It’s windy and way too cold for May, a week before the official start of summer. Popper, our eldest dog, is lying on the porch, watching the lilacs and wisteria hang on for dear life. He too is hanging on and I’m having a terrible time letting go.He attempts to get up but the wind might knock him over. He’s unsteady, able to use only three legs. His right leg has a slight tremor. A football-sized tumor, attached at the shoulder, throws him off balance easily.
He circles about, lost in a world of not knowing. His old life is gone, replaced by an invader of bones, a life crusher called cancer. He whines, not because he is in pain; he thankfully hasn’t gotten to that point yet. Or at least, I don’t want to admit that he has.
He whines to be touched. That’s just Popper. He’s a people dog.
“He only does this when I leave his side,” Lauren, the groomer said when I went to pick him up. He was still on her table, the air thick with his hair.
“He’s a talker,” agreed our friend Drew, the owner of Hope, Popper’s best dog friend. One time, Dru came to our house with Hope to chat over a glass of wine after swimming in Gardiner’s Bay. Popper did most of the chatting and we sat there wondering what the heck he was talking about.
Like his father before him, he was an accomplished escape artist. While in the city, I got a call from a woman who owned a farm on Three Mile Harbor Road. “Your dog is chasing my donkey,” she said. Popper found the only hole in the fence at the dog park and went missing from my husband.
He met every neighbor on the block and beyond. He explored one neighbor’s meticulously clean white home after rolling around in the carcass of a dead deer. The smell alone warranted incarceration. The man was sitting at his desk at the time and couldn’t figure out how a lone wolf entered his home unannounced. He was about to call the cops when Popper rolled over on his back. The man noticed his tag and called us instead, none-too-happy.
A bayman friend of ours was catching bait at some ungodly hour. Out of the darkness, Popper swam up the harbor, scaring the bejesus out of the fisherman. Sorry, to say, we had no idea he was even gone.
Although he looked like he could eat you alive, all he ever wanted from a human was a pet and maybe a little treat. He may have eaten you alive if you were a baby deer or turkey, rabbit or bird. And after the kill, he’d prance around with you in his mouth, a peacock on a runway.
One elderly woman wasn’t taking any chances, and did call animal control. I was out riding my bike, yelling his name up and down the street like a lunatic, when an official white van drove by. I finally caught up to the van and asked the driver, “Do you happen to have my dog?” The windows were blacked out so I couldn’t see inside.
“What color is your dog,” the officer asked.
“The color of sand,” I said.
He rolled down the back window. “Is this him?”
His almond brown eyes looked up through blond lashes.
“You’ll have to follow me to town and pay a fine,” the dog catcher said, “If this happens again, we can take the dog.”
Popper didn’t care. He lived by his own rules, inviting himself to a neighbor’s barbecue and sampling hamburgers from a platter without anyone the wiser, and jumping into moving UPS vans, like an outlaw to a train.
“He was never a humper,” my husband said, traveling down memory lane, “I only saw him hump twice.”
As a puppy, he humped a stuffed animal outside a pet shop in the village. A crowd formed around him and they all laughed hysterically. I felt embarrassed for him, but he didn’t care. The other time, a group of Harley Davidson riders were hanging out at Liar’s Saloon and Popper took a liking to one woman’s leather pants.
He loved women and women loved him. My husband couldn’t walk down Newtown Lane without at least a dozen girls stopping to pet him when he was a puppy. My husband didn’t complain then.
My husband was adamantly opposed to getting Popper. He had grown up with big dogs and had been through the inevitable. “Large breeds don’t last long,” he said, “I can’t handle saying ‘good-bye.’”
I wasn’t hearing any of that. “Please, I’ll walk him every day,” I pleaded, “It will be great exercise.”
Last week, we took him to his favorite beach in Napeague. He couldn’t run up and down the sand dunes or chase the tennis ball, like his younger “brother” Carson. At one point, Carson took the ball and tried to tease a response, a caring gesture that went unanswered. Popper waded in the water, something he loved to do.
“Hope taught Popper to swim in 2003,” Dru reminded me the other day. I asked her to bring Hope for a visit. It had been a while since the two dogs had gotten together to fetch balls.
“Hope doesn’t do that anymore,” Dru said.
Truth be told, Popper never really “fetched” the ball. He chased it and got it and proceeded to squeeze it in his mouth until it popped, rendering it lifeless and living up to his name again. (“Popper” because he “popped” out of his mother’s womb unexpectedly, the last out of eight pups.)
Hope still barks excitedly when they make the turn down our street. Popper heard Hope’s cries of joy and ran down the driveway, faster on three legs than all four. Those short-lived boosts of energy are tiny miracles. Just the other day, he stole a whole stick of butter off the kitchen countertop.
Dru put a crate down next to the open car door and threw a rug on top of it, so Hope could step into the back seat.
I gave Popper a gigantic bone he used to tackle with abandon. He left it untouched but took a smaller, more manageable treat. My husband was right. The inevitable has come and I’m a mess.
Staff Writer on May 16, 2016