More A Day, A Dog

Apologies if you didn't read yesterday's; am just going to keep on going for now.

And he was still Ben's dog, of course, very much so. But somehow, in that last year of his life in particular, he became my dog too. People say that dogs are one-man animals, that they choose their person early on and never waver. This has not been true in my experience. Johnson was, at the end, ours, and we were his.

But that last year, he and I were inseparable, and I was so focused on him, on trying desperately to keep him alive, that even my pregnancy, my first, was a little anticlimatic. I wanted a child, but the idea of having one, of actually being a mother, was so ephemeral, unfathomable, vague. Johnson, and his very real needs, the hours it took to soak and clean and bandage his paws, so he could walk, a little, and then come back in and have it done again, were concrete, immediate, there. When I look back on this year it strikes me that my days were actually organized around our routines, mine and his: ours. He had bad days and good ones. There was precious little prancing, but when the paws were in remission he would jog a little in the park. One day he dragged a big stick over to me as I stood under a tree, a giant branch, really, and I suddenly found myself crying, squinting up at the flat grey sky to make myself stop, finally giving in and walking, with Johnson, away from the crowded part of the park where the other dog owners knew us. We walked along the path for a change, Johnson off leash, illegally, but we did this all the time. He never wandered away from me. Finally, I stopped at a bench and sat down. He stood by me, and it occured to me I'd gone too far. Lie down, buddy, I said to him, wanting him to rest before the walk back. I had stopped crying but my head ached, I could barely look at him. I didn't want to start crying again. He wouldn't sit, though. He just stood by me, at the side of the bench, letting me rest my hand on his back.

As summer approached I began to feel pregnant, slightly, but I didn't look pregnant yet, and it was easy to imagine that I wasn't--that everything would keep going the way it always had, that Johnson would get better. Each time the paws healed for a few weeks I gave into the illusion. Each time a new medication was mentioned, or I discovered a treatment online, I tried it. The salt on the winter sidewalks had made things worse, I told myself, although that didn't explain the hips, the way he had slowed, the times when he couldn't make it to the end of the street, let alone the park, the times I steeled myself--never physically strong--and heaved him up into my arms, ignoring the oohs and aahs I got from passers-by, surprised I could lift him at all.

I always felt like I was trying not to cry on these walks, and what stopped me, most of the time, was him: Johnson himself. He never whined, never growled, never so much as withdrew his paws when I started unwrapping, surely the most painful part of the process for us both. When I removed his bandages, his paws looked dead already, limp and oozing, fur matted with pus and with blood. I can still remember the smell, a smell of decay. I had found him little shoes made for dogs to keep the salt out their paw pads, but they weren't widely available the way are now--I could only find one kind, and I looked everywhere--but they still weren't quite right--not sufficiently durable, flimsy in fact, and he wore through the first ones in less than week. I bought more, brought them to the cobbler up the street, whom I'd visited with Johnson many a time, when he could still walk that far. I told him I wanted him to put real soles on them, strong ones, that I didn't care what it cost. He was a Russian man, old himself, who had always come out from behind the counter to give Johnson a pat. When I came back the next week, he wouldn't take my money. From one Russian to another, he said--I'd told him I was half--but I knew he wasn't doing it for me. We'd gone everywhere together, Johnson and I had; in New York you can do this. It still amazes my father, did then: Johnson and I could go to the drugstore, the video rental store, the dry cleaners, the pet shop, the bookstore, even the French restaurant across the street, where they set out a bowl of water beside our table as soon as I sat down, and Johnson lay by my feet.

More to come....