about a man and his dog

I remember watching the Golden Globes earlier this year and hearing Mickey Rourke say, during his acceptance speech for Best Actor, “Sometimes when a man’s alone, all you got is your dog and they meant the world to me.”  

You think it’s just a dog, but it’s not.  It never really is.  Not to me anyways and certainly not to my pops who’s old cocker spaniel died earlier this week.  The dog that was his constant companion and partner in crime for over 10 years.  The dog that never wanted to leave his side, preferring to sit in the car for hours so that he might follow dad on whatever adventure he was going on, even if only to the diner down the street; one burger for pops and one for Hunter. 

He was never really the family dog because most of us had flown the nest by the time dad got him.  But he was there every Christmas, sitting on the couch, with his heart of gold and the rankest breath this side of the Atlantic, waiting for someone to open his box of milkbones under the tree or shaking like a leaf when dad gave him a giant beef bone from the butcher.  It was just so big and glorious and wonderful and what if someone took it from him? Oh the humanity!

Every man has a different kind of relationship with his dog but at the heart of it all is that unconditional love, one that transcends all the wrong doings, the disappointments, the shortcomings.  An affection altogether ignorant of our faults. It’s about a man and his dog and the loyalty that carries him through the highs and lows.  I don’t know a single human being who loves as unconditionally as a dog and we should all aspire to.

To understand the kind of relationship my father had with Hunter, I can only point you towards this video.  I am in fact convinced Buck 65 must have met dad and his yellow dog at some point and written a song about them.

When you are used to hearing the same thump of the old dog getting off the bed in the morning, the wake up shake, the tap dance of long toe nails and the tail wag announcing yet another amazing day in dogland (food, walk and time with their best friend never gets old to them)… the mornings seem really quiet when they’re gone. And it hurts when they leave us. So today, I am sending love to my pops who is feeling rather sad.

As for Hunter, I like to think in my hopeless optimism that Dylan was up there waiting for him and they are whooping it up in tall grasses, chasing a bounty of squirrels, with their tongues dragging on the ground, going for car rides whenever they feel like it and eating an endless supply of dog bones on all the furniture they want.

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”  ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912