My husband came home with a dog a few months ago and it has changed my life–but not in the way you might think.
Scooter is 17 pounds of purebred King Charles Spaniel. He is the elderly pet of a friend in need, he is the perpetual houseguest, and he is ruining my life.
Since Scooter’s arrival, gone is the freedom I had just learned to enjoy again now that my nest has emptied. Gone is the spontaneity of walking out the door with no schedule because now his walks are my schedule. And I use the verb walk loosely. He might walk–it depends on how his arthritic hind legs are doing at the time. Some days they quake uncontrollably. Some days he stands, unstable, rocking like he’s trying to keep his balance on one of those moving floors in the fun house. More often we just carry him. Yesterday, as he attempted to mount the stairs up to our porch, he did a backwards shoulder roll down two of them and almost stuck the landing.
When he has to evacuate his bowels, those back legs can barely hold him up, and I have to pull the leash taught so that he doesn’t fall back into his own refuse. It’s a very fine line between keeping him upright and choking him, and yet, he shows no gratitude for my efforts in coordinating this twice or thrice daily spectacle.
Scooter is white and brown with a small squishy face and big brown eyes that stare up at me. Correction: he has one brown eye that watches me. The other one is clouded white with cataracts. It’s disturbing. As a result of his half-blindness, while we’re walking, he may occasionally just fall off the sidewalk or run into a fire hydrant if I’m not navigating effectively. Sometimes he wobbles around like a drunken sailor. If we weren’t tethered together by the leash, I might pretend not to know him.
Luckily, at his age, he sleeps an awful lot. Except he sleeps (and snores) where our cats used to sleep in front of the television. We had two cats. Had. And here’s the rub: they are also old and may spend the end of their days held captive on the dark, lonely second floor since the homewrecker arrived– my Flowers in the Attic. One of them is now depressed and the other is angry. I know this because Depressed lies in his bed all day and Angry has taken to peeing beside his litterbox (which is now in my husband’s office.) Angry occasionally ventures down to see if the enemy is still occupying the first floor, but if Scooter smells him, the instinct to chase overrides the pain of his arthritis, and he flies upstairs in hot pursuit. His innate cat-hunting spirit is interrupted by his insatiable appetite for cat food, which he devours in seconds. Scooter’s agility in these times makes me question the validity of his disability. Perhaps he’s just faking it for the attention. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Scooter’s agility in these times makes me question the validity of his disability
If he’s asleep when I come home, I can fall into the house, dropping bags of groceries and stomping the dirt off my shoes. It doesn’t rouse him. I can enthusiastically say, “Want a treat?” and he ignores me like he’s taken lessons on indifference from the cats. I don’t take it personally, though; he’s been completely deaf for years–unless he’s been faking this as well to remove any accountability for his poor watchdog skills.
If you see him from a certain angle, one that doesn’t show his possessed eye, he can look kind of sweet. The other day I was carrying him, feeling his heart beating wildly, perhaps from anxiety or maybe a vet mentioned something about a heart condition once, when a woman approached us.
“Aww!” she oozed as Scooter wagged his tail manipulatively, playing up his cute factor.
But as she drew nearer, she exclaimed, “What happened to his tail?”
Oh, you mean the hairless string of bones swinging in the wind behind him, resembling that of a giant New York City rat? He’s old. He’s losing his hair in patches, most significantly, across the length of his tail. Not his best angle.
Let’s get one thing straight–I don’t hate Scooter. I’m just not a dog person–it’s nothing personal. When I present him to my friends, some of them “Ooh” and “Ahh” and speak to him in that Brittany Spears baby voice: “Aren’t you just the sweetest old thing?” To which the old thing looks to the pile of excrement he’s left on the carpet and says charismatically, “Oops!...I did it again!”
My most compassionate friend says, “Maybe you could accidentally feed him something he’s allergic to–like poison.” But most say, “Oh, but he can’t last much longer.” They’ve been saying this for years, to which my cats respond with their raised middle finger (as much as cats have middle fingers.)
Scooter is three years past his expiration date according to the average life expectancy of this breed, yet, behind the blind, deaf, arthritic, balding, wobbly, weak-hearted façade, there’s a look in his eye, one that mocks me and seems to say, I’m not going anywhere. For I am Scooter, the Immortal.
“Come on Scooter, the Immortal,” I say, reaching for the poop bags, and pondering which one of us is actually wearing the collar.
