There are worse things in the world than digging a hole to bury your dead dog in the front yard in the dark so the boys don't see his body in the morning and hitting a root or a rock or cement or the limit of your own shallow strength or Whatever with the shovel and tripping backwards, somehow, and spasmodically (I'll call it falling but empirically you would really have to say it's more accurately termed) flailing into the street and hitting your gimpy shoulder, which is gimpy because now you "swim to stay in shape", flat on the curb, as if Tony Soprano had kicked you. There are worse things. I've experienced, them, and god fucking knows (or willing) I'll experience them again.
But let's just say this wasn't the best night ever. Let's just say that.
We don't know how old he was. We got him when Robbie was about a year old I think, a little more maybe, because we had decided it was time to get a dog. Like you do. We had the house, we had the baby, we had just built a fence....so next comes the dog. Natch. Dawn wanted to be selective, to go through a service, to look at labradors and golden retrievers and such. Like you do. Me, I wanted a mutt. A mangy mangled moppy mick of a mutt. Who needed a home to go to, and a bowl to drink from, and a door that would open.
And though she may deny it, I didn't really have to make too hard of a sell once we saw him. He reminded her of Scruffy, the old family dog that patrolled the backyard of her youth, and he didn't have a harmful bone in his body. He passed the "kid test" with flying colors--you could yank and pull and pinch and poke the fuck out of him, and he was cool with it in his mangy way. So of course we got him. And of course we called him Ringo.
My work friends didn't know I had a dog and were always shocked to find out I did, because they always talked about their dogs like their dogs were kids, like you should recognize the name of their fucking dog when they use it in a conversation. I referred to myself as a 1970s style dog owner. We feed him and give him a place to sleep and clean up his shit when we get around to it and pet him when he seems to want it and he, in turn, acts like a dog. And it's cool.
And he got old quick. He got deaf, and then he got mostly blind, and then he pretty much got totally blind. And we didn't know what to do for him, after awhile, the last few years, except just make him comfortable, and give him a place to be who was, and so we did.
He seemed better lately, Dawn had just said. But he wasn't, not really. I wonder if we broke his heart, a little bit, when we got Candy this spring. A beautiful fuzzy little puppy with the best credentials that we paid a bit less than one month's mortgage to secure and had been waiting for and talking about for weeks upon weeks. We acted like we had never had a dog before. We treated her like a kid. We expected other people to recognize her name when we use it in conversation. I wonder if that fucked him up on some level.
But he did liven up the last few months, with a puppy nipping at his heels. He got a bit of a hop to his wobble. This morning when I woke up he was just standing in the hallway staring blindly into the computer room. And I wondered what he was seeing, in his mind's eye, where his journey was taking him. And I patted him on the back, or at least I'm going to choose to believe I did, and he in that moment knew I loved him.
Because I did, godammit. I did.
RIP Ringo Dingo Dawg. RImuthafuckingP.
