Old Lady in the Moonlight

Our German Shepherd/Collie mix, Lady, had seen fifteen Christmases and would not see another. She was down to one working tooth, nearly blind, completely deaf, arthritic, and incontinent. The incontinence had destroyed the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room before I had resorted to doggie diapers. I ripped up the carpet and laid down tile. Lady had the unfortunate tendency to cross the tile and end up splayed upon it like Bambi-on-the-ice, flat on her belly and unable to gain enough traction to stand up. She had lost her resonant German Shepherd “Woof” and could only wheeze “hooth.” Often at night she would hit that tile and end up going “hooth, hooth,” for a long time before someone woke up and came out to pull her back up into a standing position. If it took too long for her to be discovered, her circulation would be so bad that you would have to massage her legs and feet and sort of swing her legs back and forth until she could gain the ability to stand.

One night I awoke from a sound sleep hearing a muffled “hooth, hooth” through the wall. Lady was down and who knew how long she had been there! I flung back the covers and without taking even a moment to put on my glasses or step into slippers I ran down the hallway from the bedroom to the living room and grabbed the forty pound dog up in my arms. Twice I tried to align her four legs under her and get her to stand on her own but she’d start to slide back down. I was trying to massage circulation back into her legs but she started to gag like she was going to throw up and I quickly decided we’d deal with that outside. Awkwardly, with coughing collie in my arms, I got the side door open and was mincing painfully across the patio towards the lawn. Out in the backyard it was California “nippy” cold but not quite freezing. There was a full moon out that December evening and I had a very furry dog keeping my torso warm as I softly swayed with her to keep her legs moving.

Why was I doing this? Buying the delicatessen dog food that she could gum rather than chew, putting her food on a stand so she didn’t have to bend down for it, and changing doggie diapers throughout the day? Because I believe God entrusted Adam, and by extension humanity, with the stewardship of the garden and its inhabitants. When you agree to adopt a dog into your family you commit to caring for it, for better or worse, for as long as there is quality of life. I guess I was doing it because we all grow old and deserve to be remembered for who we were in the prime of life, not necessarily at the tail end. I was doing it because Lady could still wag her tail when I scratched behind her ears.

In her youth, Lady had been a dog of extraordinary talents. We’d been told when we adopted her that she was a “jumper” – we just didn’t appreciate what that meant. We did the first time she launched herself over a six foot wooden fence in pursuit of a cat that had wandered into our yard. The kennel where we boarded her for vacations developed quite a file on Lady D. The first time we left her they tried putting her in a regular kennel and shortly after we left she scaled the six foot chain link fence. After a lovely chase from Lady’s perspective, they put her in a kennel with a roof. She watched her handlers come in and out a few times, and figured out how to flip the kennel latch herself. But in order to create a distraction for her getaway, she also flipped all the other kennel latches, releasing all the inmates in cellblock B. When they finally found her several acres away they put her in a kennel and wired shut her door. It took her awhile but she unwound the wire with her teeth and had another fun romp with the kennel owners. They admitted she was always a friendly and cooperative dog once she was caught.

Even with the gray in her muzzle and the cloudiness in her brown eyes, she was still a beautiful dog. She wasn’t one to gulp her food and when she lay down she’d cross her paws in a lady-like way. People would stop us as we were on our “walkies” to comment what a beautiful dog she was. She walked on a leash beautifully, would let you shake her paw, and she could sit, lie down and play dead on command. Her “stay” and “come” however, was based on whether she found obeying “worth her while.” She could charm a toddler out of a cookie without making a sound. I once found a fresh loaf of baked bread that I had set out on the counter to cool completely hollowed out behind the couch. Sometimes, if I forgot my sunglasses or a grocery coupon and dashed back into the house from the car, I’d find her standing on her hind legs at the kitchen counter, “pilfering” scraps off the not-yet-washed dishes. She’d look at me with some chagrin, as if to say, “Oh, I thought you’d gone already,” then slowly sink back down to all fours and saunter out of the kitchen.

For all her dainty airs, like a Southern heroine from a Tennessee Williams play, Lady had a neurotic, broken side to her personality, brought on by puppyhood trauma. Explosive noises – be it popping balloons, fireworks, gunfire, a car backfire, or thunder – transformed her from Lady Dog to Lunatic Dog. We learned we had to tranquilize her for 4th of July and New Year’s Eve or have 40 pounds of quaking, hysterical canine trying to climb into our armpits or ripping doorframes apart. She once leapt off the balcony of a two-story cabin in Lake Tahoe we were renting for 4th of July. We could only assume fireworks had been set off in the neighborhood but how she made the leap with only a slight limp to show for it we could never be sure. We once had left her contentedly in our mini-van, windows cracked, on a cold winter’s day while we had lunch at an old west sightseeing village. We enjoyed the fake gunfight between the heroes and the bandits until we got back to the parking lot and found that Lady had gone “Hulk, smash!” on the interior of the Dodge. The door whistled and leaked without its weather stripping ever after and once a repair guy questioned me whether those were blood stains on the handles of all the windows. I just told him he was better off not knowing.

Most endearing of Lady’s attributes was the way she took shepherding the children as a sacred duty. If my husband or I started to play with the children in any sort of wrestling way she’d stand and bark at us as if to say, “Enough of that rough house behavior, you behave yourselves!” She could be intimidating if she thought it was necessary, but more often she’d simply come and sit down beside your knees and put her long muzzle across them, patiently waiting for a walk, or a treat.

I was musing about that, staring ahead at the moon halfway up in the sky when I noticed Lady and I were casting a dark shadow that stretched ahead of us when it should have been behind us. I suddenly realized what the “flup-flup-flup” noise that had been steadily growing louder had to be. The shadow shrank towards me as the police helicopter skimming over my neighborhood climbed over my head. I hoped they were not videotaping their inspection of the neighborhoods. I’d hate to see the headlines, “Naked Woman Dances with Wolf,” or “Canine Cultist Moons the Moon.” I suppose they have seen stranger things and had more notorious criminals to apprehend. Once the helicopter was safely out of sight, I put down my fur coat and after a few stiff steps, she did her backyard business and then smelled her way back to me. She wagged her tail as I scratched behind her ear as if to say, “So why are we out here in the cold?”