XVIII
elbow surgery and meatballs
TRIXIE BEGAN SECRETLY limping. I stepped out of a room and caught her hitching along the hallway as if she were auditioning for an all-canine version of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Crossing the bedroom, Gerda happened to glance back at Trix and saw that she was favoring her left forelimb. When she knew you had stopped to watch her, she made the effort to walk normally.
We checked her paw first, searching for a wound or an embedded splinter, but found nothing. After that examination, she made a heroic effort to avoid being caught in a limp, walking without hitch or hobble for the rest of the day.
Soon, however, she couldn’t conceal that her left leg troubled her. Bruce Whitaker X-rayed her and suggested she might have the same congenital problem in her left elbow that, in her right elbow, forced her into early retirement from her assistance-dog duties.
A surgeon was recommended. On our first visit to him, he led us out to a service alley and asked me to walk Trixie thirty feet away and then back toward him while he watched how she moved. “Elbow,” he declared.
He reached between her hind legs, feeling her pelvic bones. Then he suggested that I feel there as well and tell him what I found. Not having attended veterinary school, I considered myself inadequately educated to offer a second opinion or even a first. And I began to wonder about the surgeon’s credentials, too, because he had said the problem was the elbow, which was at the other end of the dog from the pelvis.
Because he was wearing a white lab coat, possessed an air of authority, and resembled Ernest Hemingway, I did as he instructed. Hemingway drank the equivalent of a fifth and a half of booze every day, frequently went through six bottles of wine with dinner, was a notorious and perhaps pathological liar, and behaved monstrously to nearly everyone who befriended him, so I’m not sure why a resemblance in this case impressed me. Yes, at his best, Hemingway could write like a wizard, but so can David Mamet, whom I would nevertheless forbid to operate on my dog.
I felt at once that the left pelvic bone was thicker than the right. Trixie had been compensating for elbow pain for a long time, continuously shifting her weight backward, stressing the pelvis on that side until it thickened. Yet she had only begun to limp a few days ago.
In the examination room, the surgeon manipulated the elbow joint, trying to make Trixie whimper. When he told me what he was doing, I wanted to pick up a surgical clamp and work on his nose until he whimpered, but I restrained myself. He needed her response to confirm his diagnosis, because this kind of congenital disorder didn’t always show up clearly on an X-ray.
Trixie refused to whimper. She didn’t wince or start anxiety panting. She just smiled at me while the doctor forced her elbow into uncommon positions.
“She’s a very stoic little dog,” he said.
I had heard that comment before.
IN FEBRUARY OF that year, Trixie had been bitten by a German shepherd that I am convinced was a trained attack dog. She reacted to the bite as if it had been no more than a kiss.
On a Sunday afternoon, we were out for a walk. As always I had a little canister of pepper spray. I carried it in my right hand.
We turned a corner and started up a sloped street we had often walked before. A boy of about nine hung by his arms from a tree limb in a front yard to our right. He looked as innocent as a choirboy, but as we drew closer, something about his attitude suggested there would be black candles on any altar where he served.
Two steps farther, I saw what the property wall at the adjacent house had concealed during our approach: a huge German shepherd lying in the yard, back from the tree in which the boy did his monkey act. It was not on a leash or restrained by anything.
German shepherds are beautiful, affectionate, and intelligent. Regardless of the breed, however, when you see a loose dog large enough to pull a Honda, caution is wise.
The shepherd glanced at us, seemed disinterested. Nevertheless, I turned Trixie around and walked away, telling myself discretion was the better part of valor, though wondering what might be the better part of cowardice.
I had gone maybe eight steps when the boy called out, “Yeah, you better run.”
We were walking, not running, but I wasn’t going to get into an insult contest with a nine-year-old, especially not with a nine-year-old backed up by a 150-pound saber-tooth dog. I could always have my revenge when it suited me, lie in wait for him some morning on the route he took to school, beat him up, and take his lunch money.
The kid’s behavior so appalled me, however, that I stopped, gave him my best look of disapproval, and asked, “What did you say?”
He had said it once. He wasn’t in a mood to repeat himself. He spoke instead to the German shepherd, something like, “Get ’em!”
The shepherd charged.
The day was warm for February, the trees swayed hypnotically in a mild breeze, and until this point in the walk, I felt a bit drowsy. Nothing brings you as fully awake as quickly as a giant dog that seems intent on getting a bite of your testicles.
As I aimed the pepper spray, I shouted, “Back!” and “Stop!” The shepherd heeded neither command, and I saw that he was charging not me but Trix, and that his trajectory would take him to her throat. So I squirted him.
The stream splashed into his nose and spattered across his face. He changed course but didn’t turn entirely away. He seemed to bite Trixie on the left flank, just forward of the hip, and then he turned away and raced back toward the boy, sneezing.
Fortunately, I didn’t assume the dog had been dissuaded, because sure enough he looped around and charged again. This time, the stream caught him in the eyes, which according to the instructions that came with the canister was the ideal hit. He turned away when he was six or eight feet from us.
He charged again. The third stream splashed his eyes, and once more he arced away from us.
Eerily silent through all this, the shepherd launched a fourth charge, this time straight at me because I had been such a bastard to him.
There were supposed to be five squirts in this canister. The shepherd retreated after taking the fourth stream in the face, and I wondered what I would do if he had not one but two more charges in him.
It might be cool to have the nickname Pegleg, and without a nose, I might have fewer sinus problems, but I really hoped not to end up with a high-pitched Mickey Mouse voice.
The shepherd had enough. He returned to the lawn where he was sitting before Hermann Goring IV sicced him on us, and he rubbed his face in the grass, trying to wipe off the noxious spray.
The kid was wide-eyed and speechless, and I had one more squirt in the can, but I decided to save it for the shepherd in case he got his second wind.
Trixie smiled at me and wagged her tail, and I felt like her knight in shining armor as I hurried her away from Dogzilla. We turned right at the corner and went four blocks on the next street before I stopped to examine her side where I thought the shepherd had bitten her. I couldn’t find any blood, and I didn’t want to linger. As we walked home, I glanced over my shoulder all the way.
I told Gerda about the encounter and showed her where the shepherd had seemed to nip Trixie. This time, when Gerda pulled back the thick fur, we saw the bite. The wound was barely bleeding because he had ripped off a patch of her skin the size of a silver dollar without getting his teeth into the meat of her.
This can’t have felt like any kind of kiss. Yet Trixie never yelped or whimpered.
On Sunday, our vet’s offices were closed. We rushed Trix to the emergency clinic near the airport. After the vet on duty sewed up the wound and gave us medication instructions, she said, “She’s a very stoic little dog.”
Short Stuff weighed over sixty pounds, but she was thoroughly feminine and appeared smaller than she was. She seemed particularly fragile to me as I lifted her into the back of our Explorer for the trip home from the clinic, because I couldn’t stop thinking that the attacking shepherd might have gotten his teeth in her throat if the first blast of pepper spray had missed his muzzle.
I had no animosity toward the shepherd. I felt sorry for him, though I knew the spray caused only temporary misery. The dog had done what the boy had told him to do and what the boy’s parents had evidently trained him to do. The people were the villains here, and the shepherd could, in a sense, be seen as a victim of theirs.
I reported the bite to animal control. The officer on the phone asked for the address. I told him the street name but did not know the house number. He did know the number, however, and knew the breed of the dog before I told him. Our attacker had a history.
Because I believe policemen and animal-control officers usually do a commendable and thankless job, I’m sorry to say the owners of this animal weren’t fined and weren’t issued even a warning citation, as far as I know. After weeks of “investigation,” an officer gave me an incoherent explanation of why the case would be closed without action.
Another officer, dismayed by the department’s failure to act, told me that the owner of the shepherd had tight ties to the city government and was destined to skate until the dog one day drew blood from a person instead of from another dog. I thanked him for his off-the-record frankness, but I told him that my Trixie was a person. Being a dog lover himself, he understood what I meant.
“A VERY STOIC little dog,” the joint surgeon said again.
Having been unable to get a whimper from Trixie when he flexed and stretched her elbow, he X-rayed it from different angles and was able to show Gerda and me the problem. Trix needed the same surgery on her left elbow as she had undergone on her right.
A couple of days later, we returned with her to the hospital. She would be staying overnight because surgery was at five o’clock in the morning. We took one of my dirty T-shirts to leave with her, so she’d have my familiar scent, and one of her favorite toys.
This was June 2000, after she had been living with us for a year and nine months. She had long ago ceased to be just a dog and became our daughter, too. Because she couldn’t understand that hospitalization was for the best, leaving Trixie there felt like a betrayal. Gerda and I half wanted to go home and scourge each other with brambled branches as penance for not insisting on sleeping in the hospital-kennel cage with her.
At home, we split a bottle of wine with dinner, and I had an extra glass from a second bottle. My consumption was laughably low by the standards of Hemingway, but if Trixie had too many more health crises, I’d be pounding it down like Papa.
We were told that Trixie would have to stay at the hospital at least one night after the surgery, possibly as many as three. But the following day, the surgeon called twice, first to report that the operation had gone well, and later, at five o’clock, to tell us that we could bring her home.
“She’s the calmest dog I’ve ever seen,” he said. “She’s made no effort to worry the incision, she isn’t straining at her tether or barking, and yet she’s been on her feet and alert hours sooner than usual.”
When we arrived at the hospital to collect our girl, concerned parents crowded the waiting room. A few appeared haunted, and I knew that with their animals, they were facing worse problems than we were with Trixie. Gerda and I felt grateful, relieved, and happy that the Trickster was coming home.
Then a nurse brought her out to us, and poor Trix was in sorrier condition than we expected. Her left arm, shoulder, and part of her flank were shaved. She tottered shakily with the assistance of the nurse. At first her face remained hidden in the plastic Elizabethan collar—or cone—that prevented her from chewing at the incision. She surveyed the crowded room, searching for us, and when we bent toward her, she tilted her head back, revealing that her eyes were bloodshot and her facial fur matted with tears.
She grinned when she saw us, and we cried. We didn’t sob noisily like babies, didn’t blubber, but hot tears sprang forth as if our eyes were showerheads. The sobbing, the face-wrenching anguish, the bitter thickness in the throat that makes swallowing difficult, the heaviness in the chest that is the weight of what was lost: All of that would come in too few years. This was a small taste of that, not an inoculation to prepare us to better handle grief—nothing can immunize against grief—but a reminder to cherish what you love while you have it, so that when it passes, you will have memories of joy to sustain you.
Gerda took off Trixie’s cone and rode in the cargo space of the Explorer with her, holding her and reassuring her.
One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointments of life, the injustices, the battering events that are beyond our control, and the betrayals that we endure from those we befriended and loved can make us cynical and turn our hearts into flint on which only the matches of anger and bitterness can be struck into flame. Other companion animals can make us more human, but because of the unique nature of dogs—their clear delight in being with us, the rejoicing with which they greet us when we come home to them, the reliable sunniness of their disposition, the joy they bring to playtime, the curiosity and wonder with which they embrace each new experience—they can melt away cynicism and sweeten a bitter heart.
And there is the matter of their gratitude. When Trixie came to us, I expected her delight, her rejoicing, her sunniness, her joy and curiosity and wonder, but the remarkable and constant gratitude that dogs express for what we give them is arguably the most endearing thing about them. A bowl of kibble is a matter of routine, but a dog seems never to take it for granted. After food, after the gift of a new toy, after a play session or a swim, in the middle of a cuddle that gives dogs such bliss, Trixie turned those soulful eyes on you and all but spoke with them, or gave your hand a thank-you lick, or nuzzled her cold nose into the palm of your hand. As surely as dogs read us and, by countless telltales, know our moods and feelings, so we can read their telltales if we put our minds to it, and perhaps gratitude is the thing we see most often.
When we did anything that particularly pleased her, she searched through her pile of toys, selecting this and that one but discarding each after consideration, until after a couple of minutes she arrived at the perfect stuffed plush animal for her purpose. In moments like this, it was always a plush toy, never a tug rope or a ball. Having made her choice, she brought it to us and placed it at our feet, not to induce us to play, but to say, This is one of my favorite things. I want you to have it because you have been so kind to me. Then she settled down and sighed, and sometimes went to sleep.
The surgeon told us that Trix would need six weeks to recover from elbow surgery. During the first three weeks of convalescence, he wanted her to be crated day and night.
We understood the need to prevent her from running or jumping, but we knew our free-spirited Trickster, who had rarely been crated and never by us, wouldn’t do well in extreme confinement. Because our desks are large, U-shaped affairs, we got permission to contain her within the work space by barricading the end with a four-foot-high, sectional pet fence that could be arranged in any configuration.
She spent part of the day with Gerda, part of the day with me. At night, the sectional gate could be arranged in a square, to form a cage, in which we put her bed and her water dish, giving her much more room than a crate.
During the day, Trix didn’t have to wear the head cone, not only because she remained under our constant observation, but also because Gerda invented a clever garment that discouraged licking or biting at the surgical stitches. She took apart a couple of her tube tops and resewed them into snugly fit leggings. Because the tube-top material was stretchy and sort of ribbed-quilted, the legging was easy to pull on and thick enough to provide protection, covering Trixie’s shaved forelimb from pastern to upper arm. I’m not sure this would work with a dog less cooperative than Trix. I think the legging prevented her from worrying the incision in part because chewing through it was too difficult but also because she understood the purpose of it and wanted to please her mom. She looked totally fab, as well.
At night, we didn’t trust in the legging alone, and we needed to put the head cone on her. Dogs despise the cone. It’s uncomfortable and confining, but they also realize it makes them look silly and is an affront to their dignity. When the cone went on, Trixie accepted it first with an expression of exasperation but then with a pitiful look that said, What have I done to you that I deserve this?
The first three weeks following surgery, Trix was not supposed to do stairs. As our offices and the master bedroom were on the third floor of that Harbor Ridge house, I had to get her down to the front door, on the second floor, four times a day to take her outside to toilet.
Because the house stood on a narrow lot and because the stairs—especially the back ones—were steep, the architect included an elevator. It was small, perhaps five feet square, cable-driven rather than hydraulic. I’m not claustrophobic, and I don’t have a fear of elevators, but I did not like that small, wood-paneled cab. The motor that drove the cables was bolted between rafters in the attic, and the entire assemblage rattled and creaked and groaned and even issued curious animal shrieks while in operation, as if in addition to the electric motor, a couple of apes were required to haul on the cables and were not happy about their job. Gerda refused to ride in it, period. Until Trixie’s surgery, we used the lift only as a freight elevator, to move heavy boxes.
During Trixie’s convalescence, Gerda broke her rule against taking suicidal risks in claustrophobic conveyances and, when I was not available, accompanied our golden girl on the harrowing journey between the third and second floors. Love conquers all.
At the time, Trixie was still shy of her fifth birthday and feared neither fireworks nor thunder, nor anything. She didn’t fear the elevator, either, but she didn’t like it. The first few times she rode in it with me, she kept looking around, trying to discern where all the noises were coming from and what they might portend. Soon she figured out that most of the tumult arose from overhead, whereafter she watched the ceiling with the obvious expectation that a disaster of one kind or another would at any moment befall us.
After half a week, riding down four times and up four times each day, Trix began occasionally to balk at another confinement in that contraption. When I opened the door, she sat down in the hallway in what we called her “bucket-bottom” posture. She weighed little more than sixty pounds, but when she parked her butt and did not want to enter that elevator, she might as well have weighed as much as a bucket full of lead shot. She was immovable.
I could lure her into the elevator with a tasty cookie, but that seemed deceptive. I could hope to outwait her—although she had the patience of Job, while I had the patience of a two-year-old. I could scold her, but considering her condition, I didn’t have the heart for that. Besides, she was right: The elevator was a coffin-size Titanic on a vertical voyage to an iceless doom.
We reached a compromise. On one of our four daily trips, now and then on two of them, I carried her down and up the stairs, and the rest of the time, she rode without pulling the bucket-bottom trick on me.
The surgeon specified that she should walk only a hundred feet to and from each toilet during the first two weeks, two hundred feet during the third week. I tried to explain Trixie’s toilet tao, but I saw by the look in his eyes that he heard the shrieking violins that accompanied the slashing knife in Psycho. I imagined being committed against my will to a mental ward where inevitably I would find myself in the company of X, who would have a list of a thousand people to whom I should send free books and invitations to party at our beach house. I said, “Yes, sir. A hundred feet. No problem.”
Using a short leash, maintaining a slow pace, I walked Trixie to the neighbor’s yard, an extra fifty feet. Otherwise, she would have tried to hold in her poop for the duration, and eventually we would have had a catastrophe that would make a plummeting elevator with screaming apes on the roof seem like a tea party.
In the fourth and fifth weeks, we were required to continue confining her, though she was allowed ten- and then fifteen-minute walks. Through the fourth week, Trixie endured these restrictions and indignities with higher spirits than I would have maintained in her situation, but then she fell into a depression. A depressed dog is more terrible than an epically constipated dog building toward a blow. They are by nature exuberant, merry creatures. We could not bear the sight of our elfin Trix so downcast that she spent the day in a sad-eyed listless detachment. Her tail didn’t wag. No squeaking plush toy could engage her. When we rolled a ball to her, she let it bump against her snout and made no effort to seize it, evidently because she knew that she couldn’t run off with it and tease us into pursuing her. Short Stuff was so disconsolate that even food couldn’t rouse a grin from her, and she ate mechanically, without enthusiasm.
On Thursday, as we were coming up on our week-five Friday appointment with Trixie’s surgeon, I called him to report on her mental state and to ask him to consider if we might be able to take her out to dinner with us on the weekend. I explained that there was a Swedish restaurant where the owners were dog lovers and welcomed us on their small patio. Trixie was fond of Gustaf, the partner who ran the front end of the business, and when we ate there, we ordered her a serving of little Swedish meatballs. We could park close to the place, lift her in and out of the Explorer, and walk her on a short leash. The patio was small and quiet, with little chance anything would happen there to excite her into injuring herself. Our girl needed a spirit-lifting excursion.
“That would be a bad idea,” the surgeon said. “You should wait another week, until she’s fully convalesced, and even then you’re going to have to be cautious with her for a while.”
Late Friday afternoon, when he examined Trix in his office, he spent more than the usual amount of time with her. He determined that her healing was further advanced than usual at the five-week mark. He relented, giving us permission to take her out to dinner that very night.
Giddy with anticipation, we raced home with her to give her a comb-out and to change our clothes. We couldn’t wait to see her eyes light up when she recognized the restaurant, to see the grin that a dish of little meatballs would inspire.
I lifted her into the back of the Explorer again, and we set off into an evening full of promise. Trixie was lying in the cargo space, and Gerda was sitting in the backseat, holding the leash so Trixie wouldn’t try to roam while in transit and perhaps be rocked off her feet.
A smart dog never stops surprising you with its sudden insights and the power of its perceptions. The trip to the restaurant involved four surface streets, a freeway, and another surface street, and we never followed that route to anything else. As I drove the first four streets and the freeway, Trixie lay in her depressive indifference, but when I followed the exit ramp and turned right on the fifth and final surface street, she startled Gerda by scrambling to her feet in the cargo space, pulling the leash taut. She looked out of the windows, left and right—and her tail began to swish.
“She knows where we’re going,” Gerda said. “How can she know?”
We were still more than a mile from the restaurant, but Trix grinned, panted happily, and used her tail as she had not used it in a week.
By the time we reached our destination and parked, every muscle in her body was tensed. She faced the tailgate with such anticipation that she seemed to be saying, Open the darn thing or I’m going right through it.
In spite of her excitement, she allowed herself to be lifted out and gently set down. Then, as if propelled by her rotating tail, she strained to the limit of her leash and led us past the main entrance to the restaurant, along a promenade that served an open-air shopping plaza, and around to the patio on the back of the establishment.
Gustaf greeted us, lavished attention on Trixie, and led us to a table overlooking the promenade. When Gerda and I were served our first course, Short Stuff received a dish of the miniature meatballs.
For the rest of the evening, she either sat at the railing that encircled the patio or lay with her chin on the bottom horizontal and her face between two staves, watching with interest as people—and a few dogs—strolled past on their way to and from the shops. Her tail did not continuously move in broad sweeps, but it never fell entirely still, either. The tip of it twitched, twitched, twitched, because she knew that her long confinement was over and that soon she would be allowed to go on long walks and to play again. She had her life back, life was good, and she was never depressed thereafter.
All breeds of dogs have a sense of smell much greater than that of any human being, some of them merely thousands of times greater, some tens of thousands. It’s possible that Trixie caught a thread of scent unique to the Swedish restaurant even when we were a mile away from it and even though she was inside an SUV.
Researchers once concocted a complex odor in a lab and taught a bloodhound to react to it in a specific fashion. Then they took the hound to the bottom of Manhattan Island, while others on the team traveled to the upper end of the borough, thirteen miles away. At the top of Manhattan, at a prearranged time, the researchers pulled the stopper out of a bottle of the laboratory-brewed stinky stuff and saturated a cloth with it. They waved the cloth in the air. They had chosen a day when a breeze moved north to south across the island, and they clocked the wind speed with anemometers at both the upper and lower locations. Less than a minute after the breeze should have carried the singular scent from one end of the island to the other, through one of the largest cities in the world, through millions of people and through a miasma of uncountable smells, the talented hound detected it and reacted to it, although the molecules must have been widely dispersed by air currents.
Trixie was no bloodhound. However, originally bred to work with hunters, golden retrievers are blessed with a sophisticated sense of smell. The restaurant was only a mile or so away, not thirteen miles, and a only few thousand people, not many millions, occupied the territory between our SUV and the restaurant. She might have snared an unraveling ribbon of scent from the air.
But I suspect that the other and no less amazing explanation is the correct one. We’d taken her to that restaurant by the same route on at least thirty occasions, and at the end of each fifteen-minute journey, she had received a dish of miniature meatballs. I think she learned that series of right and left turns and the approximate times between each turn, and associated that pattern of travel with the meatball treat. Her eruption out of listless depression into tail-wagging delight at the instant that I turned right onto the last street in the route is too meaningful to discount.
Or maybe she just read our minds.