Something About Harry - Old Dogs are the Best Dogs

By Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post
Sunday, October 5, 2008

Photo Gallery - Old Dogs are the Best Dogs (12 images)
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Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that
proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were
no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of
purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all
directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant
archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other
tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about
his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into
a simple process of elimination -- a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down
trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed,
which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend
the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings,
absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot
before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban
park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee
to his dog. The dog, about Harry's size, was tracking the flight
expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by
watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done,
then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once
done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling
and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our
walk home was almost jaunty.

Some years ago, the Style section invited readers to come up with a
midlife list of goals for an underachiever. The first-runner-up prize went to:

"Win the admiration of my dog."

It's no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find
you brilliant, even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if
you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you, even if you
are a genocidal maniac. Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.

Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and,
best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has
settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so
appealing -- his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness
to please, his infectious happiness. His unequivocal love. But it is
not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and
coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle,
graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy,
lazy and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog,
these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They
show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice.
They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they
seem at peace.

Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that
our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing
that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments
we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreate --
all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals,
only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the
passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How then, to explain
old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from
the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia?
I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm
with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance.
I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come
to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time,
and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of
the onset of their frailties. They understand that what's gone is gone.

What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of
injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as
tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught
of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their
lives. You've got to love them for that.

At the pet store, we chose Harry over two other puppies because,
when wrestling with my children in the get-acquainted enclosure,
Harry drew the most blood. We wanted a feisty pup, and we got one.

It is instructive to watch what happens in a tug of war between a
child and a young dog who is equally pigheaded, but stronger.
Neither gives an inch, which means that, over dozens of days,
the child is dragged hundreds of feet on his behind.

The product of a Kansas puppy mill, son of a bitch named Taffy
Sioux, Harry had been sold to us as a yellow Labrador retriever. I
suppose it was technically true, but only in the sense that Tic Tacs
are technically "food." Harry's lineage was suspect. He wasn't the
square-headed, shiny, elegant type of Labrador you can envision
in the wilds of Canada hunting for ducks. He was the shape of a
baked potato, with the color and luster of an interoffice envelope.
You could envision him in the wilds of suburban Toledo, hunting
for nuggets of dried food in a carpet.

His full name was Harry S Truman, and once he'd reached middle
age, he had indeed developed the unassuming soul of a haberdasher.
We sometimes called him Tru, which fit his loyalty but was in other
ways a misnomer: Harry was a bit of an eccentric, a few bubbles
off plumb. Though he had never experienced an electrical shock,
whenever he encountered a wire on the floor -- say, a power cord
leading from a laptop to a wall socket -- Harry would stop and
refuse to proceed. To him, this barrier was as impassable as the
Himalayas. He'd stand there, waiting for someone to move it. Also,
he was afraid of wind.

While Harry lacked the wiliness and cunning of some dogs, I did
watch one day as he figured out a basic principle of physics. He was
playing with a water bottle in our back yard -- it was one of those
five-gallon cylindrical plastic jugs from the top of a water cooler.
At one point, it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted
him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go
down again. It wouldn't. I watched him nudge it around until he
discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be
perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the
understanding dawn on his face; it was Archimedes in his bath,
Helen Keller at the water spigot.

That was probably the intellectual achievement of Harry's life,
tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two
hours insipidly entranced, rolling the bottle down and hauling it
back up. He did not come inside until it grew too dark for him to see.

I believe I know exactly when Harry became an old dog. He was
about 9 years old. It happened at 10:15 on the evening of June 21,
2001, the day my family moved from the suburbs to the city. The
move took longer than we'd anticipated. Inexcusably, Harry had
been left alone in the vacated house -- eerie, echoing, empty
of furniture and of all belongings except Harry and his bed--
for eight hours. When I arrived to pick him up, he was beyond frantic.

He met me at the door and embraced me around the waist in a
way that is not immediately reconcilable with the musculature
and skeleton of a dog's front legs. I could not extricate myself
from his grasp. We walked out of that house like a slow-dancing
couple, and Harry did not let go until I opened the car door.

He wasn't barking at me in reprimand, as he once might have done.
He hadn't fouled the house in spite. That night, Harry was simply
scared and vulnerable, impossibly sweet and needy and grateful. He
had lost something of himself, but he had gained something more
touching and more valuable. He had entered old age.

Some people who seem unmoved by the deaths of tens of thousands
through war or natural disaster will nonetheless summon outrage
over the mistreatment of animals, and they will grieve inconsolably
over the loss of the family dog. People who find this behavior
distasteful are often the ones without pets. It is hard to understand,
in the abstract, the degree to which a companion animal, particularly
after a long life, becomes a part of you. I believe I've figured out
what this is all about. It is not as noble as I'd like it to be, but it is
not anything of which to be ashamed, either.

In our dogs, we see ourselves. Dogs exhibit almost all of our emotions;
if you think a dog cannot register envy or pity or pride or melancholia,
you have never lived with one for any length of time. What dogs lack
is our ability to dissimulate. They wear their emotions nakedly, and
so, in watching them, we see ourselves as we would be if we were
stripped of posture and pretense. Their innocence is enormously
appealing. When we watch a dog progress from puppyhood to old
age, we are watching our own lives in microcosm. Our dogs become
old, frail, crotchety and vulnerable, just as Grandma did, just as we
surely will, come the day. When we grieve for them, we grieve
for ourselves.

The meaning of life is that it ends.

In the year after our move, Harry began to age visibly, and he did it
the way most dogs do. First his muzzle began to whiten, and then
the white slowly crept backward to swallow his entire head. Pink
nose, white head, tan flanks -- he looked like a stubby kitchen
match. As he became more sedentary, he thickened a bit, too.

I remember reading an article once about people who raised dogs
for food in Asia. A dog rancher was indignantly defending his
profession, saying that he used only "basic yellow dogs." As I
looked down at Harry, asleep as usual, all I could think of was:
meat.

But Harry's physical decline was accompanied by what I will call, at
the risk of ridicule, a spiritual awakening. A dog's greatest intelligence
is said to be his innate ability to anticipate and comprehend human
feelings and actions. It's supposedly a Darwinian adaptation -- dogs
need our alliance in order to survive. In earlier years, Harry had
never shown any particular gift for empathy, but as the breadth of
his interests dwindled, and his world contracted, he seemed to
watch us more closely. My wife, who is a lawyer, also acts in
Community Theater. One day, she was in the house rehearsing
a monologue for an upcoming audition. The lines were from
Marsha Norman's two-person play "'Night, Mother," about a
housewife who is attempting to talk her adult daughter out of suicide.

Thelma is a weak and bewildered woman trying to change her
daughter's mind while coming to terms with her own failings as
a mother and with her paralyzing fear of being left alone. Her
lines are excruciating.

My wife had to stop in mid-monologue. Harry was too distraught.
He could understand not one word she was saying, but he figured
out that Mom was as sad as he'd ever seen her. He was whimpering,
pawing at her knee, licking her hand, trying as best he could to
make things better. You don't need a brain to have a heart.

Harry was always terrified of thunderstorms, but as he aged and
his hearing waned, as if in a benign collusion of natural forces,
this terror subsided. He became a calmer dog in general, if a far
more eccentric one.

On walks, he would no longer bother to scout and circle for a place
to relieve himself. He would simply do it in mid-plod, like a horse,
leaving the difficult logistics of drive-by cleanup to me. Sometimes,
while crossing a busy street, with cars whizzing by, he would plop
down to scratch his ear. Sometimes, he would forget where he was
and why he was there. To the amusement of passersby, I would
have to hunker down beside him and say, "Harry, we're on a walk,
and we're going home now. Home is this way, okay?" On these
dutiful walks, Harry ignored almost everything he passed. The
most notable exception was an old, barrel-chested female pit
bull named Honey, whom he loved. This was surprising, both
because other dogs had long ago ceased to interest Harry at all,
and because even back when they did, Harry's tastes were for the
guys. Though he was neutered, Harry's sexual preference was
pretty evident.

But when we met Honey on walks, Harry perked up. Honey was
younger by five years and heartier by a mile, but she liked Harry
and slowed her gait when he was around. They waddled together
for blocks, eyes forward, hardly interacting but content in each
other's company. Harry reminded me of an old gay man who, at
the end of his life, returns to his wife to end their time together
on a porch swing under an embroidered lap shawl. I will forever
be grateful to Honey for sweetening Harry's last days.

I work mostly at home, which means that during the weekdays
Harry and I shared an otherwise empty house. Mostly, he slept;
mostly I wrote and paced, and my pacing often took me past his
lump on the floor. I would always mutter, almost unconsciously,
"Hey, Harry," and he would always respond in the same fashion:
His body would move not at all, but his tail would thud, exactly
once, against the floor.

I didn't really know how important that ritual was until there was
no thud anymore.

One night at 3 a.m., a smoke detector in our house began to bleep
in that water-torture way, signaling that it needed a new battery.
It was mildly annoying, but to Harry it appeared to be a sign of
the Apocalypse. He began pacing and panting, and actually tried
climbing our stairwell to hide under our bed. His rheumy legs
buckled; we caught him before he fell.

So I mounted a ladder, disconnected the bleeping thing, and took
out the spent battery. Then my wife spent two hours talking Harry
down into a semi-sane condition. She slept on the floor by his side.

It turned out to be Harry's final eccentricity. When he awoke the
next morning, he could no longer use his hind legs, and we trundled
him off to the vet. Harry had timed his departure thoughtfully. Had
he waited a few more hours, my daughter would have been unable
to hug him and tell him what a good boy he had been. She had
known and loved Harry more than half of her life, and I believe
this was not incidental to her choice of career. She was leaving,
that next morning, for her first day of veterinary school.

For nearly a week after Harry's death, my wife and I shared a
knowledge that we left unspoken, even to each other. It was
simply too heart-wrenching to say out loud.

As he lay on the gurney and the doctor began to push the poison
into his vein, Harry had lifted up his head and kissed us goodbye.

Gene Weingarten is a staff writer for the Magazine. He can be reached
at weingarten@washpost.com. This article was excerpted from
"Old Dogs" by Gene Weingarten. Photographs by Michael S. Williamson.
Copyright © 2008 by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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