We had to say goodbye to one of our dogs yesterday.
We did not see that one coming.
Roxy the mutt, was 17 and as it turned out, was so riddled with illness that trying to save her, given the danger of the surgery and the painful recovery ahead seemed more like cruel and unusual punishment.
Roxy was rescued years ago, in Valley Village, when Leslie's daughter looked out the window and saw a bunch of nasty boys dragging her behind their bikes, with a wire hanger around her neck.
Leslie, the Wonder Woman of the Valley, darted out and scared the fuck out of those kids and took Roxy in.
Roxy was a mess. She had obviously been tossed out by someone like freeway trash. The trauma never left her. It was as embedded as memorialized cement hand and footprints.
Leslie and Sarah commandeered Roxy's life and brought her quickly back to health and vibrancy. Their second dog, Fiona, was a shiny Gordon Setter puppy from Hawaii, who was just a beautiful, incredibly daffy dog.
Roxy on the other hand, was like a chain smoking next door neighbor who specialized in grumpiness and the cultivation of her spectacularly horrible front lawn. She was very defended and not the most lovable of pets: the product of being a scrappy survivor of the streets. Still, Sarah embraced her fully and those two bonded like the true sisters of the two different species that they were.
When Leslie finally had enough of LA (her attitude was well, not that much different than Roxy's) she packed her car up with dogs and Sarah and they leap frogged all the way to New York, to Dobbs Ferry, which is most famous for, well, their Ferry. I actually got a letter addressed there to:
david saman Dodds fairy, NY...and it got here just fine. Welcome to small town life.
And so Roxy and Fiona became the Backyard Girls where time was spent taunting each other, chasing birds and lounging like royalty in the summer sun. In the winter they were both swallowed up by the snow...and never once complained.
Fiona was the unlikely one to go first and that was excruciating for us. She was only 11 and suffered a series of strokes that quickly wore her down.
She left an enormous shadow that to this day still hovers over our house like the saddest kind of cloud.
Next came our Irish Setter Zelda who, like Fiona, is just a gorgeous dope. Birds taunt her like the Sharks mocking the Jets in West Side Story. Zelda will never catch a bird. Just the other day she came across a fallen nest baby and carried it in her mouth like it was made of silk and fairy dust.
When life becomes a ritual you are, I think, living a form of temporary insanity because you have conveniently forgotten that life is both temporary and a dream that sooner or later you have to wake up from. If you don't, trust me, someone will wake you up in not the most pleasant of ways.
We got a wake up call two days ago when Roxy suddenly became stricken with something that was obviously very wrong. Both Leslie and I immediately sensed that this was the beginning of the end.
And it was.
For the third time in her life, Leslie had to put yet another dog to sleep. It does not get easier. In fact it gets harder, because it reminds you of your own ticking clock mortality.
Even harder, I think, is that when we have to put them to sleep, we are forced to wake up on level that we go out of our way to avoid on a daily, hourly basis.
As we get older we become frail, vulnerable and learn to live with pain and discomfort like they were the annoying roommates that they are.
We turn to our children and our dogs in the harder times, to not only comfort us, but to fetch our legacies, and return it back to us with wagging tails.
We spend so much intimate time with our dogs, more time than with our children, that the other illusion in our lives is that our pets think and feel just like us.
We lose adult perspective and become children with our pets, especially dogs, as we turn them into the equivalent of a cuddly doll to whom we give thoughts, speech, heart and soul.
Over the years, the line between reality and fantasy blur so much that when their time suddenly comes, it feels like someone has grabbed your heart by its throat and strangled the barely living childhood right out of us.
And that is why, I think, we weep so deeply when they leave us.
It is not just the staggering emptiness we feel. The ghosts of dogs tend to linger and they tend to wait, with infinite patience still, at the door , with a leash in their mouth.
You see, just like them, we still want to run and play and romp with total abandon until mom calls us in for dinner or the sun begins to sink like hope or the many butterflies that are dreams deferred