by John Grogan
It didn’t matter how much food he devoured, either through legitimate means or illicit activities. He always wanted more. When deafness came, we weren’t completely surprised that the only sound he could still hear was the sweet, soft thud of falling food.
One day I arrived home from work to find the house empty. Jenny and the kids were out somewhere, and I called for Marley but got no response. I walked upstairs, where he sometimes snoozed when left alone, but he was nowhere in sight. After I changed my clothes, I returned downstairs and found him in the kitchen up to no good. His back to me, he was standing on his hind legs, his front paws and chest resting on the kitchen table as he gobbled down the remains of a grilled cheese sandwich. My first reaction was to loudly scold him. Instead I decided to see how close I could get before he realized he had company. I tiptoed up behind him until I was close enough to touch him. As he chewed the crusts, he kept glancing at the door that led into the garage, knowing that was where Jenny and the kids would enter upon their return. The instant the door opened, he would be on the floor under the table, feigning sleep. Apparently it had not occurred to him that Dad would be arriving home, too, and just might sneak in through the front door.
“Oh, Marley?” I asked in a normal voice. “What do you think you’re doing?” He just kept gulping the sandwich down, clueless to my presence. His tail was wagging languidly, a sign he thought he was alone and getting away with a major food heist. Clearly he was pleased with himself.
I cleared my throat loudly, and he still didn’t hear me. I made kissy noises with my mouth. Nothing. He polished off one sandwich, nosed the plate out of the way, and stretched forward to reach the crusts left on a second plate. “You are such a bad dog,” I said as he chewed away. I snapped my fingers twice and he froze midbite, staring at the back door. What was that? Did I hear a car door slam? After a moment, he convinced himself that whatever he heard was nothing and went back to his purloined snack.
That’s when I reached out and tapped him once on the butt. I might as well have lit a stick of dynamite. The old dog nearly jumped out of his fur coat. He rocketed backward off the table and, as soon as he saw me, dropped onto the floor, rolling over to expose his belly to me in surrender. “Busted!” I told him. “You are so busted.” But I didn’t have it in me to scold him. He was old; he was deaf; he was beyond reform. I wasn’t going to change him. Sneaking up on him had been great fun, and I laughed out loud when he jumped. Now as he lay at my feet begging for forgiveness I just found it a little sad. I guess secretly I had hoped he’d been faking all along.
I finished the chicken coop, an A-frame plywood affair with a drawbridge-style gangplank that could be raised at night to keep out predators. Donna kindly took back two of our three roosters and exchanged them for hens from her flock. We now had three girls and one testosterone-pumped guy bird that spent every waking minute doing one of three things: pursuing sex, having sex, or crowing boastfully about the sex he had just scored. Jenny observed that roosters are what men would be if left to their own devices, with no social conventions to rein in their baser instincts, and I couldn’t disagree. I had to admit, I kind of admired the lucky bastard.
We let the chickens out each morning to roam the yard, and Marley made a few gallant runs at them, charging ahead barking for a dozen paces or so before losing steam and giving up. It was as though some genetic coding deep inside him was sending an urgent message: “You’re a retriever; they are birds. Don’t you think it might be a good idea to chase them?” He just did not have his heart in it. Soon the birds learned the lumbering yellow beast was no threat whatsoever, more a minor annoyance than anything else, and Marley learned to share the yard with these new, feathered interlopers. One day I looked up from weeding in the garden to see Marley and the four chickens making their way down the row toward me as if in formation, the birds pecking and Marley sniffing as they went. It was like old friends out for a Sunday stroll. “What kind of self-respecting hunting dog are you?” I chastised him. Marley lifted his leg and peed on a tomato plant before hurrying to rejoin his new pals.
CHAPTER 24
The Potty Room
A person can learn a few things from an old dog. As the months slipped by and his infirmities mounted, Marley taught us mostly about life’s uncompromising finiteness. Jenny and I were not quite middle-aged. Our children were young, our health good, and our retirement years still an unfathomable distance off on the horizon. It would have been easy to deny the inevitable creep of age, to pretend it might somehow pass us by. Marley would not afford us the luxury of such denial. As we watched him grow gray and deaf and creaky, there was no ignoring his mortality—or ours. Age sneaks up on us all, but it sneaks up on a dog with a swiftness that is both breathtaking and sobering. In the brief span of twelve years, Marley had gone from bubbly puppy to awkward adolescent to muscular adult to doddering senior citizen. He aged roughly seven years for every one of ours, putting him, in human years, on the downward slope to ninety.
His once sparkling white teeth had gradually worn down to brown nubs. Three of his four front fangs were missing, broken off one by one during crazed panic attacks as he tried to chew his way to safety. His breath, always a bit on the fishy side, had taken on the bouquet of a sun-baked Dumpster. The fact that he had acquired a taste for that little appreciated delicacy known as chicken manure didn’t help, either. To our complete revulsion, he gobbled the stuff up like it was caviar.
His digestion was not what it once had been, and he became as gassy as a methane plant. There were days I swore that if I lit a match, the whole house would go up. Marley was able to clear an entire room with his silent, deadly flatulence, which seemed to increase in direct correlation to the number of dinner guests we had in our home. “Marley! Not again!” the children would scream in unison, and lead the retreat. Sometimes he drove even himself away. He would be sleeping peacefully when the smell would reach his nostrils; his eyes would pop open and he’d furl his brow as if asking, “Good God! Who dealt it?” And he would stand up and nonchalantly move into the next room.
When he wasn’t farting, he was outside pooping. Or at least thinking about it. His choosiness about where he squatted to defecate had grown to the point of compulsive obsession. Each time I let him out, he took longer and longer to decide on the perfect spot. Back and forth he would promenade; round and round he went, sniffing, pausing, scratching, circling, moving on, the whole while sporting a ridiculous grin on his face. As he combed the grounds in search of squatting nirvana, I stood outside, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the snow, sometimes in the dark of night, often barefoot, occasionally just in my boxer shorts, knowing from experience that I didn’t dare leave him unsupervised lest he decide to meander up the hill to visit the dogs on the next street.
Sneaking away became a sport for him. If the opportunity presented itself and he thought he could get away with it, he would bolt for the property line. Well, not exactly bolt. He would more sniff and shuffle his way from one bush to the next until he was out of sight. Late one night I let him out the front door for his final walk before bed. Freezing rain was forming an icy slush on the ground, and I turned around to grab a slicker out of the front closet. When I walked out onto the sidewalk less than a minute later, he was nowhere to be found. I walked out into the yard, whistling and clapping, knowing he couldn’t hear me, though pretty sure all the neighbors could. For twenty minutes I prowled through our neighbors’ yards in the rain, making quite the fashion statement dressed in boots, raincoat, and boxer shorts. I prayed no porch lights would come on. The more I hunted, the angrier I got. Where the hell did he mosey off to this time? But as the minutes passed, my anger turned to worry. I thought of those old men you read about in the newspaper who wander away from nursing homes and are found frozen in the snow three days later. I returned home, walked upstairs, and woke up Jenny. “Marley’s disappeared,” I said. “I can’t find him anywhere. He’s out there in the freezing rain.” She was on her feet instantly, pul
ling on jeans, slipping into a sweater and boots. Together we broadened the search. I could hear her way up the side of the hill, whistling and clucking for him as I crashed through the woods in the dark, half expecting to find him lying unconscious in a creek bed.
Eventually our paths met up. “Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Jenny said.
We were soaked from the rain, and my bare legs were stinging from the cold. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go home and get warm and I’ll come back out with the car.” We walked down the hill and up the driveway. That’s when we saw him, standing beneath the overhang out of the rain and overjoyed to have us back. I could have killed him. Instead, I brought him inside and toweled him off, the unmistakable smell of wet dog filling the kitchen. Exhausted from his late-night jaunt, Marley conked out and did not budge till nearly noon the next day.
Marley’s eyesight had grown fuzzy, and bunnies could now scamper past a dozen feet in front of him without him noticing. He was shedding his fur in vast quantities, forcing Jenny to vacuum every day—and still she couldn’t keep up with it. Dog hair insinuated itself into every crevice of our home, every piece of our wardrobe, and more than a few of our meals. He had always been a shedder, but what had once been light flurries had grown into full-fledged blizzards. He would shake and a cloud of loose fur would rise around him, drifting down onto every surface. One night as I watched television, I dangled my leg off the couch and absently stroked his hip with my bare foot. At the commercial break, I looked down to see a sphere of fur the size of a grapefruit near where I had been rubbing. His hairballs rolled across the wood floors like tumbleweeds on a windblown plain.
Most worrisome of all were his hips, which had mostly forsaken him. Arthritis had snuck into his joints, weakening them and making them ache. The same dog that once could ride me bronco-style on his back, the dog that could lift the entire dining room table on his shoulders and bounce it around the room, could now barely pull himself up. He groaned in pain when he lay down, and groaned again when he struggled to his feet. I did not realize just how weak his hips had become until one day when I gave his rump a light pat and his hindquarters collapsed beneath him as though he had just received a cross-body block. Down he went. It was painful to watch.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor was becoming increasingly difficult for him, but he wouldn’t think of sleeping alone on the main floor, even after we put a dog bed at the foot of the stairs for him. Marley loved people, loved being underfoot, loved resting his chin on the mattress and panting in our faces as we slept, loved jamming his head through the shower curtain for a drink as we bathed, and he wasn’t about to stop now. Each night when Jenny and I retired to our bedroom, he would fret at the foot of the stairs, whining, yipping, pacing, tentatively testing the first step with his front paw as he mustered his courage for the ascent that not long before had been effortless. From the top of the stairs, I would beckon, “Come on, boy. You can do it.” After several minutes of this, he would disappear around the corner in order to get a running start and then come charging up, his front shoulders bearing most of his weight. Sometimes he made it; sometimes he stalled midflight and had to return to the bottom and try again. On his most pitiful attempts he would lose his footing entirely and slide ingloriously backward down the steps on his belly. He was too big for me to carry, but increasingly I found myself following him up the stairs, lifting his rear end up each step as he hopped forward on his front paws.
Because of the difficulty stairs now posed for him, I assumed Marley would try to limit the number of trips he made up and down. That would be giving him far too much credit for common sense. No matter how much trouble he had getting up the stairs, if I returned downstairs, say to grab a book or turn off the lights, he would be right on my heels, clomping heavily down behind me. Then, seconds later, he would have to repeat the torturous climb. Jenny and I both took to sneaking around behind his back once he was upstairs for the night so he would not be tempted to follow us back down. We assumed sneaking downstairs without his knowledge would be easy now that his hearing was shot and he was sleeping longer and more heavily than ever. But he always seemed to know when we had stolen away. I would be reading in bed and he would be asleep on the floor beside me, snoring heavily. Stealthily, I would pull back the covers, slide out of bed, and tiptoe past him out of the room, turning back to make sure I hadn’t disturbed him. I would be downstairs for only a few minutes when I would hear his heavy steps on the stairs, coming in search of me. He might be deaf and half blind, but his radar apparently was still in good working order.
This went on not only at night but all day long, too. I would be reading the newspaper at the kitchen table with Marley curled up at my feet when I would get up for a refill from the coffeepot across the room. Even though I was within sight and would be coming right back, he would lumber with difficulty to his feet and trudge over to be with me. No sooner had he gotten comfortable at my feet by the coffeepot than I would return to the table, where he would again drag himself and settle in. A few minutes later I would walk into the family room to turn on the stereo, and up again he would struggle, following me in, circling around and collapsing with a moan beside me just as I was ready to walk away. So it would go, not only with me but with Jenny and the kids, too.
As age took its toll, Marley had good days and bad days. He had good minutes and bad minutes, too, sandwiched so close together sometimes it was hard to believe it was the same dog.
One evening in the spring of 2002, I took Marley out for a short walk around the yard. The night was cool, in the high forties, and windy. Invigorated by the crisp air, I started to run, and Marley, feeling frisky himself, galloped along beside me just like in the old days. I even said out loud to him, “See, Marl, you still have some of the puppy in you.” We trotted together back to the front door, his tongue out as he panted happily, his eyes alert. At the porch stoop, Marley gamely tried to leap up the two steps—but his rear hips collapsed on him as he pushed off, and he found himself awkwardly stuck, his front paws on the stoop, his belly resting on the steps and his butt collapsed flat on the sidewalk. There he sat, looking up at me like he didn’t know what had caused such an embarrassing display. I whistled and slapped my hands on my thighs, and he flailed his front legs valiantly, trying to get up, but it was no use. He could not lift his rear off the ground. “Come on, Marley!” I called, but he was immobilized. Finally, I grabbed him under the front shoulders and turned him sideways so he could get all four legs on the ground. Then, after a few failed tries, he was able to stand. He backed up, looked apprehensively at the stairs for a few seconds, and loped up and into the house. From that day on, his confidence as a champion stair climber was shot; he never attempted those two small steps again without first stopping and fretting.
No doubt about it, getting old was a bitch. And an undignified one at that.
Marley reminded me of life’s brevity, of its fleeting joys and missed opportunities. He reminded me that each of us gets just one shot at the gold, with no replays. One day you’re swimming halfway out into the ocean convinced this is the day you will catch that seagull; the next you’re barely able to bend down to drink out of your water bowl. Like Patrick Henry and everyone else, I had but one life to live. I kept coming back to the same question: What in God’s name was I doing spending it at a gardening magazine? It wasn’t that my new job did not have its rewards. I was proud of what I had done with the magazine. But I missed newspapers desperately. I missed the people who read them and the people who write them. I missed being part of the big story of the day, and the feeling that I was in my own small way helping to make a difference. I missed the adrenaline surge of writing on deadline and the satisfaction of waking up the next morning to find my in-box filled with e-mails responding to my words. Mostly, I missed telling stories. I wondered why I had ever walked away from a gig that so perfectly fit my disposition to wade into the treacherous waters of magazine management with its bare-bones budg
ets, relentless advertising pressures, staffing headaches, and thankless behind-the-scenes editing chores.
When a former colleague of mine mentioned in passing that the Philadelphia Inquirer was seeking a metropolitan columnist, I leapt without a second’s hesitation. Columnist positions are extremely hard to come by, even at smaller papers, and when a position does open up it’s almost always filled internally, a plum handed to veteran staffers who’ve proved themselves as reporters. The Inquirer was well respected, winner of seventeen Pulitzer Prizes over the years and one of the country’s great newspapers. I was a fan, and now the Inquirer’s editors were asking to meet me. I wouldn’t even have to relocate my family to take the job. The office I would be working in was just forty-five minutes down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a tolerable commute. I don’t put much stock in miracles, but it all seemed too good to be true, like an act of divine intervention.
In November 2002, I traded in my gardening togs for a Philadelphia Inquirer press badge. It quite possibly was the happiest day of my life. I was back where I belonged, in a newsroom as a columnist once again.
I had only been in the new job for a few months when the first big snowstorm of 2003 hit. The flakes began to fall on a Sunday night, and by the time they stopped the next day, a blanket two feet deep covered the ground. The children were off school for three days as our community slowly dug out, and I filed my columns from home. With a snowblower I borrowed from my neighbor, I cleared the driveway and opened a narrow canyon to the front door. Knowing Marley could never climb the sheer walls to get out into the yard, let alone negotiate the deep drifts once he was off the path, I cleared him his own “potty room,” as the kids dubbed it—a small plowed space off the front walkway where he could do his business. When I called him outside to try out the new facilities, though, he just stood in the clearing and sniffed the snow suspiciously. He had very particular notions about what constituted a suitable place to answer nature’s call, and this clearly was not what he had in mind. He was willing to lift his leg and pee, but that’s where he drew the line. Poop right here? Smack in front of the picture window? You can’t be serious. He turned and, with a mighty heave to climb up the slippery porch steps, went back inside.
