My husband and I have a history with unfortunate dogs. We have had a lab who suffered from epilepsy, another one who would run away repeatedly, and a mixed-breed dog who was just plain crazy.
The crazy dog’s name was Dorothy Parker. Naming her after the famously depressed poet probably didn’t help, some kind of spiritual transference thing. She wasn’t crazy in a depressed way, or a “ahhh, your dog’s so crazy!” kind of way. Her crazy was more of a “Watch out, that dog is a freaking terror” kind of crazy.
We adopted Dorothy as a pup from a friend who found her and her siblings stranded on a farm, no parents in sight. She looked like she had a bit of German shepard in her — later, we realized that it may have been more wolf than German shepard.
When you tried to put a collar on Dorothy, she would flop around like an 80-pound fish. She would run through the electric shock of our underground fencing — you could hear the buzz when she crossed over. She chewed off a corner of our picnic table bench and dug up two of my five azalea bushes. She also chewed off the tops of our solar landscape lights and left remnants of them scattered across our yard.
One night my husband was watching a show on The History Channel called “Life after People.” They were showing a wild pack of dogs roaming through a metropolis void of any humans and overgrown with vegetation. Dorothy looked exactly like the dog that was leading the pack — the one that survived past all human life.
We did everything we could to control Dorothy’s crazy, but nothing worked. We ended up giving her to a more patient owner after she jumped on my daughter and left a deep scratch in her cheek.
Our first dog was Elvis. He was a beautiful black lab, who suffered from severe epilepsy in his later years. He had been an epileptic all of his life, having a seizure about once a year in the beginning. Seven years later, he was having “cluster” episodes several times a day.
The day he died, I had come home early for lunch to let a Realtor show our house — it had been on the market for about three months. When I got home, it was obvious Elvis had gone through a number of seizures that morning. He had that groggy look and his mouth was covered with frothy saliva. I sprayed him off with a hose before going inside to light an apple-cinnamon candle and rid the house of any clutter for the showing.
My plan was to take Elvis for a walk around the block while the house was being shown. Yummy smells like apple-cinnamon help sell a house; a dog having a seizure in the middle of the kitchen does not.
When I walked out to put his leash on, he was dead. He had died in front of the door to our detached garage. It was a wooden door that opened into our backyard, unless there was a 150-pound deceased lab stretched in front of it. Then, it barely opened at all. With only 10 minutes before the Realtor’s expected arrival time, I had to call her sobbing like a baby to cancel the showing.
“Elvis has died,” I cried.
James Brown came after Elvis. He was a brown lab who was never at home in our yard or house. He ran away repeatedly. We would hunt him down, bring him back home, feed and wash him, only to have him run away two weeks later. This routine went on for months.
Once he returned home with a friend, another dog who looked grungy and homeless.
We were cleaning out our garage when I noticed James Brown and his friend frolicking in our yard. Their play turned more intimate, and in that moment, I realized that James Brown’s friend was probably more of a “life partner.”
So that was why he kept running away, I thought to myself. My sweet brown lab was simply a gay dog.
I wish I could have told James Brown that it didn’t matter to us who he loved; we loved him. I would have told him he was a member of an open, liberal family that did not judge. Our only want was for everyone in the family to be happy, including James Brown and his life partner.
But James Brown never felt comfortable sharing his lifestyle with us. The last time he ran away, we couldn’t find him and he never returned home.
Amy Gesenhues is a freelance writer who lives in Floyd County. You can read her daily commentaries at www.AmyWroteIt.wordpress.com. E-mail her directly at amy@amywroteit.com
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