Bo-Bo was a Schipperke, a small stocky black dog with no tail, a lot of energy and a peculiar habit of standing on his hind legs and waving his front legs in the air—the “patty-cake.” My aunt had a Schipperke dog that gave birth to a group of puppies, and they were distributed throughout the family—my grandparents got a girl, Nicky, and I got Bo-Bo.At first he was a sweet puppy, though a little rambunctious, as all puppies are. He chewed through every toy I had, and even today I will occasionally find some old plastic toy scared forever with his teeth marks. I think it happened to more than one unfortunate He-Man figure. As Bo-Bo grew into a foot high adult Schipperke, his tastes grew with him, and simple toys were no longer enough. Schipperkes have sheep herding in their DNA, and part of sheep herding is keeping the wolves away. To Bo-Bo, most of the world was a wolf.
At our old house, we had a giant yard where Bo-Bo got to exorcise his wilder instincts. For being a small dog, Schipperkes can really jump, and I have vivid memories of sitting on my back porch watching Bo-Bo chase down birds. He would literally leap five feet into the air and grab a bird in his mouth without any provocation. The unfortunate birds lost their lives simply for having the audacity to fly within Bo-Bo’s air space. Some dogs bring their owners their slippers, others rip birds from five feet in the air and rip them apart before they touch the ground. With the yard to play in, Bo-Bo was a pretty agreeable dog. When he came into the house he was a good and faithful companion, loyal especially to me and my dad. Sometimes he would bark at strangers, but that just made me feel safe. Even as a very young child, I knew that if any monsters came in the night Bo-Bo would bark them into oblivion. Anything that got into that house would do so over the dog’s dead body. He was a solid mass of muscle and teeth, a worthy adversary for even the most fiendish of monsters.
Like most dogs, Bo-Bo like being petted, begging for food, riding in cars, and running around in random circles. He often seemed happiest in the snow, where he got to dig around with his nose and race sleds—despite his short legs, he usually won. I think he probably would have been happy as a farm dog on a big 19th century estate somewhere, free to roam and hunt and then come home and rest his nose by the fire.
Instead of moving to a big 19th century estate, we moved to a new suburban development where we couldn’t get a fenced in yard. Bo-Bo was forced to spend all his time in the house. He had his mean tendencies before, but this is when things really got exciting. Not long after we moved in, he got loose and bit a neighbor on the finger. He started getting a larger than life reputation among the neighbors. People were scared to come see him, and eventually scared to come to the house at all. We had to keep him locked in my parent’s bedroom whenever we had company over (except family, for some reason he was always tolerated family members, even if he didn’t like them too much.) Some of my braver friends sought to challenge Bo-Bo from time to time. Their hubris was ever their undoing. One of my friend’s little brothers once sneaked into the depths of my parent’s bathroom and cornered Bo-Bo, at which time Bo-Bo sprung out and bit him in the knee. Before that, Bo-Bo chased another friend who had dared enter his lair around the house, down the stairs, and out the front door, until the kid finally got trapped in a corner of the front porch and wet himself while Bo-Bo stood growling inches away. In the dog’s defense, he never bit the kid, and never moved in to bite him. He just disabled him and snarled for a while before I pulled him away. Other times he liked to stare my friends down before giving chase. "Run up the stairs!" I'd yell. "The incline might slow him down enough for you to escape!"
Now I think about how the neighborhood must have gossiped that there was such a terror living at our house. Many of them must have conspired like Elmira Gulch to have the creature destroyed, but my family always stuck up for Bo-Bo. My dad and I treated him like any other member of the family. You can’t kick out a family member just for being mean. The kid that wet himself went on to live a productive life, and his cowering terror was always fodder for a good laugh.
But there were less funny incidents. Once, when a neighbor was taking care of him, Bo-Bo sprung out from under the bed and bit right through his foot. I must have had some very tolerant family friends for them not to insist that he be put down immediately. On another occasion, Bo-Bo became so territorial inside my parent's bedroom that my dad had to defend himself with a tennis racket to get inside. As the years went by, Bo-Bo became more and more of a problem for my mother. He would prowl the bathroom when she needed to get ready, snarling at her, and finally he lunged up and bit her in the leg. This was the last straw. I was in 8th grade at the time, and not even my dad could stand up for Bo-Bo. We had no choice but to take him in for his final vet appointment.
It might be hard for people on the outside to sympathize with Bo-Bo and the boy that loved him, but his biting issues were only a small part of the picture. Those people weren’t there to be woken up for Saturday morning cartoons year after year by the happy yipping of Bo-Bo at their bedside, didn’t see him slide around like a walrus on the kitchen floor when he got so excited he could no longer stand, didn’t see him tunneling his way through the snow in the blizzard of 1996 like a one-dog snow plow, and never got to witness him charging down the stairs at cheetah speeds every instant he heard the meat crisper open. Every time I took a trip, no matter how short or long, no matter how old I got, Bo-Bo would be there waiting for me by the door the moment I got home. He would get so excited that I couldn’t take two steps forward without him jumping around and around and around in a never ending circle, his small paws pattering on the hardwood floor.
What’s more, most people on the outside, who knew Bo-Bo only from his legend, failed to see his biggest problem. It didn’t happen too much when he was younger, but as Bo-Bo got older he became prone to violent seizures. I would wake up in the middle of the night to hear him howling from downstairs. When I went down to investigate my dad was usually already there, holding the dog on his lap in the Lay-Z-Boy. Sometimes he would stay up with Bo-Bo for hours while he shook and struggled to stand. All his toughness evaporated as he trembled, his eyes wide and terrified, without any conception of exactly what was happening to him. Watching someone in a seizure, whether they be dog or human, is a frightening experience, but my dad never stopped holding him and comforting him until it passed, no matter how long it took. Bo-Bo was a purebred Schipperke, which probably translated to inbred, which was almost certainly the cause of his epilepsy, which was almost certainly the cause of his mood swings. A lot of times, and especially in Bo-Bo’s case, the things that seem the scariest are really the most scared. People who were terrified of Bo-Bo would be shocked to see him shivering in terror himself night after night. Pets aren’t just luxuries that can be arbitrarily done away with when they disappoint us. Bo-Bo stood loyally by us time and time again the best he could. We couldn’t just toss him aside because he was dangerously insane.
In the end, we didn’t. When we took Bo-Bo to the vet that day, the prescribed him some medication to help calm him down. He was already legendary at the vet for his bad behavior, but they sympathized with us and said that the pills might do the trick. They did, at least well enough to keep Bo-Bo with us for another six years. He actually got to the point where he loved the sound of his pill case rattling since he knew it meant he was getting some meat to go with it. He was never friendly, but his aggressive behavior diminished, and he lived with us in relative piece until my freshman year of college, when he finally took that final trip to the vet at age 17. He maintained his energy up until the very last few months, but on my first call home from college I was given the bad news that he was now chasing birds in heaven.
Bo-Bo is my favorite Christmas present not just for the memories of racing him through the yard or chasing him around the house, or the way he used to sneak onto the couch to sleep when we left the house, then jumped off and ran away the second we came home. It’s not just because of the way he used to rip birds out of the sky and chase squirrels across the yard, his ebullient reaction every time I came home, or his incessant yipping. The reason I’ve put him at the top of my list is because of the lessons I learned from our time together. Pets help to teach us that love is not conditional, that those of us who are stronger and smarter have a responsibility to care for the strange, the weird, and the weak. A lot of times, the most problematic people or pets are the ones that need the most love. Where my friends saw a monster, I saw only the puppy who had been my loyal friend from as far back as I could remember. He wasn’t a bad guy—he was my dog.
Anyone who's ever loved a dog knows that they'll wait for you no matter what, no matter when, no matter where. I don’t know much about the afterlife, or if it’s true that all dogs go to heaven, or if there might be an exception that rule for Bo-Bo. But I do know that somewhere there’s a door waiting to be opened, and Bo-Bo is sitting on the other side, waiting for me to come home. Hang in there buddy. Try not to bite anyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment