Rudy

I had done all of the things to put my childhood behind me. I had grieved over a friend’s passing, graduated from college, was paying my own rent. The one thing that kept me tethered to adolescence was Rudy, my first dog and really, my first friend.

All I had ever wanted growing up was a dog. When I say all I wanted, I mean just that. A dog was the only thing. But it was never convenient or my parents didn’t trust I’d actually take care of one. “You like the idea of having a dog,” my father would bark.

One weekend I was down in Georgia on my uncle’s farm visiting my cousins Matthew and Joel. I knew their dog, a Labrador, was pregnant and word on the farm was that an American Dingo had done the dirty work. That’s what they said and that’s what stuck. And what do you know, the weekend I was there was the weekend she got tired of carrying them. Spat them all out onto the floor of their garage. The next day we were playing with the pups and one little black fur ball was especially snuggly with me. A few weeks later, and after much convincing that I was ready to take care of a dog, that puppy came to live with us on South Seminole. I named him Rudolph and called him Rudy.

He made me happier than anyone else I lived with at the time. He was a good dog. He was good at the first part of catch wherein you actually fetch the stick, but not so good at the second bit of bringing it back to the thrower. So, a lot of our time was spent with me chasing him around the backyard. I fed him and kept his water bowl full and when it came time to nap, he was my pillow. He was inextricable from my childhood so when it came time to dig his grave, my mom asked me to do it.

He wasn’t yet dead, but he might as well have been. He was mostly blind and basically deaf. His gait was off for tumors that the vet promised weren’t hurting him or damaging any innards. Said that we’d do more harm than good to try and remove them. But man, when Rudy would walk he’d whimper in a way that made you doubt any of the vet’s schooling. I was moving to Brooklyn to sleep on a friend’s couch and Rudy was due to go under the next week for surgery on the tumors. Turns out the vet was wrong and the tumors had gotten too big and had to be removed. Mom, in her clairvoyant fashion, suggested I dig a hole in the backyard before I left. She didn’t think the surgery would go well. She was right, as she usually is, and the brilliant vet didn’t realize the large blood supply the tumor had become accustomed to. Needless to say, Rudy bled out on the operating table and they had to put him down.

But before all that, as I dug the hole in the backyard, Rudy, like the good dog he was, was right by my side. It was odd in a way to dig a grave for a friend sitting right there beside me. It made me very sad, but not just because of him. Life was moving on and I couldn’t hit rewind. Like I said, he was the last vestige of my childhood and I knew he was almost gone. I was overwhelmed and so maybe my face wasn’t completely bone dry as I dug into the earth of the backyard of my childhood home. Rudy, of course, didn’t know what was happening and being pretty much blind couldn’t see it either. In his curiosity sniffing around my feet he ended up falling into the hole I was digging especially for him. It made me laugh. I bent over and helped him out and told him, “Not yet, buddy. Not yet.” But I like to think of it as a sign that he was giving me to let me know that he was ready even if I wasn’t. He was a good dog like that. He was the best dog.