The Best Worst Dog

 On March 1, 2013, I was living in the 5th Ward in a townhouse with my (current) wife who was in her first trimester of pregnancy (and having a terrible time with morning sickness), a 7-year-old who split time with me and his mom, and zero dogs.  

Having zero dogs was by design for several reasons.  I had lost the world's greatest dog, Marley, the year before and that had wrecked me.  Having a dog in a townhouse with no yard was also not ideal.  I had also just started working on Cold Justice and was traveling out of state all that summer.

As a huge dog lover, I was feeling pretty comfortable without one for the first time in my life.

That March morning, Luke had spent the night at my house in the 5th Ward and I had dropped him off at Garden Oaks Elementary School before coming back to Downtown to the CJC.  I was exiting the McKee exit off of I-10 when I saw a small black dog running back and forth across the two lane exit.  At the time, he seemed to have a life expectancy of about ten more seconds, and I just didn't have the stomach or conscience to let that happen.  I pulled over and got out as other cars whizzed past me and the dumb dog.

He had a leash on, and presumably an owner.  After knowing the dog a few days, I became convinced (and always remained convinced) that someone lost their patience with him and just threw him out the window, leash and all.  He started to run from me at first, but I stomped on the leash and was able to snag him and throw him into my 4-Runner, just as a damn METRO bus whisked by us without so much as tapping the brakes.

As I pulled back onto the road, I swear the dog looked at me and put his paw on my shoulder.  That sounds like bullshit, I know, but it actually happened.  I drove him home and told my wife that we had a visitor.

We tried to find his owner.  I posted on every lost and found page I could think of and even did a blog post on him.  I debated over calling him Keith Richards (mainly because I just always wanted to name a dog after Keith Richards), but ultimately we went Buddy Holly.  In retrospect, his absolute devotion to doing whatever the hell he wanted to do would have made Keith the more appropriate choice.

This dog was the worst.  I mean, the absolute worst.  The vet estimated his age at four years old in 2013, and we couldn't tell if he had been an indoor or outdoor dog with his previous owner.  He peed all over the hardwood floors of my townhouse.  He screamed at the top of his lungs if we tried to put him in a kennel.  We tried putting a pallet in the bathroom and closing the door, but he leapt onto the door and pulled down the handle after scratching through all of the paint on the door.  He refused to go to the bathroom on the small patio attached to our townhouse, and had to be walked multiple times a day if we wanted to save our floors.  

But man, that dog sure did seem to love us.  

We realized pretty quickly that nobody else was coming for Buddy Holly, and he made himself at home.  That summer was a big one.  Not only was Emily pregnant with Smith, I got diagnosed with leukemia and had to go through a little bit of chemotherapy.  Luke was at the townhouse a lot.  And Buddy suddenly became Mr. Popularity.

When my youngest, Smith, was born in October, however, Buddy was ecstatic.  He rarely left his new friend's side.

It didn't change the fact that Buddy remained absolutely devoted to following no rules that were expected of him.  The following Spring, we moved out of the townhouse into a little house in Oak Forest.  Buddy continued his love of peeing on hardwood floors, but his new hobby was destroying the mail whenever the postman dropped it through the mail slot in the wall.  He shredded bills, birthday cards, and magazines better than most industrial shredders.  Because the dog had a vertical leap of almost five feet, he also discovered that he had no problem leaping onto kitchen counters to get food.

We ultimately sealed the mail slot and got an outside mailbox and we installed doggie doors since he had no interest in waiting to be let out to go to the bathroom.  Even after the doggie doors were installed, he still loved a good poop inside, standing right in front of them.  He would also flip out any time we left the house.

But he was growing up right alongside my kids, and I loved watching that.

About nine years ago, we took in another foster named Lady, who had been out on the streets for most of her life.  She was as sweet as she could be, but deathly afraid of thunder and lightning.  After a few months together, Buddy decided that he, too, needed to be afraid of thunder and lightning.  He had never been scared before, but since Lady was a bigger dog and it scared her, it stood to reason that he should probably be terrified of it, as well.  

So for the past nine years, whenever there was a thunderstorm at night, I would usually wake up to find Buddy sitting on my head like a chicken would sit on an egg, and shaking like a leaf.  

He was also an escape artist who had absolutely no problem slipping out the front door without being seen.

On more than occasions, we would get knocks on our door from neighbors who had rounded Buddy up when we didn't even know he was gone.

Last year, Buddy got diagnosed with a heart murmur and the vet told us that there was no telling how long he would live.  He developed a cough that got progressively worse and worse, but he was still a happy dog.  He couldn't stand to be left alone, and good God, the dog never lost his appetite.  We moved to a new house last fall and unlike our other home, it was two stories.  We couldn't keep him from following us around up and down the stairs, even though it seemed to exhaust him each trip.

By our calculations, he was 17 years old, although a new vet that we took him to estimated him to be closer to 20.  He had more health issues and we had to keep him in a diaper.  He loved nothing more than wriggling out of it for a nice pee on the hardwoods, even though the doggie door was right next to him.  His bad habits never left.  But neither did his love for his family.

This morning, Buddy clearly let us know it was time to let him go.  I took him to the wonderful people at Veterinary Emergency Group (which coincidentally was only a few exits down I-10 from where I first found him) and held him as he peacefully said goodbye.

When I got home, we sat around and talked about him all afternoon.  My youngest speculated about what his life was like before he came into ours and who his previous owner was.

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that they missed out on the best worst dog a family could ever have.