Gulliver's gone to the final command of his master
His watery eyes had washed all the hills with his laughter
And the seasons can change all the light from the grey to the dim
But the light in his eyes will see no more so bright
As the sheep that he locked in the pen
His watery eyes had washed all the hills with his laughter
And the seasons can change all the light from the grey to the dim
But the light in his eyes will see no more so bright
As the sheep that he locked in the pen
There's four feet of ground in front of the barn
That's sun baked and rain soaked and part of the farm
But now it lies empty so cold and so bare
Gulliver's gone but his memory lies there
That's sun baked and rain soaked and part of the farm
But now it lies empty so cold and so bare
Gulliver's gone but his memory lies there
“Gulliver,” lyrics by
Bernie Taupin
April 16, 1991. While
the other dogs barked and lunged at me, held back by their wire cages, the small white
dog cowered against the back of her cage as far away from me as possible. Her white fur was scrawny, revealing blue
skin underneath. I could see each of
the matchstick-sized bones that made up her legs. She was the ugliest dog I had ever seen.
She was also the only small dog in the pound on that April
afternoon.
Emily and I had just left Kate’s baby shower. Kate, like many of my friends at that time,
was expecting her first child. Bernice was
supposed to host the baby shower at her house, but she went into labor the night
before and so we held it at her house without her.
All my friends, it seemed, where married and pregnant, or
married and trying to get pregnant, or in one case, just pregnant. I could see that our days of freewheeling socializing
and antiquing trips to the countryside were coming to an end. Instead of going to bars, they would soon be
going to “Mommy and Me” classes. Instead
of driving sedans, they would soon be driving minivans. Instead of a townhouse in the city they would
live near the best schools in the county.
I was going to get even more lonely very soon.
I can’t remember if it was Emily or me who suggested getting
a dog. In either case, after the shower we
drove from Bernice’s house on the Northside to Chamberlain Avenue where the
Richmond SPCA was then located.
We told the volunteer behind the desk that I was looking for
a small dog to adopt.
“We only have one small dog available right now,” she said,
and then led us back to the dog cages.
Most of the dogs were labs or lab mixes.
Richmonders love their labs. Richmond has more black and yellow labs
than New York has black and yellow cabs.
The girl led us to a cage with no dog. I peered into it and saw the small dog
shivering against the back of the cage.
The girl opened the door, reached in and gently picked her up.
“We’ll take you to one of our adoption rooms so you can get
to know her,” she said.
Across from the main desk, a curved wall with glass blocks
led to a hallway with several small rooms painted red with chipped linoleum
floors. We went into one of the
rooms.
Emily sat in a chair and I sat on the floor. The dog immediately climbed into my lap,
still shaking. The stress of being in
the pound had caused her to lose much of her hair, the girl told us. The dog had a small narrow nose and dark eyes.
What little hair she had stood up like white
wires. She didn’t look up at me but instead settled
down on my lap.
“She needs you,” said Emily.
“And you need her.”
Emily was right. I
had left our two golden retrievers with Billy in New Kent, and I missed having
a dog. Billy and I got our first dog,
Bear, in 1985. A year later after we
moved to New Kent, we bought Lucy, another purebred golden, from a dealer in
Chesterfield. Bear and Lucy would be the first and last purebred
dogs we would buy. Starting with the
scrawny terrier mix, we would only adopt rescue dogs from then on.
I was reading “Cats Eye” by Margaret Atwood when I adopted
the tiny white dog, so I named her Margaret.
Margaret 1991
According to Johns Hopkins medical school, studies over the
past 25 yeas have shown that stroking a dog can boost levels of serotonin and dopamine,
the mood related brain chemicals. It
doesn’t take a study to tell you that!
Who doesn’t feel better after petting a dog’s head while looking into
her eyes, those two pools of love staring up at you?
Margaret was probably about a year old when I adopted
her. She eventually put on a little
weight, although she never lost her girlish figure. Her skin turned from blue to a healthy pink. Her wiry hair became thicker.
We became attached almost immediately. If I left the room, she would come looking
for me. She was my constant
companion. I took her with me in the car
everywhere I went. She learned which
tellers at the bank drive up window gave her dog biscuits and so she would get
excited if she saw one of them.
Otherwise she would remain sitting on the front seat.
Because I had to take care of Margaret, I had to take care
of myself too. I had to get up every morning
and walk her, even if I felt too depressed to get out of bed. I had to walk her several times a day, in
fact, which forced me to get out of the house and get some exercise.
When I took her backpacking with me, small as she was, she
was always at the head of the group.
Larger dogs were afraid of her, because she was fearless. Perhaps Margaret taught me to be fearless too. This was during the Missing Years when I
went skiing in Austria, cruising in the Caribbean and backpacking in the George
Washington National Forest.
Even though Billy and I got divorced, we never stopped
seeing each other. Billy would watch
Margaret for me when I travelled.
When we remarried and moved in together, we brought the
three dogs together. As devoted to me as
Margaret was during the Missing Years, once Billy and I remarried, her loyalty
switched to Billy completely and absolutely.
One of the issues we had during our first marriage was that Billy was
not assertive enough in our relationship.
He tended to defer to me. I paid
the bills and made the financial decisions.
Billy would ask me random questions, expecting me to know the answers
because I had the college degree. When
we lived in New Kent during our first marriage, we had a problem with Bear
running away. A dog trainer told me it
was because Bear was looking for the alpha dog.
We did not have this problem the second time around. We now called Billy “Big Daddy.” Margaret’s devotion to Billy demonstrated that
Billy was the alpha dog in our house.
Instead of sleeping under the bed as she did with me, she now slept on
the bed, on Billy’s shoulder with her nose snuggled against his neck. When Billy came home from work and dropped
his gym bag on the floor, she would crawl into it and growl at me if I came too
close. She even snapped at me a few
times when I tried to reach into the bag. Sometimes we joked that Billy only took me back in order to get Margaret. It was a package deal.
Margaret guards Billy's gym bag
When the kids, came, Margaret became even more loyal to
Billy. It was as if she knew that I was
responsible for those noisy creatures.
She wasn’t sure how to deal with them at first, but she learned to
tolerate them after she discovered that they dropped food on the floor. She would sit under their high chair, and
later under the table, looking down the entire time waiting for a morsel to
drop.
Margaret waits eagerly for Audrey to drop part of her
dinner on the floor
As small as she was compared to the goldens, they seemed to
get along. Bear pretty much ignored her,
but she would intimidate Lucy, who outweighed her by about 100 pounds. She would jump up and bite the skin on Lucy’s
neck and hold on no matter how much Lucy shook her. When the kids were babies and we would sit
on the front lawn on a blanket, Margaret would guard them and chase off any
other dogs who dared to enter the property (mostly yellow and black labs, of
course).
Margaret lived a long life.
First Bear died, then Lucy. After Lucy died we got Gus The Poodle, another
rescue dog. For a while we had two small
white dogs.
As she aged, Margaret lost her hearing and most of her
sight. She slept through much of the
day. She became crotchety and would snap at Gus for no reason. But she kept
on living, 13, 14, 15 years.
In the early spring of 2006, we took the kids to Seven
Springs for a ski trip. My mom took care
of the dogs. When we returned, Mom told
us that Margaret was missing. I had
always heard that animals go off alone to die, and we assumed Margaret had done
so, because she no longer left the yard.
We had stopped walking her years earlier.
A few days later, some boys in the neighborhood found
Margaret in a shallow stream at the end of our street. Billy brought her home so we could have her
cremated. Because we found her on a Saturday
and we could not take her to the vet until Monday, he put her in a pizza box in
the freezer.
“How does she look?” I asked Billy.
“Like a frozen dog,” he replied. Billy always knew just what to say.
Margaret's last Christmas, 2005
