REMEMBERING PIRATE

A dog named Pirate died in Calgary on April 20 2018. He died a peaceful death with medical assistance. You may have known him by another name and longed for his return. If so, we want you to know that he lived a good life, all things considered. His death will be mourned by many people who encountered him in the course of his life’s journey. One of them is me. Pirate was a lucky dog, lucky in a context of hope, which is to say that a considerable number of bad things happened around him and somehow he managed to move forward with his own special blend of forbearance and enthusiasm. If he had a motto, a code to live by, I believe it would have been: “Seize the day and love the one you’re with.” Pirate was a white dog, a white dog with some brown. According to veterinary estimation, he was born some time in 2003, Part Shih Tzu, part terrier. He was a small, one-eyed curly-tailed creature whose complete life history has thus far been shrouded in mystery. We can trace it with certainty back to an August day in 2005 when Maxine Thompson of Lougheed Alberta noticed him wandering around Main Street, searching for a lover, or a friendly human. We’ll never know which it was, possibly both. He wore a tattered leather collar that bore no identification. His mud-caked hair hung low off his belly and drooped over his face. Maxine, recognizing a probable resemblance to a well-groomed Shih Tzu belonging to my father, asked Dad to take charge of his care. She promised she would find him a home if his owner had not been identified by the time she returned from an impending vacation. Thus my father began a process of bathing and trimming and ratty old collar disposal that eventually revealed a dog much life his own, except for the missing eye and the fully functioning proof of manhood. It also became obvious that, at some previous point, this dog had both learned to love humans and to build good relationships with them. Two weeks passed with no person stepping forward to make a claim. My father’s dog and his new playmate became fast friends. Maxine was still enjoying her vacation. Dad was rapidly taking on the mantle of a two-dog man, a man in serious danger of keeping two dogs when he needed only one. So he decided to give the dog to David and me “You need a dog,” he said. “Here is a free dog. He’s even house-trained.” Dad was right about one thing. He was, in fact, house-trained. Together on separate journeys, we and Pirate were to learn that there is no such thing as a free dog. We welcomed the dog into our Edmonton home with a brief tour that included a visit to the food bowl. Almost immediately new responsibilities began to emerge. The first was to give him a name to which he could answer if he should somehow escape from our unfenced yard. The second job was to build a fence, seeing as how he escaped from our yard at the first opportunity, and every subsequent opportunity, claiming our entire neighbourhood and the adjoining river valley park as his own. The third job was to find a veterinarian who could reduce his sexual longings and possibly his need to wander, vaccinate him against all forms of pestilence and advise on what should be done with the empty eye socket. David suggested that we call him Pirate. It seemed a good fit for a one-eyed wanderer who’d been living rough. Pirate thought so too. It only took him a day to get used to coming when we called him for a treat or a walk. Building a fence took a little longer. With considerable assistance from two sons and a neighbour, David fashioned a smart white picket fence enhancing the front exposure of our colonial-style home. A Caragana hedge provided protection at the side. The vet vaccinated Pirate against multiple threats, then performed four surgeries for which Pirate was not entirely grateful, one to eliminate the lust for fatherhood, one to clear the eye-socket of debris, and two more eye surgeries to clear debris that stubbornly remained. By the time he’d been with us for a month, we estimated the cost of our “free dog” at approximately $3,000, not including food. Nevertheless, Pirate continued to pursue the idea of being a free dog. From the very start, he consistently showed us two things. The first was that he loved us. The second was that he was committed to living a life befitting his new name. He showed his love by welcoming us home joyously whenever we returned from work, allowing us to pet him when he wasn’t busy, promoting our physical and mental health by insisting on daily walks regardless of the weather, and encouraging us to experience generosity by giving him unlimited treats. He established his reputation for piracy by claiming his right to free himself from bondage by any available means. There seemed no end to the methods he used to assert his freedom. In the days before the fence, he simply declined to observe the yard boundary. When we attached him to a chain, he paced up and down the veranda steps until the chain lodged in the cracks between the boards, then insisted that we free him immediately. When we replaced the chain with a rope, he spent ninety peaceful minutes chewing the rope into six-inch lengths, thereby rendering that rope ineligible for further employment. And when the fence was at last established, he dug a hole between the stocks of the tcaragana hedge and had already found some stinking dead thing to role in by the time his skulduggery was discovered. Yet it seemed that Pirate did not want to be free so much as he wanted to believe that he could be free if he chose to be. One night I heard him barking, so I went to the door to call him in. The louder I called, the louder he barked. At last, rushing barefoot into the yard to retrieve him, I found him on the outside of the front gate, demanding to know why it had taken me so long to open the gate so that he could come in for a treat to reward him for coming back instead of making us search for him. “Why didn’t you come back via the route through which you escaped?” I asked, while opening the treat bag. “The escape route only goes one way,” he replied. “Don’t you worry that you’ll be lost and uncared-for like you were when Maxine found you?” I asked. “Don’t you worry that you’ll be hit by a car when you’re wandering the streets?” “No,” he replied. “Why would I worry? I do okay, don’t I?” “You’re counting on luck,” I retorted. Indeed, he was a lucky dog. When we lost him in the park, a neighbour recognized him and brought him back to us. When a cat threatened to scratch out his other eye, he managed to negotiate a peaceful settlement. When I was hit by a car while holding his leash, he avoided being run over. Pirate was a digger. On the days when he wasn’t trying to escape, he dug holes for reasons we could not always understand. The second time he dug a hole in the middle of the lawn, we informed him that he simply had to change—or else. Or else what, we wondered when we saw evidence of the third lawn digging. Faced with Pirate’s reluctance to change his behavior, I e-mailed a letter of inquiry to an expert. “How can we convince our dog to stop digging holes?” The response was prompt and matter-of fact. “Terriers dig,” said the expert. “Get over it. Give him toys to play with, establish places where he is allowed to dig, and treat him so well that he won’t want to escape.” We bought more toys and considered ways to treat him better. “You can dig behind the pink peony,” I told Pirate, while dusting myself off after the first time I fell into the hole he had secretly dug behind the pink peony. “Thank you,” he said, failing to mention the new hole he had already dug behind the white peony. He’d buried a toy back there and apparently needed to dig it up. “You might as well dig behind the red peony too,” I said a few days later. So he did. Then he went back to digging under the hedge. The sons who had built the white picket fence unfurled a role of chicken wire which they installed amongst the stocks of the hedge. Digging under the chicken wire took longer than digging through the hedge alone. We considered this to be a victory. As the expert had told us, terriers dig. He was a dog who never failed to answer when opportunity barked. When a big scary canine would pass by the front gate he would tear across the yard at top speed, furious and threatening things he would do if only that gate weren’t there to protect the interloper. We never had to go home early to let him out because he could control his bodily functions for 12 or 14 hours. But if we returned home after a fifteen minute outing, it would be absolutely necessary that he should go out. He could manage fine in a daytime thunderstorm, but thunder in the night would catapult him trembling into the space between us in our bed, issuing a challenge. “are you the kind of unfeeling people who would force a frightened dog to sleep alone in the rockingchair?” If our mother had died, or our father, or our sister, if we were recovering after cancer surgery, or nursing a broken foot or a broken arm, he would nuzzle us sympatheticly for a few minutes, then invite us to move past the pain by taking him for a walk. Though his digging made us think of him as a terrier, he was only part terrier. Another part of him was Shih Tzu. Shih Tzus are known to be serially loyal, meaning that they attach easily to humans, then reattach to new humans just as easily. Knowing this, and knowing that he had once been known by some other name, I guess there was always some part of me fearing that a previous owner would come forward and claim him. After all, someone had taught him to love humans and to empty his bowels and bladder in appropriate places. This fear was repeatedly tested during more than 3000 walks in the 10 years we spent together. We walked in an off-leash dog park where people were constantly calling their dogs by name. I couldn’t help but wonder what Pirate was called before we named him Pirate. It seemed inevitable that one day, someone would shout; “Here Herbert!” or “Here Rover!” Then Pirate, recalling his past, would run to this person, tail wagging. So it didn’t seem all that surprising when, in the eighth year, a stranger walking toward us in the park said, “Is that Gracey?” I was speechless. “Pardon me?” said David. “Is that gracey?” “No,” said David. “It’s Pirate.” “It looks like Gracey,” said the man. “But maybe it isn’t.” Then he continued on his walk. I wondered if he was on his way to the police station to report a dog theft. “Are you Gracie?” I whispered fearfully to Pirate when we got home. “Please don’t be Gracey.” Pirate didn’t answer. If he was Gracey, he wasn’t letting on. That night I went to bed wondering what would happen if Pirate turned out to be Gracey. I needn’t have worried. He wasn’t Gracey. We were assured of this a few days later when, on another walk in the park, we came face to face with the real Gracey. There she was, a little white dog with brown markings, curly tailed, one-eyed, a mirror image of Pirate. Facing each other their good eyes met and so did their missing eyes. Apparently it’s not all that uncommon for Shih Tzus to be missing an eye. It has to do with the structure of their faces. Pirate may not have lost his eye in a fight as we had originally suspected. It might simply have fallen out. Serially loyal dogs like you better than other people during the time when they live with you. Pirate liked most people well enough, and some especially well. One of his favourites was Wayne, who lived in Calgary and was married to David’s sister Lorna. Wayne liked to take Pirate for walks when he was visiting us. Perhaps every stage of life is a stage of transition. Pirate was around during times of letting go, of giving up beloved patterns and future plans we didn’t even know we had until suddenly they were derailed. But while we agonized over the changes, he went forward, seemingly unflappable. Pirate’s ability to transfer loyalty served him well. His attraction to Wayne proved to be a lucky attachment. David developed disabilities that forced us to move from the colonial home with the smart white picket fence and the reinforced Caragana hedge. What were we to do with Pirate? “Wayne needs a dog to walk with,” said Lorna. “We’ll take Pirate.” Grateful as we were that he had a new home to go to, we couldn’t hide our tears when Wayne and Lorna loaded their van with Pirates toys and moved him to Calgary. I last saw Pirate a couple of years ago, on a brief visit with Lorna and Wayne in Calgary. He greeted me with pleasure, jumped into my lap for a five-minute pet, then ran upstairs to crawl into bed with Wayne. He and Wayne were still together there when I left the next morning. The switch of allegiance was complete. Given that I couldn’t keep him, I had to love him for that. Pirate was with Lorna when he died, having transferred his loyalty to her. He would have stuck with Wayne, but Wayne had become ill. He had moved to a care centre. In the process of dealing with Wayne’s illness, they’d exchanged their home for an unfenced retirement duplex. Unable to build a fence, Lorna developed the habit of walking Pirate several times a day. This is how they lived until a series of seizures rendered him unable to stand without falling. “I’m sorry you had to deal with Pirate during such a difficult time,’ I said to Lorna when she told us that he was gone. “Oh, don’t be sorry,” she replied. “I miss him. I get home from visiting wayne and he isn’t there to greet me.” David and I know how she feels. We miss him too, though in a different way. We miss the petting sessions and the snuggles and the endless toy tugging competitions that Pirate always won. But beyond that, we miss the life we had when Pirate first came to us, a life where the future promised an untapped reservoir of good things and we had the freedom to say: “Sure we’ll take that dog.” If he could give us advice at this point, I feel certain he would say: “Look around you, see what you have, make the most of it and move on when you need to.” This we have tried our best to do. Somewhere out there we suspect there is a person who once lost a friendly little white diggedy dog, a dog with brown patches who dreamed of being free. We don’t know what your life was like, or how you came to lose him. But if you are that person, or any other person who loved Pirate, we are truly sorry for your loss.