Patiently Waiting: Memoirs of a dog and her boy
Consider almost any apocalypse-premised movie — be it about tornadoes, tsunamis, or giant terrestrial lizard monsters serving as an allegory for nuclear annihilation. The often-expected critical moment of existential dread for the audience is not likely to be the toppling of New York City’s skyline or the unforgiving alien lasers that wipe out the monuments of the nation’s capitol. Seemingly, nothing will stoke the gasps of the audience quite as much as the obligatory scene of a helpless dog daunted by a crackling fissure racing towards their paws, threatening to consume the angelic animal. All of Tokyo may be crushed by Godzilla, nary a blink spared. But the resulting shock-wave that sends a skyscraper and a subsequent shower of sharp glass flying towards the young heroine’s Jack Russell Terrier will make the stoniest of hearts cry aloud.
We love dogs. I love dogs. More specifically, I loved a dog. The dog of my childhood was named Abby. Abby was a Cairn Terrier. Think of Wizard of Oz’s Toto, but with tan fur and none of the placability to willingly sit in a basket. She was my childhood hope come true. A dog. My own Dog. My parents did their best to resist my inexorable pleas, but even a mighty mountain gives way to a relentless stream. Consistency is key, and my begging knew no abatement.
Abby was an unbounded ball of joy. Untethered from the laws of energy conservation, she seemingly expended more kinetic energy than her tiny little body could chemically store. The first time we went to visit her at the home that was putting Abby up for adoption, she ran tirelessly in a circle around the room, jumping from couch to couch, running along the top of sofas and chairs blistering by our shoulders without ever showing a sign of tiring. Had we stayed much longer, items and persons in the room may have begun to levitate and spin with her whirlpool-like stirring of the living room.
She was supposed to be the family’s dog, but inevitably she defaulted to “Brandon’s dog.” She was with me 100% of the time that was socially permitted. Abby, however, was not a lap dog. I respected that about her. She wanted to be with you, but she had some dignity. She loved to chase a ball — soccer balls especially. One time, she got out of the house without a leash and found a group of high schoolers practicing soccer nearby. Abby expertly weaving between their legs, stealing the ball and giving chase. I remember the coach joking with my mother as she desperately tried to get Abby back, stating that he might “recruit” Abby for the team. Obviously, he was trying to lighten my mother’s sense of humiliation over a 20lb dog interrupting 20-person practice, but I took it as a sincere and serious compliment.
Abby had a pension for breaking out of the house. She always wanted to be outside. This was a trait I always assumed all dogs had until, as an adult, I met my parents’ yappy, frightened half-chihuahua, half-dachshunds, who are very business-like in their walks. If they had total control of their bowels, they would gladly evacuate them before you could even reach the mailbox so they could return inside as quickly as possible rather than being dragged through the neighborhood until nature takes its course.
Abby never walked. She pulled. In a former life, she must have run the Iditarod. I could never go fast enough to satisfy her quenchless curiosity. Efforts to train her to heel was an exercise in futility. So, naturally, her spirit to run free and inspect everything around her made her a constant proponent of prison breaking. For a good chunk of her life, we lived in a rural town, and keeping her inside the house was a battle of will. You could never casually open the door to sign a package. Though you might be smiling and making light conversation with a postal worker, you were secretly in a chess match, testing the very limits of game theory, using the one unbalanced leg to parry and counter Abby’s relentless, calculated attempts to run through the 20 degrees of open door available to her.
Despite my family’s best efforts and honed mastery of leg fencing, she would inevitably break out and run through the cornfields and neighbors’ yards. She was clever. You could never catch her the same way twice. You might be able to kick a soccer ball down a dead-end and corner her once with success, but she would never fall for it again. Kick that ball in the same alley, and she would look up at you with dismissive eyes and you could practically hear her saying, “How dumb do you think I am?” A new scheme would have to be devised for every escape. The only way to catch her that proved to have a stable success rate was to take advantage of Abby’s unrequited love of people. A poor passing stranger, clearly intending to go for a calming, uneventful walk, might happen across a desperate, sweaty boy, imploring them to grab the random dog that would inevitably run up to them. Once an alliance was struck, I would hide behind a nearby bush or tree, and when Abby thought the coast was clear she’d barrel up to this new friend, wagging her tail with delight, seemingly never suspicious that her new “compadre” was working for me! They’d grab her collar, and I’d race over to them. Abby could never resist making new friends, though I suspect she never greeted a stranger without the knowledge that this new jogging pant-clad, retiree was likely a double agent. I can only assume her greetings were a calculated risk she must have thought was worth a fresh pat on the head and rub on the belly.
Even though she bolted every chance she got, she never went far. There was, truthfully, never any real danger of her getting lost because she always kept you in her sights, always a few feet out of reach but never gone. My father and I would go on runs on Saturdays around the cornfields near our home. During several of those occasions, in our groggy Saturday morning stupor, she’d burst out as we lackadaisically opened the screen door to the backyard. She would follow us at a safe distance, panting heavily with the deep, humid heat of the summer, diving headfirst into every puddle she could find along our route. Once it was so hot, by the time we finished our run, she walked casually back up to the door with us, soaked in mud and rain water, one of only a handful of times she ever volunteered to come back inside.
One escape, in particular, was notable. After years of our ever-evolving chess matches, my toolkits and strategies were finally exhausted. Since no strangers seemed to be around and I was completely devoid of new ideas to trap her, it became purely a battle of wills: me wanting her safely back inside and her wanting to do anything else. Abby was on pointe that day, somehow harnessing the combined spirit of a gazelle and Michael Jordan. She almost psychically anticipated every dive and feint I threw at her, no soccer ball on God’s green earth or forged on Olympus itself could tempt her that afternoon. My desperate pleading simply fell on deaf ears. My defeat was finalized when our struggle reached the open field outside my nearby school. In the open space, I was no match for her speed, and she could see me coming from any angle. Frustrated, I interpreted her refusal to return home as a dismissal of our bond. Giving up, but needing something to justify the circuitous trip to the playground, I decided to stop inside my school which was always unlocked during the evenings, while the janitorial staff was working.
I huffed up to the building and flung open the nearest door, stomping angrily to my locker to fetch some papers. Exiting the building to head home, I saw Abby still in the same field, zig-zagging at a full-sprint with her head close to the ground, listening to the siren song of the invisible prairie dogs rustling beneath her feet. I went home, hoping she would burn herself out and come back to the house when she had surely tired herself out, fruitlessly chasing well bunkered rodents. After several hours, I went back outside expecting her to be sitting at the front door or under our apple trees in the back yard. But she wasn’t in either location, so I ventured back to the school where I had seen her last.
When I walked past the trees that divided our neighborhood from the open field, I saw her off in the distance. Luck had struck! Abby was standing at the top of the steps to the back entrance of the school, her face practically pressed against the glass. She was cornered, clearly hopeful some passing janitor or teacher would see her and venture over and introduce themselves. I crept close, my heart beating in my chest, sweat trickling down my brow. One snap of a twig or a crunch of pebbles and I knew the jig would be up and she’d take off, reveling in the chase as she always did. Just as I approached the small staircase at the base of the double glass doors, she heard me and whipped around. I spread my arms wide, poised to dive like a professional soccer goalie against an impending penalty kick. But she did not bolt, she wagged her tail energetically. I did not hesitate to capitalize on her temporary insanity and dove at her, slipping my fingers between her collar and neck in the same beautiful stroke. Just as I was hoisting her under my arm like a sack of potatoes, one of the cleaning staff opened the door with a grin, “Is that your dog? She’s been waiting at this door for hours! We couldn’t figure out what she wanted.”
Then it dawned on me…she had been waiting… for me.
She must have watched me go in but apparently missed me coming out. Eventually, curious as to what must have been taking me so long, Abby had gone to the door to see if she could spot me, and when she could not, she simply waited until she would.
Is there anyone or anything that waits for you like a dog waits for you? My mom told me that every day, just before my sister and I arrived home after our walk from school, Abby would race to the top of the couch facing the window to the front lawn and watch anxiously for our arrival. Like clockwork, every weekday, Abby would be sitting at that couch at 3:10 expecting our consistent 3:15 appearance. With no rumble of a bus or screech of a break to clue her in, she just somehow knew in her bones when we would arrive home.
Leaving Abby for college, I’m a little ashamed to admit, was harder than leaving my parents and sisters. I knew that I had lots of time left with my family, but by the time I left for college, I had grown from boyhood and Abby had grown old. She was still energetic and loveable, but she was slower. I was in track and cross-country through most of middle school and all of high school. And the last couple years before I left for college, she wasn’t fast enough anymore to evade me when she broke out. So, her escapes were fewer and fewer. If I was around when she got out, I’d sprint after her and within just a few strides, I always eclipsed the distance between us. She’d stop suddenly, rolling on to her back and accepting her fate with something akin to a bashful grin. I’d stoop down and tuck her under my arm with ease and bring her back inside, where she’d wag her tail and bound up after me to sit beside me for whatever I was doing.
During the summer, after my first year at university, she started to get sick and my family knew her time was coming. I was still away in my college town, working a summer job, but I left two weeks early to spend some of the precious time she had left together. She was much more lethargic than I had ever seen her. She did not tug on my arm when I walked her anymore. Her curious spark was not gone but it was flickering. Our family took her on a hike, gave her some of her favorite foods, and paid her all the attention we could spare and then some. I was lucky enough that, though her health had been waning, she was in much better condition when I visited. Perhaps, she was putting on a strong face for my sake.
She died a couple months later in the middle of the term. It’s been nearly ten years since she passed, and I still dream about her. It doesn’t seem to matter the type of dream. Happy or sad. Anxious or nonsensical. If my eyes are closed and I’m blessed with a subconscious dance of my id, she’s with me, just like she always was in my childhood.
Sometimes, I’m a bit embarrassed of the impact her short life has had on me. It appears almost frivolous to love an animal so much, almost guilt-like to think I cared so deeply for a dog when the world has so many greater problems to face and so many people who go forgotten.
But I’ve come to give myself a bit more grace for my boyish heartaches. Effortless love is so rare. True selflessness is nearly non-existent. No dog invented a vaccine or calculated the trajectory of a passing comet, but perhaps Abby and many of her fellow brethren have aspired to something almost more difficult for mankind to achieve: unconditional, unexplainable, unrelenting love.
So, perhaps the loss of a dog in a movie should deservedly elicit a gasp and tear-filled eyes because when a dog does die, something special is lost. Something inherently good succumbs to something inevitably bad.
So, now, I have to admit, my boyish hope is that Abby is somewhere nice, patiently waiting for me.
