Chester Burnette arrived in my life as a gangly puppy that the kindly neighbors had found hiding under a car at a gas station. We lived in an area just far enough outside of Chapel Hill that assholes would consider it an appropriate area for dumping a puppy “in the country.” Do not get me started on those assholes.
The short version is that there are a lot of assholes whose whole approach to decision-making is: what course of action will cause me the least trouble in the short term, since I am a moral nihilist when it comes to thinking about how my actions affect anyone else?
They dump puppies “in the country.” They do a lot of asshole things.
Our neighbors brought us the gangly puppy, and I said we would take him while we found his home (I assumed he was lost). I noticed he had a hole in his thigh, so I decided to take him to the vet. The vet looked him over, removed the bb from his thigh, and started telling me about how to feed and raise a Great Dane. I kept saying, “Oh, we aren’t going to keep him,” and he’d say, “Yeah, so about protein….”
Reader, I kept him.
He wasn’t a pure Great Dane—there was almost certainly a fair amount of shepherd, but he was half to three-quarters Dane. He came into my life at a point that a marriage was imploding and I was getting denied tenure (short version: don’t piss off a Dean or that random asshole in another department with a lot of power in the college, and I did both). He was clearly going to be a big guy, and clearly a comfort to me, so I named him Chester Burnette (I was relying on an album that had the name misspelled) after Howlin’ Wolf, because of his song “300 Pounds of Comfort and Joy.”
Life got complicated, including my finding myself driving a 40 ft. manual transmission moving truck that only had an am radio and a intermittently failing a/c, having missed the crossing of the Mississippi, at some random rest stop in Tennessee, with Chester showing signs of lower intestine shenanigans, and a cat I hadn’t seen in hours in the cab. Their food was in the back of the truck that had a jammed door ever since some asshole had cut me off. I’d blown up a marriage, been denied tenure, and couldn’t even feed these beings dependent on me. I had no reason to think I would get tenure at my new job given how thoroughly I’d fucked up my previous job.
I was suicidal.
I could not imagine facing another day. But I couldn’t figure out a way to kill myself that wouldn’t endanger Chester and the invisible cat. So, I decided I would get through this drive, and if I still wanted to kill myself in four years I would do it. (I have no clue why I set on the number four, but I did.) Procrastination can be your friend.
I got a funny little place in Columbia with a huge backyard, picked up another cat that Chester loved. They chased each other inside and out of the house. It was a long and mild spring, so I kept the back door open. As I sat at my computer, trying to write the book that would save my career, the cat would come crashing into that room with Chester behind him. Then the cat would turn around and chase Chester into the yard. It was a huge backyard with beautiful huge trees. He had a red ball, that he was convinced the squirrels were trying to get, and he spent hours banging the ball around the yard, keeping it from the squirrels. I loved watching him.
He was obsessed with the red ball, an “unbreakable” ball I got at Petsmart or something. It was big, about 14” in diameter, and he loved to carry it around. He would show it to the cat he liked, who never seemed to want to play with it. But the squirrels. When he saw a squirrel, he’d run to the ball and knock it away from them. Sitting at my computer, staring out the window, I invented a fairly complicated narrative about Chester believing that there was a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball, and he had to keep it from happening.
Of course, when he got excited, he’d run to the ball and knock it around. When he was bored, he’d run to the ball and knock it around. Basically, he was stimulus:: red ball. I would throw it for him, but it was big and I couldn’t throw it far. He was carefully polite (although clearly disappointed) in my lame throwing abilities.
Since I was broke, Chester and I spent a lot of time walking. Hours, especially nights. He almost literally walked me through one of the most difficult parts of my life.
One night, when I was walking along a very isolated trail, a guy stepped out of the bushes directly in front of me, took one look at Chester, and stepped back in. It was only days later that I realized what had happened.
While Chester had never grown to be 300 pounds of comfort and joy, he had grown to be 135 pounds of comfort and joy. And protection.
I took ten days to drive to LA to visit family, and Chester and I wandered through parks. When I thought I might stay in a park in Kansas, and it turned out to be meth heaven, it was Chester who let me know this was not an okay situation. He also scared the shit out of a guy who thought about harassing me. Another time in Texas (which has “parking areas” but not enough rest stops), I stopped at a parking area filled with trucks, and I needed to pee. So I went off toward the bushes, and was mildly puzzled by a rattling noise from the bushes. Chester simply stopped at some point and would not let me go further. This obedient dog was not letting me get near those bushes, and he remained on full alert. When I’d had more sleep, I realized why.
He hated little dogs. I don’t know why. With much work, I got him to think they were okay. Then there was the puppy with whom he was playing who rolled under his belly and bit the most prominent thing. After that, I never tried to persuade him to like little dogs. He also once got entangled in a painting because he was wearing one of those e-collar things, and I had to get a neighbor help me get him untangled.
I was broke, but had a nice chair I’d inherited from my grandmother. He was not allowed in that chair. Every day when I came home from work, I’d see him jump out of that chair as I approached the front door.
His dog food bag was open, and the cat food bowl was on the ground, but he never ate more of his food than he should, and he only ate cat food that fell out of the bowl. On the other hand, a raccoon attacked one of my cats, and he ran to the rescue, but she was badly beaten up, and was on appetite stimulant cat food. He got the nearly-empty can out of the trash, licked it clean, and then ate a bag of potatoes, a box of cereal, and various other things I no longer remember. Frantically, I called the vet to say what had happened, and she said, “How big is your dog?” I said, “135 pounds,” and she said, “Oh, he’s fine.”
If she had had to pick up the poop I had to pick up later I’m not sure she would have said “fine,” but certainly good enough.
I sometimes took him to meetings on campus for complicated reasons, and he was productively bored. When I started to date Jim, Chester would bring the red ball to him rather than me. Chester was a good judge of character. Also a good judge of who had a decent throwing arm.
While I was pregnant, we were told Chester had pancreatic cancer, so we let him get on the couch. He didn’t have pancreatic cancer. He had eaten something he shouldn’t have. After that, he was always allowed on the couch. In fact, after that, every dog has been allowed on the couch. We just get couches with washable covers. It was a dumb rule.
The only time he did something really bad was when my pregnancy got glitchy, and I went to the hospital. He was so upset that he stood on the dishwasher door and ate a plate of chocolate chip cookies off the counter. The next day, I came back and was restricted to bed rest. He would not leave my side unless he absolutely had to for the next ten days. But the cookies, although they didn’t have enough chocolate to do him any harm, gave him terrible gas. I thought I was going to get brain damage. Someone recommended I keep a candle lit, but all I could think was the image of this huge sheet of flame from time to time.
Chester loved Jacob. And sometimes when every other attempt to get Jacob to nap had failed, I would put Chester on the ground, and Jacob up against him. I still don’t understand why that wasn’t my first choice. It always worked. Jacob could pull Chester’s tongue, ears, paws, or poke him in the eye, and Chester didn’t care. Jacob loved books that had pictures of various trucks, and sometimes Jacob would “read” the books to Chester. Chester loved that boy so much.
One winter, we accidentally left the red ball on the back porch, and it froze. The house was, from the back, three stories (it was split-level), and when Chester rolled the ball off it, the ball hit the ground and shattered. So, we bought another “unbreakable” ball (that’s when we learned why it was in scare quotes), but it was blue. Dogs are color-blind, so it would be fine.
It was not.
I would throw it, he would run after it, and then get to it, and turn around and give me the most guilt-inducing look you can imagine. And my mother was Irish Catholic, so I have a pretty high standards for guilt-induing looks. We rubbed butter on it, we used excited voices, Jim scored it with a drill so it was like the one that broke. No go. We found a red one.
When things get serious with someone, you say, “Here is something that has to happen in our lives.” While we were dating, Jim had said, “If we have a child it has to have the middle name of Allison,” and I had said, “We have to have a Harlequin Dane named Hubert Sumlin.”
Later I found out that Harlequin Danes are often deaf, and they are wickedly over-bred in Texas, so we rescued a blue, named him Hubert Sumlin, and Chester had a buddy. They had so much fun. We lived in a place with a dog next door that they loved to hate, and they would run up and down the fence barking at that dog. If Hubert got hold of the red ball, Chester would run to the fence and bark as though the dog next door was out. Hubert would drop the ball and run to the fence.
The neighbor dog wasn’t there.
Chester lived much longer than Danes usually do—perhaps because the false diagnosis of pancreatic cancer meant his stomach was nailed down. But he also lived longer than he should have, in that I could not let that boy go. He was over twelve when we finally had to make the right decision, but we made it.
I love that dog, and so, when I need a name for someone, especially someone with whom I don’t have a lot of sympathy, I use his name. It keeps me honest about others.
He was a good dog. He is a good dog.
