Good old girl

I dreamed about our old girl, not so very long ago.

In my dream our tumbledown rail fence was still standing, and our old girl kept hopping through it into the common area that abuts our backyard, and there she would run and jump and play tag with the neighborhood dogs, her black tail wagging back and forth like the baton of a particularly manic orchestra conductor.

In my dream her muzzle and the place around her eyes were not yet salted with gray, and there was no pain in those eyes or hobble to her gait. And she leaped for joy as she played.

When I woke there was heaviness like a stone in my chest, and a sadness I carried with me long into the day.

Because things change, see, and we cannot un-change them. The tumbledown fence is gone and it's not coming back. And the sweet joyous girl of my dream is not coming back either.

Which is to say, we had to put the old girl down yesterday. 

She was 15 years old and half-blind and her back legs didn't work anymore, so that she could no longer get up without a gentle foot placed under her hindquarters. And when she did finally get up, she hobbled and panted because it hurt her terribly, and it hurt us just to watch her.

So it was time. And this morning when I came downstairs her collar was sitting in the middle of her dog pillow by the fireplace, and the words rose to my lips like a reflex: "Hey, Spark."

Her name was Sparky, a male-dog name given her by our then 10-year-old daughter, but she went by a dozen aliases. She was Spark and Spark-a-lark and Sparker Parker and Babycakes. Occasionally she was also Dammit Sparky, because dogs will be dogs and sometimes are.

She was a Labradoodle, born east of Columbus, Ohio, on a puppy farm, but she was always far more Lab than Doodle. Her fur was jet-black and sort of unruly-wavy, and she was the gentlest soul that ever walked on four legs. She was also a prodigious eater of unattended socks, and not long after a prodigious thrower-up of socks. As a pup, there wasn't anything of which she wouldn't test the chewability.

One winter's day when she was nine months old, for instance, she tore the cable box off the side of the house and tried to eat it. I discovered it when I turned the TV on and there was nothing but snow. 

So I went outside and there lay the box, as dead as disco. The chewable parts were a chewed mess. The metal housing bore the telltale scars of teeth marks.

None of this would have been so bad had she not done it the night of the Rose Bowl in 2006. No. 1 USC vs. No. 2 Texas in one of the greatest college football games ever played, and who could forget Vince Young's dash to the end zone that sealed it for the Longhorns?

I mean, other than me, who never got to see it.

Yet she was a good old girl, in all other ways. When one of us walked in the room not just her tail but her entire hindquarters would commence to wiggling back and forth, a sort of doggy Dancing with the Stars that never failed to make us smile. And she guarded her domain fiercely, barking my-yard-my-yard-my-yard at anyone walking on the pathways that skirted the common area.'

"Sparky, that's not your yard!" we'd always say. It never worked.

They say when a dog grows old and loves and is loved it will cling to life, however painfully, because it doesn't want to leave those it loves. It will endure much just to stay with its family a little longer.

This is likely a human conceit, but it explains a lot about Spark's last months. She loved and was loved, to the very end. And it was love that compelled that end. 

Somewhere on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge, she runs and barks and leaps for joy now, and there is no more pain. And that is solace enough for those of us left behind.

Goodbye, Sparky.

Spark. Spark-a-lark. Sparker Parker. Babycakes.