from San Diego Pets
One day, we’ll all be judged by the dogs we loved and the dogs who loved us.
By JASON WATKINS | San Diego Pets Magazine
He was my best friend, my trusted sidekick, my unfailing partner in crime and my most loyal confidant. He was, of course, just a dog, but puppy love is perhaps the purest of the form because it is unburdened by the bonds of obligation and human interraction. The love of a dog is like the love of an infant, albeit a mute and abundantly hairy one.
I got him when I was thirteen. For months I had begged my mom for a golden retriever puppy, had cut out pictures from pet catalogs to soften her. I even picked out a name—Cody, strong but sensitive—all in support of the universal truth that all boys should have a dog. But she would have none of it, claiming that I would lose interest in a dog, that I lacked the requisite commitment to care for a living creature. She said any dog of mine would suffer a miserable existence, a fair point considering my spotty record. In the nearly dozen years I had been alive, I had either lost or misplaced a kitten, two goldfish, a snake named Spanky, another snake without a name, a turtle, a box full of horny toads, more than a dozen stuffed animals and a horse. (The horse, I later learned, was shipped off to a happier place after my brother and I lost interest in him, but I always carried around a secret suspicion that my neglect caused his demise.) In fact, the only creature that hadn’t hastily fled my company was an alley cat named Tigger who, loyal to his core, could not be driven away.
Because I had an older brother who showed no interest in my suitability as a playmate (or in my existence), I grew up believing I was an only child. On top of that, I grew up in the rural southwest, ten miles from the nearest town and surrounded by cows and coyotes, so my need for a true friend ran deep. This time would be different, I told my mother. I will not lose or neglect or somehow snuff this puppy.
MY MOTHER PICKED me up from school on the day I turned thirteen. Because junior high was particularly hard on me, having introduced me to a world of playground bullies and minor injustices, my ride home was always a quiet affair. But this day was different; sitting on the seat next to mine was a small box, wrapped neatly in paper, the four sides folded one over the top of the other to hide the contents but to keep them accessible. I put the box on my lap and said that I would open it later. Then the box began to move. When I opened one of the flaps, then another, a knowing grin stretched across my face. There, staring back at me with two pinpoint, black eyes was Cody, a month-old butterscotch ball of fur. My mother had driven four hours roundtrip to pick him up from a breeder. He was registered with the American Kennel Club as Cody Watkins, the first thing in my life over which I possessed official ownership.
He slept in a makeshift kennel beside my bed for those first few, sleepless months. After learning the rhythms and rules of our home, he earned a place atop my bed. Even then, he required constant care—frequent trips outside, food, water, petting, love—all at the risk of ceaseless and pitiful whimpering. It’s said that the bonds of love are cemented at first sight, but I believe they begin in moments like these when the happiness and survival of another creature rests squarely on your shoulders and comes at some small or imagined sacrifice.
As Cody grew, my family laughed at his awkward progression from fur ball to disproportionate puppy, his limbs and paws too big for his body and his movements a mixture of aloofness and marginal dexterity. But he, like most golden retrievers, was blessed by a quiet affection for his newly adopted family and he showed us patience and grace in our endeavor to mold him into a well-trained, disciplined member of the clan. His body soon filled out, his movements gaining agility and his coat becoming a thick, brilliant blanket of orange velvet.
One of the few amenities we enjoyed growing up was a swimming pool in our backyard. Cody took to it like, well, a bird dog to water, eventually jumping off the diving board and dog-paddling to the other side where the steps were. We called it the Cody Crawl. Friends loved it. My mother hated it because she was the one left with the task of cleaning out the pool filter. His favorite activity, though, was playing fetch. Every year for Christmas, Cody got a new package of bright yellow tennis balls which we would through endlessly as he bounded across the yard (or pasture, or through the house), returning a few seconds later with the ball. He insisted that we throw it again, and again (and again) until one of us exhausted, and he never exhausted. He held onto each ball until its integrity was compromised by doggy slobber and dirt, and then he’d go find a stick or cow patty until we could produce another ball. It was in those moments, from the point of separation of the ball from our hand until he clutched it again in his mouth, as the ball began and maintained its arch and then fell back to earth, that Cody was happiest. I sometimes wondered if we facilitated this meaningless act for his benefit or if he was just keeping us busy so we’d stay around a little longer.
During my sophomore year of high school, my friend Tammy and I were to present a fictitious product in our speech class. Our visual aide was Cody, outfitted in a device we claimed could serve as a contraceptive for dogs to spare them the indigity of, you know, being neutered. Cody, not our concept, was a hit. And because his attention could only be held by the round, yellow ball in front of him, one of our classmates thought it might be funny to see him fetch, so he threw the ball fifty yards down the hallway as Cody, with the grace of a train wreck, slipped and slided from one end to the other. Students in other classrooms stared in confusion as an orange bullet blew past their door, then again on the return trip.
Partly because of this and partly because of his beauty and charm, Cody became something of a celebrity in my hometown. He was featured occasionally in my high school and community newspapers (I was on staff at both) and made appearances at social events. People asked about him not in the way one might ask about a pet but in a truly interested way. He was like my considerably more handsome and more popular brother, and I found myself, deep in throes of my own teen angst and longing for attention, acutely jealous of him.
MY FAMILY LOVED Cody and in turn he loved each one of us, particularly our other pets, who approached all newcomers with a mix of trepidation and disgust. Soon, he and Tigger were fast friends and he and Misty, my brother’s dog, were soulmates. On many days, the four of us would set out armed with a pellet gun into the fields of a neighboring ranch to hunt small game, Tigger trotting along to keep pace while Cody and Misty ferretted out rabbits and sparrows or the occasional skunk. I was base camp, dispatching the troops to every near and distant landmark within our slowly expanding world. There, in the august light of summer, a boy and his dog (and his cat and his brother’s dog) held court over a postage stamp of land, the only world those three would ever know. Sometimes the existence of a loyal pet in the life of a child is his first sign that the world may not be such a bad place, that perfection, though fleeting, is possible.
The day Misty died, Cody searched for her for hours, finally resting his head on the front porch as the gravity of the situation set in. During his formative years, she was the closest thing to a maternal figure in his life. Cody was just a dog, of course, but he was a smart dog and he knew that an unfillable void had been created by her passing. He mourned the death of Miss Watson, our bassett hound that lived through more presidential administrations that I have. He mourned the death of Gator, who didn’t die but whose ownership was reappropriated after eating ten two many of our shoes. And eventually, along with the rest of the family, he mourned the death of Tigger, who had finally succumbed to the predators of the desert. On the day Cody and I discovered his lifeless body in the middle of a cow pasture, the victim of a coyote or an owl, Cody stopped in front of his remains as if to pay his final respects. Then, as I placed the river rock at the head of Tigger’s grave in the southwest corner of our field, Cody genuflected again. So this is how it’s going to be, his eyes said. Get attached to something and then lose it.
And so it went, for the remainer of his life was marked by the slow umooring of friendships and alliances in the name of time or progress. He sat on the front porch as my brother drove away to college, and he sat on the front porch the day I drove away to college, though by now he was no longer a puppy with an unfillable appetite for chasing tennis balls but had grown into a stalwart protector, a patriarchial sentry who watched over our family and home, quickly rising to greet every new visitor with a cold, wet nose and an appeal to play a little fetch.
When I came home on weekends and holidays, Cody would be waiting there on the front porch, now with a new playmate and hunting partner. Tip, my uncle’s puppy, had taken up residence at our house and trailed Cody wherever he went, sometimes invading too closely into Cody’s personal space. No longer a spring chicken, Cody did his best to tolerate the tightly wound pup but sometimes he would indulge Tip and set off on some journey to a distant ranch, both dogs returning at the end of the day thirsty and tired.
My relationship with Cody soon faded, though, as the existential crises of college and adulthood claimed most of my waking hours and I returned home less and less. As he got older, I suspected that each time I saw him would be my last and my farewells were usually short but poignant, like visits to a dying relative. But each time I returned, he was right there on the porch where I last saw him, sometimes with a tennis ball in his mouth, sometimes not.
Just before Christmas last year, I got a call from my mother telling me that Cody had taken a turn for the worse and she was forced to make the difficult decision to have him put to sleep. For a moment I said nothing, then sighed and told her it was for the best. “He shouldn’t have to suffer,” I told her. “You did the right thing.” I knew I couldn’t have made the decision myself, that I would have selfishly chosen to prolong his suffering in order to delay my own. And I thought about Tip, now friendless on the front step.
I regretted not being there, not holding Cody as he breathed his last breaths, not being able to say goodbye. I knew, we all knew, the day would come when we would be forced to accept Cody’s passing from our family but I always imagined the circumstances would be a little different, though how I’m not sure. The truth was, it had been years since Cody and I were close, and I doubt his last moments of clarity were filled with rememberances of me and of Tigger and all of our other friends during those halcyon days of my youth when nothing mattered, not even schoolyard bullies. The truth is, he wasn’t just a dog. He was my friend. And when he finally did slip the surly bonds of earth, I like to imagine him entering his next life the same way he first entered mine: with furry ears a-flopping and a furiously wagging tail. Because someday, we’ll all be called to our maker and we’ll be judged by the dogs we loved and the dogs who loved us.
People ask me all the time what it was like growing up in the middle of nowhere, with no playmates and nothing to do. It must have been incredibly boring, they say, you must have led a lonely, solitary existence.
If they only knew.
