going on, not all of it good. Ron details in his memoir, Blue Days, Black Nights, that after the huge success of Philadelphia, he started on a downhill cycle of drug and alcohol abuse. His addiction took him through the back streets of Los Angeles, New York, and into the arms of a professional hustler, with whom he became obsessed. That relationship ended with a death, whereupon he discovered that nothing that he knew about the hustler was true, even his name.

  Ron looked for a lifeline out of his frenetic whirl of addiction and sex, and found it in the stability and resources of the community in which he lived. Part of his salvation came from his dogs, who touched his heart with their enthusiasm and love whenever he returned home, no matter how strung out, embarrassed, or grief-stricken.

  His memoir is an unsparing look at drug addiction and male hustlers, in which his small pack of dogs plays a mostly off-stage part. But he was happy to make them center stage during our conversations.

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  I’VE HAD DOGS my whole life, and the relationships I’ve had with them have been the most profound—or almost—in my life. I’ve usually been monogamous, dogwise. There have been times in my life when I’ve collected as many as three. But right now I’m back to being a one-dog man with my pit bull, Spike.

  Reaching way back, there was a dog who was such a strange object of passion. Missy was a little terrier mix inherited from a neighbor, and she was very unpleasant. She huddled under the sofa and would do serious injury to anybody who tried to take her out. She developed a sinus abscess on her face that was constantly running. And yet I loved her very much. I had her all through my teenage years and into college.

  When I was in graduate school in New York, I didn’t have dogs. Then I moved upstate in 1988, to this rundown, funky house outside of Woodstock. It’s a two-story, cream-colored farmhouse built in 1869 on a cul-de-sac at the end of a gravel lane, very long and hidden by trees. There’s a big cinderblock barn to one side of it. There’s a pear tree, pine trees, an apple tree, and a stream. It’s a really lovely spot to raise dogs and to write.

  I’m in my office talking to you. There’s a bluebird, tapping at my window. He returns every year. This is the first time this year I’ve seen him. He fights with his reflection in the window.

  Within ten days after moving here, I got a Lab puppy. To my partner at the time I admitted that I had given up life in New York City for one reason and one reason only, and that was so I could have a dog.

  We’d seen these puppies advertised in the paper, and I swore that we were just going to look at them. But I scooped one up out of the litter, held her in my arms, and took her home. That was Daisy, the first of my country dogs. She was the worst-behaved dog I’ve ever had. Even worse than Missy, because at least Missy was just huddling under the sofa, growling at people.

  Daisy had a very pleasant personality, but she was completely untrainable. We called her Bandit because any time anybody came to work on my house in any capacity, she would jump into their truck and steal a tool. You’d see these furnace-repair guys chasing this dog all over the yard, trying to get a screwdriver out of her mouth. She would let them get within two feet and then take off.

  One time she managed to get a light bulb in her mouth. I chased her desperately, trying to get it back. Then, in frustration, I had to watch her eat it. She was too quick. I called the vet, but he was calm about it, and he said, “Just watch her carefully.”

  And nothing happened. She was completely fine, after eating a light bulb.

  She was eager to enjoy life, and she entered every day with an almost unbearable enthusiasm. I loved her for that.

  Do you remember that Englishwoman who was popular in the eighties? The dog trainer, Barbara Woodhouse? She wrote a book called No Bad Dogs. My friends and I used to joke that if she ever met Daisy, she would have to change the title of her book to One Bad Dog.

  I took Daisy to classes at the YMCA. We’d see these Dobermans and Rottweilers learning all their skills, totally obedient, and here was this very friendly, very loving Lab who just could not sit still. She couldn’t sit, she couldn’t lie down, she couldn’t stay. It was just impossible for her. There was some wiring about training that just wasn’t in her brain.

  You had to love her lack of conformity. That’s the way I’ve been my entire life. My family, friends, relatives, and high school principals have all said the same thing about me: “Why can’t we train him?” Many people probably considered putting a choke collar around my neck. That spirit in me responded to that in Daisy.

  I lost her early in her life. She was hit by a car out at the end of the road. I had let her out while I was taking a shower, getting ready to go somewhere. My house is surrounded by sixteen acres of woods and gardens, at the end of a long, long driveway, and usually there’s no traffic. I went to look for her, to put her in the house before I left, and I couldn’t find her. I walked out to the end of my road with that dreaded feeling—that fear that we have about those things. And there she was.

  Right after that I heard about underground electric fences, which I’ve found to be very effective. I have used them for other dogs.

  For a week or so, I didn’t want to come home. It’s tough when you lose a dog, a dog who has always been there to greet you, who, when you walk in the door, goes completely wild to see you. And she’s not there any longer. She’s not going to be greeting you. I couldn’t bear it.

  All my dogs have been free or rescued from the pounds or the streets. So a week later I went to the pound, and found a new dog who cured my grief.

  Going to the SPCA is just an excruciating experience if you love dogs. You don’t want just one dog to take home, you want to take them all. We walked around, and
at the very end of the row, at the back of the cage, there was a shepherd-Lab mix who was just shaking, shaking, shaking. So many of the other dogs were so eager to meet me, barking to be touched. But she was just huddled in the back of the cage. We found out that she had just been dropped off, the last of her litter. All the others had found homes, but they couldn’t find a home for this one, so they took her to the pound. She had only been there less than twenty-four hours, which explained why she was so afraid. Of course, that’s the one I wanted.

  Billie grew into one of the most beautiful dogs I’ve ever seen. She had the head and body of a shepherd, with the pointy ears, about eighty pounds, lean and trim. She had very thick white fur. She also had some Lab features, so she was extraordinary looking.

  I have to say that in many ways Billie was the love of my life. I had to explain it to my fiancé, James, when we met.”By the way, I don’t know what’s going to happen between us, but I just want you to know there’s this dog named Billie in my life, and you’ll never take her place.”