I took what will more than likely be my last dog for a walk this morning. I live in a working class urban area of a city beside a park. When I look out of the window of my sitting room I can see the grass and the trees and people walking their dogs, children playing, teenagers getting drunk and taking drugs, and terrorizing the neighbours and decent people as they try to go on about their business unharmed. All of this is to be expected when you live near a park and you have to learn to take the good with the bad, know when to mind your own business and when to step up.
Mostly it's about minding your own business.
My wife and I both love dogs and for the entirety of our relationship we have had dogs, all of these dogs have either been strays we took from the park - another takeaway from living beside a park is that people will stray dogs there - or dogs from rescue centres. We always tried to find the original owners of the dogs we found, and we rehomed almost all of them, except for the ones we kept.
This morning as I was walking Honey, so named because one cold and wet December night my wife ordered honey spare ribs from the local chinese takeaway. When the delivery driver arrived with our food there was a small wet bag of bones standing beside him holding one paw up and looking at my wife with the biggest saddest eyes ever. The driver said that she had been following him around from door to door because of the smell of the food. My wife wrapped her in a towel and took her in. The dog we had at the time - a Jack Russell Corgi cross named Buddy - took to her immediately.
At the time I knew none of this.
It was 2009 I was self employed and my business was failing. I was working over 70 hours a week and stressed all the time. My wife called me and told me to stop working and to come home because she had an early Christmas present for me. I said I could not come home because I needed the money. When she told me it was a dog I stopped what I was doing and raced home in record time.
She was beautiful but I was aware that she could belong to someone else, so we put up posters with her description in the local area and said that we would give it two weeks and if no one claimed her we would keep her. One guy knocked on the door on the 14th day. He said that he heard we had found a Jack Russell and that he thought it was his dog. We were both very distressed because by then we loved her to bits. I was ready to knock the guy out because this was a dog that was afraid of everything: when I walked her if there was a strong gust of wind she would panic and try to run away. If the sun went behind a cloud suddenly then she tried to run away. Also she was skin and bone when she first came to us.
She had been starved.
To this day I have to leave a bowl of food out for her. She used to eat her fill then takes a scoop of food and hide it in her bed. If the bowl is ever empty she hides under the kitchen table until and won't come out until someone fills it. This was a dog that had been ill treated as a puppy. She only 6 months old when she came to us. My wife, being the calmer of the two us in all situations, asked him to describe her. He gave a generic description of a Jack Russell. She asked him if she had long hair in a leading tone of voice, the guy said yes. She said hold on then went in and got our 8 year old dog Buddy and said to the guy, "Is this your Dog?", the guy said yes, then my wife said well this is an 8 year old boy, and waved my dogs penis in his face. The guy left. We got a dog license for Honey and got her chipped at the vets.
Anyway, I digress. This morning as I was walking Honey in the park I came around the corner where there are two big old Oak trees. Except they are not there any more. Where there used to stand two proud old oak trees are now two sad looking stumps. I felt a sadness that was inexplicable to me at the time.
I first noticed the trees when we got our first dog, until then I never paid any attention to the park. I just used to see it coming to and from work and when I looked out of my sitting room window. We got our first dog Holly when my wife called me at work one day and said that there was this dog that had been hanging around the park that morning and that it did not look at all well. She was worried about the dog but she had to go to work. She asked me to keep my eyes peeled for this dog as I worked locally at the time. My wife went off to work and on the way home she saw the dog and managed to get it to come home with her.
Man, this dog was a mess. She was dirty and stank like hell and had to hold herself up along a wall to walk. We reckoned that she had been tied to the one spot for so long that the muscles on one side of her body had wasted. With some love from us and attention from the vet she could walk again. I never put up a missing poster for her because there was no way that I was going to let her go back to an owner that treated her like that.
Anyway Holly - she was a beautiful border collie - used to freak out whenever she saw anything that resembled a rope, so leads were out. She used to bang her head off the wall when I tried to put a lead on her so I thought, what the hell, the park was only a 4 second walk from the house. She loved to walk with me in the field and ran around in joy, playing with other dogs and just doing zoomies. One day coming home she ran out into the street and got hit by a car. We took her to the vet and he fixed her up, he had to put a metal pin in one of back legs. We were very upset and when we got home I remember sitting down beside her one day and talking to her. I explained that I knew she did not like leads but from now on if she wanted to go for a walk then she would have to wear one. I swear to God, it was like she understood every word I spoke. The next day I put the lead on her and she was fine. We went for a walk and it was great.
I started to notice the trees when the seasons changed. In Winter, just before they lost their leaves I could hear the wind getting trapped in the branches. When It was Winter they were like stick figures they were so bare. In Spring they started to get their leaves back, and in Summer they were in full bloom. I loved to see them, it felt like they were watching over the people and the dogs in the park.
Back then the park was not landscaped and had no paths. It was just fields of grass. Then the County Council decided they were going to prettify the park. They were going to put a steel fence around it and some flower beds, and plant new trees all around the fields and put in cycle and walking paths. The first stage of this was to dig up the ground for the fence. Whilst walking Holly one day she started to drink some water that had filled one of the holes for the fence posts. I tugged her way and we continued on our walk.
The next morning when I got up I was not greeted with the same enthusiasm from her as always and her eyes and tongue were yellow. Long story short, we took her to the vet, she had Weils' disease, which you get from ingesting rats pee. The digging in the park had disturbed a rats nest. The vet told us that he could try to save her but that she would probably die anyway and that it would be a horribly painful death. We made the decision to get her put down. We both loved her too much to put her through that.
This was the first and only time my wifes sons saw me cry.
To all those non pet owners out there: pets do many things, they make a house a home, they help people to bond, they give love all day long, and they teach kids about the concept of death and grieving. I came along when the two boys were young teenagers and it was not easy on any of us. The boys were missing their Dad, I was only a kid myself and I am sure I got plenty wrong. But when Holly came along it was the first time we bonded as a family.
The second time we bonded as a family was when we got Buddy. Buddy was the best named dog ever. Well, it was his second name. It was some time after Holly passed and my wife and the kids wanted a dog and so did I. My wife and I went to a rescue centre and I was feeling the pressure. There was still tension between the kids and I. After all I was an intruder in their home and they were teenagers now at a time when young men are experimenting and finding out about all type so things and getting confused about all types of things. I wanted another border collie and thought that the kids would want a manly dog as well. A mid to large breed I was thinking to myself. But the final choice lay with my wife. We were getting the dog as my present to her for her fortieth birthday.
When we got to the dog shelter they had all the dogs in their own cages and they all looked great. There were border collies, german shepherds, labradors and... the yard dog that the staff wanted to keep as a staff pet ran over and jumped into my wifes bags, which she had placed on the ground to pet another dog, smiled up at her and started to wag his tail.
That was it, she was smitten.
The staff had named him Frodo - the Lord of the Rings had been released the previous summer - and they wanted to keep him but the owner of the shelter said no, all dogs have to be re-homed. I thought I had fucked up and the kids were going to hate this little lap dog. But they loved him from the moment they met him. We named him Buddy because he was everyones Buddy. This dog would run to a snarling Rotweiler and try to lick its face.
We bonded again over this dog. We all loved him. One year we had some trouble with one of the kids and my wife and I were both very upset. My wife used to cry at the drop of a hat at this time. Buddy used to get very worried and jump on top of her and just console her and lick the tears away. When the trouble was coming to an end Honey came along and he accepted and loved her from day one. He lived to be fifteen.
The night we got him put down - because of kidney failure - was the night before my wifes fifty fifth birthday.
Honey has had a tumour on her shoulder for a while now. We did not get it checked out because they are common with dogs. It has not caused her any discomfort or pain and my wife and I keep an close eye on it. This morning when I got home from the walk, I noticed that Honey was licking it and that it seemed to have grown twice as large overnight and it is red and angry instead of its normal pink colour. We take her to the vet tonight and hopefully everything will be okay. Either way this will be the last dog we own. My wife and I are moving to an apartment across the park from us. We will be able to see the Park from the balcony but you are not allowed pets. The move will give us a lot of financial independence and we don't have to do it until after Honey has passed.
But this morning on our walk when I saw that the trees were gone forever it hit me in a way I cannot explain. I think it has something to do with how time passes without you noticing and continuity. I put down roots with my family. You think of roots as being permanent, because family means continuity. If I can keep the memory of all my dead dogs in my mind, if I can keep the memory of those trees alive, then there is continuity for them. I have never had children, but I love my stepsons like they are my own children. Both of the kids (they are two fine men now, both in their thirties) are doing well, and we are very close as a family, we have our own shared experiences, and we have all the dogs we loved in common. I know that when I am gone I put down strong enough roots with them that there will be continuity for me. There is an element of fear and regret on my part knowing that I will probably never own another dog and that I will never see those trees again, and that there remains the possibility that we are going to hear bad news regarding Honey this evening.
For some reason an echo of the empty space where those trees used to exist resonates within me. All the dead trees and all the dead dogs; maybe there is echo of them all resonating within me.
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/auzc5p/in_memory_of_trees_and_dogs/
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