Billy saw his 17th season of snow last week. It will be his last. He has been my friend, the joy of our family for so long, the best of the best of a long line of pets. One ear up, one ear down. I’m writing this as he lays in his bed. I’m not leaving his side. It’s not my first rodeo regarding the end game of a family pet.
Almost August of 2002, just a couple weeks before tying the knot with yours truly, Mary was picnicking with a group of teachers from her school in Garfield Park. A scraggly mutt limped over to the spread, drawn to the lure of fried chicken done crispy. A couple of the male teachers tried to shoo him away. Mary, a vegetarian not protective of the Colonel’s bounty, seeing this creature who was obviously left to his means on the streets of Chicago, went to him. Stray dogs and cats have a way of finding Mary, and this one had found something better than a bucket of chicken. She saw immediately that he was hurt. There was a hole in his leg that you could put a pencil through. Was he hit by a car or on the wrong end of a set of fangs? One ear stood straight up as if he was listening to the whole world around him. The other flopped limply downward, unperturbed and trusting.
Mary called me from the park. “I’ve got a surprise. I’m bringing home a dog.” According to Mary I was very sweet and accepting of the news. I’m sure my buried voice from deep in my chest was saying, “No, no, no, no,” because we had just got done taking care of her parent’s cocker spaniel until her messy end, and we had three cats, plus we had a honeymoon planned and what were we going to do with this street mutt. I wasn’t ready. But in my gut I knew. This is who Mary is. She is someone who is going to take care of this soul. There would be plenty of time to establish who the boss in the family was after the wedding. Sure.
We cleaned him up and gave him a hose bath in the back yard, then got him to vet. Back at the house we had just moved into, Billy proceeded to bring the charm. He was youthful, but not a puppy. Full grown, coloring like a German Shepard, but much smaller, with blue spots on his tongue and fluff of neck fur like a Chow. He was friendly, not skittish at all, and followed us everywhere. He was home.
In his prime, Billy was a hit at Independence Park with the dog crowd. He was the fastest dog there and loved to run. He wasn’t a fetcher, always deferring to the more eager of the bunch, but he loved the chase and was always friendly. The only times he’d get himself in trouble was with the sniff game, because even though he was fixed, he was quite the Romeo, and his hump-first-ask-questions-later approach often got the rebuke he should have known was coming.
Billy loved to wander. Forget to fully secure the back gate and he was gone. The first time we found him across Elston Avenue at Tony’s, trying to get a handout from exiting shoppers. When we first moved out of the city, he had several long excursions around the new neighborhood, and we were mostly lucky to find him in somebody’s back yard wagging his tail, then running to the car and jumping into the open door when we called him, but once ending up at the police station in jail. He had one amazing escape at my mother in law’s house where we staying. We had all gone out. Billy got nervous. He opened one door to the laundry room. Another door to the garage. And finally, a third door from the garage to the street. We got home to find the doors open and Billy gone. It looked like a break-in. We called the police. They circled the house, told us to stay back. Nothing. No signs of foul play. The neighbor across the street who watched as all this drama played out, said, “You know, your dog broke out of the house.” And after a neighborhood search, there he was in someone’s back yard. The door knobs on the house were the handle variety that didn’t turn, you just had to push down on them. From the inside they weren’t locked. And Billy figured out how to push down and open the door. Three times.
Today we are sad. The kids have never not had him. Matt, who named him, has loved him a long time. We will miss him. I called him the “doof” because of his occasional clumsiness, but mostly for his happy-go-lucky-i-love-everybody demeanor. Up until a month ago he was still showing his athleticism with a game we called “Go Billy Go.” He would run from one end of the house to the other jumping onto the couch near the back door then sprinting to fly onto the couch in the living room at the other end of the house. In his youth he would do this twenty times before panting to a halt.
He has been deaf the past two years and going blind, but he still made a Superman-like leap onto the couch from a house-spanning run. Just one though. Go Billy Go! We love you Doof.
