Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [51]
Luckily, it was summer, so it was not a problem when Oogy needed to go out in the night. Oogy and I would slowly circle the yard once or twice under a canopy of stars — just the two of us and a few owls alive in our part of the world, watching the blinking lights of a plane slowly traversing the sky overhead, listening to the occasional passage of distant vehicles, all the flowers, red and yellow and white, now colorless in the clearing in front of the hedges.
I slept in the family room for the rest of the week, until the boys came home from camp. It was the only way to make certain that Oogy wouldn’t try to climb the stairs. I slept on the floor, not on a couch, because I knew that Oogy would climb onto the couch to sleep alongside me, putting pressure on the recently repaired joint. When the boys came home, they readily took over the job of sleeping downstairs with Oogy. They saw this partly as a responsibility that they felt they were better equipped to handle than their old dad and partly as a cool adventure. But when Oogy needed to go outside, he would go to the back door and start whining and barking. And I was always the one who heard him — the boys slept deeply — and the one who would accompany him. It was neither an imposition nor a demand. He needed me. And it enabled me to feel good about myself. I enjoyed being relied upon and being able to help.
As it turned out, the boys’ willingness to sleep downstairs was the start of another phase of their lives. They never moved back upstairs into their own rooms. It didn’t take long for them to realize that it was actually teenage boy heaven down there. For years after Oogy had ruined the two Chesterfield sofas, there was nothing much in the formal living room, with its manteled fireplace and brass wall sconces supporting hurricane lamp electric lights, and we rarely used it. Then, slowly, it mutated into more of a recreation room than anything else. We put a ping-pong table in there, then a wide-screen TV that Jennifer was given as a gift for some environmental work she did for a client, and an Xbox 360 soon followed. There was also a wide-screen TV in the family room, and a DVD player in each room. What wasn’t there was just as essential to the downstairs experience: Jennifer and I were upstairs and could not listen to phone calls, ask about text messages, or tell the boys to turn off the TV or get off the computer and get to sleep.
Upstairs, where both boys slept from the time they were three until they turned fifteen, their rooms have been frozen in time like broken clocks. The sports trophies they earned throughout their elementary and middle school years line the windowsills in both rooms. Bookcases are filled with books that haven’t been opened in years. In and on top of the dressers are clothes that will never be worn again and stuffed animals that have been abandoned. The only recent additions are some athletic plaques and awards from high school, as well as some newspaper clippings recounting their victories in sports.
Following his ACL operation, Oogy was permitted only one form of exercise: walking around the yard. We did this routinely in the morning and evening, and I would come home at least once during the middle of the day for a third go-round; otherwise, his leg would stiffen up on him. Weekends, I added one or two more of these strolls. In addition, I massaged his knee every morning before work and every evening before bed. Ardmore eventually took out the stitches.
Several weeks after the operation to repair