Beauty and Grace

GRACE: March 1, 2009 - January 28, 2024

LONDON, ONTARIO – I regret to announce that thirty-one days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Grace (March 1, 2009 – January 28, 2024) has taken leave of this world.

Precisely one month before the end, on what happened to be our forty-sixth wedding anniversary - talk about a ceremonial buzzkill - Grace suffered a spectacularly upsetting ‘vestibular event’ (basically a stroke) that looked like it might carry her off right then and there. But, much to our delight, Grace managed to pretty well build herself back up from that calamity over the course of the next week. Yes, there was a new weakness, an unsteadiness, in her back legs which tended to splay if she was standing on a slick surface. She couldn’t back up so easily and had to think about how to navigate stairs; particularly when going down. And although it had nothing to do with perplexity, per se – unless she was holding some great inner dialogue about ‘What on earth is happening to my body?’ - she frequently tilted her head which made her look like a distaff version of the RCA dog cocking his ear at the bewildering sound of ‘His Master’s Voice’ emanating from that phonograph horn.

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So she regained about two weeks of reasonably comfortable life in mid-January. Though she was spending a lot more time snoozing, she kept on top of her herding duties; monitoring the coming and going of people in the house. She was still able to get in two walks and two meals each day and found ways to hoist herself up onto the couch or the bed, though she was no longer able to settle into narrower spaces like the chair in my study where she ordinarily sat sentinel through a good portion of the night. But clearly, her game was still worth the candle. If this was going to be the new doggie-normal, then fair enough. She was getting to be a pretty good age, after all, and we were all content, even grateful, to carry on within these more limited parameters.

Then in the last full week of January - all of Grace’s recent work of adaptation and rehabilitation seeming to count for naught - some pitiless, cosmic hand decided it was time to crank down the dimmer switch on our dog for good and she slipped into her final decline with one capacity after another fizzling and conking out. The only way to visit with her in those last few days was to get down on the floor beside her with a box of Kleenex close to hand, patting her and nuzzling your face in her fur and telling her what a good girl she was. She never complained vocally – unless you count the odd sigh - but minute by minute her breathing grew shorter, her eyes weren’t so responsive and her most dependable barometer of happiness had stopped wagging and thwacking altogether.

She leaves behind a piercing sense of absence which assails us every few minutes as we look down in the corner where her water bowl should be . . . hear a noise that sounds just like her stirring in her sleep . . . pull on a coat or a pair of shoes and miss the feel of her nose nudging a hand to see if a walk is in the offing. This is a hard patch every time; the very worst part of owning a dog. But we’ve been here three times before over the course of our married life – with Myrtle, Ben and Badger - and experience tells us that these ghostly cues and reflexes will not sabotage us so incessantly forever.

Gradually, eventually, such hauntings will diminish in their frequency and poignancy. Perhaps a few months down the line - having first circled round in obeisance to an instinct from the age of pre-domestication when dogs prepared their beds each night by tamping down the grass - Grace will settle into her place in the personal pantheon of great canine souls we have known. Looking forward to that day when her memory can be invoked without crying like a baby, I lay down here a few laurels of tribute to the glory that was Grace.

The first thing that needs to be said about this consistently surprising creature is she wasn’t the dog we thought we were getting. Alerted by a Kijiji notice about some mostly-Border Collie puppies being offered for free at a farm outside of Aylmer, our eldest daughter drove me out the first Saturday in May of 2009 to check out the newly-hatched litter. We were – unwisely, I’ve come to believe - seeking to replace the beloved Badger; a mostly-Border Collie mutt who’d gone to his reward four months before. But staring down into the fenced-off corner of a basement den where this tangle of black and white puppies vied for our attention, I was troubled by a childhood memory of the pure-bred Boston Terrier which my parents hastily picked up to assuage their children’s grief after our mostly-Boston Terrier mutt had been run over. The sad truth is that we never managed to bond with Nipper like we had with Boots. And that wasn’t just because our new pure-bred wasn’t as bright as the mutt we so ardently missed. Even if she’d been a more perfect copy of the dog we’d so lavishly loved, any dog who wasn’t Boots was going to fail at that unwinnable game. I don’t think Nipper ever had a chance to imprint herself on our consciousness as a worthwhile pooch in her own right.

It’s probably a fit topic for a different essay altogether but let me just plant a dark suspicion here: that a lot of second (and third and fourth and fifth) marriages are doomed by a similar drive to recapture some lost and irreplaceable magic through replication. Whether you’re talking spouses or dogs, if you really want to go another round when your first one’s played out . . . if you actually want a fighting chance at achieving happiness or success . . . then do everybody a favour by choosing your subsequent candidates from a completely different point along the intra-species spectrum.

That’s certainly how it worked out for us and Grace. By some wonderful stroke of fortune, it so happened that there was a second litter of puppies in another fenced-off section of that same farmhouse basement; these ones the mongrel products of a tryst between a German Shepherd and a Scottish Collie. And it occurred to me that adopting one of these divertingly attractive mutts instead of another almost-Border Collie, wouldn’t just be a whole new experience in dog husbandry. It also wouldn’t set me up for any divisive comparisons between the new dog and the old one. And if I got a girl this time, that would be mixing things up even further. All of our previous dogs had been predominantly black; making them challenging to photograph well. But the white, tan and brown patterning of this second litter’s fairer-furred coats, seemed to sharpen all their contours and features; emphasizing their elegantly slender snouts, adorably floppy ears (these would eventually perk up) and big dark eyes with exquisitely delineated lashes.

Every other time I’ve acquired a new dog, there were at least two preliminary visits to their home of origin. But Gracie was an impulsive, one-stop deal. Not even one hour after first setting eyes on her, I paid about a hundred bucks to cover the cost of various inoculations (and received papers attesting to the same), tucked her inside the front of my coat and we were on our way back to London. She squirmed a bit, looking around with some concern as we first pulled away. But within a couple minutes – lulled perhaps by the hum of those rolling wheels – she seemed cool with the idea that everything she’d learned about the world in her first eight weeks was now about to change.

As we pulled into our laneway, Kirtley came out to greet our brand new almost-Border Collie, and I reminded her of the time she went out to buy a green rug for our backroom and came back with a roll of maroon broadloom. “This is kind of like that,” I said. “And she’s a girl. And I think I’ve already named her. You’ll love it. It’s got heavy-handed theological overtones.”

As she grew into an adult over the succeeding months, I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t getting a little carried away by my absorption with our new dog’s remarkable beauty. In January of 2010, we were four or five episodes into The Pallisers series (based on Anthony Trollope’s six linked novels of English parliamentary life) when it suddenly came to me why I found the actress playing Lady Glencora so attractive. “Don’t you think Susan Hampshire kind of looks like Grace?” I asked my wife. “It’s the eyes that are really doing it for me.”

But it wasn’t just me. We’ve never had a dog that collected compliments from random strangers like Grace. I did most of my dog walking late at night which meant that such encounters were fewer in number but – with the pubs emptying out and all that – considerably more loquacious. The stupidest comment I commonly received was, “Oh, your dog looks just like a wolf.” “No, she doesn’t,” I’d correct them. “You could maybe make out a case for a fox or a dingo.” Kirtley usually took Grace out in the afternoon and was routinely bombarded by tributes from fellow pedestrians. On at least two occasions, she had drivers pull over and get out of their cars to walk over, crouch down and pay their homage face to face.

With some German Shepherd parentage, I was initially concerned that Grace might develop the hip problems which that breed is prone to. But as she grew it became apparent that she’d been blessed with long and sturdy Collie legs of exceptional dexterity and strength. If the right person happened to be visiting in our back room (Kirtley’s mom and our youngest daughter were particular favourites) Grace would execute an Evel Knievel leap across the coffee table to join them on the couch; the breathtaking spectacle of her flight contrasting with a controlled landing of such poise that it almost seemed prim.

Living near the river with lots of open areas and flats, we rarely took her out to dog parks but when we did, she exulted in her capacity to outrun every other pooch on site. She kept a file on all those parks’ locations and if we happened to be driving past one, she’d let us know that a return visit would not go amiss. And, incredibly enough, it was the same deal when driving past the veterinary clinic. Unlike every other dog in the world, Grace solely associated visits to the vet with dog treats – and who cares about the needles? - and was ever eager to drop in, with or without an appointment, to see if they had any more of those liver-flavoured tidbits that needed to be hoovered up.

Part of what contributed to the beauty of Grace’s coat was its constant replenishment. Hence, she was a formidable shedder. The worst I’ve ever seen. With a lot of dogs you can expect a couple weeks of follicular fallout per year. With Grace this happened seasonally and the volume was unreal. We replaced three dark carpets in the house with lighter-toned mats to conceal the extent of our problem and held her personally responsible for the second-degree murder of at least one vacuum cleaner. That picture at the head of this page was taken one breezy afternoon in the parking lot behind the old Mennonite Relief Store in Aylmer (where I once bought all eleven volumes of Will & Ariel Durant’s History of Civilization for $5.50). Waiting for Kirtley to get back from some errand - which probably involved Spicer’s Bakery - our daughter combed out Gracie’s coat for half an hour; producing a dozen puffy orbs of blonde fur that rolled across the landscape like tumbleweeds and caused one woman walking past to scowl at us like we were industrial-scale polluters. “Yeh, bite me,” I muttered at her, under my breath.

The only bone of contention that ever developed between me and Grace had to do with her bizarre attitude towards certain paper products. Whether it was just a neurotic quirk or she was compensating for some dietary deficiency never became clear. It started in my study where she’d raid used Kleenexes out of the garbage can. When I stopped pitching tissues in there, she went after boxes of fresh ones on my desk so I moved those to a higher shelf. Then she developed an appetite for pieces of paper on which I’d written in pen. I think it was 2020 when she devoured two cheap desk calendars in quick succession and then really ticked me off by eating five pages of detailed notes I’d compiled about a friend’s novella. I smacked her for that and she retaliated by peeing on my chair; which constituted, I guess, an impasse or a truce. And then I broke out laughing at the realization that there might have been some truth to what always struck me as the most preposterous of schoolboy excuses for slacking off: “The dog ate my homework.”

I eventually brought the war in my study to a close by setting my chair at an angle that barred canine access to the top of my desk. So she moved her campaign to other rooms, seeking papery products to mangle when we left her alone for a few hours. We’d try to remember to move stuff out of her range before leaving the house but sometimes slipped up and would return to find she’d done a number on a box of Kleenex here, a notebook there, even once a papier mache bowl in which we kept our keys. Then last fall, for the first time ever, she went after an actual book that had been left out on the dining room table; Barbara Amiel’s memoirs, Friends and Enemies. That’s a serious doorstop of a book which she couldn’t devour in one go, so we took to leaving out its tattered remains as a placebo or a decoy and would cheerily ask her when we got home, “So how’d our voracious little reader get along with Babs tonight?”

But all such squabbles were forgiven and forgotten by the end. And I don’t think there’s a single book in the house that I wouldn’t happily feed her one page at a time if it meant that I could be with her again in some of the easiest companionship I’ve ever known. For the last third of her life, barring illness or cataclysmic rain or blizzards, we’d wrap up each day – usually between four and six a.m. – with our Rosary walk. We had several different routes we could go, most of them traversing river walkways and lasting thirty to forty minutes.

We learned this rather elaborate form of prayer together, taking a little booklet along with us for the first couple months until we committed the cycle of four different sets of five mysteries to memory; each one of those mysteries being meditated upon each night by the recitation of ten Hail Marys. Some will accuse me of anthropomorphism in my suggestion that Grace took any actual interest in this elaborate religious exercise. And while I would allow that she might not have been primarily focused on prayer as we moved along our starlit path in such a great smelling world, I would point out that the most deeply entrenched word in any dog’s limited vocabulary – the one that is guaranteed to make her ears twitch - is her name. And I was dropping hers fifty times a night.

Photos: Bonnie Goodden