On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t make a great therapy dog. I had already accepted that he’d never show in the conformation ring. He was a different sort of dog, and suddenly, for no clear single reason, I was able to live with it. He would be my companion, and that was enough. It appeared that he did belong with us, in our home.
In just this way, with this one small step forward, I pushed away the doubts and decided.
What I knew, and that which was most important, was that he was becoming my heart dog. He was capturing me from head to toe, as surely as Gulliver had, though in a different way. I would continue to mourn that particular special dog, but my sorrow was eased. Now I could pass by his urn in the garden and ask him a question, or tell him that I was thinking of him, without disintegrating into tears. It wasn’t time to take down the photos from the cabinet in my office, but that time was near.
And so Cody stayed, and he proved to be a unique dog. He lay at my feet while I worked, finding a patch of sun in which he could bathe. He waited patiently for his dinner, not dancing in agitated circles the way Breeze did, and often didn’t even finish what he had been given unless I spiked it with some yogurt or canned meat. With the decision to have him stay came the inevitable and rapidly growing list of necessary nicknames: Code, CodyCodyCody, CodyCo, Codarino, Cody Man Cody Man, Snoops, Codalicious, Codariferae, Codarificarmente.
He turned out be a mischievous troublemaker unlike any other dog I had ever known. At first it was the morning glory vine that ran along the fence. It looked as luscious to him as a patch of corn to a crow, and while my back was turned, as I swept up the leaves that had just begun to fall, he nibbled away at it, right down to the stem; after half an hour, he came back into the house looking mysteriously sated and then began to throw up: once, twice, three times. Dogs throw up a lot, as I knew from the years of Gulliver’s grazing, so I didn’t worry at first, but when he expelled a violent rush of diarrhea that held nothing but bright red blood, I shoved him into the backseat of the car, forgot about the seat belt, and held my breath as I sped at eighty miles an hour to the animal hospital, sure he was bleeding internally. Then they told me that though morning glory was toxic, a dog would have to eat pounds of it for it to do any damage.
A few weeks went by, when, on a Sunday afternoon just before dusk, a huge patch of hidden mushrooms just around the back of my writing cottage caught his culinary attention. He didn’t stop eating until he had to vomit. Once again, we were back on the highway doing eighty and hoping a cop wouldn’t catch us. This time it was more serious. They detoxed him with activated charcoal but warned me that there would be a two-day wait till the blood panels came back and told us whether he was in danger of total liver failure. Over Monday and Tuesday we waited, watching to see if his eyes turned yellow, or if his usual happy gallop through the halls of the house deteriorated to a stagger, with the inevitable, painful death that would follow. Once again, he escaped damage.
But then, a week later, he did it another time. More detox, more astonishing bills from the vet, more frightened waiting for the call that might come bearing the news of his liver breaking down. Quickly, I became a mushroom forager, digging with my trowel desperately, staring at the ground until I saw double as I hunted down the brown and orange caps nestled under the pine trees on our property. The first day out, I collected a lawn-size trash bag filled with pounds of fungi and thought that if they had been chanterelles, I could have had a dinner party for thirty.
I cursed both his nose and his taste buds and his little, little brain. I couldn’t remember any other dog I had ever owned being such a problem—not Penny, with her Happy Meal of Dad’s zebra rug, not Daisy, with her penchant for chasing cars, and her early-morning squirrel trophies. Not even Gulliver, with his ingenious way of opening the trash can.
Two weeks later, I came out of the shower and heard him crunching away on some unlucky object. Still wet, quickly reaching for a towel, I searched, blindly, on the vanity counter for my glasses, so that I would be able to see. That was when it occurred to me exactly on what he was so happily munching away. When I finally recovered them they were scratched and bent beyond repair.
Next were my new hearing aids, left on a high counter he shouldn’t have been able to reach. He chewed them into tiny, unrecognizable bits of metal, and as I searched for the rest, hoping at least one might be left untouched, I mourned the $7,000 this new set of aids had cost me only a month before he was born. They were insured—but still I had to fork over the $700 deductible. As I scoured the carpet for a missing transmitter and wire, I worried that whatever I couldn’t find was nestled somewhere deep down in his gut, sharp enough to tear a hole. Scrupulously, I examined his poop for a week before I gave up on finding any of it.
Hearing aids were not the only things he liked to chew. Late one night, I woke from deep sleep to hear him throwing up again. I rushed to his side, knowing I had to examine the vomit to make certain there were no mushrooms in it. The vomit itself was bound together in a curious oblong shape, and as I tried to keep him from slurping it back down again, I realized there was no help for it: I couldn’t reach the Kleenex before he gobbled it up, and I was going to have to pick it up with my hand. Holding it gingerly in my palm, I put it in the bathroom sink so that I could examine it. It was spongy and bounced back to the touch. No mushrooms were in evidence, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then as I tugged on it, I slowly discovered that it could be unraveled. It was then I realized that he had chowed down on one of my nylon stockings. It had compacted into a mass that could easily have blocked his intestines.
And then there was my nighttime mouth guard.
It wasn’t much longer before he cut his paw, deeply, all the way down through the pad, on a buried piece of chicken wire, while digging a hole to China in my garden. The wire was meant to discourage gophers, but it hadn’t discouraged him. For three weeks, he hopped around on three legs, with the injured paw heavily bandaged and covered in a waterproof Muttluk. The bandage had to be changed every day, and we went through rolls of gauze and vet wrap. But he would lie quietly on Brad’s lap in the evening after I had removed the bandage and rewrapped the foot, comically cooperating by extending his leg straight up into the air, which we quickly nicknamed “legus erectus.”
All these antics, so unexpected and so undesirable, were part of this dog, and might continue to be so for quite some time, or possibly, forever. If he lived to be thirteen, I might be hunting mushrooms until I was seventy-one. Yet, perhaps not so surprisingly, he had already learned to cuddle with me on the bed—some of the time—with his soft warm muzzle tucked up tight under my arm. Or lying on his back with his hind legs opened trustingly to the world, so that his pink-and-black tummy was totally exposed, his paws curled on his chest, and his head cranked to the side like a contortionist. Breeze slept like a normal dog, curled tightly into herself, with the tip of her nose tucked up against the tip of her tail.
But as Brad and I looked back with pleasure at photos of the litter from the week when the pups turned three weeks old, we realized that this exposed position was exactly the one in which he had slept in the whelping box. Just as his brother, Riley, did so many miles away in Oregon. And just as Green Bean did in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It seemed odd that they all should manage such a strange position, and I wondered if it could have come down through the generations, just as Breeze’s head butt had come from Jack. Had the pups inherited it from their father? When I checked with Linda and Doug Taylor, I was told that this was Mikey’s preferred sleeping pose as well.
One night in late November, as I lay with him on my bed, reading, I paused for a moment. I was fondling his velvety soft ear. I realized that it was the black circular patch that I was gently rolling back and forth between my fingers. Somehow the sight of it didn’t bother me anymore—either aesthetically, or for what it meant in terms of resuming a part of my life that had once given me such pleasure. It was a casual sort of thought, one I had come to indolently, and yet,
simultaneously, it was also a revelation. The patch, the very thing that had so troubled me the first time I saw it when he was fresh and wet from his mother’s womb, had become invisible to me. Now all I saw was Cody, his freckled face surrounded by two very black ears.
Somehow here I was, curled up seven months later with a dog I had very nearly let go. A new dog with his face on my pillow. A new dog to console me about the impending loss of Myrna. A new dog to fill my arms. Still, he was not Gulliver and never would be. He was not a show dog and never would be.
Nevertheless, I had overcome both my snobbery and my disappointment and gone on to love him just the same. He had turned out to be mine, despite all the hurdles, despite all the troubles. My heart held the affection for Cody that he so wanted, and his heart held the devotion that I had so hoped to have. I lay back and flipped to the page I had been reading with amusement. And so it was that one more time, a Dalmatian taught me exactly what I needed to know.
acknowledgments
My deep gratitude goes out to those who supported me as I wrote Bespotted:
First and last, my editor Dan Smetanka, who worked on Bespotted with a magic touch and whose faith in my writing enabled me to tackle a new subject—happiness.
Gail Hochman, my agent, who never gave up even with “a different sort of book.”
Brad Clink, my husband, who lovingly perseveres despite it all and never (well, almost never) complains.
Joy Sexton, who bravely helped me remember much of our Dalmatian childhood—both the joy and the sadness.
Dawn Mauel and Michele Wrath, dear friends who generously gave “Dalmatian advice.”
Carol Markson, a new compatriot who did a “first read” and offered great feedback.
John Freund, who gave his usual skilled critique.
Julie Kaufman, who has read with steadfast determination every one of my books over the course of more than twenty-five years.
Megan Fishmann, Kelly Winton, and Emma Cofod, my expert Counterpoint team, who shepherded the book through all its phases.
Rolph Blythe, Jack Shoemaker, and Charlie Winton, for publishing all three of my memoirs.
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