I suppose I could trot out trite cliches like "she was just a dog", and quickly refute them with evidence of her anthropomorphic nature, regaling you with tales of how she was more like a member of the family than a pet. But that would be a fiction, and a disservice to the memory of that stinky, obstinate, beloved beast we've known and loved for 15 years. She was, after all, a dog in all the right ways; from her auspicious collegiate beginnings to her nascent years in Minnesota, and all the way through to her deranged, geriatric quirkiness, she was the dog we pretended to love only begrudgingly, but tacitly knew was woven into the fabric of our family.
"Dan, free puppies!" I'm paraphrasing here, but that's how I imagined Bailey wound up in the back of my brother's battered red Ford Bronco on the way to his senior year at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; some ramshackle, shitty cardboard sign alerting my cousin Joe, hitching a ride back to Indiana, that my brother should snag a four-legged pal for his final booze-addled tour of duty at Miami. However it truly went down, I'd say it's a near certainty that she lived the first year of her life in abject squalor, and that she probably drank more beer and smoked more weed that year than I did in my own senior year of college. And that's saying a lot (at least about the beer). I don't recall the exact conditions, but the sign emblazoned on the outside of the house my brother lived in that proclaimed this decrepit dwelling the "Dawg Pound" was a clear indication that Bailey's first year in life was likely a cross between Tommy Boy, The Jersey Shore, and Animal House. Only filthier. Somehow, she persevered, but my brother was left with a bit of a conundrum upon graduation, as the apartment he had rented in Chicago didn't allow pets. Bailey didn't know it, but she was about to go from the cellar to the penthouse.
Despite the fiasco involved with our previous pooch, Charlie (what a freakin' nightmare that little furball was...), my parents agreed to take Bailey off of my brother's hands. She quickly became my mother's shadow, trailing after her with a drunkard's grin and a hilarious waddle due to her *ahem* sturdy physique. My memories of her adolescence are fleeting, but I recall her omnipresent sunny disposition, and more than anything, the anxious, frothing enthusiasm when she would hear the magic words, "You wanna go to the lake????" Nowhere was she more at ease, disappearing for hours on end to patrol the woods, roads, paths, and yards of our neighbors. She'd amble back, dopey look on her face, reeking like hell and soaked up to her haunches from wading to cool off and lap up some lake water. I'm certain we worried at first, but her aimless wandering around Bay Lake's summer shores quickly became the norm.
Things weren't alway rosy for Bailey up at Bay Lake. Or rather, my parents had to plan for the replacement of several screened doors and windows any time July 4th approached, as fireworks scared the ever-living shit out of our poor hellhound. Their thunderous roar in the sky would send her quivering and panicked through any obstacle, hoping to escape what I'm sure she felt was certain doom. It took us until she was in her teens to figure out that some drugs and a thundervest were a good solution, and by then, she was about as deaf as a stump anyways. It was these stupid quirks that made her our dog, not anyone else's. We knew that thunder and fireworks would send her into a conniption. We knew that if we left her alone for too long, she'd get pissed off and eat some trash out of the trash can. And we knew that, as this rebellious or tempermental behavior slowed, our beast was nearing her swan song.
I moved back to Minnesota on December 1, 2011, and about a week later, I became Bailey's caretaker, because she had run amok in the hands of the folks to whom my parents had entrusted her while they were in Florida. Or, to put a finer point on it, you should have heard to the incredulity in the voice of the man watching her as he related how she had opened doors and windows, and destroyed screens. Welcome to every fourth of July, fella. But I digress...so this smelly beast was my ward, and all she really needed was to bed fed twice daily, given some drugs, and let outside to do her biz in the front yard. Taking care of plants is more difficult. Looking back, I really cherish that I was able to spend some quality time with her in the twilight of her 15 years (that's 105 in human years, FYI). More than a handful of times, I'd return home with a lump in my throat, petrified that I'd be the one to "find" her. Little brought me more joy in my early days back home than to hear the jingle of her tags and collar as she realized someone was here to fill up the trough.
As I pen this missive through foggy, stinging tears, a chilling sense of loss and mortality courses through my veins. On two occasions, loved ones have been spared the permanent slumber brought by death's touch, as my dad wrestled Hodgkin's disease to the ground, and my sister, Mary, madly dashed down hundreds of stairs to escape tower 2 of the World Trade Center almost 11 years ago to the day. Reverberations of anger still pulse through my head at the named yet somewhat faceless adversaries that attempted to steal my loved ones from me. I know death comes for us all, and for dogs, much sooner, and my pragmatism (as well as Bailey's absurd longevity, especially given her general portliness), has allowed me to prepare for this inevitability, and to say goodbye long before I needed to do so. But I'm still sad, I'll still miss her, and I'll still wish she defied the odds and somehow lasted another year. But then, she's just a dog, right?
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