A major dog story - The Jewish Standard

Dogs are humane. They feel heartfelt pain. They get lonely. They bask in praise. They fall in love and suffer mightily when someone they love, human or canine, leaves them. They sometimes learn from their mistakes and can be endlessly apologetic. They will do anything to rescue members of their family from danger. Like humans, they are sometimes sneaky, although never dishonest. That’s simply above their paygrade!

Personally, I prefer living with a dog to a cat, goldfish, or parrot. Dogs are work, but they are also fun. Try to romp and play with your goldfish.

Your dog will never criticize you, underappreciate you, or even become infuriated with you. Never! In my life I’ve shared space and time and abundant love with quite a few dogs. Let me tell you about Major.

Major was our only male dog. And he was always unluckily in pursuit of a female companion. His uneventful love life had the makings of a truly trashy romance novel. There was never a happy ending and there are no descendants to keep his line going. We got him the day after Toto, who became his default sister, slept through an attempted burglary. Clearly a real watchdog was needed. Major was big and strong, but little did we know about his totally non-existent guarding or sleuthing skills.

We picked him up at a local pound, which was, in retrospect, obviously too eager to get rid of him. His nuisance value was extremely high, but we innocents didn’t know any of this. We saw that he looked healthy and was very friendly to us and our four little kids. He became the dog of their childhood, always ready to defend their infractions by chastising the parent who dared to discipline them. We, the adults, got barked at by an interfering dog. Often we wanted to return him to the pound but it simply wasn’t possible. The bonds with our children were quickly more important than the multitude of issues that he came equipped with. And there were many, more than I can conjure up all these years later. Major was, in short, a big pain a long time ago. Luckily, we loved him.

The first question we asked at the pound was whether he liked to ride in cars. What we should have asked was whether he behaved well in cars. But that was not what we asked, and the provided truthful answer was that he really liked to ride in cars. Had we only asked the proper question we would have gotten a different answer.

Major did, in fact, like to ride in cars. The only problem was that he felt he needed to be the driver. Thus, he started every trip in his assigned position as the rear navigator, in the back seat of our station wagon, and as soon as we were off, usually to Parksville for a weekend, he would thrust his substantial body forward, flying speedily over the heads of our children. He became Superdog himself, landing on top of the driver. It does not need to be stated that he had no driver’s license. It does not need to be stated that this was behavior that could not be tolerated. But this was his routine, a pattern that had obviously been implicated with his incarceration in the pound in the first place. But our aforementioned progeny would simply not consider a doggie return for Major. He was ours. Forever.

Thus a new project quickly emerged for my husband: he was to build a barrier that would keep Major in the back, an imperative that was obviously necessitated by Major’s causing great risk to our lives if he persisted in attempting to drive our car.

That assignment proved to be very challenging. Although my husband is a builder, a master craftsman who has made countless pieces of beautiful furniture and finished an entire basement, complete with lavatory, in many years of designing and creating, he worked endlessly on the project to secure Major, a goal that continually was met with abject failure. This was a battle of wits that just couldn’t be won. Until, sof sof (as they say in Ivrit) he did it. Major saw immediately that he could not surmount the insurmountable. He slunk his huge body into the rear seat and finally, unhappily, lay down and simply went to sleep, his dignity intact (he would say) and my husband the proud victor (he would say), a real conquering hero. Score one for the humans.

But Major never finished his lifetime of challenging behavior. As sweet as he really was, he had a streak that needed to show that he was the boss.

Oftentimes he had to stay home alone. He resented that, communicating that if we really loved him we would never leave him behind. Try and tell a dog that there were places to which he was uninvited. He would punish us on those occasions by doing destructive things in the house. We would always know that he had misbehaved because he would welcome us home with his trademark guilty look, further proof that he knew he was being disobedient. That guilty look could apply to many activities but it was always the same. He would greet us with tail pointing down and lips in a snarling position, making sounds as if he had a head cold. Sniffling and snorting. His walking would be downtrodden, dragging, and nervous. When he greeted us that way, it was merely a matter of time before we would discover the crime. His body language was totally incriminating. No further proof was ever needed.

We would arrive home and one of the kids would say, “Major has a guilty look.” That was it. We would then proceed to locate the source of the guilt.

Once, he exceeded his own historic criminal record. We had started to put him in the basement when he was to be left home alone. This limited his ability to wander freely through the house, creating havoc. The space was heated and cozy and supplied with all the accoutrements that a dog of his stature required — cozy bedding, food, and water. Plenty of Earth’s humans would have been happy with such a place. Major always regarded it as a downgrade, similar to paying for first class and winding up in basic economy. Nonetheless we prevailed until……

We came home from somewhere and there was Major, upstairs, with said guilty look. That look was proof that we had not simply forgotten to put him downstairs. We immediately saw that there was a giant dog-sized hole in the wall that separated the first floor and the basement stairs. He had dug himself out, obviously working for hours to successfully launch his great escape. My husband had the skills to patch up the plaster and rebuild the wall. And so it was. Score another for the hound!

I won’t tell you about Major’s sad ending. It left us all in tears. He was indeed a nudnik, but we adored him.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

Opinion