In March of 2020, when we were all newly under lockdown and terrifying stories were everywhere about the exponential growth of a deadly new virus, everyone had one important job: stay out of the hospital. Medical workers were about to confront a tsunami, and it was up to all of us not to make it any worse than it was already going to be.
Pepper the dog chose that time to send me to the E.R. We were out on a routine late-night walk in the neighborhood when she spotted The Black And White Dog, who for some reason she had decided was her mortal enemy. She lunged, jerking on the leash and therefore my arm. I was not unaccustomed to such behavior and was ready with some fancy footwork to avoid being pulled off balance — but I was not sufficiently attentive, and my footwork failed to keep me upright. I landed on my spine and (as I later learned) fractured a vertebra. Pain prevented me getting back up. At my request, Black And White Dog’s owner went to fetch my sons to help me, and as I lay there waiting, Pepper — still attached to my arm — added insult to injury by stepping on my face.
Pepper died suddenly earlier this month. I would have let her pull on the leash and step on my face a thousand more times for that not to be so.
Literally breaking my back wasn’t the only challenge Pepper posed. Her occasional flatulence could clear a room. Her skin problems meant steering around lumps and bumps of all sizes when petting her. When we traveled with her to someplace unfamiliar, we could walk her for an hour or more before she finally found a spot where she felt comfortable doing her business. Her mild incontinence (for some merciful reason confined to evenings only) meant we didn’t dare let more than 90 minutes or so elapse between walks, and we prayed she didn’t drink water at bedtime, because if she did, one of us was staying up for another 90 minutes to give her an additional walk. Her opinions about other dogs — that some were instant best friends and others (like The Black And White Dog) apparently needed murdering — were unpredictable and required close monitoring. Her habit of eating the most disgusting things off the ground was repulsive and turned every walk into a contest of vigilance and will between us and her. She usually won.
But most of all her extreme separation anxiety meant we could never leave her alone. For over twelve years we couldn’t do anything as a family that wasn’t someplace we could also bring Pepper, unless we were prepared to put her in the kennel — the most expensive one around, able to meet her special needs.
I would gladly endure her farts, her warts, her random aggression, her repellent foraging, her extreme clinginess, her needy bathroom habits, and her sky-high boarding expenses in exchange for the additional year or two we expected to have with her but didn’t. She may have been a challenge, but she was a bundle of love, and great company. “You like ‘because,’ and you love ‘despite.’”
Years ago, when our sons were 10 and 8, they started clamoring for a dog. They remembered that we previously owned a dog, Alex; but if they had any memories of her, it was only from when she was already old and infirm. We missed Alex, but we also knew what a boat anchor a dog can be, so we resisted, especially since the boys were finally at an age where we started being able to have really interesting family adventures together. But they would not be denied and they wore us down. We connected with a puppy named Melanie Drizzle from the Milo Foundation, a local animal-rescue shelter.
We didn’t have her for very long before we realized that the name didn’t fit. In searching for a new name, our eyes landed on this item, still lingering in our kitchen from the recent holiday season:
“Peppermint Bark” it was.
A few months after we got Pepper, once she was housetrained and a little more grown, we decided it was time to try leaving her home alone while we all went out to dinner. We weren’t out long, but in that time poor Pepper had a complete meltdown. She was frantic and took a long time to settle down after we returned. Among the physical evidence of her agitation was this:
She had apparently eaten the lock button out of the doorknob.
We learned that puppies separated from their litters too early are prone to this kind of anxiety, and to other behavioral problems, and even to urinary incontinence. And “Melanie Drizzle” had not only been separated too early, but had already bounced traumatically from one animal shelter to another when she found her forever home with us at less than three months old.
We all loved the dickens out of her, but presumably because of her trauma it took her a good long while to seem comfortable with us, and longer than that to seem happy. But there’s no doubt that happy is how she spent the rest of her life.
