On losing the Marquis de Lafayette

 

Elsewhere I described how the Marquis de Lafayette came to live with us.

He and George remained soul-mates, although Jacob was clearly part of their pack. When we first got him, he did NOT like affection of any kind. (It also turns out that he had bb pellets in him—we only found this out yesterday.) But everyone loved him, and loved loving on him. He was just too cute not to cuddle. Sometimes he tolerated the affection, and sometimes he enjoyed it.

He always adored Jacob, and I sometimes think that Jacob was his gateway to accepting affection.

He went from being grumpy about other beings to allowing a cat, Winston Churchill (who fawned on Marquis–they do say that Churchill was a bit of a Francophile), to eat out of his bowl and to snuggle with him.

Marquis had rules. He and George took turns in the living room at night—one would be in our bedroom, and the other in the living room, and they’d swap at various points. I think one of his biggest disappointments is that Ella wouldn’t do that. (Ella, who has good hearing, sleeps on our bed and leaps up barking if there is a weird noise in the house.)

Marquis was a worrier. He worried too much about smoke alarms, but his concerns about other things were usually justified. He was the first to figure out we were going on a trip. He told on the other dogs when they were doing something they shouldn’t.

He worried about me. A lot. When I would write at home, he would settle in under my desk, often resting his head on one of my feet. (Seriously, how do any of y’all get anything written without a cat you can scratch and a dog resting his head on your foot?) That was fine till I was having trouble with a passage, when I tend to talk to myself, trying them out loud. That really bothered him, and he’d go and get a dog toy, and then try to lure me away. He’d lure me to the porch or to an arbor outside.

[One of the signs of his aging was that it was uncomfortable to get under the desk. It broke my heart.]

Marquis and I spent a lot of time on the chaise in that arbor and on a couch on the porch (or on its predecessor, a screened-in porch). He was a BIG believer in naps, and I’m not saying he’s wrong, and he often persuaded me that I needed to stop working on that passage and take a nap, or lie with him in the backyard.

He was determined (or pig-headed, or stubborn, depending on how inconvenient his intransigence was). He sailed through obedience school, and was generally reliable but some things were too tempting. For instance, we have Gulf Coast toads in our yard, a relative of cane toads, and (supposedly) they exude something that gets dogs a little high. Marquis loved holding them in his mouth. I sometimes wonder if anyone was walking by when I was yelling things like, “STOP SUCKING TOADS!” or “LEAVE THE FUCKING TOADS ALONE!”

He was a ratter par excellence. George and Duke were basically rat archeologists, and they were fascinated by places rats had been, and so (more than once) frantically examined a rat place while the rat ran between their legs to get away. While Marquis fell for that a few times, in general, he could be counted on to get the rat. But he wasn’t a predator. He loved strange cats, most other dogs, and all people. But I really think he often pretended he didn’t. He didn’t leap on people or sniff crotches the way George did. He just let himself be scratched.

At one point, we were headed on vacation for a couple of weeks, just at the moment that a friend’s house (they were remodeling) had the main beam develop a crack. They stayed in our house—we told them they could board the dogs, but they didn’t. They had a little bitty munchkin, and George was not great with little bitty anythings (because he was exuberant). They decided the solution was to run George and Marquis every day for miles to exhaust them so they wouldn’t bug the munchkin. Every day, Marquis would suddenly charge across the path, so my friend still has a scar on one of his ankles from the leash burns. Marquis had rules.

 

I’m a big believer in the idea that you have to give dogs a job. And, so we tried to interest Marquis in fetching a tennis ball. We live near a set of tennis courts, and so picked up a bunch of tennis balls that ended up in the creek. Marquis had no interest in chasing tennis balls. But, there are tennis balls in every room in the house. I’ve sometimes found tennis balls in luggage when I’ve left a bag out for packing, and I’ve seen Marquis place a dog toy in my baggage. There is always a tennis ball in my closet. I’ve tried moving the tennis ball, and another appears.

For several years, Jacob was running with Marquis, and Marquis has never forgotten the joy of those days. Even to the last, when Marquis (who always insisted on a walk) could only walk two or three houses up the street, he would harumph and walk faster (or trot a bit) if a dog ran past, as though he was saying, “I could do that, you punk.”

Marquis had sensitive hearing, and smoke alarms were hell to him. The only thing that could comfort him was Jacob taking him on a walk. He was smart, and so he knew that my turning on the fan while I was cooking was potentially a problem. This all made cooking once Jacob went off to college a bit problematic.

I sometimes joke that Jim married me because Chester was such a great dog, since we had such wildly different politics, but I think there is something to our bonding over a rational love for cats and dogs—a love that is about the pets themselves and not about the satisfaction we get from pets loving us. And so, when a pet gets a certain level of illness, you have to stop thinking about how much you love the pet—you have to take that right out of the equation—and instead try to think entirely about how the dog or cat is feeling. But, of course, no one knows what it’s like to be a bat.

I don’t know why Marquis put a tennis ball in every room; I don’t know when he did it. But it warms my heart every time I see one. When we got the information from the vet, we knew that our love for him meant that we had to love him more than we loved his being with us.

And we made the decision we made. And we try not to think about a life that doesn’t involve finding a tennis ball in every room. But I do think about his getting to run with George again.