Hello, Yellow Brick Road! – Day 282 – 2023-09-21 – Afternoon

Sedona, AZ

This story, about my first dog, may appear to be unrelated to this Yellow Brick Road journey of mine. However, if you read through to the end, you'll see that it has everything to do with it!

I don’t remember why, at age 12, I wanted a dog so badly. None of my friends back then had one, not that I had that many friends back then. 

I do remember two neighborhood dogs, though. There was Lady, the Botnicks’ gentle, almost-white cocker spaniel, who was generally tied up out front and always welcomed pats and scratches from the awkward boy next door. And there was Mickey, a feisty long-haired terrier, black and dark rust in color, who would yappingly nip at my heels whenever I bicycled by or, when I was on my paper route, try to stop me from delivering The Montreal Star to his house. 

There were no leash laws or poop ordinances back then so, unlike the tethered ladylike Lady, dogs like Mickey were free to roam (and terrorize 12-year-old boys) at will. 

Why did I want a dog? Maybe because I had few friends. Maybe to protect me from Mickey. Too many decades have now passed for me to be able to identify the reasons. But not too many to remember how virulently opposed my mother was.

A consummate balabusta (Yiddish for “homemaker on steroids”), she probably feared the dirt and disruption a dog would bring into the house. It was a house so immaculately kept that my sister and I used to tease her about what we called the “Mummy places,” those hidden-from-view spots we insisted that no one else but she would bother to dust and clean. The tops of doors, for example. Or the topside of the imposing mahogany breakfront that dominated our dining room.   

Why did she finally give in? I doubt it was my relentless nagging. She was largely immune to that. More likely, it was because I had so few friends. Only one, really. 

Two years earlier, she’d moved me from the Jewish day school I’d attended since kindergarten to the neighborhood public school in the hopes that I would make some friends in the area. Jewish People’s School, or JPS as it was popularly known, was two miles and a two-bus ride away and drew from a vast geographic pool. Algonquin, on the other hand, was near enough to most of its students that we could easily walk home for lunch.

That that move netted me only one friend possibly helped bring Lucky into my life. 

Something else I don’t remember: how I found Lucky. Although the local SPCA was only a ten-minute walk from our house and I regularly visited the dogs and cats there, Lucky was a pet store dog. 

The store, about two miles away near today’s Plamondon metro station, was not on a stretch of Victoria Avenue I had any reason to hang around. Yet hang around I must have because I visited the-dog-who-would-become-mine countless times before my mother finally came around, just in time for my thirteenth birthday.

On one of those visits, I fell to chatting with another kid, a girl about my age. “You have to name her Lucky,” she insisted when, long before my mother relented, I laid claim to the tan, short-haired terrier mix in the pen.

I don’t remember the day my mother gave in, but I’m certain her surrender must have been conditional: This would be my dog and my responsibility. Of course, I agreed, not having a clue what I was agreeing to. Nor do I remember the lucky day when I got to finally bring Lucky home. But I must have been overjoyed. 

What I do remember is that Lucky was my constant companion, and that I spent as much time with her as I could, especially in those first years. I remember our long walks through the neighborhood— to the TMR Shopping Center, where she’d follow me into the stores that would allow it and wait patiently outside those, like the Dominion supermarket, that wouldn’t, and to the nearest green space, the grassed-over vacant lot behind the Wawanesa Insurance building. And I remember her boisterous backyard rumbles with Kiki, the keeshond who lived at the end of our street.

I also remember how she slept at the corner of my bed at night and the way she settled into my half-packed suitcase each of the three summers I went away to Camp Wooden Acres for a month. 

I remember, too, how, like Mickey and his pals, she was free to roam the streets on her own but would always, somehow, hear us calling when it was time come home. It was always a thrill to stand at the front door and watch her race up the street toward me.

In those days when dog-training was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is now, I also remember Lucky’s frequent potty accidents and how she would be banished to our unfinished basement for a few hours after each episode, a punishment that contributed nothing to any behavioral improvement. If anything, it left Lucky even more highly strung than she already was. But those were different times, and we — my mother, my sister and I — did the best we could with the limited information available to us back then.

When at age twenty, a few months into my first job out of college, I announced that I was moving out, my mother announced that if I was going, Lucky would have to go with me. Seven years of pee stains had been enough. She wanted her house back.

Everything went smoothly at first. Lucky and I settled easily into my new Hutchison Street apartment with its much-faded elegance. I would walk her in the morning before I left for work — twenty minutes away at a PR startup squeezed into the attic floor of an equally faded downtown townhouse — and again when I got home. If she was stressed by my daylong absences, she didn’t show it. By then, at middle-dog-age, she had somehow mastered her potty training, so I never found any unwelcome surprises waiting for me. Only an exuberant dog, hyped-up by my return.

When I was laid off six months later, Lucky was thrilled. Suddenly, I was home all day, doing little other than job-hunting, trying to get by on unemployment insurance and, most importantly, paying attention to her. Unfortunately, she adapted far better to my stay-at-home status than to my return to work five months later. 

Until then, she’d been content to be on her own — either in the family home or in my apartment. Now, nine years of pent-up abandonment issues finally kicked in, with disastrous consequences. I would get home between five-thirty and six, tired after a long day’s work and a forty-minute rush-hour bus-and-subway trek, to find a stressed-out dog and mounds of wooden splinters next to chewed-through doors, trim and moldings. Over the weeks and months, I tried to find ways to pen her in to limit the damage, but nothing worked. Now, I was as stressed as she was, and I didn’t know what to do.

I couldn’t stay home and I couldn’t bring her with me to work. Today, I could have put her in doggy daycare or hired a petsitter or dog walker. None of those options existed in 1978, at least not in downtown Montreal.

In the end, my sister offered to take her. Unlike my 1930s apartment building with its easy-to-chew wood trim, Susan’s apartment was sleek and new, and considerably more dog-resistant.

I justified not visiting Lucky at Susan’s by rationalizing that she would adapt more quickly without me around. But the truth was that I couldn’t handle my guilt at abandoning her, a guilt that was easier to bury if I avoided her.

I couldn’t avoid her for long, however. A few months later, Lucky developed a growth in her cheek. It was so large and, likely, painful that she couldn’t eat. 

I took her to the vet, who identified it as a tumor and removed it. Within weeks it had grown back. “I can remove it again,” the vet told me, “but it will just keep coming back.”

There was only one solution, one I lacked the courage to face. 

The evening Lucky was euthanized, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t bring myself to go. Instead, I wandered the streets of my McGill student-ghetto neighborhood, trying to find ways to numb my grief and guilt. In the end, I let myself be picked up by a random guy and brought him back to my apartment for an hour of unsatisfying but emotionally anesthetizing sex.

I don’t know whether cremation and a memorial urn were standard options back, but I don’t recall being offered either. All I had of her once she was gone was her red leather leash, which I hung onto for many years. That, and decades of guilt and shame for the ways I’d abandoned her — first to my sister, then in her final moments.

I realized last Sunday that I’d never written about Lucky, apart from a brief, almost-throwaway mention in my Acts of Surrender memoir. I realized, too, that it was those same decades of guilt and shame that had kept me from doing so.

What happened last weekend and how is it relevant to this Yellow Brick Road journey?

Last Sunday was the day I learned that my daughter’s dog was to be euthanized in Sedona the following afternoon. Trixie, her 15½-year-old corgi, had been dealing with increasingly severe health challenges for some months…and it was time. Through a series of synchronicities, I found myself in nearby Flagstaff last weekend, so I offered to accompany my daughter and her mom to the vet. 

I wanted to be there for my daughter and her mom, of course, to help them through the experience. But I needed to be there, too, for Lucky. Forty-six years later, I needed to come to terms with my shame and guilt and to face the grief I had been too emotionally immature to deal with in my early twenties.

Before Trixie, I hadn’t witnessed an animal cross the rainbow bridge. Roxy, my only other dog until Kyri, had accompanied me on my first full-time road odyssey, the 1997 journey that landed me in Sedona. When my then wife and I moved to Hawaii the following year, we found a new home for her because we worried that she wouldn’t survive the state’s strict quarantine policy. So Trixie was my first. 

Not that Trixie was ever part of my life, other than peripherally. My marriage had already ended by the time she showed up. Even so, it was a profoundly moving experience — to be present as the life ebbed from her, and the pain with it, and to be present with and for my daughter in the midst of her grief.

At the same time, through it all, I heard myself whisper, again and, “I’m sorry, Lucky. I’m so sorry.”

That night, even as my mind drifted back to Trixie’s final release on the vet’s table, I felt as though a burden had lifted from my heart, one that I had been carrying for nearly fifty years. I had finally made peace with Lucky…and with myself.

Photos: 1/ Unfortunately, I no longer have any photos of Lucky. But I captured this Yellow Brick Road shot of me and Kyri just after we left Sedona last week. Not only did the experience with Trixie help heal my longstanding issues around Lucky, it made me feel even more grateful to have Kyri along with on this journey. 2/ A much-younger me with my daughter and Trixie, then still a puppy.