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Bonnie
spends two or three hours everyday walking into walls, one after another after
another. Bump, bump, crash. Bump, bump, crash. When she dies, the first thing I’m
going to do is to wash smudges off walls. Until then, why bother? It
would be like raking leaves if leaves never stopped falling. I’ve heard people
talk about how well dogs adjust to being blind. Bonnie became blind at 13, turned
15 today, and the adjustment has all been downhill. I doubt that this dog (who
once figured out for herself that could carry a ball and Frisbee at once by
putting the ball in the bottom of the Frisbee) has the mental capacity to adjust, although
it’s hard to tell given that she’s not only totally blind, she’s 90% deaf.
There isn’t a day goes by but what Peggy and I don’t wish that she would
die already.
Nothing
ever brought us more joy or more sorrow than Bonnie. I blame throwing tennis
balls to her with a throwing stick, hard, hundreds of times a
week for more than a decade for ruining my shoulders. I threw those balls
because she needed the exercise. Now, I’m mad at the universe for making me
suffer for the rest of my life because I tried to do right by my dog. Yet, I must admit
that I mostly enjoyed our ballgames—as well as hiking together and her running
alongside my bike and, oh yeah, camping (except for when she rolled in
something).
People were forever stopping to visit as I threw her ball across a
drainage canal and she ran to a pedestrian bridge to cross the canal for it. They would say something about how fast she was, and then she would shift into yet
another gear and go even faster. Sometimes, ten or fifteen dogs would gather in
this same field, and every last one of them would be trying to catch Bonnie,
and she would be running in and out among them like a fighter plane among
bombers.
In her second year, she turned into a hellion and started attacking other dogs, including her lifelong friends, so that was the end of doggie friendships. After that, the only dog she
ever played with was this great big old part husky named Freeman. Freeman liked
to kill things, and he would have killed Bonnie if he could have caught her,
but she was so fast that she could run in, nip his hindquarters, and make her
getaway before he could get turned around. Freeman’s person and I used to have
a lot of fun watching our dogs’ little game, but we were also glad that Freeman
stayed pretty close to us because we never knew but what we might have to make
him cough up Bonnie (I know, you’re not supposed to break up a dog fight;
you’re supposed to stand there and watch your dog gurgle through a crushed
trachea after you let her do something
dangerous).
Sure
enough, one day Bonnie was running backwards with the usual derision in her
eyes and a big smile on her face, no more than ten feet in front of Freeman’s gaping
jaws, when she tripped and landed on her back. At that
moment, Freeman became an optimist and doubled his speed. Bonnie didn’t just
get up, she exploded up, spun around in the air, and hit the ground running. In that moment, I was glad my
dog was okay, but in the next, I wondered if she would ever play with
Freeman again. As it turned out, she never stopped playing, neither did she
stop running in reverse right in front of him and occasionally tripping. I just
loved the spirit in her that said, “The world is my oyster, and I can do any
damn thing I please.” I spent half of my time trying to protect Bonnie from the
results or her own cockiness (the pink collar that Peggy bought for the little
puppy that she wanted to name Clair just never did seem right on the dog that became
Bonnie).
To see Bonnie as she is now, so beaten by life that she’s afraid of a cat
that doesn’t mean her any harm, is very hard. I’m tempted to say that it’s
harder than the death of my mother, but I guess it’s just hard in a different
way. So, why don’t we put her down? I could even do it myself as far as that
goes (I really have it in me), but she still enjoys her 45-minute walk each
day, and she still wags her tail when I roll her tennis ball to her. When the
tail stops wagging, it will be time.
