The Dog Who Loved a Story

Ever alert

We called him the great communicator, the dog who loved a story.

When I was in my twenties, I read Thomas Mann's long story (really a novella) called "A Man and His Dog." It's an enjoyable story, but it could hardly be published nowadays. It's an extended yet dense pastoral narrative of the long walks taken by a man and his dog. No doubt the Iowa School types would find it intolerably long-winded and pointless. I myself had trouble comprehending its message. The point was, like man's relationship to dogs, it is what it is.

Perhaps this will be my Man and Dog story. I've written about my remarkable dog Fritz before, in End of an Era and On the Long Walk Home. But the first was a raw elegy mustered in a difficult time, and the second was a fictive watercolor of my emotions. It has taken me a year to distill these memories into a proper memoir, but more importantly, to attain enough distance to write it. I wanted to treat his memory with dignity, yet also with humor, for dogs have a sense of humor. He was a terrier with bushy eyebrows. It is not well-known, but terriers communicate with their eyebrows. When he was holding a ball, he would alternately raise one eyebrow, then the other, the alternate back and forth to tease you into grabbing for it, then at the very last second he would swipe it away: "Aha! Fooled you! Aha! Fooled you again!" And dogs are one of those creatures for whom a jest becomes more humorous the more it is repeated.

Giving you the brow

Fritz understood a large vocabulary of words, all of which meant something was in it for him. For example, I had to be sparing in my use of the word "pizza" because if I ever mentioned it, Fritz would walk over and "nose" me--meaning stick his nose in my calf to indicate subtly that he wanted something--usually an excursion. If we didn't respond to nosing, we got an indignant stare, the sort that only a terrier can radiate. And then a series of low woofs and chirring which was his impression of human speech.

You must understand, to Fritz, the pizza shop was just another house that, when we visited, they give you food. They were okay with Fritz coming in and usually gave him a little pepperoni--which, of course, he came to expect.

Because of Fritz's response to human language, I came to believe that dogs also have their own functional language, somewhat guttural and direct, but by no means lacking in grammar. It's largely nonverbal, but if we were to vocalize it, it would come out somewhat with this sense:

Give to me

Pee on, now belong to me

Meet the Jaws of Death barking squirrel

Go now, get pizza

Let's celebrate--I chew, you watch

I chew, you watch

Following from language comes the dog's sense of story. Fritz very much relished stories such as this. I would hold a stuffed ferret toy and make it climb up a tree or post and say: "I'm climbing I'm climbing I'm climbing I'm up here I'm looking at you I'm looking at you I'm gonna jump I'm gonna jump I'm gonna jump waaahhh!" And then the ferret would fling itself into the Jaws of Death. This actually never happens in nature, but it is one of a dog's most cherished fantasies that the impudent, incessantly barking squirrel shall suddenly fling itself off its perch straight at the dog like a kamikaze.

Ah, a tasty meat-a-ball

Then there was the epic known as the Sockaballa Story. We found that his very favorite toy was not one bought in a store, but rather a well-worn, preferably unwashed sock with a tennis ball inside. This pendulous toy would divert Fritz without end. The histoire of sockaballa went like this, and it was best delivered in an Italian accent: "Once upon a time there was a bigga bull, walka down the street... his bigga ball dangle behind him... Dangala dangala... A little dog say oh look there's a tasty meataball! Dangala dangala... That's why he have only one ball... poor old bull! Moo! Moo! Dangala dangala..."

Poor old bull... where'd his ball go?

Fritz could hang from that sock for minutes on end. He was not a large dog, but pity the uninvited intruder who ventures into the house at night. Twenty-two pounds of terrier hanging from your jewels wouldn't be comfortable. In prison he could tell the story of why he has only one ball. Poor old ball.

Fritz did more to improve my mental health than years of therapy and meditation. He accompanied us on most of our walks, loved to stick his nose out the window on drives, and would wag his tail and dance when I came home from work. When I came home and he'd do that dance, how could I be angry or resentful? Not only did he know how to enjoy life, he taught me how to appreciate it.

Not all dogs are water dogs, but Fritz was. Lakelands were bred in the Lake District of England, on the borderlands of Scotland. If they see a hole, they will tunnel right in, searching for a rodent. Back in the day their tails were used to pull the dog back out of the hole if they got stuck. They're hardy dogs. A famous story is told of the Lakeland that got wedged under a deep rock formation and could not be dug out, so they blasted the rock with dynamite. The terrier emerged, tail wagging. If Lakelands see water, they splash right in. They love to frolic in snow.

Hoza-yobi

And so I discovered that a stream of water from a hose would drive Fritz insane. He found it endlessly amusing to leap up and bite the stream of water. If I stopped the water and teased him about it, he'd stand and put his paws together in a begging motion, imploring me to do it again. Then the water would let loose and he'd dive at it acrobatically. We called this game hoza-yobi. It's a kind of pidgin Japanese term roughly meaning "hose day"--hoza (hose) and youbi (a day of the week), because we usually played with the hose on Saturdays.

Being a terrier, his leaping powers were amazing, and the hose gave him a good workout. But in 2005, he started to limp. His back legs became very weak, and eventually he could hardly stand. We were very worried about him, and the first few diagnoses didn't land on the cause. We saw two or three vets before it was diagnosed as immunoarthritis. They prescribed Azathioprine, a medication that humans also use to treat arthritis, and he stayed on it the rest of his life. It enabled him to walk normally, maybe trot, but his running and jumping days were over.

That didn't keep him from relishing life, however. His main passion was food, and his very favorite was roasty beast (roast beef).

We gave him many names, dozens, because he had so much personality. Because he was so wooly and beastly looking, most people couldn't place his breed and thought he was a fortuitous mix of one or more shaggy dogs. He was, in fact, bred from champion Lakeland Terriers and his official AKC name was Snowtaire's Fritz Liebling. The breeder sold him because he was hopelessly short and stocky--which made him look all the more like a little bear. N's nickname for him was Bud. When he was a puppy I called him Spanky; most of his life Wicked, Wicky Boy, or Wackabu. This is a partial list of his many nicknames:

Liebling
Fritzikins, Fritzi-kun
Bud
Spanky, Spancticus, Horatio Spank
Wicked Dog, which became Wicky Boy, which morphed into Wackabu
Jaws of Death
Gacky
Snorky
Lurky Boy
Puffy (later Farticus Maximus)
Clever Lumpkin
Breath Weapon
Gentle Fang
Beastly Boy
Snifticus
Peanut
Peabody
Sir Drippabeard
Beardo

As Fritz grew into the old age of dogs, he never lost his passion for food, and walks, and drives in the car--anything that involved doing things with his people. He remained fairly healthy albeit rather lame in the last few years; some days he could climb stairs, others, I carried him. Oh, that reminds me of another name, Loado, sometimes Lodo Baggins, because he became heavier and more of a load in the latter days. But he was highly alert especially where food was concerned. He didn't want to miss out.

Nadine left for Pittsburgh in Dec 2010, and I think that her absence puzzled him. I could tell that he was concerned. He would lie near the bed on her side. He knew she was elsewhere, and accepted to wait for her return. But the days turned to weeks, then five months. When she returned to tie up loose ends, he was certainly happy to see her. I suspect that he had been sick for longer than I knew. Directly after she visited, he showed serious symptoms. I took him to the vet; they performed blood tests and an ultrasound. He had cancer throughout his liver. It was as if he waited to confirm that she were all right before he passed on. Surgery was an option, but the cancer was diffuse--highly unlikely it could be completely excised. The surgery itself might kill him or if not, at his age, a recovery would be very difficult. I didn't want him to suffer.

For the last week, I arranged my life around doing the things he liked. The day before he passed, we went to Golden Gardens, a splendid beach park and marina past the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. It had been his very favorite walk when we used to live in the city. As always, it was blustery. The wind almost tipped him over, but when he got weak, I simply carried him. We sat on a bench and looked out at the wide grey horizon and listened to the endless waves for a very long time.

We never want those moments to end, I suppose. But each moment turns to the next, and the next, then tomorrow is today, and we're left, not with each other, but with memories.

It was a comfort that I took Fritz to Golden Gardens the day before, because that had been the last day he could walk. Now he was so weak he couldn't even stand. I put my feelings into a box that day, for I had a job to do. I took him to the vet. They had a cushion laid out on the table to make him comfortable. More than anything else, I was touched by this small gesture.

I called Nadine and Heidi on my mobile phone as we waited; I held the phone up to his ear as Nadine talked to Fritz, and she told him his favorite story, the story of Puffy. It was the story of how we went to get him when he was a puppy, and on the way back, we stopped at McD's and gave him a few french fries, which made him fart so much that we almost named him Puffy.

Then we all sang "Wooo-eee Fritzi" and Nadine and Heidi said goodbye.

I laid him on the cushion and he was very relaxed, very content just to lie there. Dogs know when their time has come. I was there by his side, put my hand on his head, and recited the 23rd psalm under my breath. When I came to "My cup runneth over" the vet said, "He's gone." There was no sign that anything had changed. He simply passed out of existence.

Fritz Liebling Trenton 1996 - 2011

I apologize for ending the story this way, but it was bound to happen. It had to be said, though, so we could understand that he left this lesson for us: On that last day, as I drove to the vet, I had the car window down because it was early May, the first nice warm Spring day after an interminable season of drizzle and chill. Fritz had been unable to stand for even a few seconds. Astoundingly, he got up, walked over my lap, and stuck his nose out the window to sniff the air as he had always liked to do. I held him up with my left arm so he could fully take the air as I drove. He was still fully engaged in life, wicked and living to the fullest, right up to the very end. We can learn from him... that maybe we can go out with style yet.

Tell me about the squirrel that jumps into my mouth again

And so my man and dog story ends, though it isn't told only for our benefit, but also for Fritz, the dog who loved a story well told.