Bow wow wow: A drab afternoon on a holiday weekend

My dog Sid died four years ago this month. He would have been 98 in dog years, anyway, if he were still around.

I sometimes miss the silly pooch, how if you got him riled up his bark would sound like monkey chatter before he’d break into full howl. How he was so hyper as a pup that whenever anyone would come visit he just wouldn’t leave that person alone, wanting so much to play with a buddy. How he would sit by the fence and wait for the neighbor to feed him a biscuit.

I don’t miss the fleas, and the shedding -- enough to keep a family in new sweaters each winter, or cleaning the shit off the lawn (How weird is that anyway, that we pick pick up dog shit for the privilege of their company?)
Or how dumb dogs can be with pissing at inopportune times, or not barking when the house is robbed, or running off a couple times (though that could be funny -- once found a couple and tagged along as if he wanted to be adopted, and another time, I caught him running with a pack, until I pulled up -- then he scampered into the car.)

But overall, I do miss having someone stare at me to get the hell up in to morning, or to go for a walk with, or sit in the car with me, in the passenger seat, sneaking behind the wheel while he waited.

I had taken him to the vet less than a month before his death for his annual shots. The vet told me to consider aspiring therapy as he seemed to be moving slowly and may have canine arthritis.

Doctors talk funny. Consider it. Like I’m gonna come back, we’ll have coffee and chat about feeding aspirin to a dog.

So anyway, a month later I wake up in the morning to let Sid out and find clear, yellow vomit in the kitchen. The first thing I think is, what the hell did he eat, as dogs will eat pretty much anything, which is what I had in common with Sid.

But he seemed out of sorts, too. So I left him in the cool basement and came home for lunch to check on him. He pretty much was curled up in the same spot he was in the morning. And he hadn’t touched his food.

Do dogs get the flu, I wondered? Did some jackass poison him? Did he eat grass with Chemlawn on it? Was he hung over?

I get home from work and he’s still in the same spot. I let him out and I can tell he’s not right, so I call the vet. Not wanting to sound like one of those pet hypochondriacs, I suggest he may have eaten something the day before and give his symptoms. About an hour later they call back and say I should probably bring him in, considering his age.

During that hour, I left him out in the yard and killed time on the Internet. Looking back, I feel bad about this. But how the hell was I supposed to know?

He looked really sad in the yard, curled up again along the fence in the late evening shade. So we get to the minivan and I lift him into the back and off we go.

The vet says he wants to run some tests that will take a couple hours. Since it is close by, I go to the gym and work out instead of sitting in a lobby as if it were my wife or kid. Plus, like I said, I thought he just had canine flu.

Anyway, the vet finally calls and says to come in -- I learn Sid had cancer.

All kinds of things go through your mind when you hear the “c” word. Was it what I fed him all these years? Was it what he ate and drank that I also eat and drink? Does flea dip cause cancer? It’s made by the same firm that made the gas chambers for the Nazis, for Chrissake.

With all that in mind, I ask the vet for his opinion, a quality of life thing. I didn’t want to have my dog needing a nurse or having to watch over him 24-7. I wasn’t being callous, but sort of felt that way, but, being single, it’s not like I could take family leave while the dog recuperated.

I had to give the dog away for a year until I found a place I could live and have a pet (on my salary owning a home ain’t an option). That was hard enough, finally finding a nice family going through woes of its own, who, it turned out didn’t want him anymore when I reclaimed him, having enough of his infernal shedding.

So, I figured my chances for finding someone to watch a sick dog were like a calculus graph: approaching zero.

But the vet -- not the regular guy, but the night shift one, a bald man with round wire frame glasses and a German accent -- tells me if the surgery goes well, even being single I should be able to take the proper care.

So I ask if I can see Sid again before he goes under the knife, give the lug a hug, and off he goes. It wasn’t an Old Yeller moment, but you could tell Old Sid was distressed, disoriented and confused. He was a ninny at the vet anyway, so this wasn’t so unusual.

As I live less than 2 miles from the office, I went home. By now it was almost 10 or so.

I fall into that half-awake half-asleep state and the phone rings after midnight. The vet tells me that the cancer was worse than the X-ray led him to believe and that nothing else could be done.

He wants to know if I want to come say good-bye.

Blubbering like a 210 pound baby seal pup, I think I called my sister and brother-in-law (where it’s 2 hours earlier), then headed back to the vet.

Are you familiar with the unnerving videos of the band Nine Inch Nails? Well, seeing a dog in surgical repose, was like a scene from one. They had canvas blankets up, and his paws were hogtied together. An aspirator was down his throat, and I think a cone-shaped thing was around his neck.

It was all shades of brown and gray, and it didn’t help that the vet sounded like the scary dentist Lawrence Olivier played in Marathon Man. I kept waiting to here some industrial music playing in the background, or for Dustin Hoffman to escape from a secret room.

It was hard to say goodbye like that, thinking back at the golden furball Sid was as a pup, the happiest-to-see-me mutt in the lab-shep litter. I joked that I named him after Sid Vicious, as he was anything but he really was named after the kid who was the first to be friendly to me when my family moved to a new town my 8th grade year. He was blonde and round, too.

What brought me back to reality: I got the bill.

It was more than $1,000, about $1,200 once I decided to have him cremated and keep the ashes. Don’t they have to cremate the dog anyway? I guess they charge the fee for shoveling his remains into the wooden box and for the privilege of frying him up individually. That takes special talent.

I felt a little goofy paying that much, with a pinch of distrust thrown in with the guilt and grief. I mean, I was at the vet just a month earlier and nothing. And the German guy got me to agree to surgery saying there was a very good chance he’d recover. Shouldn’t that at least mean a break on the charges?

You can’t put a price tag on some stuff, and it seems they know that, which is why it costs so much.

I don’t know why I wanted the ashes anyway. It seems kind of goofy, but hey, nothing wrong with being goofy every so often.

I keep the box in the bag they came in, in the spot he used to sleep in the kitchen under a table, with a couple of toys. Not to many people visit, so I don’t have to explain my makeshift shrine. And it’s not like I have votive candles up, too, or posters on the wall.

Unless I get married I don’t think I will have another dog. Being single, it’s not fair to the mutt -- unless you get one of those small ones that’s more like a cat, or are a total yuppie and pay daycare fees.

So maybe that’s why I have the box - which make me more adjusted that Orson Welles at Charles Foster Kane. But we all get that lonely sometime.