For Lucy: A Complete Acquisition

August 8, 2020

 

It is not so much that I acquire dogs, it’s that dogs acquire me.

E. B. White

 

              On a warmish January day in 2011, I met a dachshund at the Verona Street Animal Shelter in Rochester, New York, where I was a two or three times a week dog walker.  I had never been drawn to small dogs, but I dutifully walked them at the Shelter.  The dachshund immediately caught my eye when I entered the small dogs room because she was not yapping like all the others, demanding my quick attention.  She was curled up in the corner of her little “room” trembling.

               After I walked a couple of the other dogs, I decided to approach her. I stepped over the barrier into her room and sat down beside her.  Her trembling only increased.  I went out to the front desk for information about her.  She had come in after an eviction. Her family had to leave her behind, although they would have two weeks during which to claim her.  No, they didn’t think that she had been abused.

               She’d lost her people, her pack, and she was petrified.  They’d be thrilled if I could get her outside for a walk because no one else had been able to.  I determined I was just going to sit beside her and see if she would calm down.  Ever so often, I would hold my hand palm up toward her nose.  It only increased the trembling.  Then after about forty minutes she finally stretched her neck forward a bit and sniffed my hand.  Another half hour and she let me slip the lead over her head, and a few minutes later we took that walk.

               I was smitten.  In about three weeks we brought her home. Her name was given as Lacey, which we promptly changed to Lucy.  She made herself at home very quickly, and anointed herself head of the pack.  Our couch-potato of a greyhound, Festus, went along with it easily.  They were a sight walking down the street together: Eighty pounds of tall-legged greyhound, and fifteen pounds of “weiner dog.”  To make the picture perfectly absurd, they were exactly the same color, fawn.

               John had indulged my desire for this addition to the household, but from experience growing up, he warned me about the stubbornness of dachsunds, and the racket they could make.  She’d been home with us twenty-four hours or so when I first heard her bark.  The sheer volume was something.  If anyone came any where near her space, she would sound off and no amount of insisting would calm her down until she wanted to calm down.

               E. B. White (1899—1985), best known as the author of Charlotte’s Web, but also a long-time essayist for The New Yorker, was an avid companion of dogs, several of which in his life were dachsunds.  “You have to watch out about dachshunds,” he once wrote, “some of which are as delicately balanced as a watch.”  Of his dachshund Fred, he said that “he saw in every bird, every squirrel, every housefly . . . a security risk and a present danger to the republic.”  Lucy was certainly made in that mold.  And stubborn?  White captured this perfectly also.

 Being the owner of dachshunds, to me a book on dog discipline becomes a volume of inspired humor. Every sentence is a riot. Some day, if I ever get the chance, I shall write a book, or warning, on the character and temperament of the Dachshund and why he can’t be trained and shouldn’t be. . . . Of all the dogs whom I have served I’ve never known one who understood so much of what I say or held it in such contempt.  When I address Fred I never have to raise my voice or my hopes. He even disobeys me when I instruct him in something that he wants to do.

               Yes. Precisely.

              Yet Lucy also lived up to her name—which means “light.”  She was a light in my life, third only to Jesus and my husband, a ranking of which she did not approve.  She was my companion through some extraordinarily difficult times in my life.  All the things White has to say about his Fred were true of our Lucy, but she also never wanted to leave my side. The cliché in her case was true—she would have followed me to the gates of hell, and, truth be told, we were almost there a couple of times in our nine years together.

               I have loved all our animals fiercely, but my bond with Lucy was complete. Or perhaps I should say her acquisition of me was complete.  Her death has been shattering.  We first knew all was not well when she stopped the guard dog barking.  Over a period of six months she had several seizures and became cognitively impaired. I resisted euthanizing her until she woke me up in the middle of the night, looking like she did not know me and trembling in fear.

               My favorite remembrance of Lucy was an afternoon she and I spent on the grounds of the Cobbs Hill Reservoir in Rochester, probably four or five years ago.  It was fall, and the leaves were deep, eye-level or more for her.  She delighted in them and ran and ran and ran, plowing through them as her eyes sparkled with happiness.  I vividly remember that joy, which is even now keeping me from falling apart at her death.  What an extraordinary gift she was.