Old Dog…
Tomorrow may be the day that I have Maggie put down. She’s 16 years and seven months old. In Berkeley Paul and Dodie had a Queensland Heeler named Dunny. They exercised Dunny by driving around the block while he chased the car. They mated Dunny to an Australian Shepherd named Opus and out of that mating came our sweet Magnum Opus, Maggie for short.
Maggie never liked riding in the car. For the first few years we could count on her to toss her cookies in the back seat whenever we went anywhere. Luckily we had a garbage dog, Sutro (a beagle Queensland heeler mix). Sutro could be counted on to clean up Maggie’s mess. Sutro had the brains of the Heeler and the biddableness of the beagle. She knew what she wanted, she acknowledged what we wanted, and how nice for all concerned if these things were congruent.
Over the years Maggie grew to enjoy travel… unlike corporate types she understood that it wasn’t about the journey, it was the destination. She’d get in the car in Berkeley, suffer in silence for some length of time, then get out of the car in the mountains and flip snow in the air with her nose. She also enjoyed the beach. Dogs don’t have nice habits. That’s how it is. Don’t get me started about dogs and the cat box. Anyway, every dog I’ve ever known has enjoyed a nice roll in something organic and smelly and dead. Or in raccoon poop. Or in the manure pile. Dogs don’t take time to smell the roses. They’re simply more bucolic than pastoral. But Maggie holds our family record for best roll in a dead thing.
We were at the ranger station near the marine mammal center at the Point Reyes Seashore entrance beyond Bolinas. We heard on the ranger’s radio that there was a dead blue whale on the tide and it looked like it would come ashore at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. How many dead bluie whales do you see in this life? We called the dogs to the car and headed down to Ocean Beach. It was sure enough there, and it had been dead for some time. So while the corpse was huge, it was also sort of… well, it was decomposing. These huge hunks of whale blubber were washed up on the beach for a long way in both directions. It was dog heaven. Major Maggie rollage occurred. The car smelled for days after that.
Maggie is one of those beasts that reminds you that Dog is goD spelled backwards. She has ever been my faithful companion. We’ve cared for her over the past year like the family member she is. An aspirin and a dose of phenylpropanolamine every morning and evening. She started out taking these pills disguised in little pieces of hot dogs. She’s graduated to the deli counter. Now she gets them in rolls of sliced ham. In fact, until today, when we boiled her up a pot roast, the ham and some slices of sausages were the only food she was eating. right now it seems like she enjoys a few bites of roast beef from time to time, which gives me a crazy hope that I can put some meat back on her bones by feeding her pot roast. Won’t happen. She’s too weak to climb the stairs, up or down. I carry her up at night and then carry her down in the morning to let her out.
The last few nights she’s been so confused that when she got up to change resting positions she walked into the side of our bed and kept trying to move forward, unaware that she’d encountered an obstacle. In other words, there are now mechanical wind-up toys with more logic power than she sometimes demonstrates.
I could wait a few more days. I could wait until she was clearly in pain. But she wouldn’t have survived this long without my care and it’s my responsibility to discern what the right thing is and do it for her. This weekend, it seems like the right thing is to take her to the vet tomorrow morning and have her put down.
