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Waldo, July 31, 2005

When I first  removed what was about a pounds-​​worth of black, brown and gray hair out of its gift-​​wrapped pet porter on my birth­day, Feb­ru­ary 14, 1994, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was. Though I was turn­ing just nine years old, I had a sting­ing sense of injus­tice about how long I had gone with­out a dog. The ani­mal I was look­ing out was very small — just a hand­ful really, dwarfed by the huge red and white bow around his neck — and his hair was long enough to obscure his species. I was imme­di­ately dis­ap­pointed, assum­ing this was to be the lat­est in the suc­ces­sion of rodents which had made due as house­hold pets thus far. I held the thing out in front of me with both my hands, its tiny hind legs dan­gling. It was shak­ing, not some­thing I’d ever seen a bunny or ham­ster do. And then came the most tell­tale sign of all: it let out a lit­tle whim­per. I looked up at my mother. I absolutely couldn’t believe it.

“A dog? You got me a dog?”

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s a dog.”

So, not exactly love at first sight, but pretty damn close. Waldo was my dog. From the morn­ing of that birth­day to the day I left for col­lege, we were pretty much always together. If I was in my room, he was in my room. If I went out to play with the kids on the block, so did he. If I was watch­ing, TV, he was right there on the couch with me, hang­ing out.

He was a Lhasa Apso, kind of an obscure breed, about 17 lbs. full grown. They’re long-​​haired show dogs and not the most obvi­ous choice for a lit­tle boy but Waldo held his own. He was an amaz­ing wrestler, he loved play­ing chase-​​oriented games, absolutely hated cats and squir­rels, though not as much as he hated being woken up and moved when he was some­how tak­ing up the whole entire bed in the mid­dle of the night. He loved to drink from a soil-​​filled flower pot.

He was not always the nicest dog to those out­side of the imme­di­ate fam­ily, and, if I may say, he was a bit of a racist. He thor­oughly bit my high school girl­friend in such a way that she could have had ani­mal con­trol put him down if she had been so inclined, but that was mainly my fault. I had left the door unlocked and told her to come straight into the house when got there. I neglected to inform Waldo and, so, he was just doing his job. It was always tough to get him to stop his bark­ing and freak­ing out any­time a stranger was in the house, par­tic­u­larly if that stranger hap­pened to be a per­son of color. We were never really able to get a han­dle on that, but this was Texas, after all, and as far as we were con­cerned, it made him a more richly-​​textured pres­ence in our lives. He was just as com­pli­cated at the rest of us.

Waldo lost the use of one of his hind legs in 2004.  A year later, he lost an eye to an infec­tion and his hear­ing went shortly after that. He devel­oped arthri­tis, and it was par­tic­u­larly acute in his bad leg. Last year he began los­ing weight and slept most of the time. On Mon­day, my mother took him to the vet because he was cry­ing. They started treat­ing him for an infec­tion, but when they bathed him he stopped breath­ing. They were able to resus­ci­tate him, but he didn’t sur­vive the night.

I’m going to be 25 in just a few weeks, and Waldo has been my dog for far more time than he hasn’t. He was a good boy, and I’m going to miss him.