Our dog, Spice, died this week. He was fourteen and a half, a ripe old age
for a dog. Right up until a couple of weeks before he began his decline, this
was a hound who could still jerk us around by his leash and nearly off our feet
with no trouble at all.
The house is extraordinarily empty right now. My husband Mitch and I keep expecting to see
him lying in the floor near the recliner, hearing his toenails click on the
floor as he makes his way to our room, or following us to the refrigerator for
his favorite snack, a Gwaltney Great Dog.
(Nope, we didn’t feed this dog IAMS or Science Diet. He turned his stubby snout up at it.) He also adored hot pork rinds and peppermint
Mentos – which didn’t, ironically, help his notoriously bad breath one bit.
We got him when he was six weeks old, a ball of coal black
fur and a mix of chow, pitbull, and boxer.
We eschewed names like Pepper and Blackie, and settled on Spice. As he grew, it was plain that he was going to
look more like his father, a full-blooded chow, than anything else. He also began to take on a bit of a bully
temperament and tried it out on one of our other dogs, an elderly chow that we
called Jack. Jack’s reaction was to
calmly hold the upstart youngster down by his neck until he thought Spice had
learned his lesson – then he walked away, but not before kicking dirt on Spice
in his wake. (That was Jack’s way of
saying “up yours.”)
As Spice grew up, he became our protector. No one entered our home that he didn’t
approve of or know. This worked to our
advantage when a couple of our teenagers made friends with potential juvenile
delinquents that came to visit. Spice
nipped both of them in the butt at one time or another – nothing serious, but
enough to let them know he meant business. One kid never came back; another, assisted by
our son, decided to enter the house from a bedroom window, thereby avoiding the dog. Among our
kids’ friends, he became legend and earned the name of “Cujo”. One of our daughters mentioned him to a high
school friend a few weeks ago and the astonished response was “are you kidding
me? Cujo’s still alive?”
In most respects, he was unflinchingly brave and tough. However, he had three weak spots. We would have to confine him when our
grandchildren or other folks came to visit, and he hated that. Spice would bark and whine incessantly when
kept in a room away from us. He was also
deathly afraid of storms and would cower behind a chair, or if we were in bed,
would climb up and get between us and the headboard until the danger
passed. Finally, he wasn’t a big fan of
water and hated having any part of himself bathed. He screamed like an infant.
Spice absolutely hated anything that flew. This included houseflies, birds, and
airplanes. On several occasions when he
was taken out to do his business, he glimpsed a jet in the sky and nearly went
crazy jumping up to try and grab it in his mouth. One famous family incident included a Quaker conure
named Bubbles who belonged to our daughter, Michelle. We were careful to keep Spice and Bubbles
separated, since Bubbles pretty much had free run of Michelle’s room. One day I heard furious barking and squawking
coming from the back of the house and realized the door was open. I raced back to Michelle’s room to see
Bubbles perched on the floor and Spice making an advance. I held my hand out and Bubbles made his way
up my arm and to my shoulder so fast he looked like a blur. The
door to the back of the house was kept firmly shut from then on.
Spice was unerringly loyal and made sure Mitch and I got
equal attention. If I went to the
bathroom, he either waited outside the door or tried to follow me in. Until we got a bed that was too high for him,
he slept between us. Had we been
threatened, I think he would have given his life without a single thought. When we came home in the evenings, we were greeted with a
cross between a bark and a whine that went on for several minutes, Spice’s
entire body wagging. If he had to go
out, he would approach one of us, wagging his tail, and bark right in our faces
until we got up and found his leash, which sent him into ecstacies; he’d turn
so many circles that we had trouble getting his leash attached to his collar.
When my cat joined the household a year ago, Spice tolerated
him; however, he drew the boundary lines and let “Cat” know that he wasn’t
welcome in our bedroom. That was his domain. If Cat tried to tiptoe in, Spice ordered him
right back out, which Cat respected. I
like to think they had a like/dislike relationship. Cat loved to take a running jump and make a
soaring leap and twist over Spice, which pissed him off no end.
Spice was a true garbage hound. If I scolded him for it, he lowered his head
and growled back like a teenager talking back to his mother, for which I “sent
him to his room”. Spice would stomp off
to the bathroom, growling all the way.
Then he’d cry and whine until we let him out.
He began declining about three weeks ago. We began having to carry him up the steps
after taking him out; the mere fact that he even let us do that showed us that
he was finally feeling his age. We ended
up carrying him from room to room and feeding him by hand. The evening before he died, we loved on him
and told him what a good dog he’d been.
He was gone the next day.
The loss is more than bittersweet. We’re so happy that he lived as long as he
did and that he’s not suffering now.
However, we miss everything about him – having to put garbage out of his
reach, his nagging us for a hot dog, his horrific breath; needing to put the
vacuum cleaner up on a chair so he didn’t sneakily lift his leg on it. We miss having to step over him when he
refused to move out of our path. I miss
feeling him at my feet as I knit or read or watch TV. We would give anything to have him barking at
us to be taken out again.
He's buried near the back of our house in one of his
favorite spots, a shady glade where he would plop down and rest for a minute
during his outings. He was buried with
love, tears, and his collar and leash.
We planted seeds around his “place” (I can’t bear to call it a grave)
that will sprout as blue forget-me-nots.
He was a wonderful, irascible, irreplaceable dog.
