Dog we have never seen before and have no 2 страница

As they grew into adolescents, our three roost-

ers took to posturing and pecking and, most dis-

tressing considering they were still in our kitchen

as I raced to finish their coop in the backyard,

John Grogan

crowing their testosterone-pumped hearts out.

Shirley, our one poor, overtaxed female, was get-

ting way more attention than even the most lusty

of women could want.

I had thought the constant crowing of our

roosters would drive Marley insane. In his

younger years, the sweet chirp of a single tiny

songbird in the yard would set him off on a fre-

netic barking jag as he raced from one window to

the next, hopping up and down on his hind legs.

Three crowing roosters a few steps from his food

bowl, however, had no effect on him at all. He

didn’t seem to even know they were there. Each

day the crowing grew louder and stronger, rising

up from the kitchen to echo through the house at

five in the morning. Cock-a-doodle-dooooo!

Marley slept right through the racket. That’s

when it first occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t

just ignoring the crowing; maybe he couldn’t hear

it. I walked up behind him one afternoon as he

snoozed in the kitchen and said, “Marley?” Noth-

ing. I said it louder: “Marley!” Nothing. I clapped

my hands and shouted, “MARLEY!” He lifted his

head and looked blankly around, his ears up, try-

ing to figure out what it was his radar had de-

tected. I did it again, clapping loudly and shouting

his name. This time he turned his head enough to

catch a glimpse of me standing behind him. Oh,

Marley & Me

it’s you! He bounced up, tail wagging, happy—

and clearly surprised—to see me. He bumped up

against my legs in greeting and gave me a sheepish

look as if to ask, What’s the idea sneaking up on

me like that? My dog, it seemed, was going deaf.

It all made sense. In recent months Marley

seemed to simply ignore me in a way he never had

before. I would call for him and he would not so

much as glance my way. I would take him outside

before turning in for the night, and he would sniff

his way across the yard, oblivious to my whistles

and calls to get him to turn back. He would be

asleep at my feet in the family room when some-

one would ring the doorbell—and he would not so

much as open an eye.

Marley’s ears had caused him problems from an

early age. Like many Labrador retrievers, he was

predisposed to ear infections, and we had spent a

small fortune on antibiotics, ointments, cleansers,

drops, and veterinarian visits. He even underwent

surgery to shorten his ear canals in an attempt to

correct the problem. It had not occurred to me

until after we brought the impossible-to-ignore

roosters into our house that all those years of

problems had taken their toll and our dog had

gradually slipped into a muffled world of faraway

whispers.

Not that he seemed to mind. Retirement suited

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Marley just fine, and his hearing problems didn’t

seem to impinge on his leisurely country lifestyle.

If anything, deafness proved fortuitous for him, fi-

nally giving him a doctor-certified excuse for dis-

obeying. After all, how could he heed a command

that he could not hear? As thick-skulled as I al-

ways insisted he was, I swear he figured out how to

use his deafness to his advantage. Drop a piece of

steak into his bowl, and he would come trotting in

from the next room. He still had the ability to de-

tect the dull, satisfying thud of meat on metal.

But yell for him to come when he had somewhere

else he’d rather be going, and he’d stroll blithely

away from you, not even glancing guiltily over his

shoulder as he once would have.

“I think the dog’s scamming us,” I told Jenny.

She agreed his hearing problems seemed selective,

but every time we tested him, sneaking up, clap-

ping our hands, shouting his name, he would not

respond. And every time we dropped food into his

bowl, he would come running. He appeared to be

deaf to all sounds except the one that was dearest

to his heart or, more accurately, his stomach: the

sound of dinner.

Marley went through life insatiably hungry. Not

only did we give him four big scoops of dog chow

a day—enough food to sustain an entire family of

Chihuahuas for a week—but we began freely sup-

Marley & Me

plementing his diet with table scraps, against the

better advice of every dog guide we had ever read.

Table scraps, we knew, simply programmed dogs

to prefer human food to dog chow (and given the

choice between a half-eaten hamburger and dry

kibble, who could blame them?). Table scraps

were a recipe for canine obesity. Labs, in particu-

lar, were prone to chubbiness, especially as they

moved into middle age and beyond. Some Labs,

especially those of the English variety, were so ro-

tund by adulthood, they looked like they’d been

inflated with an air hose and were ready to float

down Fifth Avenue in the Macy’s Thanksgiving

Day Parade.

Not our dog. Marley had many problems, but

obesity was not among them. No matter how

many calories he devoured, he always burned

more. All that unbridled high-strung exuberance

consumed vast amounts of energy. He was like a

high-kilowatt electric plant that instantly con-

verted every ounce of available fuel into pure, raw

power. Marley was an amazing physical specimen,

the kind of dog passersby stopped to admire. He

was huge for a Labrador retriever, considerably

bigger than the average male of his breed, which

runs sixty-five to eighty pounds. Even as he aged,

the bulk of his mass was pure muscle—ninety-

seven pounds of rippled, sinewy brawn with nary

John Grogan

an ounce of fat anywhere on him. His rib cage was

the size of a small beer keg, but the ribs them-

selves stretched just beneath his fur with no spare

padding. We were not worried about obesity; ex-

actly the opposite. On our many visits to Dr. Jay

before leaving Florida, Jenny and I would voice

the same concerns: We were feeding him tremen-

dous amounts of food, but still he was so much

thinner than most Labs, and he always appeared

famished, even immediately after wolfing down a

bucket of kibble that looked like it was meant for a

draft horse. Were we slowly starving him? Dr. Jay

always responded the same way. He would run his

hands down Marley’s sleek sides, setting him off

on a desperately happy Labrador evader journey

around the cramped exam room, and tell us that,

as far as physical attributes went, Marley was just

about perfect. “Just keep doing what you’re do-

ing,” Dr. Jay would say. Then, as Marley lunged

between his legs or snarfed a cotton ball off the

counter, Dr. Jay would add: “Obviously, I don’t

need to tell you that Marley burns a lot of nervous

energy.”

Each evening after we finished dinner, when it

came time to give Marley his meal, I would fill his

bowl with chow and then freely toss in any tasty

leftovers or scraps I could find. With three young

children at the table, half-eaten food was some-

Marley & Me

thing we had in plentiful supply. Bread crusts,

steak trimmings, pan drippings, chicken skins,

gravy, rice, carrots, puréed prunes, sandwiches,

three-day-old pasta—into the bowl it went. Our

pet may have behaved like the court jester, but he

ate like the Prince of Wales. The only foods we

kept from him were those we knew to be un-

healthy for dogs, such as dairy products, sweets,

potatoes, and chocolate. I have a problem with

people who buy human food for their pets, but

larding Marley’s meals with scraps that would

otherwise be thrown out made me feel thrifty—

waste not, want not—and charitable. I was giving

always-appreciative Marley a break from the end-

less monotony of dog-chow hell.

When Marley wasn’t acting as our household

garbage disposal, he was on duty as the family’s

emergency spill-response team. No mess was too

big a job for our dog. One of the kids would flip a

full bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on the floor,

and we’d simply whistle and stand back while Old

Wet Vac sucked up every last noodle and then

licked the floor until it gleamed. Errant peas,

dropped celery, runaway rigatoni, spilled apple-

sauce, it didn’t matter what it was. If it hit the

floor, it was history. To the amazement of our

friends, he even wolfed down salad greens.

Not that food had to make it to the ground be-

John Grogan

fore it ended up in Marley’s stomach. He was a

skilled and unremorseful thief, preying mostly on

unsuspecting children and always after checking

to make sure neither Jenny nor I was watching.

Birthday parties were bonanzas for him. He would

make his way through the crowd of five-year-olds,

shamelessly snatching hot dogs right out of their

little hands. During one party, we estimated he

ended up getting two-thirds of the birthday cake,

nabbing piece after piece off the paper plates the

children held on their laps.

It didn’t matter how much food he devoured, ei-

ther through legitimate means or illicit activities.

He always wanted more. When deafness came, we

weren’t completely surprised that the only sound

he could still hear was the sweet, soft thud of

falling food.

One day I arrived home from work to find the

house empty. Jenny and the kids were out some-

where, and I called for Marley but got no re-

sponse. I walked upstairs, where he sometimes

snoozed when left alone, but he was nowhere in

sight. After I changed my clothes, I returned

downstairs and found him in the kitchen up to no

good. His back to me, he was standing on his hind

legs, his front paws and chest resting on the

kitchen table as he gobbled down the remains of a

grilled cheese sandwich. My first reaction was to

Marley & Me

loudly scold him. Instead I decided to see how

close I could get before he realized he had com-

pany. I tiptoed up behind him until I was close

enough to touch him. As he chewed the crusts, he

kept glancing at the door that led into the garage,

knowing that was where Jenny and the kids would

enter upon their return. The instant the door

opened, he would be on the floor under the table,

feigning sleep. Apparently it had not occurred to

him that Dad would be arriving home, too, and

just might sneak in through the front door.

“Oh, Marley?” I asked in a normal voice.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He just kept

gulping the sandwich down, clueless to my pres-

ence. His tail was wagging languidly, a sign he

thought he was alone and getting away with a ma-

jor food heist. Clearly he was pleased with himself.

I cleared my throat loudly, and he still didn’t

hear me. I made kissy noises with my mouth.

Nothing. He polished off one sandwich, nosed the

plate out of the way, and stretched forward to

reach the crusts left on a second plate. “You are

such a bad dog,” I said as he chewed away. I

snapped my fingers twice and he froze midbite,

staring at the back door. What was that? Did I

hear a car door slam? After a moment, he con-

vinced himself that whatever he heard was noth-

ing and went back to his purloined snack.

John Grogan

That’s when I reached out and tapped him once

on the butt. I might as well have lit a stick of dy-

namite. The old dog nearly jumped out of his fur

coat. He rocketed backward off the table and, as

soon as he saw me, dropped onto the floor, rolling

over to expose his belly to me in surrender.

“Busted!” I told him. “You are so busted.” But I

didn’t have it in me to scold him. He was old; he

was deaf; he was beyond reform. I wasn’t going to

change him. Sneaking up on him had been great

fun, and I laughed out loud when he jumped. Now

as he lay at my feet begging for forgiveness I just

found it a little sad. I guess secretly I had hoped

he’d been faking all along.

I finished the chicken coop, an A-frame plywood

affair with a drawbridge-style gangplank that

could be raised at night to keep out predators.

Donna kindly took back two of our three roosters

and exchanged them for hens from her flock. We

now had three girls and one testosterone-pumped

guy bird that spent every waking minute doing

one of three things: pursuing sex, having sex, or

crowing boastfully about the sex he had just

scored. Jenny observed that roosters are what men

would be if left to their own devices, with no so-

cial conventions to rein in their baser instincts,

Marley & Me

and I couldn’t disagree. I had to admit, I kind of

admired the lucky bastard.

We let the chickens out each morning to roam

the yard, and Marley made a few gallant runs at

them, charging ahead barking for a dozen paces or

so before losing steam and giving up. It was as

though some genetic coding deep inside him was

sending an urgent message: “You’re a retriever;

they are birds. Don’t you think it might be a good

idea to chase them?” He just did not have his heart

in it. Soon the birds learned the lumbering yellow

beast was no threat whatsoever, more a minor an-

noyance than anything else, and Marley learned to

share the yard with these new, feathered interlop-

ers. One day I looked up from weeding in the gar-

den to see Marley and the four chickens making

their way down the row toward me as if in forma-

tion, the birds pecking and Marley sniffing as they

went. It was like old friends out for a Sunday

stroll. “What kind of self-respecting hunting dog

are you?” I chastised him. Marley lifted his leg and

peed on a tomato plant before hurrying to rejoin

his new pals.

C H A P T E R 2 4

The Potty Room

❉

Aperson can learn a few things from an old

dog. As the months slipped by and his infir-

mities mounted, Marley taught us mostly about

life’s uncompromising finiteness. Jenny and I were

not quite middle-aged. Our children were young,

our health good, and our retirement years still an

unfathomable distance off on the horizon. It

would have been easy to deny the inevitable creep

of age, to pretend it might somehow pass us by.

Marley would not afford us the luxury of such de-

nial. As we watched him grow gray and deaf and

creaky, there was no ignoring his mortality—or

ours. Age sneaks up on us all, but it sneaks up on a

dog with a swiftness that is both breathtaking and

sobering. In the brief span of twelve years, Mar-

ley had gone from bubbly puppy to awkward ado-

lescent to muscular adult to doddering senior

John Grogan

citizen. He aged roughly seven years for every one

of ours, putting him, in human years, on the

downward slope to ninety.

His once sparkling white teeth had gradually

worn down to brown nubs. Three of his four front

fangs were missing, broken off one by one during

crazed panic attacks as he tried to chew his way to

safety. His breath, always a bit on the fishy side,

had taken on the bouquet of a sun-baked Dump-

ster. The fact that he had acquired a taste for that

little appreciated delicacy known as chicken ma-

nure didn’t help, either. To our complete revul-

sion, he gobbled the stuff up like it was caviar.

His digestion was not what it once had been,

and he became as gassy as a methane plant. There

were days I swore that if I lit a match, the whole

house would go up. Marley was able to clear an

entire room with his silent, deadly flatulence,

which seemed to increase in direct correlation to

the number of dinner guests we had in our home.

“Marley! Not again!” the children would scream

in unison, and lead the retreat. Sometimes he

drove even himself away. He would be sleeping

peacefully when the smell would reach his nos-

trils; his eyes would pop open and he’d furl his

brow as if asking, “Good God! Who dealt it?”

And he would stand up and nonchalantly move

into the next room.

Marley & Me

When he wasn’t farting, he was outside poop-

ing. Or at least thinking about it. His choosiness

about where he squatted to defecate had grown to

the point of compulsive obsession. Each time I let

him out, he took longer and longer to decide on

the perfect spot. Back and forth he would prome-

nade; round and round he went, sniffing, pausing,

scratching, circling, moving on, the whole while

sporting a ridiculous grin on his face. As he

combed the grounds in search of squatting nir-

vana, I stood outside, sometimes in the rain,

sometimes in the snow, sometimes in the dark of

night, often barefoot, occasionally just in my

boxer shorts, knowing from experience that I

didn’t dare leave him unsupervised lest he decide

to meander up the hill to visit the dogs on the next

street.

Sneaking away became a sport for him. If the

opportunity presented itself and he thought he

could get away with it, he would bolt for the prop-

erty line. Well, not exactly bolt. He would more

sniff and shuffle his way from one bush to the next

until he was out of sight. Late one night I let him

out the front door for his final walk before bed.

Freezing rain was forming an icy slush on the

ground, and I turned around to grab a slicker out

of the front closet. When I walked out onto the

sidewalk less than a minute later, he was nowhere

John Grogan

to be found. I walked out into the yard, whistling

and clapping, knowing he couldn’t hear me,

though pretty sure all the neighbors could. For

twenty minutes I prowled through our neighbors’

yards in the rain, making quite the fashion state-

ment dressed in boots, raincoat, and boxer shorts.

I prayed no porch lights would come on. The more

I hunted, the angrier I got. Where the hell did he

mosey off to this time? But as the minutes

passed, my anger turned to worry. I thought of

those old men you read about in the newspaper

who wander away from nursing homes and are

found frozen in the snow three days later. I re-

turned home, walked upstairs, and woke up Jenny.

“Marley’s disappeared,” I said. “I can’t find him

anywhere. He’s out there in the freezing rain.” She

was on her feet instantly, pulling on jeans, slipping

into a sweater and boots. Together we broadened

the search. I could hear her way up the side of the

hill, whistling and clucking for him as I crashed

through the woods in the dark, half expecting to

find him lying unconscious in a creek bed.

Eventually our paths met up. “Anything?” I

asked.

“Nothing,” Jenny said.

We were soaked from the rain, and my bare legs

were stinging from the cold. “Come on,” I said.

“Let’s go home and get warm and I’ll come back

Marley & Me

out with the car.” We walked down the hill and up

the driveway. That’s when we saw him, standing

beneath the overhang out of the rain and over-

joyed to have us back. I could have killed him. In-

stead, I brought him inside and toweled him off,

the unmistakable smell of wet dog filling the

kitchen. Exhausted from his late-night jaunt,

Marley conked out and did not budge till nearly

noon the next day.

Marley’s eyesight had grown fuzzy, and bunnies

could now scamper past a dozen feet in front of

him without him noticing. He was shedding his

fur in vast quantities, forcing Jenny to vacuum

every day—and still she couldn’t keep up with it.

Dog hair insinuated itself into every crevice of

our home, every piece of our wardrobe, and more

than a few of our meals. He had always been a

shedder, but what had once been light flurries had

grown into full-fledged blizzards. He would shake

and a cloud of loose fur would rise around him,

drifting down onto every surface. One night as I

watched television, I dangled my leg off the couch

and absently stroked his hip with my bare foot. At

the commercial break, I looked down to see a

sphere of fur the size of a grapefruit near where I

had been rubbing. His hairballs rolled across the

John Grogan

wood floors like tumbleweeds on a windblown

plain.

Most worrisome of all were his hips, which had

mostly forsaken him. Arthritis had snuck into his

joints, weakening them and making them ache.

The same dog that once could ride me bronco-

style on his back, the dog that could lift the entire

dining room table on his shoulders and bounce it

around the room, could now barely pull himself

up. He groaned in pain when he lay down, and

groaned again when he struggled to his feet. I did

not realize just how weak his hips had become un-

til one day when I gave his rump a light pat and his

hindquarters collapsed beneath him as though he

had just received a cross-body block. Down he

went. It was painful to watch.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor was be-

coming increasingly difficult for him, but he

wouldn’t think of sleeping alone on the main floor,

even after we put a dog bed at the foot of the stairs

for him. Marley loved people, loved being under-

foot, loved resting his chin on the mattress and

panting in our faces as we slept, loved jamming his

head through the shower curtain for a drink as we

bathed, and he wasn’t about to stop now. Each

night when Jenny and I retired to our bedroom, he

would fret at the foot of the stairs, whining, yip-

ping, pacing, tentatively testing the first step with

Marley & Me

his front paw as he mustered his courage for the

ascent that not long before had been effortless.

From the top of the stairs, I would beckon,

“Come on, boy. You can do it.” After several min-

utes of this, he would disappear around the corner

in order to get a running start and then come

charging up, his front shoulders bearing most of

his weight. Sometimes he made it; sometimes he

stalled midflight and had to return to the bottom

and try again. On his most pitiful attempts he

would lose his footing entirely and slide inglori-

ously backward down the steps on his belly. He

was too big for me to carry, but increasingly I

found myself following him up the stairs, lifting

his rear end up each step as he hopped forward on

his front paws.

Because of the difficulty stairs now posed for

him, I assumed Marley would try to limit the

number of trips he made up and down. That

would be giving him far too much credit for com-

mon sense. No matter how much trouble he had

getting up the stairs, if I returned downstairs, say

to grab a book or turn off the lights, he would be

right on my heels, clomping heavily down behind

me. Then, seconds later, he would have to repeat

the torturous climb. Jenny and I both took to

sneaking around behind his back once he was up-

stairs for the night so he would not be tempted to

John Grogan

follow us back down. We assumed sneaking down-

stairs without his knowledge would be easy now

that his hearing was shot and he was sleeping

longer and more heavily than ever. But he always

seemed to know when we had stolen away. I would

be reading in bed and he would be asleep on the

floor beside me, snoring heavily. Stealthily, I

would pull back the covers, slide out of bed, and

tiptoe past him out of the room, turning back to

make sure I hadn’t disturbed him. I would be

downstairs for only a few minutes when I would

hear his heavy steps on the stairs, coming in search

of me. He might be deaf and half blind, but his

radar apparently was still in good working order.

This went on not only at night but all day long,

too. I would be reading the newspaper at the

kitchen table with Marley curled up at my feet

when I would get up for a refill from the coffeepot

across the room. Even though I was within sight

and would be coming right back, he would lumber

with difficulty to his feet and trudge over to be

with me. No sooner had he gotten comfortable at

my feet by the coffeepot than I would return to the

table, where he would again drag himself and set-

tle in. A few minutes later I would walk into the

family room to turn on the stereo, and up again he

would struggle, following me in, circling around

and collapsing with a moan beside me just as I was

Marley & Me

ready to walk away. So it would go, not only with

me but with Jenny and the kids, too.

As age took its toll, Marley had good days and bad

days. He had good minutes and bad minutes, too,

sandwiched so close together sometimes it was

hard to believe it was the same dog.

One evening in the spring of 2002, I took Mar-

ley out for a short walk around the yard. The night

was cool, in the high forties, and windy. Invigo-

rated by the crisp air, I started to run, and Marley,

feeling frisky himself, galloped along beside me

just like in the old days. I even said out loud to

him, “See, Marl, you still have some of the puppy

in you.” We trotted together back to the front

door, his tongue out as he panted happily, his eyes

alert. At the porch stoop, Marley gamely tried to

leap up the two steps—but his rear hips collapsed

on him as he pushed off, and he found himself

awkwardly stuck, his front paws on the stoop, his

belly resting on the steps and his butt collapsed

flat on the sidewalk. There he sat, looking up at

me like he didn’t know what had caused such an

embarrassing display. I whistled and slapped my

hands on my thighs, and he flailed his front legs

valiantly, trying to get up, but it was no use. He

could not lift his rear off the ground. “Come on,

John Grogan

Marley!” I called, but he was immobilized. Fi-

nally, I grabbed him under the front shoulders and

turned him sideways so he could get all four legs

on the ground. Then, after a few failed tries, he

was able to stand. He backed up, looked appre-

hensively at the stairs for a few seconds, and loped

up and into the house. From that day on, his con-

fidence as a champion stair climber was shot; he

never attempted those two small steps again with-

out first stopping and fretting.

No doubt about it, getting old was a bitch. And

an undignified one at that.

Marley reminded me of life’s brevity, of its fleet-

ing joys and missed opportunities. He reminded

me that each of us gets just one shot at the gold,

with no replays. One day you’re swimming

halfway out into the ocean convinced this is the

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