The Joy Series: Old Dogs Redux

There’s a website that my pal Tommy Tomlinson told me about called “Does The Dog Die.” The site is exactly what it claims to be. It has a series of movie posters, and when you click on one of them, it will tell you if the dog dies. The site actually has all sorts of trigger questions on there. For instance, if you click on Supergirl, which officially comes out tomorrow, the first question is, obviously, “Does the dog die?”

But then there’s:

• Is someone sexually assaulted?

• Is there eye mutilation?

• Is a woman brutalized for spectacle?

And then, if you keep going down and down, you’ll find this:

• Does a cat die?

I don’t know, something about that being WAY down there is funny to me.

In any case, I won’t spoil for you if Krypto dies in Supergirl — you can look for yourself — but, I mean, come on.

I bring this up because, as I mentioned, our ancient poodle, Westley, took a turn for the worse a few weeks ago.* What happened was that he seemed to lose feeling in his left front paw. He could no longer put any weight on it.

*In case you’re wondering about this column and don’t want to read ahead without the answer — Does The Dog Die? NO!

We took Westley to a vet, who couldn’t really give us any answers. Same with the doggy neurologist. Westley turns 14 next month. There are no great answers for 14-year-old dogs. We settled into our new status quo. He limped along, doing the best he could. We had to put a bench to block the stairs, and we had to rearrange our lives to spend all our time in the living room so that we could be with him. We even got a new television for our living room. We’d been needing to do that for a long while. But we mainly did it so we could be with our guy.

Thing is, he started getting worse. I guess we should have seen that coming. His back legs started getting shakier. He started falling for no apparent reason. He found it difficult to even lie down, so he would just stand in the middle of the room, two or three of his legs quivering, as he tried to figure out his new reality. We started helping him lie down — and once down, he would stay down for hours and hours at a time.

It was truly horrible. When our vet came over to the house to look at him again — she has been treating Westley since he was born — she and Margo started crying.

Westley put his head in my lap and gave me that look, the one he’s given me a thousand times as he sat at my feet while I was writing, the look that said to me: “Why did you leave Jim Palmer out of The Baseball 100?”

And I said, as bravely as I could, “Well, at least he’s not in any pain.”

Then it occurred to us: How do we know he’s not in any pain? Westley is, we have found, the most stoic dog imaginable. All his life, the girls have pulled at his fur and bopped him on the nose and squished him (well, they did this when they were little), and he’s never made a peep. When he’s gotten shots, when he’s taken a spill, when he’s been stepped on by accident, he’s quietly gone about his business.

And our vet said, “Why don’t we try some arthritis medicine?”

She wasn’t confident that it would make any difference at all. But we were at that point where we had to try something.

And here’s the craziest thing of all.

It worked.

I don’t mean it worked as in Westley is now his younger self again. He still can’t or won’t put weight on his front paw. But in so many ways, he’s back to being Westley again. He’s moving about from spot to spot to find different places to sleep (his favorite activity). He’s bumping his head into my leg, demanding that I stop writing now and pay attention to him (and lately he’s been focused on why Eddie Murray wasn’t in The Baseball 100). He’s barking in the morning again, as he’s ready to start his day.

We can only imagine that he was in terrible pain before, and he just didn’t show it.

And now, with the pain calmed — perhaps even gone! — he’s able to try mischievous things like sneak some food off someone’s plate or stand by the window to bark at the UPS person.

You can’t turn back time, of course. It’s tempting to wish for that, tempting to wish for those days when newspapers were delivered to the driveway, and Sports Illustrated showed up in your mailbox every Wednesday, and people talked with each other rather than looking at their phones. But wishes like that, I’ve come to believe, run counter to actually living. Time goes forward. Life goes forward. I’ll never drive the girls to school again, no. I’ll never walk into old Yankee Stadium again and hear the echoes, no. Westley will never make a mad dash around the house and keep going, round and round, until we relent and start chasing him.

No. But he’s standing by the chair, looking steadier than he has in weeks, and he’s got that look on his face, he’s wanting me to box him, and so I do, light pats, left hook, right hook, jab, jab, oh no, Westley is in trouble, he’s on the ropes, he needs the bell to save him, and when the flurry is over, he does what he’s always done. He shakes his whole body, like he’s trying to spray off water, and he walks contentedly to a new spot where he can sleep.

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There’s a special going on at Barnes & Noble where members (and I believe membership is free) can get 25% off all preorders by typing in the code PREORDER25. That means you can get 25% off FIFTY SEASONS, my baseball book that will come out on February 2.

I am putting the final touches on the book over the next few days — I’ve decided to do a massive rewrite based on a whole new theme — and, well, I don’t want to jinx it, but I think it just might be my best baseball book. I mean, no, I’ll never write a book that means more to me that The Soul of Baseball. And I truly love all my books. But with this one — a countdown of the individual baseball seasons that echo — I think I’ve unlocked something special.