Dogs are gendered pets. Man’s best friend. There aren’t many great stories about a girl and her dog. Marley and Me, My Dog Skip (did anyone even see that?), Old Yeller; childhood classic Homeward Bound gives each young boy and canine companion, while their sister has “Sassy!” (I am channelling the final scene here – you with me? “Sassy!” No? Rewatch immediately.) Judith Butler’s doubtless abhorrence aside, my own experience runs entirely contrary to this.
Yes. I am a crazy cat lady in the making. I love She Ra inexplicably (my father deigned to share today that, “on a scale of 1 to 10, she’s probably a 5”) and she is my first pet who is really and fully mine. But cat lady and dog’s best friend are not mutually exclusive categories.
Ben is my dog.
Ok, ok. Ben lives with my parents, and they rescued him by the time I was no longer living full time at home (the last summer, in fact, that I lived in our family home). I had been working for my dad, and he told me that we were leaving work early to run an errand; that errand was confirming that we wanted to adopt Ben, who was, of course, not yet “Ben.” My childhood dog, Bixby, had been dead 2 years, and my parents were interested in getting a new dog. Not a puppy, though – they didn’t have the energy to train one. So when my mum saw a pure bred Golden Retriever (which Bixby had been) at the SPCA, given away by his owners at 7-years-old, she called my dad right away. “Chance” – a name we early rejected in an attempt to stem the flow of puns from my dad about our new dog, “Second Chance” or “Last Chance” – had acquired an unfortunate breed trait of growing benign tumours, which is likely why his family had given him up. When my mum found him, the SPCA had removed 4 baseball sized tumours; his entire back was shaved, and he had four 7 inch incisions healing. He looked quite beat up, but had the most shameless, endearing grin I'd ever seen on a dog. It's his trademark look - like Julia Roberts, but less frightening and more dopey.
Ben came home with us that evening. Two days later, I maintained my streak of naming our worthwhile pets and he was dubbed Ben Black. (My brother insisted on Willow as the moniker for a cat who, so mean she would wait at the top of the stairs so she could jump out and attack people’s faces as they ascended, did not have a long tenure with our family).
I always felt a close tie with Ben. Almost days after deciding on “Ben” as our new hound’s name (and yes, I realize that it is confusing and perhaps a little ignorant of us to change a 7-year-old dog’s name – but you haven’t heard my dad pun), he acquired a new nickname: DumbDumb. I felt the need to not only defend my proffered name, but our newest family member. Since then, we were tied.
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And this. We shared a fondness for rugby balls. |
We adopted Ben five years ago. Twelve is very old for a Golden Retriever. When Bixby died, his descent into old-dogdome was the course of a week; he jumped out of my dad’s car and hurt himself and by the end of the week could no longer lift his head, and was put down. This all happened, however while I was at boarding school. Ben’s aging is much more drawn out, so purported my teary eyed mother, after we had made the mistake of trying to take Ben on a too-long walk, which caused him to trip and fall a couple of times. He is absolutely covered in tumours, and his hair hasn’t grown out evenly since his last hair cut. It is one of the hardest things in the world to watch his cheerful face and know that he is slowly dying.
“You really bring out the puppy in him,” my dad told me this morning. Ever since I used Ben as an inspiration to channel an energy and a kindness from within myself. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all be a little more like our dogs? Better hygiene and more science, but a willingness to greet kindly every person we encounter, and to smile and play whenever we can?
So, to Ben, with love.