Even though I have been a dog fancier most of my life, I am still learning and my dog Marshall is the current teacher. Marshall is an old dog, 13 years old as of last November, and he seems to be running out of patience in teaching me, especially when it comes to something that he wants that I don’t understand. In those cases, he stands directly in front of me and stares with his soft brown eyes holding mine in a steady glare. I always break. After a while, I get up and give him a cookie since that is his most frequent demand and, even if it isn’t what he wants, he accepts it as a substitute most of the time.
One of the things that Marshall has taught me recently is that old dogs are a lot like old men. For one thing, Marshall doesn’t suffer fools easily. If a puppy happens by, Marshall sniffs him a few times and then walks away as if to say ‘you aren’t worth my time’. And he won’t allow a puppy or a strange dog to give him a thorough sniffing either. After the obligatory sniffs at each end, Marshall demands that the stranger desist and he gives a warning bark to show he means business even though that is definitely impolite in dog-language. It is kinda like me hanging up the phone on a pesky salesman.
Marshall’s age is beginning to show. He likes spending most of his time on his bed and in the morning, he has a harder time getting up to start the day. I’m like that too. Some days, the bed just feels better than the cold floor. When Marshall finally completes all his yawns and stretches and decides to move off his bed, it is apparent that he has stiff joints. He moves gingerly at first, one step at a time, and then slowly gets his motor going to full speed which is only slightly above idle.
After Marshall finally gets going, I take him for a morning walk to the neighbor’s house where I drink coffee with other old dudes. Marshall is welcome at the coffee-drinking club and my buddies all take turns in handing out pieces of crumbled dog cookies to the little beggar. He had a high time begging cookies for several months until the vet noticed he had put on several pounds. “No more cookies,” the vet demanded. I tried explaining about the cookies to Marshall but he wouldn’t have any of it.
The vet suggested replacing cookies with carrots. It sounded like me trying to enjoy broccoli instead of a hamburger but I decided to try it anyway. And, just as wonders never cease, Marshall liked the carrots. He would gobble them down like hungry relatives at a wedding feast. I got in the habit of carrying a pocket full of carrots every day on our morning visit to the coffee klatch. The carrot ruse worked for several days until I learned that old dogs don’t seem to digest carrots so well when I found a generous pool of them along with green bile and other nasty -looking substances that Marshall had thrown up on his bed. After that, I put Marshall on a strict carrot rationing system.
One of the most telling symptoms of Marshall’s aging is his gradual loss of decorum in the matter of eliminating body waste. His ‘bathroom habits,’ as we would call them, have definitely changed. Marshall always used to have a delicate nature and he showed as much by being discrete in his manner of heeding the call of nature. Almost never did I have the distasteful job of cleaning up his poo as Marshall generally went to the woods at the edge of our lawn to do his business. Day after day he would find a different, but secluded spot to make his deposit. If nature called while we were on our morning walk and he was on the leash, he would walk to the edge of the road as the signal for me to give him more lead. Thus warned, I would loosen the leash and he would wander to the woods to find a suitable place for a deposit. I always looked away discretely and Marshall returned the favor by attempting to cover his deposit by kicking dirt over the soft brown mound before walking away.
As Marshall got older he spent less time in searching for the perfect place in the woods or alongside the road to make a deposit. Instead, he would head for the nearest patch of weeds, squat, make a few perfunctory kicks and walk away. Sometimes, he would even look me in the eye as he performed his routine, apparently unembarrassed by his performance in full view of onlookers.
This winter, Marshall’s age seems to have provoked him into to moving one notch lower in doggy world of ‘I don’t care who sees me poop.’ On many mornings during our walk, he stops me abruptly with a pull on the leash to squat. And then he poops. In the middle of the road. Fortunately, his lack of decorum matches my devil-may-care attitude and we both continue on our morning walk after he relieves himself, neither of us with a care in the world. Fortunately, it snows most days so that we don’t have to look at the prior day’s deposits.
Despite the title of this piece, I don’t have a direct parallel with Marshall’s poop habits although the wife would argue that my habits in choosing clothes to wear each day would qualify for an award in “least amount of care” category. She thinks my purple gloves are unseemly for a gentleman and my habit of wearing a baseball cap on most occasions is oftentimes a foul. I tell her that I am not playing that game any longer and I like my gloves and my priceless collection of baseball hats.
Marshall’s age and lower energy has made caring for him easier. His main focus is eating and sleeping and he excels at each. This focus is most noticeable in the evening during our television time. He lays on his bed in deep sleep until I get off my easy chair for a snack. My quiet movements seem to interrupt some sort of energy field he maintains; by the time I open the refrigerator door he is standing beside me. I don’t know how he manages to awaken from a deep sleep and move his aching bones so quickly, but he does. I generally stand looking at the open refrigerator and he stands looking at me. I always break and Marshall gets a snack along with me. He isn’t losing a lot of weight.
So the dog is changing as he gets older. Like me, he is not old, just older. Although he can’t run as fast nor jump as high as he once did and he is sort of prickly when things don’t go his way, he is still a loyal dog and I’ll miss him when he is gone. Just don’t make either him or me angry. We don't like being older in the first place, so it doesn't take much to make us angry.
Grandpa Bill
