by Janet Elder
On that day, Rich’s heart began to melt. Huck stood and watched him shave. When Rich sat on a rocking chair in the living room, Huck went over and put his head on Rich’s lap, waiting for Rich’s affectionate touch. It took no time before Rich was calling him “Huckie boy” and roaring with laughter when Huck gave Rich’s face a bath of licks. A day earlier Rich was dubious about Huck’s appeal. Now he was smitten.
Rich had fallen hard for Huck and Huck for Rich. The first time Rich was out of town for an extended period, Huck pulled at a gray T-shirt Rich had left on his desk chair until he was able to get it free. Huck then trotted off with it to his own bed, put it down, and lay on top of it.
Michael became the envy of friends whose parents had not yet caved in on getting a dog. Jesse, the son of Susan Finkelstein, the woman who kept telling me a dog might be the one thing our kids would have to do without, said he wanted to get the identical dog and name him Tom, so the boys, friends since nursery school, would have dogs named Huck and Tom, a fuller tribute to Mark Twain’s vision of boyhood. Another buddy asked his parents for a dog, but the resistance was great, so they started talking about getting a rabbit.
Huck shadowed Michael all over the apartment. When Michael came home from school each day, Huck ecstatically licked his face. While Michael did his homework Huck slept at his feet. When Michael sat and watched TV or played a video game, Huck squeezed into the chair alongside him. When Michael went outside, Huck waited by the front door.
It was easy to see why Lisa referred to Huck as her “little love bug.” He was always looking for someone to stroke his head or his back or rub his belly. He liked to be touched. The moment any of us sat down in a chair, Huck would come dashing over, sit at that person’s feet, and rest his head on the sitter’s knee, waiting to have his head stroked, waiting to lick a hand.
Huck’s unrestrained devotion reminded me of a dog captured in a painting that hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In Young Man and Woman in an Inn by the Dutch painter Frans Hals, a man and woman are reveling at the doorway of an inn. A dog is resting his head in the reveler’s hand, content to just be with the man. That was Huck’s spirit, too, blissful when he had a lap to sit on or a human hand on which to rest his head.
Huck also loved to play. I had more patience for fetch than either Rich or Michael, something that Huck figured out immediately. One morning, while Rich and Michael were out at Michael’s basketball game, I was home with Huck, trying to use the time to get a few housecleaning chores taken care of before they returned. Huck was determined to let me know that chores were not really a good idea, that it was really time for the two of us to play ball.
He picked up his favorite orange soft plastic ball and started following me around the apartment until I was still. He dropped the ball at my feet and looked up at me, waiting for me to pick it up and throw it. He’d scamper after it and then bring it back, laying it at my feet again, waiting. After a few back and forths, I tried to bring the game to an end. But Huck was just warming up. He started dropping the ball at my feet, looking up at me, and barking, as if to say, “Come on, let’s play some more.”
When I didn’t respond, he tried other ways to draw me back into the game. I was making our bed when Huck’s orange ball came rolling out from underneath it, stopping just at my feet. Huck was lying in wait under the bed until I was close enough, and then, with his nose, sent the ball out to deliver his message. Huck was nothing if not persistent. He fit right into our family.
Huck was ever a people watcher. He’d stand and watch me load dishes into the dishwasher, hoping for a stray scrap of just about anything. He’d stand and watch Michael pack books into his school backpack; he’d watch Rich put his shoes in the closet.
When Huck came to live with us, he was only four months old, full of all the unbridled mischief of a puppy. He’d chase the vacuum, and take all the socks out of the laundry basket, spreading them around the living room floor. He loved to disrupt. Michael would sit down to play the piano, and Huck would wander underneath it, walking in and out and between Michael’s legs, making it impossible for Michael to play on. Huck was confused by television and barked at the set whenever a dog was on. He had come to love cream cheese, more than any other treat. All we had to do was say “cream cheese,” and Huck would come running.
We were all pretty eager to take Huck for a walk, but there was still a hurdle. Lisa had said we’d need clearance from the vet before we could take Huck outdoors.
The Simons had been our guide on all things involving Huck. There was no question we’d take their advice on vets, too. We took Huck in a taxicab to see Jon Miller, a neighborhood veterinarian with a fun and quirky manner.
“Well, well, whose dog is he?” Dr. Miller asked, as Michael gingerly put Huck up on the examining table.
“He’s mine!” Michael said proudly.
After looking in Huck’s ears and eyes, taking his temperature, listening to his heart, manipulating his limbs, examining every part of Huck, and then showing Michael how to clean Huck’s eyes, Dr. Miller pronounced Huck “perfect.” He said we could take Huck for a walk the following morning. And then he added: “I like the name.”
We were now ready to take Huck out onto city streets. Our first adventure would be to the Seventy-ninth Street and East End Avenue bus stop, where Michael boarded the city bus for school.
Michael bounded out of bed early that day, eager to walk with his new puppy. We left at about 7:30. I put the collar around Huck’s tiny neck and Michael attached the leash. Novices that we were, Rich and I each inspected and reinspected the collar to make sure the fit was right.
Michael, Huck, and I headed out the door, into the elevator, past the doormen, who had already begun to refer to our new dog as “the incredible Huck” (a comical reference to the superhero the Incredible Hulk, capable of feats of superhuman strength), and out the front door of our apartment building. We had barely made it outside when several people, hurrying to work and school, stopped to admire Huck. He had such a sweet face, was so small, and was such an unusual color for a dog that it was hard not to take notice. And then there was the smiling blond boy at the other end of the leash. Together, they looked like an urban Norman Rockwell painting.
Michael held the leash, and we started walking toward the bus stop. Like a toddler who had just learned to walk, Huck wanted to stop and examine every piece of paper, every person, every other dog, every parked car, and every mailbox. The five-minute walk from our building to the bus was starting to look like it would take an hour. Michael, unable to really get Huck to keep walking, turned the leash over to me. My luck wasn’t much better. I realized this was not the moment to teach Huck to walk on city streets. Michael was about to be late for school. I picked Huck up and carried him to the bus stop.
Michael stepped onto the bus and then turned to wave at Huck and me, blowing kisses until the bus pulled away. I turned and put Huck down for the walk up East End Avenue and back home. On the walk home Huck was just as determined to explore everything and everyone on the street as he had been on the walk to the bus stop. He’d linger at a fire hydrant and then try to dart across an intersection. I began to wish I were one of those monks.
At one point, Huck started pulling hard on his end of the leash. Before I realized what was happening, he had slipped his collar. I was panic-stricken. “HUCK! HUCK!” I screamed. “Oh no! Oh my God!”
Huck went tearing up East End Avenue. He’d stop for a split second to sniff at something and then take off again. He was a five-pound puppy, loose, with no collar, and no experience on busy city streets. He didn’t really even know his name.
I was terrified. I was afraid he’d be hit by a car. How could this be happening? People tried to help, but that just made Huck run more. So did my running after him. For a moment he stopped to sniff another dog. I was too far away to catch him, but close enough that if I threw my body to the ground, I might be able to fall on top of him. Forgetting all the warnings fro
m my doctors about not getting hurt or cut, that is exactly what I did. I hurled my body on top of Huck.
I now had Huck in my arms. Several people stopped to help. Someone put Huck’s collar back on him. I carried him home. Once we were safely inside, I discovered my own bloodied knees and realized that in the chaos, I had lost the scarf I had been wearing to cover my still bald head. It was a metaphor of sorts; our little dog, our Huck, had from the very beginning made all of us forget about cancer and its debilitating emotional and physical effects.
I knew in that moment how much I already loved Huck, something I had never thought about before we got him. I had only thought about how happy he would make Michael. From the moment he arrived, Huck brought a lot of love into all our lives.
Like all new dog owners, it took a while, but eventually Huck and we developed our own rhythms. Michael taught Huck how to high-five. “Give me five, Huck,” he’d say as he raised an open hand. Huck would raise a paw and touch it to Michael’s hand. “Good boy,” Michael would say, smiling triumphantly.
It, too, was a metaphor of sorts. We had closed the door on a very dark chapter in our lives. We had a victory of our own, and Huck had been our mascot.
I found I had learned from Connie and the monks enough about the fine art of crating, which made training easy enough. Huck never chewed on the furniture or did anything destructive. He had a couple of accidents on the living room rug, but nothing to speak of. After that first day on the street when Huck had slipped his collar, we hired a private dog trainer for one or two sessions, hoping to be taught how to get Huck to walk next to us instead of in front or behind. But it seemed overdone for such a small dog. It was such an over-the-top, New York thing to do. In fact, it was embarrassing. The trainer talked to us about signing a long-term contract, which pretty much put an end to that.
In early December, a close friend, the same friend who had given me the antique-looking earrings, convinced me to give up my reticence and allow myself to be in the spotlight for a night. She and her husband generously hosted a dinner party to celebrate the end of my cancer treatments.
Michael stood up in front of a room filled with my friends and colleagues and said, “I am really proud of the way my mother has powered her way through breast cancer.”
When I looked around the room and thought about how much each of the people there had done for me and my family, I was so choked up, I could not speak. I had had a lot of help getting through it all. The truth of the matter is, I was the one who had cancer, but everyone in that room, along with many people who were not there, had gotten me through it. It was their deep affection and care and compassion that had powered me through. It was Rich’s undaunted spirit and Michael’s bravery.
The holidays quickly approached. I was especially thankful that year for our many blessings and looking forward to the joy of the season more than usual. Since Rich, Michael, and I celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, all December long it feels as though we are either celebrating or planning to celebrate. Our most cherished tradition is cutting down our own Christmas tree. When Michael was about six, Rich located a Christmas tree farm, because he knew it was one of the happiest memories of my childhood.
Ever since then, every December we bundle up and drive an hour and a half to the four-hundred-acre working Jones Family Farm in Shelton, Connecticut, which has been in the Jones Family since the mid-1800s. There are two hundred acres of Christmas trees of all types—Fraser fir, Angel white pine, Douglas fir, Scotch pine, balsam fir, and blue spruce.
Once there, we park the car, pick up a saw from a basket filled with saws, and climb a path up the mountainside, the snow and ice crunching beneath our boots, in search of the perfect tree. My find always comes early on, sometimes halfway up the mountain, but Michael and Rich always insist the best trees are at the top. So we trudge on.
The Jones Family Farm is a happy place. During one of our hunts, a young man with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a freshly chopped tree in the other came out from the thicket of trees and asked if we’d take a picture of his girlfriend and him. Moments earlier, he had asked her to marry him and she had said, “Yes.”
With a brand-new puppy at home, I thought we’d forgo the tree cutting. But tradition being what it is, we didn’t. We left Huck at home, drove through the snow to the farm, climbed the mountain, and debated which of several trees Huck would like. Michael, who by then was doing more and more of the sawing, made the first cut and started sawing. He kept at it until his hands were so cold inside his gloves he could barely move his fingers. He turned the saw over to Rich who finished the job.
Once the tree was felled, we carried it down the mountain to a spot where the farm hands took it, put it through a baler (a conelike device that encased it in twine), and strapped it to the top of our car. We then joined the other people crazy enough to do this and drank hot cider and ate cranberry chocolate chip cookies around an outdoor fire. It was Christmas the way I remembered it.
When we got home, we carried the tree through the front door and set it in the stand. Huck didn’t quite know what to make of it and started barking at it. He soon stopped and settled himself underneath it, where he stayed while we adorned it with lights and ornaments.
We hung four stockings that year, one for Rich, one for Michael, one for me, and one for Huck. Huck’s stocking had been a gift from the Finkelsteins. It was red and green and had Huck’s name embroidered across the top. Down the side was the word woof and three paw prints.
On Christmas Eve, before he went to bed, Michael stuffed Huck’s stocking full of gifts he had bought and carefully wrapped for him. There was no mention of the gifts Michael might receive; he was completely focused on Huck. “Do you think Huck will really like his presents?” Michael asked me as I was kissing him good night.
The next morning, Michael, ignoring the presents spilling out from under the tree for him, went right for Huck’s stocking. He sat on the floor, pulled Huck onto his lap, and tried to get Huck to take one of the presents in his teeth to tear the paper. With some assistance from Michael, Huck ripped the paper off the first present. “Huck, it’s a new toy!” Michael exclaimed. “It’s a Santa.” Huck took the soft plastic squeaky Santa in his teeth, ran around the room, dropped it, and sat right down on Michael’s lap again, seemingly waiting for the next present. It was hard to believe this was Huck’s first Christmas. He behaved like an old hand.
It went on that way until all the new doggie toys had been opened. It wasn’t until Huck’s stocking had been emptied that Michael turned to open his own gifts.
And I opened the gift Rich and Michael gave me, a pair of earrings with three interlocking rings to celebrate the strength our small family had shown these past months.
CHAPTER 4
THE POSTHOLIDAY WINTER was long and cold. By March, when Michael had his midyear school break, I was ready for some sun. It was time to hold Auntie Babs to her word, time for her to make up the spare doggie bed. It would be our first vacation since my cancer treatments had ended and the first time we left Huck for more than a few hours.
Michael, a baseball worshipper and die-hard Yankees fan, wanted to go to Yankees spring training. The Yankees were going to play their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox. Rich and I agreed to take Michael to see the Yankees in Florida and decided to add a side trip afterward to a beach resort. Sun, baseball, the beach—the kind of vacation to make me feel young, healthy, and very much alive. No demands, no newspaper, no computers, no phone calls. Perfect.
I had gone through the rigors of cancer treatments fixated on getting myself in shape. The doctors had said that one of the little-understood consequences of the treatments for breast cancer was weight gain. Weight gain? I had always thought chemotherapy leaves everyone depleted and thin. Apparently chemotherapy for breast cancer is different. The depleted part was the same, but the thin part was not. I was determined not to gain weight. Bald AND fat? That really seemed cruel.
All through my treatments, I
had spent a lot of hours in the gym doing whatever I had strength for, and I was disciplined about what I ate. I walked everywhere I could. It worked. Despite the months of poison dripped into my body, and the weeks of having my chest, neck, and arm radiated every day, I had come out of it all in better shape than I had been in before it started, back when we sat sipping cappuccinos in Venice.
At a follow-up visit with my surgeon in January, he commented on how fit I was. I told him that exercising had given me the illusion of control over my body. While I am extremely fond of him, and eternally grateful to him, he said in a detached way, “Well, it is just that, an illusion.” I wished he would have just let me take refuge in my denial.
For our trip to Florida, I treated myself to a new bathing suit and a pair of white shorts. I bought gobs of suntan lotion and a new hat, having thrown away the one I had to wear the previous summer to cover my then bald head. In fact, I had thrown away or given away just about everything I owned that was in any way cancer related.
Once I had enough hair to go to work comfortably without a scarf, I took out the stack of scarves given to me by dear friends, washed and ironed each one, wrapped them in tissue paper, and gave them to a woman I knew who was suffering through chemotherapy for the second time. Nearly everything else went into the trash. It was as though I had the garbage collector carry away all the pain and fear that had insidiously become a part of our daily lives. We had a new life now. We had Huck.
The night before we left for Florida, we took Huck, his oversized round pillow of a bed, a turquoise-and-white plastic sneaker that squeaked when he held it in his teeth, his red leash, his red jacket, his food, and a container of cream cheese to the Clarks’ house in Ramsey, New Jersey. Huck had been there only once before for a few hours on Christmas Day.