He had been dropped off at the pound a week earlier by a family who claimed to have found him on the side of the road and kept him for a few months before bringing him in. When they brought him in he weighed less than 55 pounds. He had gained over 5 pounds in a week, and another 5 pounds the next week. He didn't have a name, so the kind folks at the pound named him "Doc", which seemed like a good fit. He didn't have a birthday, but they estimated his age at "between 1 and 2", so I celebrated his half-birthday on Labor Day every year. And he didn't have any bark, since he had clearly not been well treated. I'll never know exactly where he was from or how he got to the pound.
The one thing he did still have was testicles. And they don't let you take an un-neutered dog home from the pound. And it wasn't until Tuesday that the vet was coming to snip him! So I had to put Doc back in the cage at the end of the day. I'll never forget the look in his eyes: "I did everything right! I thought things were great! Why are you leaving?" But then he was that much happier to see me when I picked him up.
The first night was rough. I had to sleep with my hand off the side of the bed laying on him to keep him from shaking. But when Auntie Amanda first came to visit we bought him a proper dog bed. When my parents first came to visit he ran outside and hid behind their car. But soon my dad came to occupy the coveted "favorite person besides Eli" spot ... a spot that Becky was never able to overtake.
He still had a lot of puppy in him. He ate my sunglasses. He ate my astronomy textbook. He ate several shoes. He would get trapped in the closet when he tried to hide from thunderstorms.
My first summer with him we went to Los Alamos for two months. We went for hikes almost every day. He swam in the Rio Grande. He scratched his face barreling through some barbed wire in the forest. And he most assuredly had found his bark.
Back in Ann Arbor we went fetching in the park every day. I bought a chuck-it so I could throw the ball farther. I bought a light-up ball and a light-up collar so we could continue fetching at night. He ran circles around the other dogs -- literally. He ripped his ear on a branch and needed a triple dose of sedatives to get him to sleep while they stitched it up. And he woke up full of energy 15 minutes later. They thought he was going to be out all night.
He was a great car passenger. He drove with me to Colorado every winter to bound in the snow with his Uncle Buddy. He would eat the snow to keep cool, and then come inside and shiver uncontrollably as it melted in his stomach. He hiked around McDonald Observatory in west Texas. (But he never did like the thorns and burrs around there.)
He came with Becky and me when we moved from Ann Arbor to Santa Barbara. He loved the drive, and the smells along the way. He loved hiking the trails in the mountains.
But it was when we got to Santa Barbara that he really found his true love: the ocean. He would crash through the waves to fetch his orange bumper toy. Again. And again. And again. And then I would throw the tennis ball down the beach with the chuck-it. Again. And again. And again. And he maybe would be tired at that point. I know I was.
But he was getting on in years. He survived a snail-bait poisoning, thanks to Becky's quick reaction and his strong constitution. He started to miss a few steps. He couldn't go in the waves as well as he used to, but he could still fetch the ball. He had new challenges to contend with. Ones that cry and crawl and occasionally tug at fur. Doc had infinite patience and is super sweet with kids, but you could tell he sometimes resented the other attention-grabbing kid in the house.
Doc carried on. Made the move up from Santa Barbara to Oakland, but at that point he couldn't handle the waves any more. He survived the attack from the pit-bull. He survived the endless fireworks in the neighborhood for Chinese New Year and the 4th of July. But he was getting slower. His walks were getting shorter. His fetches less and less often.
His last night at home he was having a dream. With adorable twitches and, sadly, no more little barks. And I like to think he was dreaming of chasing a ball into the ocean.
