The Poodle Permanent
Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 02:22PM 
Osito in RecoveryI’m not a dog person. I never have been. I once knew a woman who returned a dog for its propensity to drool. She is my mother.
Two weeks ago, I was talking on the phone with a potential landlord for a summer sublet when he asked if I had a dog.
“Me?” I said, “No. I have a poodle.”
Half of the people I know don’t think of me as a dog owner. These are the people I meet when I am traveling. They get to know me as a blur of movement, and that blur does not seem to have room for a pet. Back at home, in my other life, I have acres of room, and I have Osito.
He is home to me. In nine years, I’ve spent less than a half-dozen nights without him when I am sleeping in my bed. I don’t like to count how many nights I’ve spent without him when I have been traveling. So I don’t. Or I didn’t, until this last week.
Osito is sick. He had a 3”X1”X1/2” tumor removed from the underside of his tongue on Monday. Now we’re waiting on results from the biopsy as he re-learns how to eat and drink with only half of his tongue. He leaks, a lot.
Even as I write this, there is part of me that feels I should apologize to you. He’s just a dog, I feel like telling you, and me. Dogs, we all know, (and as I just wrote about recently) die. Statistically speaking, they live less than a quarter as long as humans. I want you to understand that I know this is a normal progression of life. And then I want you to explain to me why it still feels so damn hard.
I had never planned on getting a dog. Not having a dog was a part of my personality, and a part of my pact with my ex-husband. Back when we were dating, we were hiking down from a day of climbing on Snow Creek Wall in Levenworth and had entered the normal people radius. Perfume, deodorant, bling…and dogs. There must have been one dog that did something particularly egregious—bark, poop on the trail, drool—and it was enough to prompt Eli and I to each offer, and confirm, that we would never have a dog. I remember tromping down the last mile on packed dirt and thinking this was yet another way in which we were perfectly compatible.
Two years later, we got Osito. To be fair, it was my idea. I was laid up from car accidents and the life I’d planned, of conquering the world while climbing and guiding, suddenly looked a lot more like going along the world while walking and hiking. I wanted a companion. I wanted a poodle.
“A poodle?” Eli had said.
My family had three of them in different heights and dispositions.
“Us?” he said.
My reasons were simple. They were the best dogs. They did not shed. They were what I had wanted. Eli protested to the very end, and even said, in his final plea for dignity, “If we have to get a poodle, can we at least call him a Portuguese water dog?”
That was nine years ago. My life has done nothing but change since. Home, partner, job—they’ve all fluctuated. But not the poodle. He is the tentacle that stretches backwards into every versions of my adulthood. No other friendship or relationship even comes close.
I’m not someone who exudes a traditional sense of stability, or projects the desire for it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. Growing up, I used to look at adulthood as a fixed entity. (This was an odd perception given a childhood during which my parents divorced, moved, and remarried.) In my mind, I would become an adult and it (life, change, any of it) would be done. Maybe it was a desire to speed up this process that had me get married at 21. And maybe it was the same desire that had me build the heaviest and most permanent house I could shortly thereafter.
Back then, I would have never thought that a squirming bundle of black fluff would end up having more of a presence in my life that an eighty-ton house or a seven-year marriage.
I know that my emotions about Osito’s lack of permanence are linked to other choices and decisions in my life. I know that learning about his illness during a summer marked by loss of life makes the news even harder. And I know that when he no longer with me that I will find new and surprising ways that consistency and movement work in my life. For now though, I am marking the mooring he provides my life. Maybe it isn’t normal for your dog to anchor you. But then again, he’s not a dog. He’s a poodle.
Reader Comments (18)
He's not just a dog. He's Osito--understanding when you are coming, going, happy or sad. He helped me through the flu, depression, break ups and missing you. Damn, Majka. You've made me a lover of poodles. Big fluffy ones who walk with me up Sanitas or over to Pekoe for a cup of mate. Thank you for sharing him. I miss both of you daily. xo
Any pet's guardian can relate, it is about the most helpless feeling in the world to watch them suffer. Sending healing thoughts Osito's way.
I've partially caught up on my Limnal Line reading- even my friends dogs are my best friends. I wish I could have a dog but haven't figured out the travel conundrum yet. BTW- I remember trying to keep up with you on a desert trail at red Rocks, Blur of Movement is a fair descriptor :-)
Did you leave out a word in the 3rd sentence of the last paragraph (?)..... great post, though- I remember a good feline friend of mine waiting until I was away climbing in Utah to check out, though he'd been in bad shape for quite some time. The only thing worse than forming close friendships with animals is not doing so....
It all makes sense. He is your anchor--he provids unconditional, unflinching, no questions asked love. I only met him once but that was enough to know he is smarter than many humans. Hope the biopsy is negative.
Sending healing thoughts to you and Osito and hoping for a great outcome for you both.
I don't have that many regrets when I look back though I certainly have a few. One is the time I went on a short trip when my sweet love Juliette was sick with cancer. I felt obliged to take the trip and took it, and Juliette, though she deteriorated considerably over the few days I was gone, waited for me to return. It was clearly a struggle for her. And I should have been with her, wish I had been with her, for her remaining days. It is a regret I will always carry. I will always love her but the truth is I did wrong by her at a time when she most needed love and support. And it is something I will never be able to fix.
I wish, with all my heart, Osito could read this.
Osito is in the kitchen slopping up his dinner and I am reading the responses from all of you. We feel loved. Bonnie, your comments are especially felt and I will take them to heart. It is suddenly very important for me to be here. With him. For Ed, I say, get a dog. It will change your life. It changed mine. Osito and I are going to crawl in bed and I'm going to let him drool in his new post-surgery way on my pillow. It seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend the evening.
Majka, your post is eloquent as always and gave me pause although I only met Osito briefly on my way through Boulder almost two years ago. I'll do my best to remember your words as I move through the hospital this year and afterward. It's so easy to get caught up in the medicine and forget that for the patient and their human in front of you, this moment is only one piece of their shared life's arc. I met a Dachshund with cataracts last week with a zest for life and walks on the beach with his surfing human...another reminder.
Some smart person said, "Dogs aren't our whole lives, but they make our lives whole." Thanks for sharing Osito.
I like thinking of them making our lives whole, and about each time we think about them, or anything that matters, it makes all of us more sensitive to the others around us. Osito's new drooling tendency, for example, is opening a whole new world of love on my end for others.
Majka
I read your post two days after Hermes died. Hermes had been my hiking companion on many day hikes and a couple overnight backpacking trips. Some of the day hikes were over ten miles in mountainous, wilderness areas. We had not hiked since the day after thanksgiving, however, until two days ago. I took him with me up to the Gunks and the Mohonk Preserve. Together we hiked up to Bonticou Crag. It was a short mile and a half ascent and he did well. But on the hike down he started to tire and was really dragging by the time we got back to the car. Two and a half hours later he could barely walk from the car to the house and I had to carry him up the steps. He died less than two hours later. He was less than five years old. Your post about Osito confirmed that I am not the only climber and NOLS grad that has loved a dog. Thanks for the post. Osito is lucky to have you as his human companion. If you have never read it, I refer you to John Muir’s story about Striken.
John- Hermes sounds like he was a champ of a dog. Being able to share life in the way we want to live it, outside, inside, up and down, is the best thing about best dogs. Thinking of you while you move through the loss of him in your life.
Majka
Hi Majka, I met you in NH last winter. Osito looks like another grand poodle I once knew, who is also more human than dog; that's the reason I've tried to talk my SO into getting one.
My friend Brent wrote this not so long ago, and it's the best thing I've ever read about the death of a dog. You might relate - but don't read it if you're feeling vulnerable. http://groups.google.to/group/rec.climbing/msg/e05520e0a3eeb24c
Best, Julie
I don't think it matters how close to vulnerable you are at a certain point, if you read that post (http://groups.google.to/group/rec.climbing/msg/e05520e0a3eeb24c) you will feel it. Thanks for sending me there. Heartbreaking and really real, and real in all of this transition some of us contain in our lives. I have a month to be in one place, same bed, more than I have had in two years. I feel honored to have that time with Osito.
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New to your website. Read this post. My story is the same, my puppy's name is Butter. She's my anchor. Husband, houses, jobs, friends, passions have all ebbed to and fro like waves, but she's always been there. She's my child, irrational as it is, and I love her unconditionally. I don't know what I'd do without her. Thanks for sharing.
Aleya