Walks with Leporello, Thoughts on LOVE, GOD and DOG - 1. I. Eyes of an Airedale Person

From: AC Benus
Sent: Monday, May 9, 2011 4:40 PM
To: […]
Subject: For all Leppy lovers . . .

It is with heavy heart and sluggish hand that I inform you of our loss. Leppy shook off his mortal coil Saturday evening. He died at home peacefully, surrounded by his family, knowing he was / is loved.

He lived to be 15 years, 6 months and 1 day old.

He is survived by Sunny and me and his two brothers, Figaro, age 3, and Masetto, age 9 months.

Our loss is heaven’s gain, for after all, we were only permitted the chance to ‘borrow’ him for a while anyway.

We were / are lucky to have been / be so blessed.

AC and Sunny

I. Eyes of an Airedale Person

May 11, 2011

I suppose I should start Tristram-Shandy-style, before the beginning. [i] But what exists before we are born? Life does. We drop in as characters in the fashion of Japanese novels, without introductions or prefaces, and without any particular grand, let’s tie this whole thing up, finales. We drop in on our own stories already in progress, and in which we only – at least at first – play a small part. We start as novices in our own tales, and if we are lucky, gain sight of ourselves through the eyes of others. As a newbie we may witness great acts of love and heartbreak, and interpret these wrongly as petty, self-serving ones – the question is always – how do we relate? The yardstick of our own experience measures our ability to love and to see love in others, and this stick is mighty short in the beginning, but grows as we do. God with his universal divider placed firmly in his weary hand is the longest-lived, and consequently, the longest sufferer of heartbreak.

Max mouthed a tennis ball and nuzzled my crotch with it – gently – his huge brown eyes assessing my face frankly as I sat on his sofa. He glanced fleetingly at the parakeet to my right side, then back to me. Max was the father, or, to use the correct term, the sire, of the Airedale puppy we were there to meet and potentially adopt. Max – whose full name I was to later learn from his pedigree papers was Max What-a-Dog Keisel – stood in front of me a seeming Genesis-sized giant – well over 120 pounds and proportioned like a small calf might be. His ears were perfect folded handkerchiefs; silky coin purse on the outside and a flush healthy pink on the inside. Now with the ball in his mouth, his mouth in my crotch, the ears rode the back of his head in the classic expression of formal appraisal. He was interviewing me. Doing so to assure himself I was worthy of his issue – and by the way, what type of person was I?

The parakeet was his buddy, and later I saw Max, in a moment of boredom, go over to the cage and prop his nose against the bars. The cage occupant acted with a hell-to-pay ire for the invasion of his space, but it was all a friendly sham, a ritual of play, for in a few moments the parakeet was on the floor of his cage and using his beak to caress the big black nose of his big Airedale lug. Max closed his eyes momentarily, enjoying the tickling scratch, and the passing of love from the bird. Then it was over. With no fuss, Max stiffened, huffed through the bars and moved away. The bird flitted up to his perch and eyed Max’s retreat.

Now here I was, pooped after a Saturday of relentless driving from San Francisco to Sebastopol, and then through backroads-tundra to this sofa and Sacramento. We, Sunny and I, had set up two appointments to look at puppies. We almost turned back a couple of hours out of Sebastopol because there we had met a sweet little girl we thought fit our bill. Here at 7:30 PM, for our 4:00 PM appointment, we knew instantly that Max’s offspring was to be our companion dog. A second ‘almost didn’t happen’ occurred as we rang the doorbell. The door opened and we were greeted with “We have to be someplace by 8, and were just leaving – we thought you weren’t showing up.” We were ushered in and greeted by Max, then by GB’s Abby Gail Keisel, the pup’s mom – or dam – and sat down. Abby was much more reserved and eyed us maternally, leaning against the sofa in calm participation.

I tried to take the ball. Wrong. Max would not release it. I tried again, and this time he shook his head violently like he was breaking the neck of a rag doll. So, I frowned and figured “Let him keep it then.” What he did next startled me. He dropped the ball right into my hand. Why? I had given up, pooped out on his game. Consequently he made the rules easier so I could play too. I tossed the ball. He brought it back to me, and the whole scene of my trying to take the ball was repeated.

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It seemed to me there was never a time I didn’t know about Airedales, but I suppose my first and very memorable introduction to their abilities came in high school, reading James Thurber’s The Dog That Bit People. Muggs, their family Airedale circa 1917, was a tough cookie who patrolled the mean streets of Columbus, Ohio, like a kingpin holding turf and prepared to fight and lick any challenger. The Thurber family’s dog had the remarkable ability to regret. His mother, the one person Muggs never bit, always knew by his expression that he was sorry after having sunk his teeth into neighbors, salesmen, delivery men, cops and senators (yes, Muggs bit one of Ohio’s U. S. Senators while he was campaigning in the Thurber home). [ii]

My re-introduction to the subject came in January 1990. Connoisseur Magazine ran an article by Chip Brown praising the Airedale as a combination of “Style, Brains and Clownish Wit.” [iii] The piece’s title apparently did not have room for Brave and Persevering, but Brown tells of Moujik, a Central American Airedale who, in the 1950s, caught a burglar by the wrist in the middle of the night, and detained him on the staircase until morning. Moujik had, the criminal later related, snuck up noiselessly as the man took his first step on the stairs. He felt a dull ping, looked down and found a menacing Airedale attached to him. The dog growled under his breath with every twitch of struggle the man exhibited, and by morning, when the family found him, the would-be thief was a nervous wreck. Moujik, matters well in hand – or rather, well in mouth – hadn’t felt it necessary to raise the alarm and deprive the household of its peaceful slumbers. Brown’s subtitle states ‘Everything One looks for in a Spouse,’ and after we moved to San Francisco in 1995, Sunny suggested it was time for a puppy – “an Airedale?” I asked. “Of course,” he said – ‘Quiet dignity’ Brown’s article quoted, and ‘The ebullient joy of life’ – what else, but an Airedale?

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We met this Sacramento puppy. We saw the clear fact that he was the pick of the litter, strong, gentle and wide-eyed, and we were lucky a third time. This pup, as the prize among his littermates, left his parents and siblings’ side first. However, the couple who took him home at six weeks began to have issues with their relationship and returned him at eight weeks. Here at the end of January 1996, Sunny and I sat with a breeder who used to live around the corner from us in San Francisco, and who, like us, had always raised dogs in a family of two daddies. Yes, he was our puppy. Thrice moved, fate tricked away the obstacles to ensure he was going to live with us, no matter what.

We struck the bargain, exchanged a deposit check, shook hands, and Sunny and I prepared our household for baby’s arrival. We would pick him up the following Saturday, January 27th, so Sunny made a bed with a slipcover decorated in the puppy’s new name, and we bought food and bowls, a collar, leash, any and every thing a pup would need for his daily existence. I also picked out a humble stuffed canvas toy mouse. It had a rope tail and floppy ears with blue fabric on the inside, These were his first possessions. What a paradoxically long week I had to endure as it flew by in a blink: the last static charge of a life soon to be entirely different.

The day of pickup, we were early, having fetched the rental car at the crack of 6 AM when the place opened. At the sound of the doorbell, we received the same warm greeting from Max and Abby as the week before, and the same wide-eyed gambol from the puppy, who was exactly twelve weeks old that Saturday morning. Bruce Waggoner, the breeder, looking a bit misty-eyed, told us how the little family of dogs had played all morning. He had even gotten out his camcorder to capture the family romps. For we had seen this type of family play the week before. For insistence, one time the puppy had gone and climbed up on the bean bag chair, the leather one against which Abby Gail was already lying. A moment later, Max sidled over, pretending he saw no one around, and plopped down on the bag, causing a puppy-bounce and instant play amongst the three of them. Witnessing this, and the puppy’s confidence, I knew instinctively that his long-term exposure to his parents and siblings was one of the ingredients allowing a well-adjusted dog to grow from puppyhood.

But, as we sat at the dining table, filling out the paperwork for the official transfer, I became distracted. It was hard to hear the information about the banana-flavored de-wormer we were to give the puppy, because Max was causing a fracas. He was pacing around, and each time the puppy came near him, he’d snap out a warning bark, and then turn his back on him. In a minute or two, Abby joined in. It seemed to me they were ganging up on the puppy and battering him. I thought to myself, based on what I had been reading in the puppy books, that we’d arrived at the right moment. Max, as the intact male – so the print experts warned – had to eventually see other males as his rivals and dominate them. And here Sunny and I were, right on time to ‘rescue’ the puppy from a dangerous situation. Bruce apologized, not knowing why they acted like this when their morning had been filled with such lovey-dovey play.

And so, we bundled our puppy up in the towel we had brought for him, and left Sacramento self-satisfied that we had done good for all involved.

I mentioned that the pick of the litter was back early, and from there all his nine siblings were adopted one by one. He was held back because “the couple,” a young man and woman, said they needed time to work out their interpersonal issues, but would return for him in a week or two. They never did, presumably splitting up, so our pup was the last to leave the side of Max and Abby Gail.

I said perspective is important, and my self-righteous reckoning of ‘rescue’ was seen through the novice eyes of a non-Airedale person. For years, many years, I wondered at Max’s behavior, until at last, the experienced Airedale person I had evolved into, allowed me to see through his eyes. Max loved his children, he had been through loss – puppy after puppy, over and over again, and his hostile attitude to his young son as he saw Sunny and me reappearing at his house, was to prepare the puppy for being separated from his parents. Max grieved for his own impending loss by making his child ready to leave them. Acts of love, sometimes forced by others and out of our control, lead us to that beautiful perspective through others’ eyes – a Godly perspective, with or without a ball in the mouth, with or without a nose in the crotch. As I write this, I imagine Max in his living room after we left him all those years ago. I see him wandering; avoiding the puppy’s places; seeing him everywhere, yet knowing there is nowhere he can be seen. I imagine Max going over to the parakeet cage. The bird scratching his nose, and Max closing his eyes with the numbed pleasure afforded by routine. Family does continue; others do need us; and although it’s cold comfort, it’s comfort nonetheless.

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Of all my personal Airedale stories, fought for and won through dogged determination, or of all the many faithful Airedale accounts I have heard – like the bravery of Moujik – the example of Max’s heartbreak turned to selfless act, to thoughts of his innocent child’s emotional well-being before his own sad-ness, makes Max’s story the greatest I know. Fifteen and a half years later, at the end of his pup’s life, I relate to his grief best; to his loss. Now you have him again. Now I have a more proper perspective on the both of you. What I have gained through experience because of you is a much-lengthened yardstick with which to measure a proper deference for what I see. Thank you Max, what a dog, Keisel. Thank you. [iv]

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