by Dave Nasser
This was ridiculous, as well as infuriating—after all, we’d done nothing wrong! We’d brought our big dog to a hotel that said it took big dogs. Any other time, I’d be making my case—firmly. But this wasn’t any other time, and this was not the day for standoffs with annoyed hotel staff. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated, keeping one hand on George’s snout from behind the door, and beckoning Christie to follow me in. “He’ll be quiet now,” I promised. “You won’t hear a peep from him for the rest of the night.”
“Big bark on that animal,” observed the woman. The man nodded.
“I know,” I said, necessity clearly being the mother of invention. “People have remarked on it before, as it happens. Almost sounds like he’s a Great Dane or something!”
At which point, I thanked them both and then firmly shut the door.
Mercifully, Christie was so out of it that she crawled into bed within minutes of getting back, and fell immediately into a deep, deep sleep. George and I settled slowly, the TV on low, once I’d run out—quick as can be—to get myself a pizza. And, after I’d taken him out back, late and very furtively, to use the bathroom, we took to our beds pretty early too: me onto the other side of the creaky mattress and him to his own bed, which we’d fashioned out of blankets, and which must have been really hard and uncomfortable. We’d made it up on the floor by the bed, right by Christie, and when I woke in the morning that was still where he was, her right hand gently resting on his flank.
CHAPTER 12
From Little Acorns
Life goes on. It has to. Because all things must pass.
It was something I remember being told all my life, but now I understood it as a reality. Life held bad times and good times, and if we expected to enjoy the good times, then we must live through those bad times as well.
Though we would never forget the pain of losing Sebastian—Christie especially—as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, we gradually began to put the whole ordeal behind us, and look forward to the future with optimism and hope again.
They say something good always comes out of something bad if you look hard enough, and, in some ways, that was true. Though it felt slightly melancholic to anticipate the coming Christmas—recalling the previous Christmas and all those hopes not yet realized—we felt more like a family, even so. George had matured into a wonderful dog, and was now such an integral part of our little unit that we couldn’t imagine him not being there. This was especially true for Christie. There was no way you could overstate how vital a part he’d played in helping her get over what had happened to our baby. It was almost as if it had made a man of him.
He was two years old now, and still he was growing. By Christmas 2007, when I took him for his checkup, he weighed in at a whopping two hundred and fourteen pounds—the same as a large adult male human. To think he’d grow any bigger was mind-boggling; he was such a huge dog already.
He was now completely comfortable in his ever-expanding skin, and had developed a really lovely personality. Though it was amazing to see such a big animal be so gentle, we figured that was the whole point, really. He was a gentle giant precisely because he had nothing to prove; he could take on the world, and he knew it. He didn’t need to be aggressive, or pushy, or run around asserting his authority. In dog terms, he really was top dog.
He was also, officially, top eater and top pooper, and attending to his needs, at both ends of the spectrum, were, since I was the one who was most with him on weekdays, a big part of my daily routine. He would get through around one hundred pounds of dry dog food per month, plus the occasional treat of beef jerky and meat sticks, and if he had his way—and this is still the case today—he would happily eat double that amount.
Naturally, what came out of the other end of George came in equally impressive amounts. His poops were huge. They could weigh about four or five pounds and could easily fill a five-gallon bucket in a week. To deal with them we fashioned this great set of tools, basically a stiff rake and a snow shovel—you don’t see a lot of snow in Arizona, it’s true, but I managed to track one down online—and between them my tools did a pretty good job, even if people did sometimes stare. Dealing with his poops, of course, mostly fell to me, something I’d always kind of accepted would happen, but that seemed to have happened without it being discussed. The only comment Christie made, ever, on the subject was that they were man-sized, so it needed a man to pick them up. I couldn’t fault her logic, so I let it go. It was okay. Just as long as he didn’t get diarrhea…
As well as keeping me occupied as his personal groomsman, George had found himself a hobby. After the holiday was over, on a wild new year’s whim, I went out and got myself a golf cart. I didn’t play golf; I didn’t even have any plans to play. I’d noticed since we first moved into our neighborhood that several of our neighbors tooled around the area in golf carts, and it seemed a really neat way to get around. They weren’t legal to drive out on the main streets, of course, but around our neighborhood, which sprawled over several hundred acres on the edge of town, they were the perfect mode of transport on a blisteringly hot Arizona day.
Right away George loved my golf cart. In fact, once he’d taken possession of his place beside me, he was reluctant to give it up to anyone. He loved everything about being out and about in the golf cart with me. Unlike the truck, where he’d have to lie across the seat in back when we traveled, the golf cart had plenty of room for him to sit up front beside me. It was open on the sides and had a pretty high roof, and he’d sit in there just like he did indoors on the sofa, with his haunches on the seat and his front legs on the floor. And, being built for slow speeds, the golf cart had no windshield either, so George was able to feel the wind on his face, and see, hear and smell everything around him.
But if January brought George the best belated Christmas present ever, February brought even better news for us. Christie was once again pregnant.
This time, however, she wasn’t excited at all. How could she dare to be? How could either of us allow ourselves to be? As any parent who has ever lost a baby will tell you, not daring to hope is the order of the day once you realize you might be granted a second chance. You just can’t let yourself believe you’ll be that lucky.
Christie was terribly anxious about things right off the bat. She was unable to allow herself to relax for a moment, with the memories of Sebastian once again clamoring in her head. And it seemed her fear wasn’t misplaced either. At only eight weeks in, her first scan revealed bad news—all was far from well with this pregnancy too.
She had what was called a molar pregnancy, her doctor told her—one that would never develop properly into a baby. It was a kind of benign cancer that grew straight after conception in place of a normal fetus developing. It was, and is, an incredibly rare complication (only around one in a thousand or fifteen hundred pregnancies in the United States are affected) and it seemed like the cruelest, most horrible piece of luck. Two such rare and unrelated complications—what were the chances of that?
Once again Christie had to go into hospital—for a D and C, this time—and it was while there that she was given the even more depressing news that it was important that we didn’t try to conceive again for at least six months to be sure that all the traces of the tumor were gone, so that the same thing wouldn’t happen again. We resolved to put the whole idea out of our minds. Perhaps this baby of ours just wasn’t meant to be.
It’s during times of great trauma that you know who your friends are, and we’d been lucky to have made some great friends in Tucson, having hooked up with some guys I knew from my school days.
Paul and I had been friends since the second grade, when we both went to Sam Hughes Elementary School. Like all boys that age, we liked to hang out outside, and were particularly fond of riding our bikes. One of our first big joint projects was to build ourselves a ramp so that we could jump our bikes over our neighbors’ garbage cans. We kept this going well into our teens. In fact, it was me who h
eld the coveted Evel Knievel record for jumping the most cans at one time—sixteen!
We made friends with Jim at Tucson High. By now our sporting activities had become a bit more mainstream: I played football, Paul played golf and Jim played baseball. After we left high school, Paul and I rented a house together. A lot of good parties were held there…
Like me, Paul and Jim were now both married, and their wives, Lee and Dana, were really friendly too. Christie and I were soon welcomed into their group. George wasn’t left out either: Dana had a dog too, an energetic Labrador named Boomer, who, despite being only half George’s great size, became his absolute best friend right away.
We’d met up again at the Turkey Bowl the previous Thanksgiving. The Turkey Bowl is an annual neighborhood event for Thanksgiving, held in late November, when families get together, play a football game and generally hang out. That day was the first time we all got together officially, and the first time any of our new friends had met George. It was safe to say that he made quite an impression.
Over the summer of 2008 we spent a lot of time hanging out. It was around then that we established a really fun new ritual: pretty much every Friday night we’d gather at Paul’s house for an informal happy hour—a chance to relax over a few drinks and some chips after a long week.
Paul lived close by, in a red brick, ranch-style house, and his backyard had a great outdoor living space, with a barbecue, TV, refrigerator and even a beer tap, which made it the perfect place to unwind.
As ever, George’s size was a talking point at Paul’s. They’d all spent time with him out-of-doors, but within the confines of a house you got a truer sense of how he filled a room—and how normal dog rules just didn’t apply to him.
We were used to George’s counter-surfing antics at home, of course, and took care not to leave food out in places where he could get it. “But that means everywhere!” Paul pointed out, one happy hour in late fall, when George had simply waltzed up and scooped a stray pretzel off the bar. “There’s, like, no horizontal surface in the average human household high enough to be out of his reach.”
Dana laughed. “You’re telling me! I thought Boomer was bad enough. It’s like having toddlers marauding around the house again, only this time they’re giant-sized ones.”
Paul gestured toward George, who was out cruising around the backyard with Boomer and Paul’s children, Liam, Jake and Jami, oblivious that he was the topic of conversation. Again. “I mean, I know it’s a bit of a cliché, and I’m sure you’re pretty tired of hearing it, but take a look at him, will you! That dog is just bigger than a dog’s got a right to be.”
“He’s a Great Dane,” I said. “A Great Dane. The clue is in the name here.”
“Yeah, but there’s ‘great’ and there’s ‘great.’ I’ve seen my fair share of Great Danes. And let me tell you, that guy is not like any Great Dane I’ve seen. I mean, did you ever see a dog as big as he is before? Honestly?”
“No,” I admitted.
“And have you ever measured him?”
I shook my head as I sipped my beer. “But we do get him weighed regularly. And, yeah, you’re right. The doc says he’s pretty big, even for a Dane.”
Paul gestured toward George. “He’s not just big. He’s huge, Dave. And you say he’s still growing?”
“In theory, he is—just about.”
“And even now, I’m betting you’d have to travel a long way to find a dog as big as he is, don’t you think, Jim?” He sipped his beer again, then gestured to the motif on the glass. “Hey, there’s a thought,” he said, holding it up. “You ever go and check out the stats?”
I didn’t connect for a minute. “What stats?”
He gestured to his glass again and grinned. “You know. All the stats in Guinness World Records? See how big the biggest dog in the world is right now? I’m betting they’d have one in there, wouldn’t they? They have everything you could think of that could be awarded a world record, and a hell of a lot else you never would. Liam has a copy. I’ll have to go find it and take a look for you.”
I laughed, suddenly realizing what had prompted the name Guinness. “You have shares in that outfit or something?” I said. Paul’s favorite drink had always been Guinness. It was his staple first drink on Friday nights—and often his second and third too. I shook my head then. “And, no. No, I haven’t ever checked that out, as it happens.”
“Well, I will. Be kind of interesting to see, wouldn’t it?”
Interesting, yes, but not that interesting. Not so interesting that I rushed out to check it for myself. Yes, George was pretty big—maybe the biggest dog in Tucson—but I didn’t doubt for a moment that, somewhere in the world, there’d be a dog—maybe lots of dogs—even bigger than he was. What were the chances of him being the biggest in the world, really? Pretty remote.
It was only in late November 2008, when I took George for his annual checkup with Doc Wallace, that it occurred to me that, actually, maybe the odds weren’t so long. Doc Wallace had seen one hell of a lot of dogs in his time, after all.
By now, I’d had to find new ways to manage our vet visits without trouble. As with water, when George really took against something, there was no way in the world he was going to change his mind. And there was also no way—and this was truer now than it had ever been—to make him do anything he didn’t want to do. No way, as in physically no way.
And George didn’t want to go to the veterinarian anymore. Despite the good doc’s fabled affinity with animals, which still held completely true once we were actually in there, George had obviously not forgotten that there’d been a time when he’d come into this place in possession of his manhood and then come out again, soon after, less than whole. He was therefore very antsy about visiting the doc’s clinic, and would no longer, under any circumstances whatsoever, allow me to take him in by the front door. It was the same as with our doorbell at home, but in reverse. He’d see the entrance, stiffen up and refuse to enter. No way.
This problem was, naturally, kind of difficult to deal with. Trying to shift a couple of hundred pounds of reluctant dog came under the category of “not humanly possible”—not for one man on his own, anyhow. Not for nothing did the puppy manuals stress training so much. A dog this size did exactly what he wanted, so it was imperative that you were the boss.
And I was, in all the ways that really mattered in life, but he wasn’t playing ball on this one. So I had to be clever and outsmart him with my brainpower. And, applying it, I worked out that if I drove around to the parking lot out back, I could take him into the clinic via the back door instead. Of course, he wasn’t stupid, so this solution would continue working only as long as he didn’t suffer any further indignities at the hands of the good doctor, but since I couldn’t imagine anything worse than him losing his cojones, I figured we were good for the foreseeable future. And should something unpleasant involving knives or needles need to happen, then I’d just have to come up with a Plan C—a Plan C that might need to involve a whole bunch of heavy-lifting gear, but I decided we’d cross that bridge if and when we came to it.
In the meantime, George was in, and up on the doc’s scales, and I was in for something of a shock. Not that it would be a complete shock when it came: there was the way the doc whistled after he’d led George up on the platform and the way his eyebrows shot up when he read off the number on the scale. But when he spoke, I knew exactly what I expected him to say. And he did.
“You know, Dave,” he said, as George stepped back down off the platform, “in all my years in practice, I can honestly say I’ve never seen a Great Dane as big as George here. You see his weight?”
I hadn’t. He now obligingly showed me. “This dog now weighs in at two hundred and forty-five pounds.”
Now, that did take me back. “Two hundred and forty-five pounds? But that’s—”
“Huge, Dave. That’s huge. That’s, let me see, over thirty pounds more than when we last weighed him, in fact. That’s way more tha
n any Great Dane that I’ve ever heard of—one thirty to one sixty pounds is normal for a male, but two forty-five? Incredible. Just plain incredible. Not that we didn’t see it coming, I guess.”
I shook my head, stunned. I knew he’d grown some, but by that much? I guess we just didn’t see it so much when we saw him every day. “But should he even still be growing at this age?”
Doc Wallace shook his head. “No, he shouldn’t. But perhaps he’s not now. He’s three years old, right?”
I nodded. “Just this month.”
“So, then, he’s probably done. Or, at least, he should be. In fact, I’d say you’ll want to be careful with his food intake. He looks great right now. His weight, build, and height are all in proportion. He’s in really good condition all around, in fact. But you’ll need to be pretty careful from here on in. If he gets any heavier than he is at the moment, then it will potentially become harmful for his health.”
That I did know. We’d had that drummed into us from puppyhood. “We’re careful,” I told him. “We have to be careful. If we’d let him, he’d eat way, way more than he does.”
The doc nodded. “But he’s in fine shape right now, as I said. So whatever you’re doing at the moment, keep on doing it.” He ran a hand across George’s glossy flank, then scratched his own head. “But what a size! In all my years… What a size!”
He was still scratching his head when George and I left his office.
“You’ll never believe what I’m going to tell you,” I told Christie, minutes later, from the parking lot of Doc Wallace’s clinic. It had become our ritual, this, after my visits to Doc Wallace. We’d pile in the truck, then I’d call Christie and say, “Hi,” and she’d always say, “Go on. How much?”
