“One day I saw myself in the street like that. I was that dog.” Alberto Giacometti to Jean Genet, explaining his canine wire sculpture:
__________
By the time I escaped my third marriage and marooned myself in New York City, my wife and kids treated me like a dog. That’s not a complaint. The life of a domesticated animal is pretty comfortable as long as you’re not being raised for slaughter—if you follow the rules, you get plenty of exercise, you get to sleep undisturbed, and the leftovers are delicious.
And look at it this way: the only continuity in my career as a husband, 35 years’ worth of running from my mother, is Alex the 90-pound Weimaraner. He was my stooge and my surrogate, or vice versa, in all three marriages, first to last. He saw me through, from graduate school to tenure-track professor. Nothing else stayed the same, certainly not me. And then everything changed.
There have been eight Weimaraners in my family’s history since 1960, when my father acquired one as a hunting dog—they’re pointers and retrievers, great swimmers with webbed feet. It’s a strange breed. They look like skinny, sinewy Labradors except that their short hair is silvery. Their eyes are pale yellow, so they deflect your gaze until the sun goes down, and then they shine like lanterns. They’re “high-strung,” as the breeders and trainers will tell you, which means they have too much energy to be contained by any residence, or absorbed by any one person: they’re extremely social animals.
My first wife, the actress, picked Alex out of the litter that was romping through corn stubble at sundown on a farm in northern Illinois, west of everything except the Mississippi River. I asked her why she chose this one, and she shrugged, she said: “He was out in front.” He stayed there. I spent most of my time catching up with him, scolding, screaming, stomping, assuming all the while that I was auditioning for the role of bad father. In that phase of his life, he ate books for fun, always the ones I was still reading. He wanted my attention, and I wanted his.
One night, after that first wife had left me for an acting career in LA, I let Alex out the back door, and he didn’t return. I found him next morning lying there on the back step, body shaking, teeth chattering, gums white—he was clearly in shock—so I said, “You stupid fucking animal, why didn’t you come back to me?” Then I realized he was just about dead. There were deep cuts on his face and shoulders, lesions on his legs and ribcage. Clearly he’d been in a fight with another dog.
I scooped him up, put him in the back seat of the car and rushed him to the vet, who, having hooked Alex up to an IV apparatus, said, “What makes you think he was in a fight with another dog? Look at him, he was hit by a car.” He moved a stethoscope around the dog’s deep chest, then closed his eyelids, as if he were an expired human in a hospital bed. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid he’s dead.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, a car, he’s dead!?” I said. “You know, I don’t know why I thought that, dogs fighting and shit. I thought maybe he got caught humping the wrong bitch*—you know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
Just then Alex stirred, the vet jumped, and I started crying.
“Dear God, he’s alive!” I didn’t say that, the vet did.
He checked the vitals again, stepped back, and said: “Well, he’s got massive internal bleeding. I don’t think he’s going to survive.“
“Me, either.”
“What?”
“I don’t think I’m gonna survive.”
“You weren’t hit by a car.”
“Yeah, but my wife left me.”
During and after the first wife, I unleashed Alex on long runs every day in whatever open space I could find because if I didn’t, he’d tear something up—a chair leg, a magazine, a book, a baseball glove, whatever caught his canines’ fancy. One day, for example, he chewed his way through the library copy of volume 3 in Lenin’s Collected Works, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). You’ve seen a dog chew a bone. Imagine those paws gripping a hardback, sinking his teeth into the book that made a revolutionary’s reputation, before there were any Bolsheviks.
On the same day Alex ate Lenin, he took a shit in the dining room of my apartment and peed on the couch. When I came home, I thought a demented decorator had broken in to rearrange the furniture, because my heavy black lounge chair, a birthday gift from the now-departed wife, was in the dining room, fifteen feet away from its accustomed place in the living room.
The seat of the chair had been gouged out by the dog’s teeth rather than an intruder’s boxcutter, I guessed, but why was it so far from home? I finally realized that with every bite, Alex had yanked the chair a few inches away from its original station, so that by the time he was done, it was in the dining room overlooking his own pile of shit.
As I stood there assessing the damage and screaming at Alex, the two cats, Tiger and Ralph, bounded into the room, wondering what all the commotion was about. I grabbed a broom and started sweeping the bag of cat litter Alex had strewn around the dining room—was he still jealous of the cats?—into a plastic bucket. I was considering the possibility that this multidimensional mess was a symptom of emotional trauma when Ralph jumped into the bucket and took a shit that went over the edge, landing on the floor near Alex’s earlier, larger deposit.
Why did I put up with this behavior? God only knows. But here’s a guess. We acquire pets and tolerate their wayward, inexplicable behavior because we need their affective recognition of our mastery, and that requires an acknowledgement of their will, as sentient beings who can decide to love us or not. To begin with, it’s the existential impasse of the slave master, but then—or so we like to think—it evolves into the normal dilemma of the parent, who has absolute power over the child yet wants him or her to become a self-determining adult, the kind who can freely return our originary love. (There’s no better rendition of this dilemma than J. K. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip [1965], which is equal parts beautiful and excruciating precisely because the animal’s freedom is conceived in “sexual” terms, as the master’s decision to validate the beloved dog’s “choices” while in heat; according to Alan Bennett, this extended eulogy is in fact an autobiography through which Tulip acts as Ackerley’s stand-in.)
Maybe that’s how Alex turned me into a vegetarian. He was already seven years old when I started dreaming about carving, flaying, roasting, and eating him. (You know how dreams go, never according to plan.) Outside of Greek mythology, what father eats his children? Vaguely incestual cannibalism is not a recipe for a good night’s sleep, so I swore off dead animals, and this on the eve of my entry into the academic job market. I think I was hoping that my renunciation of desire for a four-legged facsimile of a child, like me just an unruly mass of appetites, would make me an employable adult. I was raised by wolves. Alex, too.
One night, not long after my separation and divorce from my first wife, I came home to find that a five-foot jade tree I had nurtured for years was gone from the front window. WTF? Alex had dragged it into the bedroom, hoisted it onto the bed, and spread the dirt evenly, corner to corner, making an organic coverlet for me. The clean-up was simple, I just folded the blanket and dumped it in the garbage can outside.
Then one day Alex ate several 8-track tapes, just for fun, like the books he treated as chew toys. They were my ex-wife’s favorites, so I didn’t mind. I was especially pleased that he had destroyed the sound track to Barbra Streisand’s gooey remake of “A Star Is Born.” The next day, when I took him for his run in the park, I received material confirmation of his comedic purpose.
Every ten yards or so, Alex would squat and shit something brown and shiny. When I caught up to him, I realized it was tape from an 8-track, and I knew it was Streisand. He couldn’t quite get her out of his system all at once, nobody can—hence the interval stops. I lit a cigarette, stood on the tape, and yelled, “Go!”
He bolted and stopped twenty yards away to squat, but then the tape was spooling out of his ass and he was running for real. He was a half-mile up the hill by the time that brown ribbon reached its end.
My second wife, the working-class lesbian from the South Side, didn’t care much for dogs, but she liked Alex, probably because he was more thoughtful and caring than she knew how to be. He became a kind of father figure for her, and so I played the role of the uncle in this weird triangle. That’s probably why our marriage lasted only 18 months. In this phase of his life, Alex played the part I would later reprise with my own children born of the third marriage—a selfish, gluttonous, but cheerful old hound.
One night I cooked six Cornish hens on the gas grill in the back yard of my Chicago apartment on Seminary Street off Armitage Avenue. That second wife, a big mistake I rectified by drinking and philandering, had invited her best friend from college days for dinner. Between us we ate three of those hens and drank two bottles of white wine.
The next morning I broke out the leftovers—every dog’s remainder of hope—and made my way through most of another hen. Then, as per new habit, I drove my wife to work off Michigan Avenue, where she worked as a bookkeeper for a company that managed a dozen Arby’s franchises. When I returned home, the rest of the hens were gone, of course, because I had forgotten to stow them in the fridge and Alex had eaten them, bones and all. He had been careful, however, to pluck the fowl from the bowl on the kitchen table, so there was no mess to clean up. My disciplinary measures were accordingly mild. I said, “Alex, you’re such an asshole” and left it at that.
That night, I was getting ready to turn off the light when I noticed that Alex hadn’t climbed into his chair at the foot of the bed, where he always slept. He was, how to say this, addressing it intently, as if he were about to flush a bird from the frozen corn stalks of my youth, the dreamscape where I’d once again raise the .20 gauge shotgun to my shoulder and shoot a random pheasant driven by panic—by the dog—into flight.
I said, “Alex, go the fuck to bed.” He broke his point, looked over at me, but he didn’t move. I repeated the command, which he understood perfectly well, but still no movement. “Jesus, what is your problem tonight,” I said, “Get in your chair, will you, goddamn it, don’t make me get up out of this bed, c’mon, man, it’s late.”
Nothing. So I got up and patted the seat of the nicely upholstered chair, saying, now cajolingly, “Go to bed, Alex, it’s time to go to bed.”
He wouldn’t budge. So I collapsed into the chair and was immediately tilted to the right by a significant bulge below my left buttock. Once again, WTF? I got up, lifted the seat of the chair, and there was a whole grilled Cornish hen stuffed neatly into the back corner, ready for consumption but waiting for my permission.
I looked at Alex, he looked at me, and we both started laughing. His eyes danced, anyway, as I lifted the hen from its hiding place and offered it to him. He trotted off to the kitchen with it. I didn’t worry about the bones in his gullet, and I knew he wouldn’t make a mess.
“Good night,” I said, and got back in bed. I turned off the light, just listening now. He spent about ten minutes with that bird. I heard him climb into his chair.
My third wife, the Italian Catholic who reminded me of a Puritan divine, loved Alex, until she didn’t. They bonded right away—he clearly thought she was a good match for me—and he remained impossibly attentive to her through her troubled first pregnancy. Even afterward, when her new motherly affections were already attached to the first-born, he followed her around all day, curling up next to her wherever she parked her still swollen body, hoping to pitch in somehow, if only by licking her face or the new creature she held so tightly.
We moved to North Carolina, my first tenure-track job, three weeks after the baby was born. My wife had quit her job as an editor—she was going to take two months off and then free-lance, she hoped, for her former employer. Our son was pretty easy-going, so her days at home weren’t miserable by any means. But one day she called me in my office.
“Hello?
“The dog is gone, and I mean today. Come and get him right now, and take him to a shelter, or sell him, I don’t care what you do, just get him out of here.
“Jesus, what happened, did he bite the little man?”
“No, the fleas did, his fleas, Alex’s fleas. The baby is covered in flea bites, do you understand? It’s disgusting. I want you to come and get this fucking dog, or I swear I’ll kill him myself.”
“All right, let’s calm down, I’m leaving now, don’t do anything until I get there, OK?”
“Hurry up.”
This was my second introduction to the ferocity of maternal love. My own mother was more or less indifferent to her kids, or rather to me and my older sister (she warmed to the third child, my little brother), so I had always been bewildered by the stroller-wielding women on Clark Street who never stopped talking and tending to the infants they were pushing toward success on LaSalle Street.
Now I understood the amplitude of their attachment to these creatures. My own wife would sacrifice my dog, Alex, the only constant in my life, on the altar of maternal devotion to a barely sentient being whose behavior she couldn’t control, let alone predict—a son who would one day betray every trust she had placed in him.
I was the father of this same child. Why didn’t I feel a similar attachment? What was wrong with me? What did I lack? As I drove home from campus, I kept asking these leading questions, cross-examining myself without objection from the opposing attorney.
I remembered the night before we left Chicago for Charlotte (I’d be driving there with the dog, she’d be flying there with the human). You read about this fateful conversation in the last chapter of this memoir.
Was that the beginning of the end of the marriage? I now think so, but in any event I can honestly say that this conversation kept me awake long after the infant grew up. I wanted to be Alex, curled up and sleeping happily next to Mom, with no resentments against, no anxieties about, this new creature who claimed all her attention. I didn’t want to sacrifice my needs and desires in the name of “responsibility,” not yet, anyway. I wanted to be the dog, not the father.
I got my wish.
Alex never made the move to New Jersey, where I got a great job at Rutgers University in 1988. He died on Thanksgiving Day, 1985, in Wheaton, Illinois, run over by a car while in the care of my father. My wife and I couldn’t take him with us to Washington, D.C., where I had a post-doc fellowship at the Smithsonian, so I asked my father to keep him for the year. He was happy to do so because he loved the breed, and the dog, as much as I did.
I asked my father—who would soon after dispossess me, bequeathing me only his Navy whites, the dress uniform for officers he never quite fit into—how it happened.
“It was right out in front of the house, he was running across the street. I’m sorry, Jim, he was a good dog. Frisky, always wanting to run. I thought maybe he was trying to get back to you.”
“Back to something,” I said, deflecting his kindness along with his guilt. “What are you going to do with the body?”
“Well, the animal control people took him. They said they’d be cremating the body.”
“All right. Thanks, Dad.”
Alex had survived my third wife’s fury over the flea bites, but their relationship had not. The new household rules, part of my plea bargain on arriving home that day, were, first, the dog was to stay at least three feet away from the baby at all times, and second, the dog was to receive regular chemical treatments to kill any pestilence he might carry. I knew the first rule was pointless because the fleas lived in the funky old carpet of our shotgun house as well as in the dog’s short hair—unless we fumigated the whole place, they’d always be there to infest something.
For the same reason, the second rule made no sense except as a ritual punishment: the chemicals you use to kill fleas have weird effects on the nervous systems of the animals you treat, and the fleas return within two weeks, anyway. When I gave Alex a bath in these chemicals, he shook for an hour, and not because he was cold. I covered him in blankets, anyway, and whispered, “You’re OK, you’re OK, hang on.”
To my wife I said, out loud, “We can’t do this, we’re poisoning him. Look at him.”
She said, “He’ll be fine. He can take it. He’s a dog, not a person.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Meanwhile I thought, “Christ, he’s more of a person than I’ll ever be.”
But I followed the new rules to save Alex’s skin. I couldn’t imagine life without him, even though he was already eleven years old. A year later he was dead by automobile. My wife’s sadness at the news surprised me until she said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Jim. I know he meant a lot to you.”
She was right, he did. It’s not just that he and I were the only ones still standing after my first wife left. Or that I got custody of him after I deserted my second wife. Or that he approved of my third wife. He was always there, demanding more attention, from my earliest days in graduate school to the completion of my first book. Over the twelve years of his life, I had more emotional interaction with him than with anyone else, including those wives.
Most days I’d say, “Alex, maybe you can help me with this,” and launch into a one-sided conversation about whatever was bothering me. He was my talking cure long before I could afford a shrink. He was mostly asleep while I spoke, but now and then he’d open his eyes and turn his massive head toward me, always conveying a curious approval of what I was saying, just like a shrink. The transference, as the psychoanalysts call the process by which we let our contemporaries—friends, lovers, colleagues—stand in for the shadows of the past, was easy. Alex reminded me of everyone and everything, especially my self.
Pets are like cartoon figures in this sense: you can project almost anything onto them because they’re blank slates, receptacles of your neuroses. But sooner or later, you realize that if that’s all they are, you’re the problem. Just by being there, they bring you out of your self. They’re an education.
I identified with Alex because he was a natural-born narcissist, operating on the instinct of self-preservation. Sure, he was a domesticated animal who had learned many skills, words, gestures, and attitudes from the human beings who surrounded him with their commands and their apologies. But that self-preserving instinct of his was an accident of birth—he was born a dog. I was a self-made man.
I was dogless in Jersey for six years. By that time the first-born was ten years old and already hell-bent on failing in school—he never did graduate from anything except Basic Training on Parris Island, where the Marine Corps turns flesh-and-blood punks into fighting machines. My daughter, the second-born, was seven, and was already an excellent student. She would one day graduate from Cornell Law School.
I needed a Weimaraner. I thought maybe the kids did, too. I developed a stump speech for my campaign.
“A dog can teach you the limits of your powers,” I’d begin, “whether of persuasion or of physical strength. A dog can teach you gentleness, kindness, forgiveness. A dog can make you feel like the adult in the room, which is to say the one who doesn’t just beg for the food, he cooks it. A dog can learn from you, too, he can, uh, learn to control his impulses.”
So conceived—I never got to this part of the speech—a dog is a parent’s stand-in. It’s a relief from responsibility, not a new addition. At that point in my career as Mr. Mom, I needed the help, anyway. I was getting breakfast and dinner on the table, to be sure, but I was hoping that a Weimaraner puppy would teach my children those other lessons, the kinds I couldn’t. I was insisting that they accompany me to church at the same moment, and to the same end—experience the unfathomable, see what faith might mean, feel the claim of unreason, learn to love your neighbor even if he brays at the moon. They knew I was an atheist, unlike their mother, but they went along because they already knew my limits as a father. They, too, needed a Weimaraner.
I found Harry the Weimaraner in a suburb of Philadelphia. He had enough papers and pedigrees—a resume, really—to make me think I was interviewing a job candidate. Except that his owners, breeders and professional handlers of show dogs, wanted to interview me, plus the wife and kids, to make sure Harry was going to a “good home.”
We got all dressed up for the interview and drove to Cherry Hill, where we drank tea, ate canapés, and talked about the history of Weimaraners, meanwhile watching the six puppies in the next room build manic piles of themselves, fall asleep, and not even notice when the inevitable landslide happened because they were all still asleep as they fell. Late in this surreal conversation—I did most of the talking because the owners, a husband-and-wife team, directed their questions at me—I was asked to explain the origin of my interest in Weimaraners.
“Well, my father was a hunter. He wanted a pointer, a retriever, so we could hunt pheasants in downstate Illinois.”
My female interlocutor flinched, then looked away, as if I had just divulged that I was a fan of child pornography. She was the handler, the one who takes the show dogs through their paces at the Westminster Kennel Club. To turn such well-groomed animals out of doors and put them to work was clearly an abomination.
Her husband stepped in at that point—he was the breeder, so he wanted to sell the dog, not raise it or groom it or show it. He said, gently, “Your father was a hunter?” I was on the verge of panic, thinking I’d blown the interview. Had I dragged my family this far to fail in my quest for an alter ego, a surrogate father?
I said, “Yeah, he wanted a hunting dog, he wanted to train it, and then take him back to where he’d grown up on a farm downstate. He wanted to relive something, maybe, I don’t know, but he did it, I watched him do it. We spent hours out there shooting guns, getting Denny, that was the first Weimaraner, getting him used to the sound, and throwing those canvas tubes for him to fetch.”
“I thought your Dad grew up in Chicago.” That was my son’s contribution to the conversation.
“He did, but he spent the summers downstate on a farm. With his relatives, the Swedish side of the family. He always wanted to go back there. That’s where we went hunting.”
The breeder husband said, “All right, then,” and slapped his thighs, concluding the conversation. He and his wife conferred in the room where the puppies were still building piles out of themselves, where we could watch the humans disagree about this sale, but we were finally permitted to submit a check and return the following week to pick up the little man we had chosen from the litter.
Harry was nothing like Alex. Where Alex had been aggressive, angry, quite possibly deranged by the trauma of my first divorce, Harry was calm and cool, the Fred Astaire of Weimaraners, never much excited until I suggested a run in the park, and then he’d get all Gene Kelly on me. I spent more time with him than with my kids, even though these were the days, the 90s, when I drove them to school, picked them up from the nurse’s office when necessary, coached their rec teams in town (no football, just baseball, soccer, basketball), helped them with their homework, and did all the cooking. They saw a lot of me, probably more than they wanted to. Harry saw even more.
I identified with him, too, as I had with Alex, but differently. Harry was a beloved figure in town, constantly loping off to the north side, searching for some bitch* in heat. His accidental hosts, my neighbors, got used to calling me and explaining that he was standing or sitting in their backyards, waiting hopefully for an assignation.
“Hello?
“Yes, I’m sorry to bother you, but I think your dog is here. He’s got a badge on his collar with this phone number. He seems friendly.”
“A badge? Does it say ‘Harry’?”
“Yes. He’s been in the backyard for an hour.”
“Is your dog a bitch*, I’m sorry, I mean, do you have a female dog?”
“Yes, she’s a pure-bred Pekingese, three years old, beautiful—“
“Is she in heat?”
“No, she’s neutered—“
“Well, someone is, maybe it’s him. You’re where, exactly? OK, thank you, I’ll be right there.”
Me, I stayed closer to home, on the south side of town, where my neighbor’s wife started rutting in the same month Harry arrived—more on this in the next chapter—but, like him, I was species-specific in expressing my sexual desires.
Harry the Weimaraner did have an educational effect on my kids, just not the ones I wanted. When he was fifteen years old, my son said, “I wish I was Harry.” I said, “Why?” I wasn’t that astonished, because the dog did just about anything he wanted. Not that he was getting away with bad behavior, like Alex, no, it was that he meandered through his life without thinking or worrying about what came next: he didn’t have to. Neither did I. Maybe my son was expressing admiration for me?
“Because he eats when he wants, he doesn’t have a job, he doesn’t have to go to school, he just lays around all day unless you take him for a run. His only problem is how not to take a shit when you’re gone. And you’re not gone that often, Dad, I mean, you work, like, two days a week or something.”
All true. I was living the life of a dog because I wanted to. Like Alex, Harry was my stooge and surrogate. So, soon enough my wife and kids would begin to treat me like a pet, something to be trained for higher purposes than running in the park. They rightly detected that my animal instinct for self-preservation had finally become a problem because it detached me from the familial oaths I was sworn to uphold. Harry and I had become interchangeable parts in their eyes—and mine.
Under his tutelage, I could see that a pet has no power, no say in the day-to-day arrangements that organize the life of its habitat, the family that bought or adopted it. It can only watch as events unfold, things happen, and it knows, as result, that if it wants to maintain its status as a lovable object, it obeys commands—it defers its own desires, otherwise risking punishment, exile, maybe even death, but it keeps working. Like I did the day my wife grabbed the phone and hung up on a guy who was trying to sell me tickets to an off-Broadway theater season. Or the day she told the salesman at Macy’s, “He’ll take these, he needs the room in the waist.”
I could also see that I wanted to be a pet, to be powerless—to be a dog with no responsibilities except to keep charming the locals. So I kept cooking the dinners and coaching the rec teams, but in all else I ceded control to my masters, my wife and children. Meanwhile, Harry and I got out when we could.
But we were never that far from home. In our domestic arrangement, we relied on each other for signs of impending doom, or mere punishment, at the hands of the powerful creatures who ran our world. I like to think we were also able to diagnose each other, Harry by waking me from alcoholic blackouts, grunting and licking and pawing, me by noticing how his demeanor changed from day to day, as if I were nursing a demented uncle who had refused to leave home, leaving me to decipher and treat his symptoms.
One day, for example, I noticed that Harry wasn’t lying down on the couch, always asleep until the alert was sounded for the daily run in the park. He was sitting, but he was curled, head down, holding himself up with his two front legs braced against the gravity that normally determined his daily schedule—eat, sleep, run, sleep, eat, sleep, and then sleep some more. He was about to die of causes unknown, and we both knew it.
Here’s the story of that day, as I wrote it for the three-year old daughter of my neighbors down the street, for her amusement and mine. It’s called “Harry Looks Sad: A True Story About a Weimaraner.” It’s accompanied by a drawing I did of a dog—my dog—in the throes of death. A true story? You bet.
One morning Harry the big grey dog looked sad. So I said, “What’s wrong, Harry?” Harry just hung his head.
“You hungry, Harry?” I put five cups of kibble in his bowl, big brown pebbles making a little mountain of food.
Most days, Harry loved to eat, whatever food was in front of him. He’d scoop up some of those pebbles, chew them, spit them, always looking around as he ate, looking for more. Sometimes as he chewed he’d lose a few of those pebbles in his water bowl, where they’d swell up and look like tiny basketballs.
But on this day, Harry didn’t want to eat. He walked away from his food. So I said, “Harry, want to go for a run in the park?”
Most days, Harry loved to run in the park. When I let him off the leash, his mouth would open and his tongue would start flopping. He would chase all the birds in sight. Sometimes he almost caught one on the ground. More often, the birds were in the air long before Harry came near.
But on this day, Harry didn’t wag his tail and bark. He didn’t scrunch his shoulders and stamp his two front feet. He walked over to the couch, climbed up, and sat down. He hung his head. He looked sad, like an old man with too many regrets. So I said, “OK, Harry, you sleep for a while. You look tired.”
But Harry didn’t lie down and go to sleep. He kept sitting with his head hanging down. He looked like my grandfather curled in his stuffed chair, pretending to sleep.
So I said, “Harry, what’s wrong?” He lifted his head and looked at me when I spoke, but not for long. He looked sad as he lowered his head. Maybe he’s not sad, I thought, maybe he’s sick. Maybe I should take him to the vet.
So I called the veterinarian right down the street from where you live at 123 Magnolia, and he said, “You can bring him over now.” Then I said, “Harry, let’s go for a ride!”
Most days, Harry loved to ride in the car. He’d stand up and stick his head out the window and let his ears be lifted by the current our motion created. Sometimes they’d flap like sails on a small boat turning into the wrong wind. I like to think his ears recorded something.
But on this day, Harry didn’t run to the door and wait for me to open it. He stayed on the couch, head still lowered. Now I was worried. He must be sick, I thought. I said, “C’mon, Harry, let’s go see the doctor.” I pulled gently on his collar, and he got down from the couch.
Most days, he’d run down the steps to the car. But on this day, he walked, slowly, carefully. I wanted to lift him, but he was too heavy a load. I did help him into the back seat. Most days, he stood up so he could stick his head out the window. But on this day, he sat down.
I drove to Magnolia and Second Ave, put Harry on his leash, and walked him into the vet’s office.
The doctor was a nice man, but he had the wrong job. He liked computers more than animals. He looked at Harry, then at me, then at the computer screen, and said, “What’s wrong with Harry today?”
I said, “I don’t know, but he’s not himself. He won’t eat, he doesn’t want to go outside, he just sits on the couch, hanging his head. He won’t even lie down and go to sleep. To me, he looks sad. “
“He looks sad?” the doctor asked.
“Well, yeah,” I said, “he just mopes around. It’s not like him.”
“Sad?” the doctor asked again. He was squinting at me suspiciously, making me nervous.
So I said, “Can you take a look at him, doc, he’s got me worried.”
“Very well,” the doctor said.
He put his hands on Harry’s chest, then his stomach, then his back legs. He looked into Harry’s eyes and ears and mouth. He even lifted Harry’s tail and peered at his rump. Then he said, “I don’t see anything wrong with Harry. He seems fine.”
“Oh,” I said, “But he seems so quiet. I don’t know, he’s got me worried.”
The doctor said, “Well, there’s nothing I can do for him. Why don’t you take him home, and let me know if there’s any change.”
“Change?” I said. “Doc, here’s the change, he won’t eat, he won’t run, he won’t even lie down. Don’t you think he looks sad?”
“Sad?” the doctor asked, squinting again at me, not the dog.
“OK, maybe he’s not sad,” I said, “Maybe he’s just sick.“
“He’s not sick,” the doctor said.
“All right, then I guess he is sad.” I was still worried.
As I walked Harry to the car, I started wondering, why would he be sad? It didn’t make sense. “What’s Harry got to be sad about?” I asked myself out loud. “He sleeps all day unless he wants to play. He eats enough to feed four cats. He runs in the park almost every day.”
I was still worried, but now I asked myself, “Is Harry happy? I mean, I do scold him if he won’t come when he’s called. I do whack him on the rump from time to time. Sometimes I tell him he’s getting fat. Maybe he feels I’m too critical of him.”
Harry looked very sad as he climbed onto the couch and sat down. He hung his head. I said, “Don’t be sad, Harry, the vet says you’re OK. You hungry?” He lowered his head. So I called the vet again.
He said, “You just left here. Why don’t you wait two hours? If you still think Harry ‘looks sad,’ as you put it, bring him over.”
So I waited two hours. Harry just sat on the couch, all curled up. His head got lower and lower until he looked like a big broken pretzel. He never did lie down. When the two hours were up, I drove to Magnolia and Second Ave, put Harry on his leash, and walked him into the vet’s office.
The doctor looked at me and said, “What’s wrong now?”
I said, “I still don’t know, but there’s been no change. He just sits on the couch and hangs his head. He looks, uh, well, I don’t know, he looks sad.”
“He looks sad?” the doctor asked, more suspiciously than ever.
“Well, yeah,” I said, “Look at him. Doesn’t he look sad to you?”
“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said. “You know that Weimaraners were bred out of bloodhounds long ago. Maybe you see something sad in those eyes.”
Harry did have weird eyes. They were blue when he was a puppy, then they turned gold. They reflected light until after dark. He always seemed to be staring at something.
But I said, “It’s not just his eyes, Doc. It’s everything about him. He’s not himself. He looks—“
“Sad?” the doctor said.
I was getting nervous, so I said, “Well, OK, I don’t know, but he’s got me worried, that’s for sure.”
The doctor said, “Are you sure Harry is the one who’s sick?”
“What do you mean?” I said, my voice breaking up into tiny squeaks. I looked for the exit.
“Harry looks fine to me,” the doctor said. “You don’t look so good.”
“Me?” I gasped.
“Yes, you.” He wasn’t smiling, either. His arms were crossed and he looked solemn, like a judge about to sentence me for crimes I hadn’t committed. I was so nervous I jumped up and hooked Harry to his leash, yanking him away from this bland inquisitor.
“Doc,” I croaked, “Is there another vet nearby I can take Harry to? I don’t want to make you feel bad, but I think we need a second opinion.”
“We?” he asked.
“Yeah, Harry and me,” I said.
“Oh, of course,” he nodded, still looking solemn, “You could take him to Doctor Schwerck in East Brunswick.”
“How do I get there?”
“Ask Penny at the desk,” he said. He hadn’t moved, and he hadn’t looked at Harry even once.
After Penny told me how to find Doctor Schwerck, I walked Harry back to the car. I put him in the front seat so I could keep an eye on him.
I drove for a half hour looking for Doctor Schwerck. Harry just sat there in the front seat the whole time. His head got lower and lower. He never did try to stick it out the window.
When I reached Doctor Schwerck’s office, I put Harry on his leash and walked him into the waiting room. There were three other dogs and a couple of cats, too. Most days, Harry loved to sniff dogs and chase cats. But on this day, he just sat next to me, head down. He looked sad.
The nice lady at the desk finally asked me to bring Harry to Room 4. Together we hoisted him onto a steel table. Harry sat down right away and lowered his head.
A half hour later, Doctor Schwerck charged through the back door to Room 4. He moved so fast his white coat followed him like a flag swirling in the wind. He looked at me, then at Harry, and then he laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“He is,” Doctor Schwerck said. “He’s been eating rocks!”
“Rocks?!” I couldn’t believe it.
“OK, pebbles, rocks, call ‘em what you want,” he said. “You got a gravel driveway?”
“We have gravel walkways in our backyard,” I said. “How do you know he’s been out there eating rocks?”
“Weimaraners!” he cried. “They’re famous for rock-eating, God knows why they do it. Look at him—he’s got a belly ache, that’s why he’s bent over like that. And his belly aches because it’s full of rocks.”
I felt better. At least Harry wasn’t the only dog out there eating rocks.
“How do we get them out?” I asked.
“Well, we take them out by cutting him open, or he pushes them out. One way or the other they gotta come out. We’ll take an x-ray to see how big they are. And how many.”
“Pushes them out?” I felt my own stomach turn when I asked.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile, “it’s no big deal if the pieces are small enough.”
“Pieces?” My stomach turned again.
“Yeah,” he said, “remember, Harry chewed those rocks before he swallowed them.”
“”You’re kidding,” I said.
“Nope.” Doctor Schwerck laughed again. “Let’s get him ready for an x-ray.”
An hour later, we were looking at pictures of Harry’s guts. Sure enough, 21 pieces of rock showed up in his stomach, all gathered together as if they had planned to meet there. No wonder Harry looked sad!
Doctor Schwerck said, “OK, they’re small enough, so we’ll give him some drugs to soften his stool. You should feed him noodles for the next few days. That will help him pass these things through his bowels.”
“Should we put sauce on the noodles?” I asked. I don’t eat plain pasta, nobody does, it’s like bread without butter, food without drink, land without water.
“Oh for sure, and serve some wine, too,” Doctor Schwerck laughed. “Just make sure you watch him when he goes outside. No rocks for dessert.” He laughed again. “They might upset his stomach.”
I leaned over Harry and said, “Hey, Harry, good news. The cure for rock-eating is people food!”
Harry was sleepy because Doctor Schwerck had already given him a shot to loosen his bowels. But he stood up when he heard me say “people food.”
“Let’s go home, Harry,” I said. I wasn’t worried about him any more. I knew why he had looked so sad all day. Doctor Schwerck laughed again. I did, too. I’m pretty sure that Harry wagged his tail.
__________
*The technical term for a female dog, no political connotations.
If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” – Will Rogers
Nice writing there professor. I thought for sure Harry was a goner. Glad it was only rocks, until it was something else. I had several dogs over the years in a small town where the traffic on my street was about one car/truck per hour, but all the dogs managed to get run over and kilt. I sometimes wonder if the car/truck drivers were aiming for them. Little else to do in a small town I reckon, maybe. Woof.