Travels with Bentley

Bentley was special. I know that everyone believes their pet is unique and smart and irreplaceable. And so they are, but what is really unique and irreplaceable is the relationship we have with them.

On Sunday I took Bentley for his normal walk after lunch – his dinner. He was eager to go, always eager for the next activity and he rushed out the back door on his extended leash until it jerked back in my hand. I saw him snap his mighty jaw at one of the ferns overgrowing the path, part playfulness, part showing off who is bigger and faster and stronger than that dumb plant. As we turned right on the street, he was still a good six feet ahead of me and I was probably egging him on to let out his energy after being cooped up inside. Then his two hind legs buckled on the right, and he fell over onto his left side. By the time I got to him, his legs were stiff and shaking and I knew he was having some kind of seizure and was talking to him to get him to snap out of it. But the look in his eyes told me no.

Steve, one of the neighbors down the street saw us and came over. I told him to call Jason from inside our house. When he got no immediate response, I told him to get Petie and Rich from around the corner, our friends who have had their own Pitbull babies and would know what to do. We petted B and gently knocked him, then not so gently. Rich tried CPR and we all pleaded with B to come back, telling him how much we loved him, but it was not to be. Soon Rich carried him into our yard where we put a blanket over him and sat with him trying to take in the shock and deciding what to do next.

This being the 4^th of July and knowing that our local vets don’t do emergencies, ended up having to go to the nearest animal hospital, 26 miles away, in Middletown this time. Petie and her niece Kristin wrapped another blanket around him and carried him to the car. We stretched him out along the back seat where he always loved to sit and go anywhere with us. Always happy for a new adventure. Jason sat with him all the way in the back. Abby rode with us for a little bit as she stepped out of her house when we drove by.  Jason was upset at having to go so far but I was just proud to be driving in the car with my boys in the back for the last time, honoring Bentley for the last time with this ride.

Bentley never was like other dogs. Our late friend Peggy who we lost to Covid in May 2020 was not a dog person by her own admission, but B was her one exception, because she, a professional therapist, decided that he was a real person. He would be over the top enthusiastic when she came in, then leave her alone as we asked, but he would keep coming back and nudge his way into her presence, get physically close to her, all 70 pounds of him as much as he could, sliding his heavy body next to her on the couch or rest his head, which weighed as much as a brick on her leg.  He loved all the people we loved and many others beside that, especially all women.

In 2011 and 2012, we lost my brother and stepmother to cancer. Our dog Maddie died in May 2012 and then my father died in September. By the end of that year, we were so strung out by grief and the accumulation of having to cope, of moving on, of holding it down, that we were completely getting on each other’s very last nerve. Somehow, we started the conversation on getting a new dog and that started a huge discussion on who would be taking care of the dog and every other possible topic of disagreement or discord in our then 7-year-old relationship. B was, you could say, the universe sending us help with our seven-year itch.

Jason found an animal rescue group and went to see the dogs they had available for adoption at an industrial hangar in Little Falls NJ. He went by himself at first and pretty much fell for Bentley right away. We went back together, then another time with his mom and B was adorable on every occasion, he knew perfectly well even then how to pull at your heart strings. We took him for a walk around the block and he crouched down and refused to move as soon as we saw another dog, a habit that never really left him even as he got much better in his later years. He was not socialized, even if he was said to be fully grown at a year and three months old. His records said he was rescued from the kill shelter at around 6 months, in Manhattan, then adopted by the summer of 2012. We were told that upon inspection the animal rescue people took him back from the adopters because they did not treat him well. The shelter nursed him back to health, had him neutered because at this point, he was over a year old.

There was another brief adoption attempt just before we got him, some person who took him home but then returned him once she found out that her cleaning lady was afraid of him. He may not have been socialized to be with other dogs – to the point where even at the shelter the guy who ran it often kept him in his van away from the other dogs, even if they were all in crates. He would always make dogs with a nervous disposition even more nervous, then he would walk away happy with himself for showing up the weaklings. But he knew how to work with humans, how to get their attention and charm them into petting him, playing with him, but more importantly feed him and eventually adopt him.

More discussion followed until Jason’s mom told me to “get the damn dog already” and stop going after each other about all our petty grievances of the past seven years. The guy from the shelter delivered B in his van, some day between Christmas and New Year of 2012 and we never looked back. B made himself comfortable but kept his distance. At the beginning, he could only really relax if he was curled up against another warm body, a remnant maybe of being in the litter or being removed from it too early. He still did his puppy crouch with other dogs outside and playing could be hard, especially with larger dogs where he often went from being curious to being nervous, cranky and annoyed within a minute or so.

When we got him, he had very little hair and some pink patches on his saggy loose skin. After he spent the first couple of days in our apartment, I woke up one day and smelt him so strongly, a musty smell of yeast and the sour smell of skin sores, that I told Jason we need to take him to the vet right away. Stacey Joy Hershman, natural vet extraordinaire in Hastings on Hudson, declared him a walking emergency with her usual sense of drama. He was riddled with fungal infections, mange, and intestinal parasites. She prescribed a strict regimen of medication and raw food to nurse him back to health, but she wasn’t sure that he would make it. Just how the people of the shelter and B had fooled us into thinking he was healthy; I am still not sure. Part of it was that they did clean him up before having him neutered at the beginning of December, and that this deterioration in his health had started but only gotten unacceptable after we already had him. But part of it was his adorably determined look, not begging but demanding to be taken care of, to be adopted and taken home. We were successfully blindsided, but we never regretted it.

One of the conditions for adopting another dog was that I would personally be more involved in taking care and bonding with the dog, something I had never 100 % committed to I suppose with Maddie the dog that Jason had when we met and who indirectly brought us together. For B’s arrival, I took a week off right at the beginning of the year 2013 and took care of every meal and every walk, as we took care of his medical needs together. Some of the meds were heavy on his nervous system and his organs, but he was incredibly resilient and positive and determined to live. He could stare you in the eye without end, just until you embraced him.

By May 2013 he was healthy, had put on almost 15 pounds and had filled up all the pouch of skin that used to make us speculate that maybe he was part Shar-pei. Jason was working from home at that time already and so we were lucky, and B was lucky that we never had to leave him alone very much. It wasn’t that he displayed any bad behavior when he was alone, it just wasn’t necessary to leave him much and we all grew used to him always being with us, or one of us at least. If we went far away, he sometimes would stay with Jason’s mom, whose house was like a second home for all three of us, or we would get someone to stay with him, combine it with dogwalkers if the dog sitters had to work. We took him to stay with a boarder on the upper west side once, but she did not follow our instructions and left him in her apartment with other smaller dogs in the evening and left out a package of cookies. He ate them of course, then woke the dog sitter up very early because he had to go out urgently. As she ignored him he pooped on her rug. He was never one to be ignored, his messaging was always loud and clear.

He did better with the various women that stayed with him if we went on longer trips, but that was only once or twice a year, back when we used to travel. And then we did the Bentley trips where he could come with, to the Delaware a couple times, upstate to Milford where he looked like the star he was in the beautiful renovated barn we stayed at. He was a master of making himself at home wherever we were, our home, the house in Hastings, the house in Pine Grove that we bought in 2018. He loved going out in the yard, to play with Jonathan in Hastings, or in the garden in Pine Grove. He wasn’t good for dog runs or much other play with other dogs except the smaller ones. He would be all timid and almost afraid with bigger dogs at first but then he would assert himself and that never went well. And with him being a Pitbull it was always his fault.

He got into scrapes with bigger dogs but always ended up being the one getting hurt because he didn’t know how to really defend himself. I used to joke that he never had a childhood like MJ, because that is how it seemed. He never got over his puppy playfulness or his lack of confidence with the bigger dogs, but he tried. Recently, he got better and better at ignoring bigger dogs, but he still knew where all the other dogs of his generation lived and would bark at them when we passed their building, just once, then run on, after he set of a cascade of barking from his frenemies inside and a bunch of other dogs responded to the ruckus B had provoked. Then he would give you a sideways glance saying, “did you see what I just did?”

But he was essentially a home body, literally, like Jason and me, most happy being at home, ecstatic when we had guests like Peggy, when everyone was together, eating, chatting, playing. Whenever everything was as it was supposed to be he would get out one of his chew toys and sit beside us softly chewing away on a piece of rope or a toy animal, just as he did during lunch last Sunday. Recently he had developed a habit of getting up and leaving the room if Jason and I bickered and raised our voices, even if it was never addressed to him. It was always a sign for us to take it down a notch, that we were not kind to each other if B wouldn’t sit with us.

Life with a dog is all about structure and it is the structure that he gave to my life that I miss the most. He might stay in bed after I got up or come to the couch with me and curl up against the inside of my thighs, sometimes under the blanket, if it was cold. He liked to be warm and comfortable, one of his many cat-like qualities. By seven a.m. he would be ready on the dot to be fed, getting up, doing is best upward dog, then downward dog, then jumping excitedly on all four legs to get me up and to the fridge to prepare his food. This had to be followed by a walk, sometimes long, sometimes just only to get the necessities out of the way, then back inside and back onto the bed with Jason to watch over him during his last hour of sleep.

There might be a longer walk at 11 or 12, but he definitely expected a good workout after his 2:30 dinner which he would wait for patiently lying on the floor of the kitchen from 12 noon onwards, where it is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Then it would be time for a nap, one of many, but for this afternoon nap I often joined him, or he joined me whenever I was at home. At dinner he would come running when he heard Jason cut his apple on the cutting board, and he would be sitting pretty throughout our entire meal knowing he would get some fruit. He quietly demanded his routine as in the early evening, he would do another walk around the block, almost as a favor to me but also knowing that there would be a treat when we came back inside. Then he would make himself comfortable, on my couch or Jason’s, preferably in our spot, which carried our smell most strongly and he would only reluctantly moving over when we wanted to sit there ourselves.

And this is how I carry him with me in my soul, as a timekeeper, who made me get out and get up even if I did not want to. He healed us as we healed him, he fixed our petty arguments and our physical ills, he would be there to provide a routine and the glue to keep our little family together. We knew he wasn’t going to be around forever, but we were hoping for a few more years. He was with us through three months of isolation in our cottage in Pine Grove during Covid as we came to terms with the new world evolving round us, and he was the same, always steady, and only demanding what he needed, food, love, walks and physical closeness. It was in some twisted way one of the happiest times of our life.

And now, just as we thought some of our biggest challenges are over, he is gone. Some people say he had to go, it was his time and he stayed with us for as long as he could. There were some suggestions from the vets that his kidneys were compromised, or his blood pressure was too high, but as Jason likes to say, he always rallied, and he always came around. This year alone he had a terrible bout of bloody diarrhea, and he was bitten by a bull mastiff that had escaped and was unattended and nibbled on Bentley back legs while I straddled B to keep him from putting his teeth into the bigger dog. This may all sound like he was a lot of work, but he was just a bit unlucky, a bit of a klutz with a tendency to get into trouble, just so he could prove he could come out on top again.

The physical absence of losing a pet is the worst. Every time you enter the house you miss their welcome, their response. Bentley loved to sleep with us, on one of the couches or on the bed where he would nestle between us and find the snuggest, warmest spots. In all the places that he considered his home, he would know where to find the sun and where the sun moved in the course of the day, he would move with it. Even in the back seat of the car he would know where the sun would come in and try to get on top of the bags if any of them were blocking his way.

He was the king of being together, peacefully, quietly, and that is the worst thing about losing him, the fear and the knowledge that we will never all be as one again, home bodies all of us. And the outside world is equally hard to face without him because he knew every place and everybody. In the last year had become a major bringer of joy and love and happiness to strangers and friends alike. He did not care about other animals, except dogs. No squirrels or rabbits or birds would even register with him. But if anyone said good morning or told us how beautiful he was, he would walk right over for some nuzzling and a belly rub, making whoever petted him feel so much better.

This year, 2021, more than ever, he became a messenger of love as people came out after the long winter of covid. Very often, he would go up to strangers sitting in the park or people working in their yard and introduce himself. People would tell me, “your dog just made my day, he lifted my spirits , he changed my mood, made me feel better than I had all day”. Imagine having that kind of love and spirit in our life and home for almost ten years. I can still smell him everywhere and with a little imagination I can feel the warm weight of his massive body against mine and his gentle, slightly cool breath on my skin. But he had to go, and push us forward into the future, the rest of our life without him.

Musical Post Script

Music is one of the few things that consoles me, and Bentley’s energy and emotion reminds me of the opening sequence of Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark”. The words, the melodies and the energy conjure him up perfectly>

“Love came to my door, with a sleeping roll, with a madman’s soul, I thought for sure I’d seen him, dancing up a river in People’s Park, looking for a woman to court and spark”.

Court and Spark is what he would do whenever he went up to people, demanding affection.

 “Help me, I think I am falling in love again”

He would fall in love with little doggies half a dozen times, crouching like a puppy, timid until the doggy got closer and he would get up with his big tail flapping around behind him like the sails on a windmill.

“I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive”

B never lost his puppy energy, the puppy moves, that spring in his step as he accelerated and walked beside you. He felt unfettered and alive, and made you feel just so, walking behind him.