In memory of George Stein, 1989 - 2003.
One of the small informal rules I try to follow on this web site is never to write about family pets, unless they be monkeys. Happily, this rule gives me a fair amount of leeway. Nevertheless, I’m going to break my rule today, and I predict that the results will be maudlin as all hell.
I’m about to board a plane for Boston to meet up with the nuclear fam for the traditional Thanksgiving feasting. After my brother gets in from LA, we’ll all spend some time agonizing over how healthy George seemed just a week ago, before finally knuckling in to reality and giving the word to put him to sleep. There will be tears.
What can I say about George? The traditional word employed to describe dogs of George’s ilk is “faggy.” I guess this word is theoretically offensive, but its use in this case is so widespread and specialized, and its original meaning so almost quaintly retrograde, that it no longer packs much sting. I suppose I could employ a euphemism such as “flamboyant,” but George isn’t flamboyant. He is a lionhearted little creature in unfortunate packaging.
Due to prolonged childhood exposure, I like small dogs. I do not like those bug-eyed, shaky little things that give a bad name to the entire race. But not all small dogs are chihuahuas, and it’s high time someone mounted a vigorous defense of wee, spirited canines.
Spirited small dogs are funny, because incongruity is funny. Most humor plays in some way on a juxtaposition of two incompatible ideas, and nothing is more endearingly incompatible than the princely self-regard and ludicrous physical circumstance of a small dog. Funniness equals personality, and personality equals likeability. Q.E.D.
George belongs to the subspecies of small dog known as the Bichon Frise. Bichon Frise, I’m pretty sure, is French for “fuzzy bitch” (the latter word meant in the technical sense, of course), and I’m happy enough with this translation that I don’t feel the need to verify it with an actual French-speaking person. Fuzzy bitch is a fairly apt description of an animal that looks like the result of a union between a polar bear and an Ewok.
(Because it’s easy to find pictures of the breed online, I feel compelled to point out that Bichons in real life do not look as stupid as those intended for show. You don’t have to cut their hair like that, just as you don’t have to shave a poodle into pompoms. Bichons are — or can be — very cute, and George was cuter than most.)
Bichons are distinguished by their pleasant temperaments, and indeed you’d be hard-pressed to find a more sweetly stupid animal than George. George in a nutshell: good-natured, fuzzy, obsessed with food. A creative writing teacher would probably instruct me to show rather than tell, but I don’t do character study, and besides, he’s a fucking dog, y’know? He used to jump on me when I came home from school; he loved going for walks; and he was a total pest at the dinner table due to years of surreptitious scraps from my dad. George was a dog, if you catch my meaning.
Here’s an anecdote: all the nurses at the hospital where George currently resides have left notes in his patient chart remarking on how damned sweet he is. One of them described him as “stoic.” I wish she hadn’t, because it set us all to crying again.
Here’s another anecdote: My dad’s assistant at work recently confided to my mom that dad sometimes claims “George is the only one who really loves” him. Presumably dad says this mostly in jest, but only mostly, because it is a sentiment I understand well. When I was going through the hell of adolescence, I was firmly convinced that Casper, our first dog, was the only person (yes, person) in the world I could rely on. The fact that a man in his mid-fifties can voice a similar sentiment about a 25-pound walking throw pillow says a lot. It says that my family is a little bit weird, and it says that my family’s solar system revolves around the dog.
My brother and I discuss George with surprising frequency, despite the fact that neither of us has lived with him for years. We find it funny to impute dark motives or grand significance to George’s actions, and we tend to recycle a few wellworn tropes: surprise revelations of direct blood lineage to George (“Oh, by the way, I thought you should know that George is your real father.”); claims to the greater share of George’s affection (“I talked to George the other day. He told me to tell you he hates you.”); George as a major player in world or cultural affairs (“I am confident that George’s recent appointment to the Iraqi General Council will provide a moderating counterforce to the influence of the more radical clerics.”; “I was surprised by the decision to cast George as Helen of Troy in the upcoming Hollywood epic starring Brad Pitt.”); and George as a tragic figure trapped in the Turkish prison of my parents’ home.
This last joke is inspired mainly by the electric shock collar that my parents force George to wear. You remember I mentioned that George isn’t the smartest of animals? Well, he never quite got the hang of not peeing on the carpet, and my parents, fed up with the cleaning bills and lingering odors, finally installed one of those invisible fences around the living room. If George were ever foolish enough to wander into the area protected by the invisible fence, his shock collar would deliver a small zap to his neck.
My brother and I howled in protest when the fence was installed. We highlighted the relevant passages in the Geneva Convention. We wrote letters. We demanded inquiries. We were convinced that the fence was cruel. The fence was an abomination. The fence was surprisingly effective. Dumb as George was, one zap was all it took to keep him out of the living room forever.
So the electric fence became another joke, and as odd and dumb as these jokes were, they all got at the same essential truth: we missed George like hell, and we felt a vague guilt that he was growing old in our absence.
So now that’s done. It was no better or worse than I expected it to be. That is, it was flatly awful. These days, they don’t come out and tell you it’s time to put an animal down. The technology has gotten too good for that. They tell you that all his systems are failing, that he’s got this and that infection, that he’s blind and mostly deaf, but that maybe if they take a kidney out and he survives the operation and the antibiotics do their job then he might have a few decent months left in him. As I predicted, we agonized and agonized and came to the inevitable conclusion that attempting anything heroic would be cruel.
The animal hospital would have been kind of funny under different circumstances. Angell Memorial has been described as the Mass General for pets, and indeed the place is a mindblowingly large and professional operation. Only, instead of people, the hallways, examining rooms, and ICUs are filled with dogs, rabbits, and canaries, which make the whole place seem like a live-action cartoon.
A man passed us in the hallway carrying a wicker gift basket with a helium-filled “Get Well” balloon tied to the handle. Who was the basket for? Was the guy’s Pekinese going to read the note, paw through the basket’s contents, and say, “Hey, thanks, man. You know how much I love yogurt-covered pretzels. But you’re still not forgiven for having me spayed.”
Plaques on the wall read “This examination room dedicated to Boomer” and “In Loving Memory of Inky — With Us Always”. Pet owners sat stonefaced in the lobby while their dogs strained at the ends of leashes to get a better sniff of each other, tails frantically beating the air.
Everyone did their best not to look at us, because we were snot-covered embarrassments.
The whole day had been filled with absurd, melodramatic moments. I caught myself once gazing through the window at the leafless trees outside and muttering, “You were a good boy, George. You were a good, good boy.” The sight of George’s chew toy under the sofa choked me right up. Still does.
When they finally brought George into the examining room, he was obviously in a bad way. Normally a stout, physically robust little dog, he had shed about a quarter of his body weight. He wandered the room in confused circles, his back legs twitching and occasionally giving out.
After spending some time with him as a group, we took turns saying goodbye to George individually. Mercifully, he settled into a peaceful nap for these last moments. The vet offered us the chance to be with him when she put him to sleep. Only my mother accepted. I was torn, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to watch.
Christ, I miss that little fucking dog.
