I’m starting to wonder if our next dog will sing along the way our lab Sammy does while I play the piano. I imagine trying to play her song without her, and I think keeping it a duet would help. Some things are better with a friend.
While I worry about becoming a solo act, my wife Danyelle is jealous of the neighbors she sees walking their dogs. Sammy’s arthritis flares if she walks too far on the pavement now, and lately, her right elbow has been so bad that she’s basically been on house arrest. Danyelle and I are poor wardens. Lame though she may be, Sammy’s proven difficult for us to contain.
There’s a gap underneath our gate in the backyard, and Sammy’s taken to exploiting it, returning from foraging expeditions badly hobbled and with a swollen belly. It’s happened enough that I’ve started having dreams about chasing her through the park behind the gate. Early one morning as I lay in bed, Sammy ran in front of me, darting in and out of neighbors’ yards, at one point pausing her joyful romp to look back at me, ankles splattered with mud, a terse expression on her face. She seemed to be half checking I was okay, half ensuring there was nothing I could do to stop her bolting from my sight. I worried that she would hurt herself, but she was so happy to run free I didn’t even bother calling her back. She turned to crash through a row of bushes and into the world of deliciously foul smells that awaited her on the other side, and the sound of Danyelle’s voice woke me up. “John,” she said, “Can you help me? The dog threw up.”
Every time Sammy gets out it’s a setback, and Danyelle and I have both been frustrated, guilty, and feeling sorry for ourselves and our helpless animal. The first time I caught her, she was near the edge of the marsh sniffing. A construction crew loafed during a break across the street and watched as I yelled at her to come; when I leashed her, I realized she was covered in shit. The second time, I came across her heading for the exact same spot. She was bounding out of the park and into the street, all four paws off the ground, moving stiffly, but joyously. When I called her name, she froze in shame and limped slowly over to me.
The last time that we failed to contain her, Danyelle and I were especially piqued. It was after 10:30 at night; we weren’t expecting Sammy to be so keen on exploring in the dark; and we were eager to go to bed. When she didn’t reappear at the front door in due time, I took the golfcart out in search of her, creeping over the tree roots in the park access before accelerating past our fence line. I heard her before I saw her. She came up alongside the cart panting and then showed herself in the headlights’ glare. My anger melted into relief, and when I called out, “Sammy!” my voice was like a fawning child’s. Afterwards, her right foreleg was so bad that she couldn’t put any weight on it.
It’s the worst flare up she’s had so far. The vet can’t do anything for her. Sammy’s already on injectable drugs that block pain and lube joints, and they don’t seem to help. The only thing that calms down the inflammation is rest, which adds insult to injury. Sammy grabs balls out of her toy bin and slams her forepaws on the ground to show she’s ready to play. I cringe and ignore her, and then my heart sinks when she collapses in a sad heap. We could keep her from jumping on and off the furniture, but it’s a cruelty we can’t tolerate. She sits in front of the loveseat and cries at night wanting to cuddle next to her mommy. We tried stopping her for about a minute. The spot next to Danyelle is hers.
The loveseat is part of a living room set that Danyelle and I bought together when we were first married. We were still very much “young people” then, no kids, still starting out in the world. That day in the store we spent two hours lounging in different furniture and shooting the breeze with a college-age sales rep before landing on the cream-color leather low-back sofa and love seat combo. Sammy’s yellow fur glides right off the smooth leather, but there’s a dark spot in one of the cushions where she’s repeatedly clawed out a place to curl up. When she’s not using it for a full-on nap, she likes to sit in that spot and hang her head and forepaws over the back of the loveseat and face the kitchen so she can keep an eye on things while she dozes. There’s an electric keyboard off to the right, and sometimes when she’s sitting like that, I turn it on and play her song so that she’ll howl along. I play it softer and more slowly for her these days, and when she joins in, the barking and gravelly exuberance of her youth is replaced by a low mournful note, rich and warm in tone, that makes me sad and just a little afraid.
We aren’t there yet, but the specter of ending things is looming larger than ever before. One day when her leg was at its worst, I noticed a touch of desperation in Sammy’s hazel eyes. She beamed them at me from over the back of the loveseat in a way that was clearly asking for help. She’s even a little slower to trot into the kitchen when we’re preparing meals. The other day, I pretended to scold her for not coming to greet me when I walked out from the bedroom. She rectified the situation quickly, rubbing the sides of her face against the inside of my legs and pressing her forehead into me while I ran my fingers through her coat talking about how good she is and how she lives down on the ground. She gave her ears a noisy shake, turned to give me her hind quarters, and smiled at me before spinning around and repeating the whole process.
The kids are sensitive to Sammy’s worsening condition too. When I pulled the minivan into the driveway after a night out, I told them they had to go straight to the shower and get ready for bed, and my eight-year-old corrected me quietly, “After some Sammy pets.” I sat at my keyboard and made up a song for them about a mole named Billy whose kinfolk miss him after he falls prey to a marauding dog snout. They cried, so I told them a story about a dog who moves upriver and lives a wild life free from want. They cried some more.
I remember when I learned the song “Linus and Lucy.” I was living in a split-level apartment downtown, and I had a keyboard in my second-story bedroom. I would open the window and play while I watched the sun filter through the leafy branches outside, enjoying the way the left and right hands fit together, two distinct voices, one low and simple, its counterpart floating above it with more complexity, each seeming to complement the other by some happy accident, kind of like a man and a dog. For the last nine and a half years, it’s been Sammy’s song, ever since the day she laid at my feet as a tiny puppy, sad that her mommy had left the house, and howled in sorrowful accompaniment while I played the tune.
Everybody likes the song. I sat in with the band at Danyelle’s and my wedding and played it much to our guests’ delight, and it’s not all that rare for people to ask me to play it when they come over to the house. Recently, a friend came over with his kids, and before they left, the little girl said, “Play the Charlie Brown song.” Maybe the thought of Sammy’s discomfort was weighing on me, because once I got started, I played as fast as I could, and when I got to the signature lick that always starts her to howling, I banged up and down the keyboard in a furious, discordant improvisation. “Aww,” said the little girl, “you messed the song all up.” She would have preferred the straight, uncomplicated version, the one from the cartoon. I stayed there at the bench when she left with her dad and hung my head when I couldn’t remember the B part that I used to know. I never play it anymore. I just play the part that Sammy likes. That part, I’ll never forget. I wonder if I’ll keep playing it when she’s gone.
The Raging Elitist 