Jack

We tend to make the dead into heroes they never were.  And, largely, our dog Jack was a pain in the ass.  He was constantly barking for us to feed him: we joked that he had Prader-willi syndrome: a bizarre human illness that manifests itself in never feeling full.  It must be a horrible disease to truly have: parents end up padlocking cabinets and refrigerators from children who suffer from this.  If Jack had paws that gripped, we’d have had to do the same thing.

Allegedly, I enabled Jack.  Whenever he barked, as the story goes, I fed him.  This is a bit of an exaggeration, though not much of one.  When he was small, I would get up twice in the middle of the night (yes twice) to feed him because I’d convinced myself that he had “low blood sugar.”  I concluded this based on nothing.  I felt he told me this with his expressive eyes.  One day Diane turned to me and said, “He has you so fooled.”  From then on, I only woke ONCE in the middle of the night, probably something I didn’t need to do either.  I guess I remained a fool/ enabler.

Part of this was because he was hard to resist.  We forced his cuteness on people, making them admit things like he was “the cutest dog [they’d] ever seen.”  He was always so happy that he made other people happy.  His tail would wag so fast that I would wonder: 1) how it was that anything could be so happy, and 2) what was there to be so happy about?  I remember being sent home early from work on 9/11.  Who was the only thing smiling that day?  Jack.  I guess he was just glad to see me.

He wasn’t just cute, he was a true hero.  And we knew this during his life, not after his death.  This is because on an average morning in 2008, with two leashless and hungry pitbulls facing Diane, Jack leapt in front of her to sacrifice himself and protect his pack, in this case a pack of one: Diane.

I can still hear Diane’s scream as I reached for my other shoe in the closet on that morning.  Without successfully grabbing it, I ran outside and instinctively scooped Jack up in my hands.  Because of the one shoe, I awkwardly ran to my neighbor’s house who rushed us to the emergency animal hospital.

In sacrificing himself, the pitbulls had peeled Jack’s skin like the outside of an orange.  His condition was touch-and-go, but one month and thousands of dollars later, Jack was back home and, almost, as good as new.

But Jack wasn’t as good as new even before the attack: he was a medical lemon. His file at the Marina Del Rey vet’s office was—quite literally—the thickest one they had.  (The vet said it wasn’t right when the file weighs more than the patient).

Always smiling (truly) and hungry, Jack developed every affliction that yorkies are known to get, and then some.  As a baby, he had major surgery on his liver because of his liver shunt.  He was on special food for his entire life.  He developed an enlarged heart, joint problems, cataracts, skin allergies, various benign tumors, and had to have his system flushed from having eaten grapes (our fault: not inherited).  Oh, he was also born with double teeth.  While under sedation for the liver, the doctor plucked out a row at no cost to us.  In the end, what made his life unbearable was a collapsed trachea.  The specialist said it was the worst she’d ever seen.   By the end of his life, we were spending at least $100 a month on his nine different medications and he had to get a semi-annual echocardiogram which was no fun to pay for either.   In tallying up his bill, it seems he owes us just over $34,000.  (Yes, this is a guess).

Here’s a little bit about our guy that almost made him worth the money: Jack loved to lick, especially our feet.  He loved to protect his family.  As noted before, he loved to eat.  I envied his (and most dogs’) easy happiness.  He added fun and love to our family.

Just a few highlights we’ll always remember…

• The day we got him I lay the floor and he jumped all over me.  He was like a black cotton ball.  
• Taking him to a 5-star hotel in San Diego and seeing him prance around like he owned the place
• The day Jack found (and luxuriated in) our neighbor’s 10-pound bag of dogfood (jack crapped and vomited for days thereafter).
• Seeing him fall asleep with a stuffed animal lodged in his mouth.
• Taking him to work with me at a Santa Monica office and having Kevin Nealon pet him.  
• Joking that Jack was in love with his female vet only to have her literally comment, “I think he’s flirting with me!” to which Diane and I cracked up.  
• Coming up with millions of nicknames for him.  We used to keep a list and there are too many to remember: Bob Crane the fat hen & Crazy licker pup are two that pop in my mind.  His lifelong nickname, though, was simply “Pie.”  We called him Pie just as much as we called him Jack.  
• Having him escape a closed-in area while Diane was working with a client.  The client didn’t just get to see Jack run through the house, the client got to see Jack run through the house with a pair of my underpants in his mouth…
• Jack’s instinctual love and protection of Bryan.

The day we got Jack from the horrible lemon breeder, he was six-weeks old.  The lady with large glasses had bathed him before we came, so she handed him to me wrapped in a towel.  “We’ll take good care of him,” I promised, presuming that she’d care.

Instead, I should have directed my comment to him.   “We’ll take good care of you, Jack,” I should have told him.  And, if he could speak he’d have promised the same thing to us.

Despite not having this exchange, this is exactly what happened: we took care of Jack just as much as he took care of us.  What a dog.    

Look back at those pics... he really was the cutest dog ever.  Am I right or am I right?...