Comet's Tale (7 page)

I was weak and fuzzy-headed, but a deep mulelike guffaw rumbled up from my belly. Comet stared at me for a moment and then melted into the bed without any further fuss.

The dog bed was still in the living room when Jenny arrived later that day. “You didn't lift that bed into this room, did you?” She sounded like a highway patrolman asking for license and registration. I related the earlier event and Jenny snorted, “How gullible do you think I am? Who did Queeny convince to put her bed out here right in everybody's way?”

“I'm serious. Comet did it herself.”

Jenny stared at Comet doubtfully. Comet stared back. Jenny blinked first. “I told you that dog's smart enough to know what she's doing,” she said. Comet remained motionless, as if poured in bronze. To signal that this territorial skirmish was not the entire war, Jenny said on her way to the bathroom, “That bed can stay there until I'm finished, but it goes back into the bedroom and out of the way before I leave.”

Comet grunted and looked at me, her brows raised. “Hey, I have nothing to do with this little spat,” I whispered, checking to make sure Jenny had not overheard.

Once again, I slumbered through Jenny's departure. When I woke up, the light tinting the walls a soft mauve told me the afternoon wasn't completely exhausted. Before I could call Comet's name to find out where she was, I heard a short rap at the front door. Then a creak, and the door swung open. A young woman with short dark hair hustled into the living room bearing two large sacks of groceries. Pam was a neuromuscular massage therapist whom I had met shortly after moving to Sedona. She had managed to keep me somewhat mobile over the past year. Pre-Comet, I saw Pam only occasionally, but my promise to Freddie that I would take better care of myself had prompted me to schedule weekly in-home sessions with Pam. I didn't know if her expertise extended to intestinal disorders, but I had called her a few hours earlier and related my adventure in canned cuisine. I was hoping that whatever was left of the tuna could be massaged out of muscle tissue.

Pam lugged the groceries through the living room and into the kitchen as I sat up on the couch.

“You're awake. That's a good sign,” she said.

Hearing Pam's voice, Comet trudged out from the bedroom where Jenny had banished her earlier. Her slumped shoulders conveyed the attitude of someone on a chain gang. She leaned against Pam's legs.

“You didn't feed her any of that rotten food, did you?” Pam demanded.

“Of course not.”

“I know what will make you feel better,” Pam cooed to Comet. “Let's go for a walk.”

“There's nothing wrong with her! She's just mad because Jenny, the housekeeper, is trying to show Comet that a new sheriff's in town.”

Ignoring my explanation, Pam asked, “Have you called your wife?” Pam knew all about my state of forced marital separation. I didn't confide my innermost feelings to her, but under the soothing spell of her massages I had talked about the general situation. “Maybe you should call Freddie while I try to lift Comet's spirits,” Pam said as the two of them left the house.

The last thing I wanted to do was talk to my wife. Any news of distress from me caused her to careen like a pinball from alarm to frustration to guilt. This was just food poisoning; I didn't need to upset Freddie.

Pam and Comet soon returned, breathless and exuding good health. “Did you two solve all the world's problems?” I inquired.

“Not all of them.” Pam detached the leash and Comet sprinted to me and stopped just inches from my face, pushing her cold wet nose into my cheek, a sloppy but endearing gesture. Then she trotted into the bedroom. It took her less than three minutes to once again drag her big cushion into the living room, placing it next to the couch where I was propped on a pillow. Meanwhile, Pam was heating some chicken soup. The aroma of simmering broth filled the room as she debriefed me on her walk with Comet. “She turned around after one block and practically pulled me back to the house. Now, seeing this”—Pam motioned to the inert body next to me—“I definitely think she's worried about you.”

“Hmm,” I responded. A few seconds ticked by.

“Well, I guess I'll set up the table for your treatment,” Pam finally said. As soon as she did, Comet lay down underneath it.

“I really am sorry I had to drag you all the way over here,” I grunted as Pam began her work.

“Would you stop? I told you I have other clients nearby, so it's not an inconvenience.”

Facedown, I quieted and concentrated. It took a focused intent to relax knotted muscles so that the gentle treatment could penetrate. New age instrumental music wafted in the background and aided the effort. After an hour she gently placed a towel over me, signaling the end of the massage. “Don't try to leave the table too soon. I'll be out back with Comet.”

About twenty minutes later I found Pam sitting on the patio. “I feel much better. I might live,” I announced.

“We're all anxiously waiting to find out.”

Pam went inside to pack up her table. When she came back out to say her good-bye, she delivered it with a parting shot.

“I know you're familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Have you ever thought about checking into getting a service dog to help you?”

Americans with Disabilities Act? Service dog? Come on!
That stuff is for people who are much worse off than I am.

I started to respond, stopped, and then just sat there, too perturbed to speak. Finally Pam said, “All I'm trying to do is subtly suggest that you're getting worse, not better.”

“You call that subtle?”

She plowed ahead. “What about Comet? She's intelligent, strong, and calm. And she absolutely fawns over you.” Comet stretched and stood up in apparent agreement.

“Let me try a housekeeper first, okay? Anyway, Comet is a rescued racer. She's not designed to be some kind of helper animal.”

“Have you asked Comet? Wolf, I have to tell you something. It appears to me that Comet is already helping you in so many ways. You just refuse to notice. That dog is scary smart.”

7

OCTOBER 2000—ARIZONA

Ego is a seductive enemy that makes us lie, cheat, and write bad checks. If you were in a room with me that week, you could have almost heard the feathers plump as I stuck out my chest in defiance. Jenny could come clean my house, but I was not about to have my groceries delivered, hire a personal chef, or look for a service dog. The food poisoning had been a onetime setback. I would be just fine on my own. Bring it on!

Comet could certainly smell the manly hormones as she observed my strained efforts around the house. Her serene gaze followed me, or if her eyes were closed, her ears twitched in the direction of whatever clumsy racket I was making. A nervous determination fueled me, in sharp contrast to the greyhound's amused and calm demeanor. As I huffed and puffed, I couldn't escape the feeling that Comet had conducted her own assessment of our situation. She was just waiting for the right moment to give me a stern lecture about slowing down, accepting the moment, and making the most of it. Despite my hunch that Comet might be onto something, I couldn't stop myself from blundering forward.

At 2:45 a.m. on the night after my food-poisoning fiasco, I got up to fetch some Gatorade from the fridge, tripped over the coffee table, and cracked my rib cage on the table's corner. I crashed to the floor and stayed there, in too much pain to move. The morning came. It passed. By midafternoon it still hurt to breathe, and I remained prone in the same spot on the carpet where I had landed the night before. These freak accidents were getting to be a habit.

Comet had once again been locked inside the house all night and half a day. “Go ahead and pee on the carpet, Comet. It can always be cleaned,” I urged her. She slowly got to her feet, turned to the wall, and settled back down with her butt facing me. There had always been a keen independence to this greyhound, and it was never more obvious than when I said something that embarrassed her or was just plain wrong. Telling her to pee in the house fell into both categories. My anguish over her predicament made me curse myself out loud.

Nearly twelve hours after my fall, I heard a knock at the front door.

“Come in,” I called. No response. I could turn my face just enough to see a shadow framed by the door's stained glass panel. After many long seconds the shadow started to retreat. I took a deep, agonizing breath and yelled,
“Come in!”

Dan and Charlotte, a retired married couple, lived across the street and were the neighborhood eyes and ears. I had given Dan a key to my house in case of emergencies, and now he stood over me shaking his head as if this was exactly what he had expected.

“I knew something was wrong when your newspaper was still in the driveway,” he said.

“Can you let Comet out?” was my instant request.

As the greyhound relieved herself in the proper locale, Dan guided me to the couch and handed me the Gatorade that had escaped in the night.

“Should I take you to the hospital?”

“No, thanks. There's nothing anybody can do about a broken rib. By tomorrow I'll be able to get around again. I've got enough painkillers to get me over the hump.”

No more than a week had passed when, as I was walking Comet on a nearby trail, a desert lizard took a bite out of my big toe (with midwestern hubris I had worn open-toed sandals). The accident tally was now at three. When the skin started to turn black, I went to a podiatrist who prescribed a series of antibiotic injections and said, “If we can't get it under control, we'll have to consider tissue grafts.”

Undergoing tissue grafts was a much more pleasant prospect than talking to Freddie, but at this point I knew I had to bring her up to speed. These mishaps were simply bad luck, or so I told myself, but when linked together it sure looked like I wasn't keeping my promise to her. To soften the blow, I began the conversation with a little light humor. “I always knew there was a good reason why I wouldn't let the girls have a pet gerbil. They have teeth.”

“Steve, you have to get more help. I mean it! If I have to, I'll quit my job right now and be on the morning plane. Don't make jokes.
C'est pas drôle
!
”

Humor had always been my default position when I felt cornered into dealing with my physical woes. It was the only approach I could take, given the way I was raised. My mom and dad both came from large, poor farm families who tilled the glacial soil of Iowa, the birthplace of John Wayne. My father had learned from his own family that when facing illness or injury, silence was a virtue.

Throughout his youth, Dad's parents fought to overcome the brutal poverty of the Great Depression by selling grain for rock-bottom prices. There was no money to pay for doctors, and health insurance was a fantasy on the order of buying a brand-new tractor. When Dad's mother and many of his eight brothers and sisters suffered severe complications from diabetes, including having limbs amputated, they did not talk about it. When some of them died young from the disease, the family bore the losses without complaint. There wasn't any room in the emotional budget for openly grieving or railing against fate. When my father was diagnosed with diabetes in his midfifties, he carried on the tradition, never expressing fear or discomfort. It was expected that I would do the same. For me to acknowledge vulnerability, even in a self-deprecating joke, was actually an improvement over my father's seamless stoicism.

Freddie knew all about my family history and appreciated my attempts at humor, gallows and otherwise. However, the frustration in her voice as she begged me to get with the program told me that the comedy routine was doomed. But if I couldn't deflect my situation—particularly my physical pain—using denial and jokes, how
was
I supposed to handle it?

Chronic pain does more than hurt. It turns you inward and shrinks your life down to a narrow tunnel of endurance. What makes the effort bearable is the hope that someday you might find relief. But although there were specific causes for much of my pain, it had long ago defied simple treatments. Some of my problems could not be directly connected to a specific anatomical defect or identified on an x-ray. All too often in recent years, my own macho upbringing was echoed by the very experts whose help I sought.
Suck it up, pilgrim!
Some health providers with real medical degrees thought that chronic pain was “all in your head.” Bones heal and nerves regenerate. This attitude was always summed up with the phrase, “I don't see anything on the MRI.” If it can't be identified and fixed, it doesn't exist.

The more enlightened medical practitioners recognized that injuries and trauma could impact the body in ways that are still not fully understood. Over time, constant severe pain can change the nervous system by affecting peripheral nerves. As it continues, this condition can change the spinal cord and affect different levels of the brain. Years of uncertainty and lack of a concrete treatment can depress a person to the point of contemplating suicide. Even a person like me.

At the time, ending my life seemed like a reasonable plan. The doctors had stated that my problem could not be fixed. If my spine could not be repaired, I could never have my life back. If I couldn't regain my health, Freddie would forever remain the family breadwinner. If I couldn't be the person my daughters had grown to know and love, what was the point of going on? None. Within six months of being fired from my law firm, I had seen the logic of cashing in on my life insurance policy. It made total sense. Without hope, nothing else did.

A war between my emotions and what passed for rational thought raged every minute of every day. Just when I would conclude that I was a born coward and grant myself permission to pull the plug, genes that had been passed on for generations would taunt, “What a baby! You goin' to give up at the first sign of trouble?” That was always countered with a more studied argument. “You should at least leave your family with financial stability.” Detached, I would watch the drama play out at a distance. Every once in a while Freddie would telepathically detect something in the air, repeatedly calling me from work. “You aren't acting right. You aren't thinking of doing something stupid, are you?”

“
What are you talking about? Of course I won't do anything stupid. What do you think I am, crazy?” With that, I would hustle back to the mental movie, sitting on the edge of my seat, wondering what the outcome would be.

By the time I moved to Sedona, I had already been in significant constant pain for three full years. I was continually juggling medications in search of the right cocktail to suppress the burning and cramping. I was furious at myself, my body, my former partners, and the unfairness of it all. I believe one reason Comet decided to come home with me that day in Flagstaff was that she knew I needed to cool down. Comet's approach to life was entirely different from what I had been taught. She was not stoically enduring her painful memories, nor was she denying them. She definitely wasn't fuming over them. No dog, not even Comet, would calmly accept a life of cruelty. But to fret about having been born a racing greyhound, riding in cages from track to track, and then being abandoned would have been futile. It would have wasted the time she had left. Comet seemed to understand that.

With Comet more than other dogs, I was always asking myself if I was reading human motives into canine behavior. Yet I am convinced that dogs can think critically and recall past experiences. My daughters once adopted a sheltie named Chip whose former owner, a man, had abused him. Chip was unfailingly loyal to Freddie and the girls, but he wouldn't give me or any other male the time of day. I know that Comet, too, thought about her past. I only had to watch her flinch whenever the breeze from an open window blew an interior house door shut. It wasn't the noise that made her cringe; she wasn't afraid of sound from any other source. It was the memory of kennel doors banging in the wind while she lay abandoned at the Tucson track. Yet Comet was not demoralized or mistrustful. Her gleeful willingness to enjoy her new life was a revelation.

J. M. Barrie, the author of
Peter Pan
, once observed: “The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he hoped to make it.” Consider me humbled.

IT WAS TIME
to cut the excuses and get moving. I needed help more than a few times a week, and with more than just grocery shopping. A service animal was the only option anyone had suggested, so that was the one I went for. If it meant I had to accept a label I detested—
disabled
—then I would do it. Eight silent days had passed since Freddie and I had spoken, and I had a strong suspicion that the next time we talked, I'd better have something new to say.

The only thing I knew about the Americans with Disabilities Act were those parts that dealt with penalties for discriminating against disabled employees. I had no clue about the provisions that applied to dogs that helped people. In fact, the only “service” dogs I was aware of served as guides for the blind. Those dogs were always Labradors, golden retrievers, or German shepherds.

A little research revealed that in 1990 the ADA had greatly expanded both the category of people needing assistance and, potentially, the type of animal who might provide the help. Disability now encompassed any “mental or physical condition which substantially limits a major life activity.” And service animals were not limited to dogs or any particular breed but were now defined as animals who were “individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability.” Dogs who retrieved objects from the floor, pulled wheelchairs, turned on light switches, provided balance, or alerted to seizures and other medical conditions were included, as long as the help was directly related to a disability. Medical facilities, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, and all other businesses open to the public were required to allow service animals to accompany their “disabled” handlers.

This meant that if I had such an animal, I would be allowed to take him or her with me to all those places, and even onto airplanes. The idea was tempting. It would be nice to have a helper to hold the door open for me while I used my canes. It might hurt less to get out of a chair if there were an assistant to pull me up. And it was awfully embarrassing when a spasm hit in public and I ended up sprawled on the floor or sidewalk. A service dog could provide support when a spasm threw me off balance.

But a greyhound as a service dog? I had never seen or heard of such a thing. There were good reasons why those other breeds were the dogs of choice. They were big and strong enough to pull a wheelchair but not so large that they couldn't lie next to a restaurant table or on the floor of public transportation. They were smart and had an intense desire to please, which made them easy to train. Most important, they were raised as pets, which meant that they were already socialized and well mannered when they entered the training program.

A rescued racer, in contrast, would seem to be a terrible choice. The typical greyhound spends most of the day resting, which certainly raises a flag about endurance. Greyhounds have little or no desire to please by fetching—it's not an attribute of the breed—and their fragile teeth make the task even more disagreeable. Then there is the potential for getting your arm yanked from its socket if a greyhound spots a cat down the block and decides to give chase.

Yet Comet exhibited all the behavior I had witnessed in exceptional working dogs. She was curious and confident; friendly but properly focused; strong, loyal, and intelligent. The fact that greyhounds seldom bark was an added bonus. And I had reason to believe that far from being genetically inappropriate as service dogs, greyhounds might be ideally suited to the task. My forays into greyhound history had uncovered a quote written by the Greek historian Arrian in 124 AD: