My dog Ginny Weasley and I have gotten old together. Well, she’s old—thirteen—while I am merely older. But we got gray in all the same places, most notably around our eyes and our muzzles. We both sigh a little when we lie down and grunt when we stand back up. We both pee more often than we used to, her outside and me inside, unless I’m in the middle of nowhere, in which case I’ll pee in the open air as the Good Lord intended.
Our eyesight is worsening and we’ve lost some of our hearing, especially at higher frequencies. Ginny used to be able to hear me un-peel a banana from two rooms away. Now she can’t recognize her own name unless you say it loudly, and clap, which sounds like we’re mad though of course we’re not. Her favorite person in the world, alongside me, is my friend Mike. Ginny can still hear Mike’s low voice and that makes me so happy.
Ginny has, I hope, a few years left. I have—I hope—a few decades. To improve both our lives we start every morning with a walk. Mostly we do circles around the pond at Abiqua Heights Park. She poops once or twice along the way. Because the pond is very much not in the middle of nowhere, I pee before we leave.
Ginny goes on high alert when she sees a squirrel at the park. That may be out of professional obligation more than anything else. I trained her at home to chase the squirrels away from the bird feeders, but now she only does it when I’m watching. Sometimes she doesn’t do it even then, and I fake scold her, “You had one job to do,” but she can’t hear me.
On our walks, the dog is on the lookout for squirrels. I’m interested in the red-winged blackbirds. This time of year the blackbirds at the pond are so wrapped up in each other—and the preoccupations of youth—that I can pass within six feet of them and they won’t fly away.
Old Ginny is lying on the rug next to me as I write this. I know when she drifts into sleep because she snores now—something else we have in common—and occasionally chirps (I don’t know how else to describe it) and her legs twitch. Awake, she is trained to be the grumpy old woman yelling at squirrels to get off her lawn. But in her dreams Ginny is running. She is sprinting after an orange Chuck-It ball, which she used to do for miles and miles every day, panting so heavily I worried her heart might burst mid-stride. Yet she always brought the ball back for more.
Ginny dreams of adventures, as do I, though only when I’m awake. Does she also dream, like her old man, of the harder moments—barks she’d like to un-bark?
Does she dream of all the lost Chuck-It balls she dropped in the creek by the dog park when she went to get a drink, only to see the ball get carried away by the current and disappear for good around the bend? For Ginny—another difference—this is where the story of the ball will end. But I often wondered about it. I imagined the ball drifting down Silver Creek and into the Molalla River, then to the Willamette and the mighty Columbia, where I pictured it bobbing along under bridges and beside barges before being dumped into the Pacific.
What is the half-life of a durable rubber ball? I think it must be around for centuries. Worst-case scenario it gets lodged in the blowhole of a porpoise, killing the creature. Better for it to find its way to that big floating island of trash, where it has a chance of being cleaned up someday. Best case of all, it washes back up onto a beach, where another dog finds it and the cycle begins again.
Ginny’s dreams are undisturbed by knowledge of the Anthropocene. But then again she doesn’t get to know about porpoises. So tradeoffs.
I just got up to pee (inside). Ginny followed me and whined outside the bathroom door. She does this a lot when she can’t see me. Is she nervous for herself? Or for me, afraid I might disappear around the bend like one of those balls? “I’m not that old,” I tell her. When I travel for work, Ginny is listless. She watches the front door for hours. I don’t remember her being like that before the pandemic. She has gotten used to us being all together all the time.
Ginny is now fully awake. She knows it is time for our walk but I’m still writing.
I listen to two Bible podcasts on the morning walk. One is a Bible-in-a-year podcast. The other is the daily liturgy. So I’m in the park with my dog and the squirrels and the lusty blackbirds, but also with Jesus at Bethany and with lusty Solomon and his 1,000 wives and concubines.
My podcasts haven’t mentioned blackbirds. The Bible does mention dogs, though almost never in a good light. In Scripture, dogs are always licking sores and lapping up blood and returning to their own vomit. Jezebel’s body was devoured by dogs.
I think the writers of the Bible would have liked Ginny, though.
I read that some Orthodox Christians believe we will see our pets in heaven. I want to believe. Ginny has some kind of soul.
And isn’t Church tradition full of stories of saints with special connections to animals? St. Anthony healed a piglet with the sign of the cross. St. Kevin let a blackbird nest in his outstretched hand. St. Francis tamed the wolf, St. Sergius a bear, and St. Herman an ermine.
Those are miracles I have no trouble believing. More common, though perhaps no less miraculous, is how animals tame us. “Be the man your dog thinks you are,” I heard the Amish farmer David Kline say.
Late one night, years ago, I was trying to leave the parking lot of a restaurant. But a cat was blocking the driveway. It just sat there staring, absolutely unimpressed by the headlights, the size of my vehicle, or me.
At that moment I remembered the Bible story of Jacob wrestling with a man who turns out to be God. “Let me go, for it is daybreak,” the man says to Jacob. To which Jacob replies, “I will let you go only if you bless me.” God did bless Jacob, and gave him a new name, Israel, which means, “He who struggles with God.”
The cat seemed to be saying to me, “Bless me and I’ll let you leave this Taco Bell.” And so I did. From the driver’s seat of my Honda Element, I blessed the cat, and made the sign of the cross over it, and then it just loped away.
I’ve never blessed Ginny in that way, though hopefully I have in other ways. She has certainly been a blessing to me.
Everything above was written in my journal yesterday. Now I’m typing it up at a coffeeshop, and, God help me, I feel like crying.
Most of us only get three really great dog relationships in life: one in childhood, one in our prime, and one in old age. Ginny is my prime-of-life dog, though I do feel more tired than I expected. At this point, it’s hard to imagine getting another dog after her. I got the best one already.
She has certainly been better than I deserved. All Ginny wants is to be with me. I know she’s waiting for me back home even now. All I have to do to make her day is walk through the front door.
I had to laugh at “we sigh when we lie down and grunt when we get back up” - my husband and I were just saying we’ve reached the “announcing all movements with a sound” phase of life. I remember years and years ago sitting on a flight beside an older lady who did that, and thinking “welp.. that’s what’s ahead of me”. It arrives sooner than you think.
One of the great gifts of loving a pet is the ability to love with unabashed sincerity. We are so societally cynical, everything has to have a wink and a smirk underneath it, so much facade maintenance to avoid being considered “ick". But you can just flat out love your dog and no one cares. It’s a wonderful open place in our hearts and souls that brings such value to us humans.