my dog ate a log Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Advice on Writing and Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

When I was a kid, my family got a dog, and I got sent to doggy training school with this dog. This was in the day when you didn’t start training your dog till it was six month old, since the training consisted of yanking it around with a choke collar. (I’ve since been told that this method was actually popularized by literal Nazis. I choose to believe that’s true.) Since the dog weighed as much as I did, it didn’t go well. Or maybe it did. During the whole training, he was the least well-behaved dog in the class (with some kind of shepherd a close second). On the day of the final exam, it was windy and there were bits of paper, bags, and leaves blowing around. Almost every other dog in the class was out of their minds running after the flotsam. Jack got first place, since he was the least badly-behaved dog in the class. (The Shepherd got second.) Jack went on to be a wonderfully well-behaved dog, within reason. (Where he found all those bras he placed on the front lawn I don’t know.)

When I was an adult, I got a Malamute mix, and went to a dog training class. The trainer, who had a Sheltie, gave us lots of advice, and had us do things like teach a long recall by having the dog attached by a long length of clothesline. The scar between my fingers is no longer visible. For complicated reasons, I also ended up with a Dane/Shepherd mix (Chester Burnette). So I trained both dogs. Chester was so good he became a demo dog, and I flirted with the idea of becoming a dog trainer. After all, I had done such a great dog with Chester. This is called post hoc ergo propter hoc. Meanwhile, the Malamute mix (named Hoover) would take off if the door was opened more than two inches. I dismissed that training failure as my not having been experienced enough. Nah. He was a Malamute.

I read a lot of books and articles on dog training (and a fair amount on cat training), and it was all very emphatic, very clear, and contradictory. It was all in the genre of “You just have to [do this one thing] and you will have a perfectly behaved dog.” But, were that true, then there would only be one dog training book, or all the books would say the same thing. There’s more than one book, and they contradict each other. So, training a dog is not a simple thing that involves doing just this one thing.

I ended up deciding that all the advice was good. It had worked for the trainer, and their training of their dog. Almost all advice about dog training is good, but it isn’t all relevant to every situation. At that time, there was a big thing about dominance in dog training (the Monks of New Skete were big), and that worked with the Malamute. If I wanted him to sit, I needed to plant my feet, stand up straight, and say, “Sit” like I was a boot camp instructor. That was good advice. For Hoover.

If I did that with Chester, he would climb onto the couch and cover his eyes with his paws. It was bad advice for Chester.

At 38, I became a parent. I didn’t want to parent the way my parents had, so I read so very many books on parenting. And it was just like the dog training books. Every book said that you should do it this way because it worked for us. And, like the dog training books, they contradicted each other. I’m willing to believe it did work out for them. But, were raising a child easy and straightforward, there would be one parenting book, or they would all say the same thing, There isn’t and they don’t.

Almost all advice about parenting is good, insofar as I’m certain it works for some parents with some children, but it isn’t all relevant to every situation. One of the particularly rigid and doctrinaire books was written by someone who had to retract a lot of it when they had a special needs child.

In other words, I think a lot of both dog training and parenting advice is post hoc ergo proctor hoc. People engaged in certain practices (or believed they did), and they got a good outcome, so they believe that those practices led to those outcomes. And they told others to do it the way they believed they had done it. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the dominance-based practices of the Monks of New Skete worked despite what they did; maybe the “spare the rod” folks did more damage than good, but had enough kids enough not-damaged that they could claim success.

More important, even if those practices worked for them, that doesn’t mean that those practices will work for everyone.

I started working in a Writing Center when I was around 19. And I’ve been paying attention to advice about writing ever since. It’s almost all good, even Strunk and White, in that it’s almost all going to work for someone in some situation. Some writers get through a whole career by working themselves into a shame-filled panic. I have never met a successful writer who wrote a Ramistic outline before starting a draft, but I suspect Cotton Mather did, and he wrote a lot. I met a writer who claimed to write from beginning to end without substantial revising. I’m dubious, but maybe it worked for him. Some people write for two hours every morning; some people write late at night; some people find that binge-writing works for them; some people write a little every day.

So, I wish that people looking for advice on any of those things knew that just because someone thinks something worked for them doesn’t mean it actually did, although it might have, but that doesn’t mean you’re at fault if it doesn’t work for you.

Self-help rhetoric is pretty consistent. It has these steps:
1) You are failing at what you want to do;
2) You can succeed if you do this simple thing;
3) I know because this simple thing has worked for me, and the people with whom I’ve worked.
There are lots of great things about self-help rhetoric. It’s comforting. It’s hopeful. But the way in which it’s hopeful (“all you have to do is [this]”) can mean it’s shaming when it doesn’t work. And that’s the moment when the simplicity of self-help rhetoric becomes toxic.

Self-help advice is always true in that it has worked for someone. But it’s never always true. And it never makes writing, or training a dog, or raising a child, easy. Because none of them is an easy thing to do.

Unless you have a sheltie.

Chester Burnette: 135 pounds of comfort and joy

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.

Can dogs eat…. your head?

The whole process whereby we got Clarence remains a little unclear to me. We had had three dogs for a while, and Duke died. Jim got in touch with a group that did mastiff rescue, and then had his heart stolen by Louis, so we had three dogs. And then the mastiff rescue people got in touch with us. They had a four-year old mastiff. And so we ended up with four dogs.

So, we took the pack—Ella, Louis, Marquis—up to a neutral place where they could all meet (basically a barn). And they all wandered around and sniffed each other and things, and Clarence came up and put his head in my lap, and, well, that was that. We would later find out this was odd—Clarence didn’t like strange dogs, and really didn’t want to be approached by them. He wasn’t always okay with strangers. But he was fine with this pack, and he was fine with us.

Having passed the adoption test (they have to be careful about people who are getting dogs because of dog fighting), Jim and I went up and got him.

Louis was dubious about Clarence, but Louis was pretty much dubious about everyone (and kind of the fun police). And Louis ended up getting along fine with Clarence, basically because Ella was actually in charge of the pack.

When we adopt a new dog, we set up a bed on the floor in some room in such a way that I and the pack are all sleeping together. For Clarence, we set that up in the living room, but it happened to be a night with a major thunderstorm, something that always agitates dogs. And that’s when I discovered that Clarence’s previous owner had, for reasons that remain obscure to me, decided it would be a great idea to teach a 160 lb. dog to jump on people and nom their arms. So, I found myself with a 160 lb. (or maybe 170 since he’s thinner now than he was then, and we’re pretty sure he’s now around 165) dog who was leaping around, especially leaping on me, and trying to hold my arm in his mouth.

I threw the other dogs out of the room and was, for the first time in my life, edging on intimidated by one of my dogs. But it was so clearly high spirits, and—and this continued to be the case—although he was grabbing my arm in his massive mouth and holding it tight, I didn’t feel any teeth. I still don’t know how he did that. He spent the first night across the room from me. The next night he was closer. The third night he was spooning with me.

The storm passed, in both senses.

I’m calling him Clarence, but we hadn’t decided on his name. We were considering various big guys, such as Charlie Mingus, but also guys with wrinkled faces, like Willie Nelson or Levon Helm. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was a small, wiry guy, so no resemblance, but Clarence felt like a Clarence (and I do love me some Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown). Also, Brown had, as far as I know, a good and long life, and we wished that for him. He came to us with the clear signs of having been fed the wrong food for four years, but no real signs of abuse (except for, in the backyard, a male carrying something).

He was a momma’s boy from the beginning. We discovered that it was cheaper to buy twin mattresses (he required two, on top of each other) than dog beds. We discovered that he got cold at night, so we took to putting a blanket over him when he went to bed. He often created a doggy burrito. It was hilarious.

We discovered that he got lonely at around 5 am, and wanted me to roll off my bed onto his. If he had a bad dream in the night, he would insist that I move over and give him room to get in bed with us. We have a ritual of waking up and cuddling with all the dogs and whatever cats choose to show up first thing in the morning. Clarence would wake us up, and then pretend to be asleep. He would, and I’m not kidding, fake snore.

We often joked, or perhaps it wasn’t entirely a joke, that he would wait till we were asleep, and then unzip his dog suit and emerge as a really empathic and mildly neurotic human.

He loved walks. He hated strange dogs approaching him. He loved stuffed animals, and would cuddle with them. He was intimidated by the cats. If a cat lay on his bed, he would come and get one of us and look sad. Or just lie on the floor and hope the cat would move. He would, if they wanted, let them boop him, but he was always at least a little worried that they would kick his ass.

In other words, he was intimidated by a being that weighed .06 of him. Our cats weigh less than his head. He could have eaten either of our cats in one gulp. But, instead, he was sad and hoped he could get his bed back.

The whole “no strange dogs” thing was fraught. It’s really common for dogs who are totally comfortable with other dogs off-leash to get freaky on-leash. The problem is: if you have a dog who weighs 165 lbs, who can swallow some dogs whole, you can’t risk that he’s got an on- or off-leash distinction. So, after someone lost control of their dog, and it charged Clarence, and he alpha rolled it, Clarence (and Jim and I) spent a day every week with a really good dog trainer, who got him to be okay with other dogs. As long as I wasn’t holding the leash.

As I said, Clarence was a momma’s boy. So, for years, I was the one who held his leash. And, when we saw a strange dog, I got nervous because I was afraid that Clarence would get agitated, and then Clarence sensed my agitation, and he thought he needed to protect me. It was a nasty spiral of anxiety about the anxiety of each other. The solution was for Jim to hold the leash, but still, when things got twitchy, Clarence attached himself to me. So, for Clarence’s sake, I had to learn to manage my anxiety more effectively than the method on which I’d relied for 40+ years–pretending I wasn’t anxious. He needed me to recognize when I was anxious, even when I “thought” I wasn’t. I did that for Clarence, but it turns out that it applied in all sorts of other areas. Clarence demanded that I learn something about myself. Clarence made me a better person.

Clarence did that with Pearl too. She came to us a dog who didn’t like to eat, who didn’t like people, but who loved Clarence. And Pearl, on walks, checked in with Clarence (and Jim—she’s a daddy’s girl) in order to be a little bit more brave. And she is. Because of him.

Clarence tolerated Louis, but he loved Ella and Pearl. He was the gruff older brother who was sweetly grumpy about their getting up in his face. On walks, when Pearl was upset (by airsocks, people with yellow vests, really scary leaves, that asshole Labradoodle) she checked in with him, and he had this move that always gave me a catch in my throat. It was a kind of shoulder bump, and it calmed her down. We all need that shoulder bump. I miss that shoulder bump.

Clarence loved rolling in the grass, and his method made me laugh every time. His roll started from his nose. He rolled in various places along busy streets, and it was fun to watch drivers laugh. He had a few favorite spots—we really don’t know why. Sometimes he wouldn’t roll on a favorite spot, and we never figured out the criteria.

Clarence’s previous owner probably paid a lot of money for him (since he appeared to be a purebred bull mastiff, and they’re pricey) and then fed him the wrong food (as is clear from his paws), taught him to jump on people, nom arms, mistrust males holding things while in the yard, and yet gave him enough love that he came into our home expecting to be loved. So they did something very important very right.

Mastiffs have a lifespan of 8-10 years. Given that he had clear signs of having been fed the wrong food, we figured he’d be on the short side. About a month after we got him, I gave him a corncob (something we used to do—the dogs nom on it for a while, and then cheerfully lose interest). He swallowed it whole. It was an obstruction. We ended up at the emergency vet. They stapled down his stomach (thereby preventing bloat—what kills a lot of big dogs), so I’ll admit I had hopes that he might live longer. But last summer was hot and long.

We used to walk the dogs for two miles every day. And Clarence had three places that he stopped to roll. Near the coffee place, where he got a treat, in front of an auto repair place (where people driving by would laugh), and on a particular lawn (sometimes two). In summer, Jim would wear a pack that had water and water bowls, and we’d stop halfway through and give them water. But, even so, Clarence was panting way too much (we all were—it was a long summer), so we took to taking a one-mile walk with him—up to the coffee place, where he got a treat—and then back home where we dropped him off, and then took the girls for another mile. He was always thrilled, to his last day, to go on a walk, but also quite happy to be dropped off.

He was stoical. In the four years we had him, he never yelped. He once flinched (this last week, when I touched a sensitive spot). But, he stopped eating, and seemed to be holding himself as though he was in pain, and so we took him to the vet, discovered he had cancer that had metastasized, and we were in the realm of palliative care. So we were. And we got lots of great advice from friends who had been through the same thing, some very recently, even the same time (take lots of photos and videos, offer scrambled eggs, indulge). We gave him lots of pain meds, and were getting up twice during the night in order to ensure he was always medicated. And then it was time. Pearl and Ella saw him after he died, but we put them away while they took his body away, and I watched them track the path of his body.

And so, here we are, without him, but blessed and better because of him.

Winston and Louis

cat and dog cuddling

[I posted this originally in January of 2018, but took it down when it became part of a book. Since the book has been out a while, I’m putting it back up.]

Today we lost a 14 year old cat and a 2 year old dog.

We got Winston Churchill and Emma Goldman on the same day around 14 or 15 years ago because someone in the Cedar Park neighborhood we were then living in (big mistake) was influenced by the “Secret Life of Dogs” (I assume) and so let his dogs out at night. They killed little dogs and cats, among them a neighbor’s dog two cats of ours. One of many reasons I’m glad we moved out of Cedar Park.

We got the two kittens from different rescue groups, and they bonded instantly. Winston was (we found out quickly) ill, but before we figured that out, he was waking us up around 4 am to harangue us, so we named him Winston Churchill (who was famous for the same behavior). It turns out Winston had a virus, which he passed to Emma Goldman (named that because she was clearly a total anarchist), and so I had to pill him multiple times a day. One of my secret superpowers is pilling animals (I also include fixing wonky toilets, getting total strangers to tell me their life stories, and losing things), so I was pilling this poor kitten all the effing time. I can do it, but I can’t do it in a way that animals like.

Yet, he forgave me.

We took to calling him Winston, and not Winston Churchill, because in many ways he was closer to Winston Smith. He disappeared whenever strangers appeared (there are people who’ve been over to our house many times who’ve never seen him), and we had to start working with an in-home vet because if we got out the cat carrier, he simply evaporated.

On the other hand, he could be incredibly brave. When we got him, we had a Great Dane and two mutts. Winston loved Emma, but he loved the dogs more. He spent his whole life sincerely believing he was a dog. He had complicated medical issues—he couldn’t eat fish, or eat anything from plastic. Because the Marquis de Lafayette was his best bud, he ate from the Marquis dish, and so the Marquis had to eat out of non-plastic containers and we couldn’t add fish to Marquis’ bowl. And Winston, at all of 12 pounds at most, snuggled with Hubert (120 lbs) and Duke (100 lbs).

For cats, head-rubbing is submission. Cats are not pack animals, and so normally the whole pack configuration isn’t really something to which it’s worth paying attention when you’re talking about cats. But it was interesting with Winston. Winston, after a while, took to beating up on Emma, so she dumped him, but he was entirely submissive to the dogs—to all the dogs. Most of the dogs tolerated him, but Hubert, George, Marquis, and Louis were actively sweet with him and allowed him to rub heads (which doesn’t mean the same thing in dog language).

After a while, the three cats each claimed domains, and Winston claimed the bedroom. He always slept with us on the bed, exerting the cat gravity power so that a 12 pound cat is actually an immovable force. He was probably the single most affection-loving cat I’ve ever had. For a while, he allowed Emma to sleep in the bedroom, but at some point that ended, and he allowed Sapphira to come in and get morning snuggles (Louis put an end to that, oddly enough). So, morning snuggles was Winston and the dogs. When we fed the dogs, he would head into the study, and eat out of Marquis’ bowl. Winston LOVED dogs. He especially loved licking their faces and ears. Hubert and Duke kind of liked it, and Ella and Clarence barely tolerated it, but Louis loved Winston. When we knew we were putting Winston down, I worried about how Louis would react.

Winston was always an indoor cat (with the exception of the catio), and he was until recently a beefy guy (and ended up being kind of a bully with Emma). The last year has been vexed in that we knew he was losing weight and something was going on, but he remained his dog-loving cuddle all night self. When definitive tests were done, he had major intestinal tumors and cancer that had metastasized to his paws. And so, today, we had an appointment with a vet to come and put him down. He was still, even with the damn cone on his head, cuddling with the dogs, and sleeping with us at night, but he was clearly unhappy. And he died, in the lap of someone who loves him, purring. He died about 90 minutes after Louis.

Louis was really sweet with Winston. Winston had a cancer that metastasized quickly, and gave him bloody tumors in his paws. He continued to sleep on the bed, and Louis (who always slept on the bed) accommodated him endlessly.

When Duke (a 100 lb Great Dane) died, we put in for rescuing a Mastiff. We’re good with big dogs, and they’re often hard to place. That mastiff rescue process wasn’t working well, and Jim knew I was a wreck about having lost Duke, and one day he said we should look at dogs. I assumed Jim was being sweet with me. We went to where APA was showing a few dogs, including what they said was a rottie mix (they marked him as large or extra large). I thought he was adorable, but I also thought Jim was looking at dogs for my sake, and so I took his enthusiasm for that dog as being supportive of my grief. I said we needed to look other places, and we did. And he kept saying, what about that rottie-mix, and I kept thinking he was just being kind to me, and so, when, after having looked at dogs at various other places, I said, “Yeah, I think that rottie mix is the best choice,” he rushed me to the car and drove like a maniac back to the place we’d seen him. He actually jumped a curb. That was the dog that would be named Louis.

We had had a dog, Duke Ellington, who was a wonderful dog, but a little bit staid. And then we got a puppy who adored him (and whom he adored) and who made him a little bit more playful, so we named her Ella Fitzgerald. And Duke died.

And then this rottie mix (he wasn’t) came home and bonded so thoroughly with Ella Fitzgerald that he was obviously Louis Armstrong.

And he was the most hilarious dog we have ever had. Austin is so good at getting dogs adopted that Austin now takes dogs from the shelters of other cities (and even counties), and Louis came from Bastrop. He had abrasions on his leg and neck suggesting he’d been thrown from a car (which is what people around here do to get rid of unwanted puppies—don’t get me started), and they thought he was going to get to be a large or extra-large dog. He thought he did. He got to be fifty pounds.

He was hilarious.

He hated mornings. He loved morning walks, but he never wanted to get up. He was the most talkative dog I’ve ever had. We’ve had dogs with strong opinions (Marquis is very clear that he thinks we should build a fire, nap, give him Dasequin, rearrange the dog beds), but Louis gave six-part Greek orations. We’ve had dogs with whom you could have conversations, but never a dog, but he had a lot to say. You could have a long conversation with him. Even I thought he could out-argue me.

We took him through all the Petsmart training, and he was a gem. My plan was, when I retired, that he and Ella would be our nursing home dogs.

He would have been great. He worried about other beings. If I sneezed, he would put his paws on me. He worried about Winston (especially once Winston got sick), and he worried about whether Clarence was going to get upset at seeing another dog (he sometimes does), and he worried about whether Ella was going to jump on me (she shouldn’t, and she does).

And he ate everything. He was the “can dogs eat…” dog. He ate the bark off our firewood, and he once ate a large part of an organic firestarting log. He ate arugula, watercress, lettuce, and all the things no other dog (even Clarence, who wouldn’t eat arugula) would eat.

And he cuddled. I have a high tolerance for sleeping surfaces, so our practice is that, when we get a new dog or cat, I sleep on some dog beds on the floor with them, and then we transition into the bedroom, and then into their finding their own space. The first night with Louis, he slept across my neck. Literally. The next night he slept across my chest, then legs, and then we were in the bedroom. And every night after that he slept cuddled in either my arms or Jim’s. And the night before he died, he crawled under the blankets, and had to be rescued because he got so hot he was panting. He was, without a doubt, the single most affection-loving dog I’ve ever had.

He and Ella were terrors—they were total siblings (although not littermates), with a hilarious game. Louis would dig a little bit in the ground, and this his job was to keep Ella from taking that little spot, and the two of them were tear around the yard with him keeping her from home. They jumped on each other at certain marked point on the morning walk (why those points, neither Jim nor I ever figured out).

We really worried about Louis because, although he was terrified of tires, he had NO sense about traffic. And he had a tendency to slip out behind someone who opened the front door. And we live somewhere that, if it’s raining or not, the front door might or might not entirely close. More than once we realized he had slipped out and we had to chase him down. It was our nightmare that he would get out and get into traffic. And our nightmare came true. He ran half a mile in order to get on a fucking freeway.
We had come to the difficult decision that we would put down Winston today, and therefore would spending all our time cuddling with him, and thinking about him. Louis slipped out, and we didn’t notice. This breaks my heart.

And, for reasons we don’t understand, he ended up half a mile away on a major freeway. A vet saw him just after he’d gotten hit, and tried to save him. And that vet (whose name we never got) took him to an emergency vet, but Louis was DOA. And someone called Jim, and he called me, and so the vet, Jim, and I all stood in a room and sobbed together over this hilarious dog who was now dead.

And so, today, we sent along their way a hilarious and young dog and the old cat he loved. I don’t believe in Hell (the scriptural basis for it is weak), but I believe in heaven, and I believe that these two are frolicking together. And the grief is for those of us who are left to mourn for them.