Stop the charade! The guy right under my desk would make the perfect president. He has it all: the loyalty of Washington, the empathy of Lincoln, the populism of Roosevelt, and he can out-charisma JFK any day of the week.
Trouble is, he is dead, and a bit of me is, too, every time I look down at the cherrywood box that holds his ashes.
I speak of—and will ever mourn—our cocker spaniel Percy, who died in my lap a year and a half ago. “I’ll never go through that again,” is the grim vow made by many who lose their dog and never get another. Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” had it right about the pain that never goes away:
We spoke in tears of 15 years
How his dog and him
They travelled about
His dog up and died
He up and died
After 20 years he still grieves
But when he lived, my red friend with furry ears down to his shoulders lived with boundless happiness and hope. Walk him down any street in any town and you would see the smiles of approaching strangers start to form two blocks away. The feeling was mutual: He would greet them with docked tail furiously going back and forth. Friendships, however brief, were made.
And what gusto. See him trotting down a leafy stretch of the Appalachian Trail into a stream, sinking down like a cow in the Ganges, and then, after a minute, rising back on his legs, shaking himself off, and dashing up and down the trail, his furry, shoulder-length ears flying in the wind, as if to say: Joy to the world, indeed.
At home, you would find Percy on the northern top corner of the couch, a leg dangling down almost coyly. (The boy knew he was cute but was careful not to make a big deal of it. His parents were no strangers to the Westminster Dog Show; he himself never got there, due to, of all things, a crooked tail. He was born in Sacramento, and his pedigree name smacked of California: Dawn Glow Sunshine.)
Now let’s turn to the debit side of the ledger. No need: It is blank. I swear on any mother’s grave that the dog almost never barked. Children loved him and vice versa. Came when called; never fought with others of his ilk. (Every summer, my son’s Maltese mix Cliffie would come to stay. Percy wasn’t thrilled about it, but stayed aloof. Think Jimmy Cagney and Cary Grant.) No plastic bags, please: Percy invariably did his business beneath bushes or in the woods. In his youth, he did pee on the ball bag of my son’s soccer coach, but the sheer force of Percy’s personality saved the day.
Our children, at least the two-legged ones, are long gone. But the house was never emptier than after Percy left it. Friends had warned us of the abyss ahead and urged us to get a “replacement dog” while he was still alive, but we chose to go through his last days just the three of us.
We pay every day for not listening to them. We have just begun to look for another dog now. In the meantime, it is out to the mudroom every morning—noting the empty leash dangling from a hook—to fetch the hiking boots and then out to the trail beyond, which doesn’t beckon quite like it once did.
They say you will never walk alone. The hell you won’t.
