LET LEAPING DOGS FLY
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
Before, my daughter was the one begging. "Please, please, can I get a dog?"
I was the one saying: "A dog is a big responsibility. You have to walk him and train him and be around every day to let him in and out. And dogs shed and get ticks and dig holes in the backyard, and when it rains they smell. You really don't want a dog."
But she said: "Yes, I do, Mom. I need a dog. Please, please, talk Dad into it."
And so I did.
And my daughter got her dog.
Molly was a war dog. She arrived in January 1991, when the first Gulf War was raging and the pictures on TV were grim. My daughter had transferred from UMass-Amherst to Stonehill that semester and was living at home.
Molly was just six weeks old when we found her, and the cutest puppy ever. She was good, too. She didn't chew furniture. She didn't cry at night. She didn't nip at fingers or hurl herself at doors or bark incessantly. Plus she knew right from the start that the great outdoors and not the family room rug was where she should do her business.
We were on easy street - Who says a dog is hard work? Who says puppies aren't smart? - until one spring day when the wind blew over a piece of fence in the backyard and Molly ran into the street and got hit by a car. And, presto, the perfect dog that didn't eat furniture or hurl herself at doors became a connoisseur of anything she could squeeze into her mouth and a smasher of doors supreme. For the rest of her life, as long as her legs would allow, Molly jumped on people, jumped out of cars, jumped from the front seat to the back, propelled herself against doors and windows and fences and all movable and immovable objects.
Plus she ate everything that wasn't nailed down.
Somehow in the middle of this transition from perfect dog to a dog with a few challenges, Molly became mine. The daughter who had promised to feed and walk and take care of her had guess what returned to dorm life.
But I didn't mind. By then, I loved Molly, my big, fat, bargain-priced, not-quite-all-black Lab, warts and all. A trainer got her to walk and heel. I have a mental picture of this, of Molly on a leash and on her best behavior, looking almost like a show dog. But for the rest of her life, away from the trainer, she pulled me wherever she wanted to go. PBS came looking for bad dogs one summer and found mine. She didn't disappoint. They put her in a documentary. In reruns, I watch her leaping like a kangaroo trying to jump over a fence to get to me.
She would leap over anything to get to me. I loved that about her.
She could have gone to law school for what we spent at the vet. She ate a tube sock and had surgery. She ate panty hose and had another surgery. She ate a terry-cloth dish towel with apple appliques and had more surgery. And after her final surgery, she ate the plastic intravenous tube that was pumping her full of pain medication.
Years of pleading with her to behave never worked. Nor did the Prozac the vet prescribed. Only old age slowed her down. And only death stopped her.
"Why do you want another dog?" my grown-up daughter asks now. "A dog is a big responsibility. You have to walk him and train him and be around every day to let him in and out. And dogs shed and get ticks and dig holes in the backyard, and when it rains, they smell."
My memory of Molly is different. When she wasn't sneaking up the stairs in search of some garment to eat; when she wasn't nosing through the trash; when she wasn't climbing up on the couch so she could reach the counter where the chocolate chip cookies were cooling; when she wasn't storming a door or bolting down the path or running away; when she wasn't being bad, Molly was a very, very good dog.
I never wanted to love her. But I did. And I never wanted to miss her. But I do.
I've had two years now of clean floors and no hair on my coat. And way too many years since a lovable, crazy, OK, dysfunctional dog tried to leap a fence just for a glimpse of me.
