Dog Years
By Leon Peter Blanda
My best friend grunts, sharpening a large bone into a lethal weapon with his teeth. He gnaws the rounded ends of the femur down to a jagged boobytrap for me to step on later. Larry is a dog, and the bone is his favorite chew toy. Though, chew toy doesn’t fully encapsulate the danger of the deadly bone dagger clenched in my best friend’s grisly fangs.
When my bare foot falls upon the roughhewn edges of the half-chewed toy—no doubt in the middle of the night, on my way to pee—it will set off a chain reaction of excruciating pain, followed by a freight train of classic swear words, peppered with a few harmless replacement curses my kids have pitched as substitutions. When shouted in exchange for the French classics, the soft-swears transform me from Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction to Samuel L. Jackson in The Incredibles. For instance, there was an incident that once occurred in which a “piece of *** mother******!” cut me off in traffic. My young daughter, whom I forgot was in the car with me, calmly suggested, “Daddy, why don’t you say, ‘You rotten piece of fried chicken,’ instead.” (And I gotta tell ya, folks—if you grit your teeth when you say it, calling someone a “rotten piece of fried chicken” has the same mouth feel as some of my favorite four-letter words. You can really chew on those crunchy consonants. Try it. It’s fun.)
Anyway, Larry is what polite pup owners would call an “aggressive chewer,” and those polite pup owners have never yanked thirteen inches of braided rope from Larry’s butthole like starting an old lawnmower. Aggressive chewer is an understatement. Larry doesn’t chew his toys; he eats them whole, except for the bone, which is too big, but he’s working on it.
Larry doesn’t chew his food, either. Rather, he inhales his meals, eating in a manner that suggests I’ve got a stopwatch running, and he’s trying to beat his best time. Because of Larry’s vacuum-like method, the vet suggested feeding him from a special food bowl. Made of durable plastic, raised walls zig-zag across the circumference of the unbreakable dish, forming a complex maze—as hostile and confusing as the hedge maze outside the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. This maze dish is designed so that the food scatters into different chambers, making it difficult for Larry to scarf everything in a single chomp. At every feeding, Larry drools over his maze plate, waiting for me to dump his food, glaring at me, wild-eyed as Jack Nicholson with an ax clenched in his meaty fists. When the dry bits of kibble scatter throughout the maze, it reminds me of a hundred young Danny Torrances running for their lives. Larry attacks, and none of the little Dannies survive. Not this time.
It’s 2:00 a.m., and I step on one of Larry’s crudely sharpened deathtraps. An unavoidable avalanche of bad language bursts from my lips, and I’m reminded again why I never wanted another pet: it’s too painful. Not just because of the bone dagger eviscerating the arch of my foot, but also because of the broken-hearted pain that comes with the absolute certainty of knowing my furry best friend will one day die before me.
I still feel echoes of the pain from when I lost my first dog. Her name was Sugar, and I was only a kid when her untimely death stripped my love of dogs. After Sugar died (and for nearly three decades), I treated dogs like toilet seats in public restrooms: no touching, and absolutely no kisses. Friends’ dogs, neighbors’ dogs, free-range park dogs—no, thank you. I proudly maintained a very “pet your own dog” attitude for years.
Until Larry.
But back to Sugar, our dearly departed rust-colored mutt. Studying her sharp face, pointed ears, and mid-length fur, you could find a thousand different breeds in her features. Sugar was an outside dog, unlike Larry—who thinks he owns the place—and was only invited to come inside the house on days when the southern Louisiana weather became too inclement for a living creature to survive without shelter. On the rare occasions Sugar was allowed in the house—during hurricanes and hard freezes—she, unlike Larry, had the good sense not to leave little synthetic-bone daggers lying around to crucify toes and impale the arches of feet. Sugar wouldn’t harm a pinky toe on a Pekinese. A gentle soul—if, in fact, dogs have souls…
Also, in juxtaposition to Larry’s Hoover method of dining, Sugar ate like a normal dog with manners. She chewed and swallowed each bite before going for another mouthful. She ignored all chew toys; and showed no interest in chewing on anything, other than bubblegum, despite her inability to blow a bubble. What do you expect? Dog lips are designed for slurping their own buttholes, not Dubble Bubble.
Thirty years—that’s human years—have passed between Sugar’s death and Larry’s reign of terrier (get it?). Thirty glorious, peaceful, dog-free years.
While I enjoyed canine bachelorhood, many of my friends were burdened by the responsibility of a dog - dogs they loved very much and wanted me to love as well, though I did not, could not, and would not. I had resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn’t a “dog person.” Remember; I have a strict PET YOUR OWN DOG policy. I was that guy, who’d rather not pet your dog, much less let your dog sniff me with its snotty nose, or lick my flesh with its toilet-tongue.
Say what you want about a dog’s tongue being cleaner than a human’s and I’ll introduce you to Larry’s rabbit turd fetish. He inhales every little lawn Skittle he can get in his dirty mouth. Because he eats them so fast, he chokes, and must cough them up like an old lady with COPD.
Then, he re-eats the residue. Cute, huh?
Not just rabbit turds, any turds. All turds. He’s not picky. He loves turds.
Oh look—What’s this? Larry wants to give you kisses.
What’s your move?
Be warned: Someone—who shall remain nameless—came down with a bad case of pink eye when Larry licked his face after gorging himself on backyard brownies. Okay, it was me. I caught conjuncti-Fido-s.
Throughout my dogless twenties, and blissfully canine-free thirties, my pet-owning friends would always goad me to pet their dog, knowing I wasn’t a fan. I always thought, it’s your dog—you should have to show it affection. You wanted the dog; you give it attention. That’s your responsibility. Not mine. I’m a guest in your home—which smells like a wet dog, by the way.
Some of my lonelier friends often claim their dog is like their child. Well then, all the more reason you should love it. Besides, I have two children—human children. Flesh-of-my-flesh, evolved-from-apes homo sapiens that came from my loins, both of which I love with all my heart. But when we have guests over, I don’t make those poor saps pet my kids. That would be weird. They’re my kids. I wanted them. I brought them home, and it’s my responsibility to give them the affection and attention they crave. Also—and this is just an aside—I would never allow either of my children to hump your leg. Ever. Especially my friends who don’t want kids–I would never force them to engage with my children in some vain attempt to change their mind about procreating. But a dog lover will do that. They want you to love their dog.
Even you! Yes, you, reader. You think that your dog is the best dog in the whole wide world, and that I should feel the same. You know you do.
This scenario has happened to me on more than one occasion during my dogless years: I enter a friend’s home; it smells like many wet dogs. Before I fully cross the threshold, some stinky mutt runs up, pushing its wet snout into my business, and my visible disgust prompts an interrogation:
“Why don’t you just pet him?” they ask.
“Because I don’t want to,” I beg. “Please don’t make me.”
“He’s just saying hi.”
“To my crotch?”
“He won’t bite.”
“Let’s hope not.”
(Then, said to the dog about me, as if I’m the one being obnoxious.) “He’s alright. He’s my friend.”
“You know, if you didn’t sell me weed, I wouldn’t even come inside your house.”
“Come on, just pet ‘em,” they insist, undeterred. “Why don’t you want to pet ‘em?”
I always give them one last chance to stand down. One more opportunity to turn back. “Do you really want to know why I don’t want to pet your dog? Really??? I promise, it’s a hard story to hear.”
“Yes,” they always answer, only to later regret. “Why won’t you pet my sweet puppy-wuppy?”
“Okay.” I sigh, and feel my shoulders slump. “You asked for it…”
#
Sugar was a rescue with rust-colored fur and a friendly disposition. She was my first dog—my first, best friend. My only friend. I didn’t have many friends back then, and Sugar filled the role with aplomb. Brave and loyal. Friendly and playful. You would’ve loved her. And she would’ve loved you. Truly. She was the sweetest pup.
Sugar, my buddy, my pal, my bestest friend, left this world lying in a ditch across the street from my house. I didn’t see it happen. Thank God. However, it may have been at that moment that I began to question the existence of a God that would allow something so awful to happen to the world’s sweetest dog, leaving a twelve-year-old kid devastated and emotionally scarred.
I had come home from school and fell asleep before even doing my homework (which I wasn’t going to do anyway). My younger brother and I shared a room and an old bunk bed. When my dad erected the captain’s quarter-style beds in our room, my brother immediately claimed the top bunk. The first night he slept up top, he popped right over the railing and tumbled to the floor, his head missing the lower mattress and bed frame by inches. Like a drunk walking away from a car accident without a scratch, he miraculously avoided serious injury. This happened more than once, and when my parents could no longer tolerate being banged awake by the late-night thuds, my brother was banished to the bottom bunk, and I became a top (am I using that term correctly?).
When I awoke that terrible day from my after-school slumber and climbed down the ladder from my big-boy bed, the house was eerily quiet. Too quiet for our house, which was old and rickety. You could hear every footstep and shouted conversation through the sheetrock and two-by-fours. Italians don’t talk to each other. They scream. Even when they’re not arguing. Which is rare.
I found my mom standing in the kitchen, mascara running down her cheeks, unable to speak. I couldn’t find my brother, and my dad was quiet as stone, watching television with bloodshot eyes (I’d learn later in life that it may not have been from crying that reddened his eyes, but the small stash of marijuana he kept hidden in the shed. The shed was as big as a barn, but held no farming equipment, and only housed a rusted Ford F1 pickup truck, a few old tools, and my dad’s dried-out weed—which I found as a teen in a little plastic baggie, hidden in a drawer of an ancient tool box).
What happened to Sugar was purely an accident. She dug a hole under the fence and bolted into the street. The car didn’t stop. The driver never came back.
Stupid mutt.
Stupid driver.
Life is stupid.
My father found Sugar’s broken body lying in the ditch across the street from our house, surrounded by muddy crawfish holes and a light dusting of litter—fast-food wrappers and plastic cups, debris tossed from the windows of trucks lacking catalytic converters, by drivers lacking common decency.
She was still drawing breath into her lungs. Quick, shallow breaths.
Living so far out in “the sticks” nowhere near a licensed veterinarian, it fell to my father to put Sugar “out of her misery.”
Though we had no gun, my dad did what he had to do (whatever that was) to end Sugar’s suffering, then dug a small hole under a three-hundred-year-old oak tree in our backyard. Everything happened in the span of about an hour and a half: The car running Sugar down. My dad finding her and having to finish her off. Then digging the hole and shoveling dirt back over her lifeless body so his family never has to see her that way. An hour and a half. My best friend was in the ground forever in an hour and a half, long enough for a nice after-school nap.
She was buried beneath an old oak tree. I remember the last rays of golden-hour daylight slicing through the autumn leaves, glistening off my mother’s tear-streaked face while we, as a family, surrounded Sugar’s fresh grave. My world felt… heavier?—as if the weight of existence had become leaden, burdensome.
No words were spoken, no eulogy was given. I don’t recall walking away from Sugar’s grave, and I suspect a part of me never did. Perhaps I left an innocence standing there amidst the dead leaves, beneath the mournful oak’s twisted branches.
Whenever I think back on the day Sugar died, I still wonder with a heavy sense of guilt—if I had been awake at the time, would she have been with me instead of dying in a ditch amongst the crawfish holes and empty McDonald’s cups? Would she still be alive today? If so, she’d be almost a thousand years old—in dog years, of course. (Someone should check that math.)
After Sugar’s death, I never wanted another dog. Until, of course, we adopted Larry this past spring. Even then, I wasn’t so sure about that guy…
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