by Dave Nasser
I recalled what the breeder in Oregon had told me. It was finally beginning to strike a chord. “You know, we should get back in touch with her and try to find out how the rest of the litter are shaping up,” I said. “Be interesting to know how they’re doing, wouldn’t it?”
“Particularly since she said he was the runt,” she pointed out. “He may have brothers and sisters who are even bigger than he is.” She ruffled the fur around his ears. “Imagine that!”
George, at this point, climbed his front paws up Christie’s torso, in that way he always liked to do when we came home. I swear if he could talk he would’ve had something to say about his mom calling him a genetic mutation—not to mention calling him a runt, come to think of it. He looked about as runty as a mammoth these days. And he’d be right to be annoyed, too—up on his hind legs, he was now taller than Christie by about a foot. Instead, he licked her face.
“I really don’t think I can imagine that,” I said.
But I did like the idea of tracking down George’s family, if for no other reason than simple curiosity about the genes that had made our pet so astonishingly big. So I got back in touch with the breeder from Oregon, who still had Georgie’s mom as a pet. I told her how big George had grown since we’d bought him.
“One hundred and eighty pounds?” she said. There was silence for a moment. “Wait a minute. One hundred and eighty pounds? You’re sure? But he’s not even a year old yet, is he?”
“This month,” I confirmed. “He’ll be one at the end of this month.”
“Wow,” she said. “Wow. That’s one pretty big boy you’ve got there. His dad tipped two hundred, so he was big too, but not at a year old. He was way older when he hit that weight.”
I told her we’d been wondering about George’s size, and we’d grown curious about what had happened to his siblings. I said we’d thought we might try to get in touch with the people who’d bought the other pups, and she told me she’d forward them my e-mail address and phone number. It was only a day later that I got a call from a man in Phoenix who had taken one of George’s sisters, Bella. He was really friendly (Great Dane owners, I was beginning to realize, almost always seemed to be) and said he’d love us to come and visit any time we were passing through town.
As we hadn’t done anything for our first wedding anniversary and as we’d both been working nonstop, pretty much—not to mention spending so much time up to our eyes in plaster and dropcloths and clutter and tools—when the call from the guy came, we both saw it as the perfect excuse to take off on a spur-of-the-moment anniversary road trip.
The distance from Tucson to Phoenix is a little over 120 miles by road, so this would be one big adventure for George to make too. We took the truck, as he was way too big for the car now, putting the backseat down and making him a nice bed with plenty of soft blankets for him to lie on. We’d also packed a picnic, or, rather, Christie had. She’d made us turkey salad sandwiches, brought some sodas and some chips, and packed plenty of dog food and water for George. “So now it’s a proper family outing,” she’d remarked.
Bella’s owner turned out to be a really nice guy, who was around our age, and lived in a beautiful and clearly much-loved home on the outskirts of Phoenix. It was new and sprawling and set in lush gardens full of hibiscus, bougainvillea and aloe. Maybe one day, I thought, we can have a pretty yard like this one, though it wouldn’t be any time soon, I knew, given the junkyard that ours was at the moment. And it was good to see that big dogs—he had two of them—and nice homes could coexist without chaos.
It turned out that Bella’s owner was as curious about George as we were about Bella, and he welcomed us all pretty warmly. Right off, you could see that George and Bella were siblings. Even though he towered over her, they were the spitting image of each other: the exact same pure blue coat, the same head shape and look. They sized each other up in the middle of the backyard, his one hundred eighty pounds to her modest one fifteen counting for nothing: he was a guest on her patch. You could see they both knew it, and he acted with due deference to his sister.
It took no time at all for them to say hi to each other. George did the thing he always seemed to do with new dogs now: he got close, rested his head and neck patiently on the other animal’s flank, and waited for them to make the first move. As ever, we marveled at his gentlemanly conduct; the word “gentle” really seemed to sum him up. It wasn’t long before the two of them went into full-blown play mode, bounding around the backyard like they’d been together all their lives, while our kind host made us cold drinks and told us all sorts of stuff about Great Danes. It was a shame, we all agreed as we ended our short visit, that our pets didn’t live a little closer to each other.
We parted with the promise that we’d be sure to keep in touch and that if we were in Phoenix we’d stop by again. Little did we know that in less than a few months, we would be back, but for a very different reason.
In the meantime, George’s birthday was looming. He’d been in the world for a whole year now, and living with us for not much less time than that. And Christie, it seemed, had plans for the celebrations. “We’re going to throw him a party,” she told me.
“A party for a dog?” I gaped at my wife. “Honey, you have to be kidding me.”
It didn’t look like it, though and, really, I should have expected it. Christie had, after all, only a few weeks before, dressed Georgie up to celebrate Halloween. She’d chosen him a superhero outfit, for reasons that weren’t clear, complete with the whole collar and big cape thing. I had, at the time, risked a killer rebuke by commenting that George was our dog, not our kid. But it seemed it had fallen on deaf ears. Now she blinked at me as if I’d failed to understand, or was just stupid. Then she shook her head.
“No, I am not kidding, honey. It’s his birthday, so he has to have a party.”
Despite the previous flight of canine dressing-up whimsy, my wife was, and is, a very levelheaded woman, not generally prone to bouts of sentimentality. She’s certainly not the sort to get crazy ideas—not if I keep her out of Nordstrom and Macy’s and similar high-risk shopping environments, at any rate. In one of those stores, let me tell you, she could go crazy in a second. But was I hearing her right? Was she seriously suggesting that we throw a birthday party for a dog? Sure, I loved our gentle Georgie—he was a pretty special kind of dog, but he was still a dog the last time I’d looked—not a superhero, and definitely not a baby.
But then I thought a bit more. Maybe she was thinking it would be an excuse to have some friends over. Maybe that was more what it was really all about. With the remodeling, we hadn’t been able to do that a whole lot, and I was aware of how short a time she’d been in Arizona, and how important it was that we develop friendships and put down roots in our new home. “Okaayyyy…” I answered. “And where’s this celebration taking place?”
She pulled another face that suggested I was lacking a few brain cells. “At the dog park, of course,” she said. “Where else would we have it?”
Christie was right. Maybe I was short a few brain cells. It probably was a stupid question. If you weren’t planning to throw a house party—and she obviously wasn’t—where else would you hold a birthday party for a puppy? T.G.I. Friday’s? McDonald’s? Of course it would be at the dog park. There were dogs, doggy owners and plenty of space there. But it still sounded ridiculous. “But with who?”
“With the other dog owners,” she answered, quick as can be. “Mom’s going to be here for the weekend, plus my grandma and auntie, of course, but mostly I thought it would be something we could do with all the people we meet down at the park. I thought we could all, you know, get together with our dogs, and, well, have a little party. Why not?”
And so, Christie not being one to make idle threats, a party in the dog park was exactly what we had.
It was all new and strange to me, this business of having dog friends because, the truth was that when the day came for us to celebrate George’s birthday, we did so w
ith a bunch of people—about a dozen of us in total—whose names we mostly didn’t, and still don’t, know. We knew all the dog’s names, of course; it would be difficult not to. We knew Drake, the Great Dane, but also Bart, the yappy little West Highland terrier; Chester, the highly strung liver-spot Dalmatian; Disney, the trimmed-to-within-an-inch-of-his-street-cred black poodle; and Super Mario, the appropriately named mile-a-minute Afghan hound. And never let it be said that Christie doesn’t know how to organize a party. Despite there being no manual, as far as I know, called Throw Your Dog the Perfect Party (though there just might be) and despite there having been no precedent set (we’d neither of us attended a similar party down at Morris K. Udall Park, and I seriously doubted that there’d been one before George’s), she organized a party that any dog would be proud of. There were special party hats for the different dogs, in all sorts of wild colors, with a variety of tassels, carefully sourced from the pet store. There were also games to play, treats to eat and, best of all, a big tray of “pupcakes”—special dog cakes she’d tracked down, specifically formulated for canine tastes—which were gone in the blink of an eye.
We were a little anxious, it must be said, about Christie’s ninty-five-year-old grandma, mostly because she was such a big hit with all the dogs that we were seriously concerned she’d accidentally get knocked over in the crush. But apart from that, it all went really well. George, of course, was in his element. Showing an early appreciation for the advantages of his status in life (one we would come later to recognize, unequivocally, as his incredible star quality), he bounded around with his canine pals, mingling impressively, and lapped up being the center of attention among both his doggie and non-doggie pals.
To an outsider, strolling past the dog park that November early evening, one glance through the wire-mesh fence would have said it all, really: dog lovers and owners really are special—a breed apart.
As for me—the Dave I’d been for most of my years, at any rate—I remember deciding one other thing that evening: this was the single most embarrassing thing I’d done, or been involved in, in my entire life. I ran around, threw balls and sticks, adjusted drooping doggy headgear, doled out sweet treats and pupcakes and took lots of photos, all the while wondering to myself (though I didn’t mention it to Christie) what on earth people would think I was doing. To say I felt silly would have been like saying the Pope is Catholic.
Yet, as we began packing up after our hour or so of fun, with the low sun winking off the bright metallic hues of the party hats, I happened to glance across at my wife. Her face was a picture; there was no doubt about it. But it had a look I hadn’t seen there before. I was used to her cool business head, her drive, her sense of humor; I was used to all aspects of the person she was. But here she looked different: she had an aura of contentment.
This party for George wasn’t silliness at all—not at all. This birthday party was a sign.
CHAPTER 8
The Road Less Traveled
Had we spoiled our dog? I wondered. Was that what had happened? Had we pampered him, indulged him, let him have his own way on one too many occasions? Had we created a rod for our own backs with this pet of ours? Had we inadvertently created a monster?
It was December 23, at seven in the morning, with the sun rising, the way dusty and the road long. And George wouldn’t go to the bathroom.
We’d set off, in the star-sprinkled Arizona dark, on An Adventure, which was now becoming, in the early-morning sunshine, A Big Stress. We’d stopped first, still in darkness, on the outskirts of Phoenix, at a gas station. And he didn’t need to go, which was fine. Since then, though, we’d also been through a couple of fast-food chain parking lots, without progress, and we were beginning to worry about the fact that neither place seemed to be providing whatever it was George required to have a pee.
Little did we expect such a hassle. This was to be the sort of road trip made famous by a dozen iconic movies: a long strip of glossy asphalt, the sun blazing down above us, balls of tumbleweed (duly tumbling), acres of dry scrub (though no iconic heat haze in December, of course), the dusty hard shoulder, the endless, unreachable horizon, the traditional plumes of dirt billowing up every time we stopped…
Except we seemed to be stopping rather more than we’d planned to. “What’s his problem?” I asked Christie, though I wasn’t really asking Christie. I was speaking rhetorically, because it was my turn to take George, so she was sitting in the truck.
“What’s his problem?” I asked again, this time louder, and to her.
She leaned out the window and shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps he just doesn’t need to go.”
“Honey, he must need to go. We’ve been traveling for four hours. And he’s drunk, like, half a gallon. He must have to.”
Bet this sort of thing never happened to Jack Kerouac when he was on the road…
It was Christmas and we were traveling to California.
We’d taken George to visit Christie’s parents only once before, and this Christmas trip was a big one: about twenty or so family members would be either driving or flying in. It would be George’s first big family occasion as well, and already he was behaving like a recalcitrant teenager, refusing to get with the program.
Traveling to California was a big deal for George. We’d started out with that day trip to Phoenix, of course, and he’d been okay with that; on our first trip to California, he had been okay too. But back then he was smaller, and a whole lot less picky about where he’d use the bathroom—which kind of mattered. It was an eight-hour road trip from Tucson to Seal Beach, California, five hundred miles of mostly desert country on Interstate 10. There wasn’t much variety in the choice of places to empty your bladder.
But this time he was picky. Boy, was he picky. Whatever he’d picked up about life along the way, he’d definitely grown a lot more choosy. Just as he’d grown wary of Doc Wallace’s tendency to prod him with needles, it seemed he’d also grown fussy about where he’d squat (which is how Great Danes always pee, male or female), so it was beginning to feel a lot less like an adventure and more like a growing headache—not to mention it might be the potential forerunner to a major medical emergency. We were currently miles, I figured, from the nearest veterinary hospital and I had visions of having to call 911 from the side of the freeway, yelling, “I need an ambulance! I have a dog in urinary retention!” How much fluid could a dog take before his insides exploded? Surely it had gone in, so it had to come out.
Or did it? For this was yet another—perhaps our fourth—human-dog standoff, or, rather, not so much a standoff, as a wander off. This dog of ours wouldn’t squat anywhere.
“How can he not need to go?” I said again. Christie leaned out of the truck. She seemed way too relaxed.
“He hasn’t drunk that much,” she said. “Besides, it’s hot up in the truck. He’s been panting it all off. He loses lots of fluid that way, don’t forget.” She gestured to where George was padding in small circles in the dirt, stopping only to bend his neck to sniff the odd weed or to peer thoughtfully into the middle distance.
“Besides,” she went on, “you know how he is about going in strange places. Maybe if we drive on a ways—find somewhere a little different—”
“But in what way different? Italian tiles, piped music, a bidet? And if he’s like this now, how’s he going to be at your parents’?”
“Oh, stop stressing, honey. Come on. Let’s drive on for a while.”
George definitely heard this; he gave me such a haughty look. He loped regally back to the truck.
And so we drove on. And on a bit farther. And still on. Another bunch of miles. Another dusty hard shoulder. Another couple of hours. Another well-appointed place for going to the bathroom (a Mexican fast-food place, this time, for an early lunch) that seemed to tick all the right boxes: a good selection of soft grasses, nothing spiky, not too dusty or exposed. Yet, again, another bathroom refusal. He was getting like a highly strung show jumping stallion.
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“Okay, you’re right,” said Christie, this time the one out of the truck. “You’re right. He really should need to go now.”
Except he didn’t, and we stressed pretty much constantly from that point. How was he going to manage once we got to California? More to the point, how were we?
Not Going to the Bathroom had never been something that crossed my mind when contemplating the various downsides of dog ownership—never. Crashing into furniture, inadvertently knocking over small persons, costing a week’s salary to feed, fighting neighborhood cats—these were real considerations before we got him. But going to the bathroom? Dogs love going to the bathroom. Going to the bathroom was what dogs did best, wasn’t it? Going to the bathroom, I’d always thought, was the doggie equivalent of John Travolta swaggering down that street, paint can swinging from his hand, in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever. Since when did going to the bathroom become an issue for an animal? Particularly for a dog—dogs love peeing.
I said this to Christie. “Beats me,” she said, and then she tutted. I think, by now, I might have been ranting.
But then, thankfully, to our immense relief, a whole six hours into the trip, he finally condescended to go to the bathroom in the back lot of the Palm Springs branch of McDonald’s, a little way off from the Dumpsters. It was a small patch of grass and it was a tense couple of moments. Once I saw him squat, I had to put my finger to my lips urgently so that Christie wouldn’t start talking and distract him. To anyone watching, we must have looked crazy. We weren’t sure what it said about his taste in stylish bathrooms, either, but God Bless America even so.
Christie’s parents lived in a California cottage house situated on a bluff about a quarter mile from the Pacific Ocean. Seal Beach is a small, attractive city that sits between Los Angeles and Orange County. It isn’t a big place; it has a population of around twenty-five thousand, around a third of which live in a big place called Leisure World, which is a gated community for senior citizens. Leisure World shares beach space with both a huge naval weapons station and the equally massive Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, which comprises around two-thirds of the land of the whole city—an odd mix, but they seemed to get on.