The Dog Who Flew

The Dog Who Flew

By Noel Laflin

July 2012

The puppy that first flew from a box (if one were to believe Jeremy so very long ago) and then flew into the arms of either a ghost or an angel nearly seventeen years later (as I tend to believe) died peacefully on a warm August Sunday morning in 2009.  The ghost and/or angel did their intervening just weeks prior to the old girl taking her final breath while stretched out upon the kitchen floor. David and I were with her when she moved on.  As hard as it was for me to see her pass, since I had cared for the little dog nearly all her life, it was worse for David.  This was the young man’s first time dealing with the death of a beloved pet.  Well, many of you can, no doubt, sadly recall what that feels like.  To me, it’s like a kick in the gut.

Now, it was actually Jeremy who first tried to prepare me for the puppy’s arrival way back in the fall of 1992.  I remember the phone call from the relay operator, announcing that Jeremy wanted to have a phone conversation with me.  As this was years before the advent of mobile phones with texting capabilities or even email, if one wanted to have a conversation between a hearing impaired and a hearing individual, one called the teletype device for the deaf (TTY) relay operator.  Jeremy had a TTY device at home, in which he would place the handset of a land line phone into two circular rubber cuffs and begin typing away on the attached keyboard.  The sounds of the keystrokes would then appear as letters and words to the receiving end of another TTY machine.  The conversation crawled across a narrow LED screen on both users’ devices.  If a person with impaired hearing needed to speak with a hearing individual, then he or she would call a specially trained operator, who would then relay the typed and spoken conversations back and forth to the two parties. I always pictured the process like a tennis match, where the commentator was either speaking or typing everything said between the two players.  It was an interesting way to communicate, to say the least.  Folks new to the experience never forgot the awkwardness of their first relay call.  It was frequently interesting to the relay operator as well.  They had to be prepared for the hearing impaired user wanting to “talk” about any subject, from as mundane a request as asking the hearing party, “Hey, what time should I come by tonight?” to something more off the wall, such as wanting to schedule an appointment with a call girl.  In the latter case, I suppose it may have been awkward for the call girl too.  Anyway, on this particular October day, all Jeremy wanted to relay to me was the fact that he had found a dog – a puppy to be precise.  

“Hi honey doctor - this Jeremy here.  GA (GA were the universal TTY letters for Go Ahead.”)

“Hello, Jeremy.  What’s up? GA.”

“Don’t be mad – I found a dog – brought dog home.  GA.”

“Jesus, Jeremy, we don’t need another dog!  We have a dog!  How big of a dog? GA.”

“Little dog – puppy dog – very cute. GA.”

“OK, what kind of puppy?  German shepherd type puppy or what?  GA.”

“Little dog – you will see.  DON’T BE MAD!  HA HA! You fall in love with puppy – puppy cute like me - HA HA! Ok puppy need bath now.  I wash in sink.  Make her pretty!  Bye for now!  SKSK.”  (SKSK were the universal TTY letters for ending a conversation or signing off – it stands for Stop Keying, Stop Keying – the party has stopped typing and hung up.)

“Operator, is he still there?

“No.  He has clearly typed SKSK – he has signed off.  Sorry.”

“It’s all right.  Thanks, operator.  I appreciate you guys.  You must have some great stories.  Too bad confidentiality keeps you from sharing…”

“You have no idea.  Have a good day, Sir”

With that, I had the rest of the afternoon to dwell on what Jeremy was up to; this was clearly nothing new to me.  We had, by that time in our lives, already lived together for nearly seven years.  I had become quite accustomed to his childlike enthusiasm, not to mention his pidgin-like English.  After all, English wasn’t his first language anyway – ASL (American Sign Language) was.  Jeremy got by in our hearing world in the most charming of ways.   

Needless to say, that after all this time together, there were few dull moments.  Jeremy was always pulling me into some new adventure either by design or benign happenstance.   He was also pretty good at coming up with some wild excuse or circumstance to justify his actions and behavior.  I couldn’t wait to hear what strange events lay behind the finding of the new puppy. On the other hand, I really dreaded the thought of a large breed greeting me as our small condo and miniature yard would never accommodate the likes of a shepherd, lab or retriever.  It had better not be a big breed I muttered to myself on the drive home.  I’ll kill the kid if it’s a Great Dane!

I opened the kitchen door off of the garage with some trepidation.  Jeremy had his back to me as he was cleaning out the sink.  And there, staring up at me from the kitchen floor, sat an innocent looking miniature ball of fur.  With tail a-wagging this tiny creature with big brown eyes and a wet black nose leapt with the greatest of enthusiasm to meet the new guy and in the process excitedly peed on my shoe.   I sighed with relief; it was not a shepherd, lab, retriever or God forbid a Great Dane.  This looked like a Lhasa or Shiatsu pup.  All right, so small we could handle.  The little mop with a tail danced with unbridled joy and piddled some more.

The puppy’s commotion caused Jeremy to turn around and smile sheepishly.  Without as much as a hint of hesitation his hands started to fly with signing.  I had to slow him down repeatedly so as to get the story right.

“So,” I was summarizing after a minute of excited explanation,” you were driving down Newport Avenue when you saw this van pull over to the side of the road. It stopped, the passenger side door opened and then a cardboard box was tossed out onto someone’s lawn before it sped off.  Right?”

Jeremy pounded his right fist on top of his left fist with both index fingers and thumbs extended: “Right!”

“And because you were forced to stop right behind this van, you saw the box being tossed out of the side door and land on the grass.”

“Right!”  Jeremy signed once more.

“And out of the box came a flying puppy?”

“Right again,” he answered.

“So you did what any good person would do and pulled over to investigate – correct?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, and yes!” the lad signed, shaking his right fist enthusiastically.

“The puppy was covered with grease because the inside of the box had held cans of oil or something, right?”

The right fist shook up and down excitedly once more: “Yes!”

“You were afraid the puppy would wander into the street and get hit by a car, huh?”

“True.” Jeremy’s expression took on a more serious quality as his right finger flicked off of his chin and flew straight my way.

“So, you put the dirty puppy back in the oily box and drove home in order to give her a bath – correct?”

His fists, with the extended finger- thumbs sign came together once again.

“Now, why would anyone in their right mind throw away a perfectly good puppy,” I signed.

“Crazy bad people,” Jeremy replied – index finger circling the side of his head, quickly followed by his open right hand glancing downward off his lips.

“Bad people indeed,” I signed back with the same downward off-the-lips hand motion. When you mouthed the word for bad and cast the downward hand off the lips in such a manner - well, it really implied BAD.

“So, how did you clean her up,” I inquired.  The dog, who all this time had been chewing on my shoe laces, looked pretty spruced up to me.

“I use this,” Jeremy signed, bending over and pulling out both a bottle of Pine-Sol and a can of Ajax from under the sink.

“Jesus, Jeremy – that’s really strong stuff to use on a puppy!” I shouted.

“No - she OK.  I rinse good.   She like bath!” he retorted, fingers flying.

I looked at my shredded shoe laces and decided that the dog was obviously no worse for wear.  I picked her up to smell her fur.  She licked and then bit my nose with tiny canine incisors.  She smelled like a freshly washed puppy.  No hint of Pine-Sol or Ajax even lingered.  Lucky dog indeed.

I set the puppy down and looked at Jeremy.  “Have you named her?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.  “Maybe you think up good perfect name.”

“Well,” I pondered.  “She flew out of a box, right?”  I signed the word box by extending both hands straight out, palms facing and then turned them ninety degrees with both palms facing me.  If you try this you will notice the square shape it infers: a box.

Jeremy nodded in agreement.

“If we sign box and add the letter Y,” I continued, we get “Boxy!” I declared.

A smile as big as Greenland lit up his face.

“Boxy!” he repeated, signing slowly at first and then resigning it quickly twice more.  “Boxy, Boxy, Boxy!  Perfect for her.  She fly from box and land with us!  I love name.  I love her.  Hope you love her too!”

“I do,” I assured him.  “I do.”

Three years later, to the month, Jeremy died.  In the end, even trying to care for a small dog – which turned out to be a Lhasa after all – was too much for the lad.  He was only thirty-three years old.  AIDS didn’t care whether he could hear or not.  SKSK – Jeremy signed off way to soon.

The ghost and/or angel that caught Boxy so many years later is still a topic of discussion for David and me.  Initially, I thought it was Bill’s ghost that saved the old dog when she fell off the kitchen landing and onto the bottom floor below.  But, upon reflection, it could have been Jeremy I suppose.  He of all people would have been the perfect candidate for a real life role in a redo of “The Littlest Angel”.  I am certain that his childlike antics in anyone's idea of heaven would surely have gotten on the nerves of the other angels.  He was probably sent to the Understanding Angel to work things out.  Maybe part of the deal was his coming back here one more time to catch a falling dog and set her gently down unharmed.  I don’t know.  The finer workings of any religious belief remain a profound mystery to me.  But, I am always open to speculation, not to mention divine intervention.

However, I see that I am getting ahead of the story somewhat.  I suppose I should back up a bit first and fill you in as to what led to Boxy’s second flight later in life.

You see, the truth of it was, she was just getting old.  Boxy was approaching the age of seventeen in human years – so what did that make her in dog years – a hundred and twelve and counting?  Well, whatever the equivalent, Boxy was starting to show her age.  She could now sleep twenty-two of any twenty-four hours in a day (she preferred the coolness of our downstairs bedroom closet).  And although she still loved her walks, they were much slower excursions that last year.  Eating was still a favorite pastime for the old girl but she was growing finicky as to what she preferred.  David and I tried nearly every brand of dog food available over the course of time, only to have more losers than winners.  Consequently, we humans started going out to eat more often just so we could bring home left over chicken of any sort.  This seemed to be Boxy’s favorite dish those last few months in particular.

Sadly enough as well, our next door neighbor, Bill, was also in decline during this time.  Cancer struck him suddenly and harshly.  As long-time neighbors, going on twenty years, we had always cared for each other’s pets.  We had keys for one another’s place, so that I could feed his cat when he was gone and he could do likewise for Boxy when David and I were out of town.  So, it was a sorrowful time indeed when he passed quietly one night in May while in hospice care within his own home – just one thin wall away from us.  Losing Bill was a heavy blow.  We cared for him greatly.  One could not have asked for a greater neighbor.  And for some unfounded and unexplained reason I also felt that Bill’s spirit might be lingering a bit after his passing.   It had seemed to me that the good man still had unfinished business to attend to.  But what I suppose I really must have been wishing for was just a little more time with the gentle soul – I missed him that much.

Within a month of Bill’s demise, Boxy also took a sudden turn for the worse.  She seemed to be having dizzy spells that would cause her to circle slowly, fall over, be quite out of it for a minute or two and then sleep soundly for a long while.  When she did awaken, she had a tremendous thirst for ice cold water.  

We took her to the vet – but nothing was conclusive.  He prescribed some sort of medicine which had a very strong narcotic component to it.  On that very first night, while still under the effects of that potent drug, Boxy lay on the carpet just off the kitchen.  Next to her sleeping form stood the railing for the stairwell.  There is a gap of maybe six or seven inches between the bottom bar of the rail and the carpet.  There is no way that a critter should be able to roll in her sleep between that gap and fall the eight feet to the bottom stair below, but this dog did.

I was in the bathroom when I heard the disturbing ‘thud’.

“David, what the hell was that,” I shouted through the closed door.

He had been on the computer at the time and so had not witnessed the fall.  But, he too heard the resounding ‘thud’ of Boxy’s body having hit the bottom stair below.  He jumped out of his chair and took a look for himself.  The doped up dog was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly he yelled, “Oh, my God!  Boxy fell!”

I shot out of the bathroom and peered down the stairwell expecting to find an old dead dog with a broken neck.  At the very least I pictured multiple fractures and an animal in absolute agony.

But there on the very bottom step sat Boxy, as if she had just awakened from a most pleasant dream.  She looked up at us and shook her head slightly before wandering off into the hallway.  There had been no yelp, nor cry of pain from what should have been a back breaking fall.  I scrambled down the thirteen steps and cautiously lifted the old girl, fully expecting her to cry out with at least a broken rib or two.  There was no resistance, no whining in pain of any sort.  Upon closer examination of legs, back, ribs and head there was not the slightest evidence of trauma.   She simply laid her head on my shoulder and sighed. That was it.  I gently set her down and watched her amble off to the bedroom closet for another long nap.

Now, the rational explanation for what had just occurred would be that she rolled in her drug-induced sleep, slipped thru the bottom railing and was in such a relaxed state that when she hit the bottom stair eight feet below (I later measured the fall) that she suffered no injury.  A drunken friend of mine once rolled out of his top bunk and fell six feet before hitting the rock hard cobblestone floor beneath him.  Like Boxy, he picked himself up and climbed back into bed with no apparent injury.  I do not make this up as I was witness to that fall some forty years ago.  Ah, well, we all know the old saying that the good Lord looks out for drunks and small children.  If that adage be true then I guess we need to add small dogs to the list too.

Well, you could have taken rationality and thrown it out the window for all we cared that strange summer night in 2009. David and I just could not buy it.  And yet, even after all of the discussions and dissection of the event which we two have played out over and over again during the last three years, we still have no logical explanation as to what saved Boxy that evening.  And thus, the image of Bill’s ghost flying to the rescue in order to catch the wretched pooch first entered our thoughts. He had unfinished business, I reasoned.

Boxy lived on fairly peacefully for the next six weeks.  Ironically enough, the fall seemed to have reinvigorated her.  But as the dog days of summer really set in, we watched with sadness as the old girl took daily turns for the worse. As I wrestled with my conscience as to when the best time would be to take her in to the vet and have her gently put down – well, gratefully, Boxy beat me to the punch.  She came up for a drink of cold water one Sunday morning, started to weave – but allowed me to ease her down upon the very kitchen floor where we had first met sixteen years prior.  I called to David to come make his farewells, which he did with tears streaming down his face.  He was not alone in his grief.

It must have been the very next week or so that the first angel “coin” arrived in the mail.  This good luck charm, no bigger than the size of a quarter, is an inexpensive bit of junk metal with the likeness of an angel stamped on both sides.  It came within a solicitation piece from Catholic Relief Services.  Over the last three years sixteen of these tokens have come by mail.  I have never contributed so much as a dollar and yet they continue to haunt our mailbox.  With the arrival of the latest one just last week, I am now rethinking the whole Catholic Relief donation idea. 

I have saved every one of the angel tokens.  I stack them on the base of the old lamp, whose light shines down the stairwell. 

And in addition to the arrival of these sixteen angel touchstones over the past three years, I have begun to question my original supposition regarding unseen rescuers: if not Bill, than whom else might have jumped in to catch the falling dog?

An old friend of mine has wondered aloud, on more than one occasion, whether I still believe the story of Boxy having been tossed from a van via an oily box so long ago.

“That boy could make up some whoppers,” my old friend lamented.  “I bet he paid good cash at any pet store for that puppy and then took delight in creating such a crazy story just to throw you off guard - to keep you from getting mad at him for spending money he never had. You most likely paid for that dog and never even knew it.  He was a master at both manipulation and tall tales.”  My friend knew Jeremy all too well.

That very notion had crossed my mind at least a thousand times over the years.

But what I answered instead was, “I never gave it a second thought.  Whether true or not, it’s still a great story.”

And all angels have perfect hearing too, no doubt - not to mention impeccable timing when it comes to catching a flying puppy.