I’ve been sitting here trying to compose a column on health-care reform or Trayvon Martin, only the two most important issues of the moment in America.
But my thoughts are overpoweringly elsewhere and I may as well let the words follow.
They’re with Scooter, named for the only way he could move when he came to us nearly 15 years ago, and who, for his parting act, left several marks on my left forearm.
Deranged, in apparent pain and with his system shutting down from his cooling paws inward, he apparently did not care at all for the contortion into which I placed him moments ago. It happened as I lifted him out of the car at the vet’s for the fateful injection.
Have you ever experienced the numbing effect of having your entire arm just below the elbow squeezed tight in the jaws of your beloved dog?
Then you haven’t truly lived.
These medicated and bandaged spots are oddly ironic forms of metaphors, I guess, for what the inimitable little guy left on my heart—on our hearts.
Nearly 15 years ago, Shalah walked in and announced that she needed to tell me what she’d done. She’d been driving along a busy thoroughfare in inner-city Little Rock and seen a small and scraggly black puppy, only a few months old and with no collar or tag, run over in the middle of the street.
She’d rushed him to the animal hospital, his tongue graying, his life on the brink. He was in emergency surgery at that moment.
I said one thing: We can’t have a third dog.
She said the poor little guy, bones broken and beset with mites that had eaten away at his ears, probably wouldn’t make it anyway. If he did, we’d find him a home, she said.
An hour or so later the phone rang and the vet wanted to report on the post-operative condition of the “stray,” at which point I astonished myself by asking, “When can we get him home?”
I did not like the sound. Stray.
I remember the day we indeed got him home. He was in a crate, still bandaged in the hip area, where he’d suffered severe breaks that would impair him for life.
He had soiled himself and was crying out. I pulled him out of his cage, cleaned him and said—remembering this as if it were yesterday—“Things are going to get better for you, little guy.”
I’m pretty sure I kept my word.
That was on a September Friday, and he scooted around with Shalah and me and the two Labs, Bubba and Sissy, for that entire weekend. I must have spent all of it in shorts, because, on Monday, when I pulled on slacks for work, Scooter skidded briskly away and let out a skunk-worthy odor as he disappeared under the bed.
I guess that meant he’d had a bad experience with someone wearing long pants.
Some weeks later I overheard Shalah telling someone that I thought Scooter had cost us only $700. Apparently she’d taken a sales-commission check and signed it over to the vet.
Whatever the amount, it was the best money we ever spent.
Scooter became my Kavanaugh Boulevard walking partner, pressing along with three good legs and one bold, bold heart.
The best Christmas gift I ever got—I’m looking at it right now—was a print of a happily anxious black mutt attached to an unattended red leash and standing next to a pair of men’s tennis shoes. The mutt’s ears are pointing forward, indicating his intense readiness for that happiest of moments when that big pal of his slipped on those shoes and marched him down the road for whatever adventure awaited.
A couple of years ago, Scooter began routinely whining at the foot of the stairs as he contemplated his unlikely but essential climb to join me upstairs at the computer.
Perhaps I should have started carrying him at that point. But he was headstrong. He would get started, ploddingly—click, click, click, his head emerging arduously over each rung—and we would cheer his successful ascent to the landing.
Occasionally he would slide backward, and I, ever listening for that, ran to rescue him.
It might have been on one of those occasions when he blew out his good rear leg, a situation the vet said he wouldn’t correct surgically because, gosh, the arthritis in the boy’s back was so bad it wouldn’t make much difference.
So for the last several months Shalah and I have carried Scooter up and down those stairs. For the last several weeks we’ve helped him get up, often to find he’d had an accident in his straining to raise himself.
This is the first column I’ve written at home in months that wasn’t interrupted at least once by Scooter’s barked or yelped command to come help him up or carry him outside.
I don’t know how I’ve managed to get it written.
This boy had some serious spunk, I tell you, from beginning to end.
John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.