“My Life with George” by Judith Summers

When our youngest son started third grade, somehow he convinced his mother that the family needed a dog. He didn’t need to convince his father, who was already there. But it was the mother who needed to be convinced, and the 8-year-old somehow managed it.

We researched dogs, looking at all kinds of breeds. We talked to dog owners. The requirements were small, not prone to being “yippy,” low-shedding, and good with children. Finally, after reading about a particular breed in one of the big dog magazines, we found the dog we were looking for. We would learn later that the magazine lied about “low-shedding.”

We found a breeder. There was at that time only one in our metropolitan area, and she was known as crazy. So we headed west, about 300 miles west, in fact, across Missouri and into Kansas. Some 40 miles northwest of Lawrence, down a dirt road and over a log bridge, we found the breeder and the puppy. And we took our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel home.

Judith Summers and her son Joshua went looking for a dog, too. They were looking to help fill a London flat and a family life emptied of Summers’ larger-than-life husband, television producer Udi Eichler, who had died from cancer. Eichler was known to the rich-and-famous (actor John Thaw, he of Inspector Morse fame, read a poem at the memorial service) and the no-to-rich-and-famous. Summers thought she knew what she was getting with George, her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Summers was wrong. (She got hers two years after we got ours. I could have warned her.) George transformed the family’s life.

She tells the story of what happened in My Life with George: The Inspirational Story of How a Willful Dog Brought Joy to a Bereaved Family. It is as much the story of life with a dog as it is a memoir of love, loss, grief, and the attempts for a family to recover and go forward.

Cavaliers are everything they’re claimed to be – friendly, gorgeous, gregarious, happy, the kind of dog that people stop you on the street to pet. Like most dogs, they have healthy appetites. They also eat things they shouldn’t. They’re also prone to physical ailments, and will make you best friends with the often-weekly visits to the veterinarian. Our vet bills alone put the vet’s daughter through college. But you pay, because the loyalty these dogs express evoke a similar loyalty from you. Just ask Summers. She figures she spent more than $20,000 on vet bills – on top of what the pet insurance paid.

Judith Summers and George

George was the type of dog who created stories – stories about what happened to prospective boyfriends, about interactions with other dogs, the battles for control the cat waged, the constant, ongoing need for grooming (and vet visits), and what happens to your heart when that face looks up into yours and smiles.

Summers is a writer and author who lives in London. She’s published Soho: A History of London’s Most Colorful Neighborhood (1991); The Empress of Pleasure: The Life and Adventures of Teresa Cornelys (2003); and Casanova’s Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved (2006). She’s even published a sequel to her story of life with George – The Badness of King George (2010), the title a clever takeoff on the “The Madness of King George.” She lives in London.

My Life with George is the real thing – Summers knows this subject of Cavaliers because she’s lived it. And she provides the good, the bad, and the crazy of what life is like when you own this particular breed of dog.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Dog, Part 2

So we brought our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel home from Emmett, Kansas, and life would never be the same.

He might have been home all of two days when we learned that he liked to bark at dogs in general, but would imitate the ferociousness of a pit bull when it came to Golden Retrievers. Reason: unknown. It just happened. Cody has never thought of himself as a small dog, and will never back down from a barking contest with any other kind of dog. Especially Golden Retrievers.

His first few nights home, he did two things. First, he ate the cardboard box we placed in his crate for a bed (he was just under four pounds and we bought the crate for a fully grown dog, even if he was small). Second, he cried. For several nights, it became a ritual: puppy put to bed; sons put to bed; Mom and Dad put to bed; puppy cries; Dad gets up, scoops the puppy up; Dad lies on the sofa with the puppy going to sleep on his chest. I know, it was the totally wrong thing to do. But it only lasted a few nights, until Cody figured out the routine (I never told my wife) (maybe I just did).

After a few months, we enrolled Cody in obedience classes, which he enjoyed but the lessons weren’t very long-learned. Mostly because of the fact I rarely did the homework. Still, as I liked to proudly point out, he was salutatorian in the agility classes (OK, so there were a total of four dogs in the class). (Cody did not graduate at the head of his class in obedience.) My most memorable moment from the classes was when we all sat in a circle and passed our dogs to each other, to familiarize the dogs with people other than their owners. The first dog passed to me was a full grown Doberman pinscher, who stared at me with a look that inspired a vision of me lying on the floor with a snapped neck. The dog’s name was Toby. Instead of snapping my neck, he licked me in the face. I looked like someone had thrown a bucket of water on me, but I was totally thrilled. Or relieved, whichever came first.

Cody settled into the family. Dogs are creatures of habit and routine, and Cody is the stereotyped rule for that. He knows the precise time he should be walked in the morning, at lunch, before dinner and at bedtime. If the schedule slips, he lets us know, usually by licking and rattling his food bowl. He eats dinner before we do, but he knows to expect a snack or “second thing” once we finish eating. It doesn’t matter what the second thing is, as long as it materializes.

Cody has lived up to the breed’s reputation for friendliness and sociability around children. He doesn’t complain (unless it involves his food routine). For a long time, he liked to eat anything, and we had to be careful about what landed on the floor (a stray piece of pepperoni from a pizza taught us that lesson). One of his favorite “snacks” was to eat the small cardboard tags attached to the youngest’s Beanie Baby collection, which, my son pointed out, destroyed the collection’s value (as if there were any).

The breed is prone to two physical ailments – heart murmurs and ear infections. Our Cavalier has somehow managed to escape the heart problem (“He has the heart of a five-year-old dog; he’ll live for years yet,” the vet tells us cheerfully, pleasing me but totally discouraging my wife). But Cody has the market cornered on ear infections – long ears and small ear canals are perfect characteristics to keep the veterinary pharmaceutical companies profitable forever. Cody’s ears alone have likely been responsible for many executive bonuses.

Like most dogs, Cody loves naps. He knows about Sunday afternoons. He fully expects a nap with Dad, positioned right between Dad’s feet, for precisely one hour. If I decide to go biking instead, I get a look of abject heartbrokenness. This dog knows how to inspire guilt.

Last year, he became a college man, and moved into the fraternity house with our youngest. He became a major attraction, especially for college students of the female persuasion. His photo was included with the fraternity composite, he has his own Facebook page and he claims to have hazed some pledges, if walking a dog three times a day constitutes hazing.

He’s now back at home. However you calculate the formula, he’s really old – ancient – in dog years. He has arthritis and is increasingly deaf. Getting up and down the stairs is more and more a problem. He’s also more crotchety and tends to show some temper now and then (“leave me alone inside, will ya? Guess what that puddle is on the hardwood floor?”). He’s sleeping more, and his totally precise biological clock doesn’t work as well as before. But when it’s time to eat, he’s still a brand new puppy and can move like greased lightning.

One day, I’ll have to face “life without the dog,” but, well, maybe not. My wife is less concerned about the impact on our youngest and more about how I’ll react. I don’t know why. There’s no need to worry about it, because I can’t imagine it. It can’t happen. And it won’t. So there.

The Dog, Part 1

I’ve been following my online friend Marcus Goodyear’s tweets and posts about the death of the family dog. I realized I haven’t talked about my dog in this space before. He’s getting up there in age, and after reading those comments by Marcus, I’d rather talk about my dog now than do the eulogy later. Except, as I constantly tell my wife, the dog is never going to die.

His name is Cody. His breed name is bigger than he is – a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. He’s been with us since my youngest was in third grade. My youngest is now in college. That makes Cody old, in human years.

It took my youngest some considerable period of time to convince his mother that we needed to get a dog. His older brother never seemed to care for pets; he was too busy at baseball, soccer, football, basketball and any other sport available. We knew we had a problem with our oldest when, at five years old, he would get up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays and watch golf on cable.

But the youngest wanted a dog, and gradually he wore his mother down. But she had a plan of her own – she wanted a contract, signed by him, that said he would take care of the dog. She was also nobody’s fool; she had my son’s co-conspirator – me – co-sign the contract.

I began to research breeds. My wife’s instructions were relatively simple: small, good with kids, no shedding, no nervousness (what she calls “yippiness”), and a minimalist barker. I read a lot of dog magazines (this was before a lot of stuff available online). I talked to friends and people at work. A woman at work told me about her dog – a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel – and told us to visit. She lived all of two blocks from our house, so we visited. And fell in love with the dog.

The breed fit almost all of the requirements: small, great with children, no nervousness, and relatively light on the barking. Only one requirement was missing – these dogs shed. I mean, they shed, as in big tumbleweeds of hair blowing through the house. But I could point to several comments in dog magazines about “minimal shedding.” I didn’t point to the fact they were mostly lies.

The next step was identifying a breeder. At the time, breeders of these dogs were few and far between, and deliberately so – that’s how the price stayed as high as it did, by restricting supply. Ours cost about $200 – a pound. There was a breeder in the St. Louis area, but she didn’t have any puppies currently available. My friend from work suggested her breeder – a woman who lived on a farm in eastern Kansas.

And that’s what we did. It became an event in my relationship with my youngest child. Early on a Friday afternoon in October, I got him out of his third-grade classroom early (that alone made me a hero) and we drove from St. Louis to Topeka, planning to spend the night there, before going on another 35 miles to St. Mary’s, Kansas, and then a few miles north to Emmett. Except there was a hot rod convention in Topeka, and there was no room in the inn. Any of the inns. So we backtracked to Lawrence and stayed at a Holiday Inn that my youngest still remembers because the lobby contained a putt-putt golf course.

The next morning, we drove to Emmett, which was rural. Rural as in, you get off the county road on to a dirt road for a few miles until you come to the log bridge (real logs, included the bridge floor) over the creek. The farm where the breeder lived was just past the bridge.

It was a good place to breed dogs. This was a farmstead, and the breeder supplemented the family income. There were nine children, so these dogs and their puppies were around kids all the time. We first met Cody in the arms on a three-year-old, or at least one of the arms of a three-year-old, who was carrying the puppy around like a bag of groceries. Papers, dog and cash exchanged hands, and we were officially dog owners.

Before we left the farm, we sat in the family mini-van and looked at our newest family member, sitting quietly in a small box on my son’s lap. Cody (the name was selected by the youngest) began to cry a little bit, and my son stroked his head and calmed him down. Then he looked at me and said, “Dad, we are so blessed.”