But the year I turned forty was exceptionally good in most other ways, and so I remember that party with particular fondness. My work and my family were in full flower. I was no longer wrestling with the uncertainty of youth and couldn’t even imagine the challenges of age. I was fertile but not pregnant, busy but no longer crazed. No one was in diapers; everyone was in school. My hair had not yet begun to go gray. My life was in a kind of equipoise.
All I really needed was a dog. For the first time since I graduated from college, we were dogless. For a while we had had three at once. I began with a cocker spaniel named Dollar, whom I had chosen because she was the runt of the litter. Soon I learned that if you choose a puppy out of pity, you may well wind up with a crazy dog trying always to prove her mettle, or, as we liked to say to our friends, “She will cross the room to bite a small child.” Proving that dogs are better at reading people than people are at reading dogs, she stopped that behavior when the small children belonged to us, else she might have wound up at that mythical farm in the country to which parents took unwanted dogs when I was young.
Next came a golden retriever owned by a group of twentysomethings who realized, too late, that the demands of dog ownership and a life of work, parties, restaurants, and clubs did not mesh. One of their number advertised in my office: FREE, TO GOOD HOME, words that are second only to “shoe sale” in their ability to cause me to acquire that which I do not need nor can truly afford. Jason was an enormous redhead so good and gentle that he could have been a pediatric nurse had he had opposable thumbs.
Finally there was the shaggy black mutt, the companion of a squatter who died intestate in an abandoned building around the corner. “We’ll take care of the dog,” said the police officers removing the body, which is another version of that farm story. Instead I carried Pudgy home. By the time my husband had returned from work the children had already bonded, and his objections were for naught. I figured that if having two dogs was chaotic, one more wouldn’t make much of a difference. I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it’s time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Dollar, Jason, Pudgy. When you saw one of us on the street, struggling with three leashes, it seemed we were just one dog away from becoming crazy dog people. Then, one by one, they grew old and died. Soon there was a little pet cemetery on the hill by the corn crib, with homemade headstones of cracked roof slates inscribed with chalk.
Occasionally someone will tell me that they won’t have pets because they’re messy, and I suppose there’s some truth to that, between the fur and the slobber and the occasional puddle on the floor. I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and that its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they can keep it neat. But the truth is that we were far messier without dogs than with them. After Pudgy died, when the click of claws on the floor was merely a spectral phenomenon, I discovered that the children dropped more in the kitchen than they ate. I had never noticed how many goldfish crackers, Cheerios, and crusts tumbled off the table. That was because they were either snagged in midair or gobbled as soon as they hit the ground. Dogs make messes, it’s true, but they clean them up as well.
So a month after my fortieth birthday party and less than eight weeks after Pudgy died, I found myself in the birthing suite of a kennel in New Jersey, where the breeder’s favorite female had produced a dozen puppies. As I sat down amid the scrambling, wriggling, wagging, and woofing, the mother rose wearily and left the room, her midsection and her muzzle drooping. The puppies had hospital bracelets around their necks with numbers on them, numbers that reflected the order in which they had been whelped. The puppy who kept clambering into my lap and looking quizzically into my face was number eleven. When I had taken number eleven home and named him Beau, I began to get a taste of what his mother’s life was like. For two weeks he woke every morning at 4:45 A.M., letting loose with a sharp little yip. Housebreaking a puppy and toilet-training a child have this in common: The adult in charge is made to feel absurd because of the need to praise the most basic bodily functions. “You are such a good boy,” I would murmur, freezing in the dew-drenched grass as the night eked out its closing hours, remembering the deep and endless darkness during nighttime infant feedings as Beau danced a puppy dance under the stars.
Life is a great mystery, that’s for sure. If anyone had described all this to me when I was twenty, I would have scoffed at that domestic routine. When I was thirty those children were just a gleam in our eyes; at forty I had only the vaguest notion of who they would become. And still today I am never really sure of the future, whether the quiet will stretch on for many years or be interrupted by change or cataclysm. There’s not much I take for granted.
But the life of a dog is not much of a mystery, really. With few exceptions, he will be who he has always been. His routine will be unvarying and his pleasures will be predictable—a pond, a squirrel, a bone, a nap in the sun. It sounds so boring, and yet it is one of the things that make dogs so important to people. In a world that seems so uncertain, in lives that seem sometimes to ricochet from challenge to upheaval and back again, a dog can be counted on in a way that’s true of little else.
There’s one other mystery in the lives of people that is not much of a mystery in the life of a dog. That’s the question of how long he’s going to be with you, although people gloss over this part of the deal most of the time. When we acquired Beau, we got a lot of stuff with him. A red Kong for him to chew, which he never liked as much as chair legs or shoes. A crate for him to sleep in, which he got accustomed to after several nights of tormented keening. A dog Frisbee, which he ignored as it sailed above his head. And a book entitled Your Labrador Retriever. The edge of that book is all chewed to bits, and inside is this sentence, “The average life span of a Labrador is twelve years.”
Beau died two weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday. The five of us knew three days in advance exactly when he would go, which seemed terribly wrong. There are some things that I’ve never really understood scheduling: a cesarean section, a date night with your husband. But I never felt as bad as I did scheduling the last moments of Beau’s life, placing the call to the vet and the crematorium so that both could be ready at nine A.M. on a Monday morning. I never felt as bad as I did turning good old number eleven, for that whole horrible weekend, into a dead dog walking. Or limping, I guess.
I don’t know exactly how we settled on that time and day. It’s true that we were all together for Christopher’s college graduation, that Quin was home from Beijing and Maria from college and that all three of them wanted to be there. The trajectory of Beau’s existence had reversed itself: While he once ran off, leaving three children at home to worry and wait, now they had sailed free while he lay by the door, patiently anticipating their return. I knew just how he felt. My husband and I live in a cleaner house now, with only canine company, waiting for the noise, the disruption, and the delight that the return of our three natives brings. The tables have turned for us all.
Maybe it was that his children recognized what we had tried for months not to see: that it was time for Beau to go, too. Over a period of several weeks, what little light was left in the Big Guy’s pale, blind eyes had seemed to dim, and when he cried, he no longer seemed to be looking for attention but to be seeking an end to pain. For a long time we had kept him alive because he still had some life in him, some curiosity that made him put his nose to the ground to see what other animal had recently passed his way, some faint scamper to his step when his chow rattled into the bowl, even if the bowl had to be placed right up against his face to show him where to find it.
Then one day we suddenly realized that we had been keeping him alive not because it was good for him, but because it was good for us, because it was too hard to make the decision to let him go. And in the joyful bargain between dog and person, that is the one unforgivable cheat.
He seemed a little perplexed by all the attention when we gathered around him on the patterned rug, so colorful, so good at hiding doggie stains. I lay next to him on the floor at his head while Dr. Brown, there for that house call, true to her word, positioned herself next to his hind leg. Beau pulled back irritably at the first pinch, then went still again, looking, as ever, dignified and handsome, his head held high. I had my arms around his neck, my face buried in his shoulder, and from above me I felt what I thought for one befuddled moment was rain, the same rain that was falling so hard out on the street, making that stones-in-a-tin-can sound. Then I realized it was my husband’s tears. I could hear our children sobbing, and suddenly, improbably, I was almost exultant at the love we had managed to muster for that old dog, and at the thought that someday, if I was very, very lucky, I might have a death as simple and serene as this one, with these same people around me.
People talk nonsense to dogs all the time, the same as they talk to babies. I whispered in his ear over and over again, the way I had when he was a puppy squatting on the grass. “Yes, yes, you are the man,” I murmured, “you are the best dog, yes, everything’s going to be all right, you are the man.” Dr. Brown looked at me and I nodded and she pushed the plunger on the syringe. Beau took two deep growly breaths and then he fell onto me. We had put him down. I don’t like euphemisms for death, hate the term “passed away” for someone who has died, but the expression we use for dogs is the right one. We put him down.
I’ve never really believed what people say, that death smoothes the lines of life away, that the tension and the worry disappear. Yet somehow after the vet had packed up and the children had gone, Beau did look more like his old self, before his legs and eyesight and hearing began to go. He looked more like the kind of dog who would try to drive a horse from his stretch of the road, or swim in circles, his tail a feathered rudder, in pursuit of geese. He looked like one of those handsome Labs on the cover of a dog book. He looked like what he was: a really good dog.
The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed. In the fifteen years since Beau had joined our family, nine pounds of belly fat and needle teeth, he had grown ancient by the standards of his breed. And I had grown older. My memory stutters. My knees hurt. Without my reading glasses the words on a page look like ants at a picnic. But my blood pressure is low, my bone scan is good, and my mammograms are so far uneventful. I love my kids, and they love me, and we all love their father, who is still my husband. Starting out, I thought that life was terribly complex, and in some ways it is. But contentment can be pretty simple.
And that’s what I learned from watching Beau over his lifetime: to roll with the punches (if not in carrion), to take things as they come, to measure myself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise my nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically, holler, “I smell bacon!” I’m not what I once was, and neither, by the end, was he. The geese are making a mess of the pond, and the yellow Lab gets to run every morning with her master. The first couple of times she was walked by herself were particularly sad. Bea misses Beau terribly, I suspect, but I may just be projecting again.
Each morning I used to check to see if the old guy was actually breathing, and each day I tried to take his measure—was he hurting? was he happy? Was the trade-off between being infirm and being alive worth it? And when the time comes to ask myself some of those same questions, at least I will have had experience calibrating the answer. Sometimes an old dog teaches you new tricks.
PHOTO CREDITS
© Amanda Jones: images 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 34, 38, 41, 42
Jim Dratfield’s Petography ®: images 14, 21, 30, 31
Jim Dratfield’s Petography ® / Getty Images: images 5, 10, 12
Jane Burton / Warren Photographic: images 8, 27
Valerie Shaff: image 19
© Kim Levin: images 26, 32, 36, 40
Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos: images 33, 35, 37, 39
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of five bestselling novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, and Rise and Shine. Her New York Times column “Public and Private” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of those columns was published as Thinking Out Loud. She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30s” columns, Living Out Loud; a book for the Library of Contemporary Thought, How Reading Changed My Life; the bestselling A Short Guide to a Happy Life and Being Perfect; and two children’s books, The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After. She is currently a columnist for Newsweek and lives with her husband, their children, and her Labrador, Bea, in New York City.
ALSO BY
Anna Quindlen
Rise and Shine
Being Perfect
Blessings
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
How Reading Changed My Life
Black and Blue
One True Thing
Object Lessons
Living Out Loud
Thinking Out Loud
Copyright © 2007 by Anna Quindlen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Quindlen, Anna.
Good Dog. Stay / Anna Quindlen.
p. cm.
1. Quindlen, Anna. 2. Authors—20th century—Biography. 3. Pet owner—United States—Biography. 4. Human-animal relationships. 5. Labrador Retriever. I. Title.
PS3567.U336Z46 2007
818'.5403—dc22 2007031820
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-666-5
v3.0
Anna Quindlen, Good Dog. Stay.
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