Pug Hill - Alison Pace [76]
“Oh,” Pamela says, nodding slowly. “I would have thought it would have had to be a boyfriend.” Yes, I think, I know that.
“Yeah, I did, too, initially, but it actually doesn’t. So I have to decide first if I’m going to talk about a dog, a dog from my childhood who is no longer with me, or if I’m going to talk about a boyfriend, who has gone the way they all seem to go.” I laugh even though, really, it’s not all that funny.
“Dogs or ‘dogs,”’ Pamela says, making quotation marks in the air with her fingers after the second “dogs.” She smiles, and I smile, too, as that is the exact phrase I’ve thought to myself, quite a few times since last Thursday, since I remember so many of my boyfriends as being dogs, too, just a very different kind.
“Right, so, if I talk about dogs, dogs without quotation marks around them,” I continue, “of course I could talk about Morgan. You know about Morgan right? The Saint Bernard?”
“The one who was always running away to swim in swimming pools?” Pamela asks, a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“I like that story,” Pamela says, and I agree, I do, too.
“In many ways,” Pamela says thoughtfully, “it seems that the very purpose of Morgan’s life might have been to get away.”
I agree. “If anyone could be ‘The One That Got Away,’ Morgan could be.” And I think again of Morgan’s story, so full of drama and intrigue as it is, it could make for a very good speech.
“Okay, that’s a good start, but we should cover more bases. What else ya got?”
“Hmmm,” I think, flipping back in my mind through all the dogs I’ve loved before.
“Or I could talk about Brentwood,” I continue. “The wheaten terrier we had.”
“Oh, I remember Brentwood!”
Brentwood, in a most literal and also in a most figurative sense, got away. He dug a hole in the backyard, underneath the fence, and ran off down to the beach. We looked for days and couldn’t find him. Two months later a strange man, who looked very much to be homeless, rang our doorbell, returned him to us, and turned away without a word. We wondered a lot what had happened to Brentwood during those two months, if he’d spent it just wandering, being homeless himself, or if he had been abducted. Something bad had happened; we suspected that strongly. We also suspected strongly that he blamed us. Brentwood spent the remaining five years of his life peeing on all of our pillows, every chance he got.
“He was the only dog we ever had who was relegated to the laundry room,” I say and we both look into the distance at the pugs, remembering the beleaguered Brentwood with a collective sigh.
After a moment, Pamela says, “I think the Brentwood story is a little depressing,” and she is right. I remember, perhaps a bit late, that I’ve been endeavoring lately to make a good effort at staying away from depressing.
“Yes,” I agree, “you’re right. And, anyway, if I’m going to talk about a dog, really, I should talk about Spanky.”
“Sure,” Pamela says, and I think maybe she’s a bit bored now, and I’m feeling a little self-centered talking only about my speech, but I’m also feeling happy because I’ve just thought of Spanky, and Spanky, out of all the dogs I’ve loved before, is by far my favorite.
“Which one was Spanky?” she asks. Even though Pamela has known me since childhood, has known all the dogs I grew up with, and it’s understandable that she could get confused, it seems so unreal to me that anyone could hear the name Spanky and not know instantly of which dog I am speaking.
“Spanky was the shar-pei,” I remind her, “the third shar-pei we had.” And then, for a few minutes it’s just me, sitting at Pug Hill remembering Spanky. Let me fill you in.
Spanky came to us at the end of the shar-pei years, a time I remember as a bit stressful, because the two shar-peis who came before him, Sasha and Margaret, were extremely high-strung.
Why my mother continued to acquire shar-pei puppies on a yearly basis, when the first two were such behavioral night-mares, is really a little bit beyond me.
But I’m so happy that she did because