Remembering Luna

I’ve never been nostalgic. I have trouble looking backwards. I don’t even like to look at old pictures more than once or twice a year. But as I get older and my mind fades, I find that this habit has made me forget parts of the past, and I don’t want to forget Luna, our sweet beloved dog, who we had to put down this week after a couple years of decline, so I’m doing what writers do and writing down some memories.

In 2005, my wife Angela and I were settled into our first house in the Bryant neighborhood of Seattle and getting ready to start a family. Like many couples in similar situations, we thought a dog would help us figure out how to work together to care for another living being, someone who was totally dependent on us. Plus, we’d both had dogs as kids and thought they were sweet and fun.

In retrospect, it would have been kinder and better for the world if we’d gone with a rescue dog, but it was our first dog and we just didn’t know what we were doing, so we did what knew how to do, and searched Craigslist for various breeds. Fox Terriers. Airedales. Kerry Blues.

But the previous Thanksgiving, I’d visited my brother in El Paso, and his girlfriend Kimberly, who took care of rescue dogs, had a little Boston Terrier named Tony. He was one of the crazy Bostons, running all over the place, and liked to dig up the solar lights in the backyard and lay them out in a line.

But the thing that really drew me to him: During a break after Thanksgiving dinner, the mother of one of Ryan’s friends stepped out into the backyard to smoke a cigarette. She sat down to light it, and Tony came zipping across the yard, jumped up, and snatched it out of her mouth. It was the coolest spontaneous trick I’d ever seen from a dog, so I was advocating pretty hard for a Boston.

Then we saw Luna’s picture in an advertisement and that was that.

We contacted the breeder — she was supposedly born on a farm in Union, Oregon — and paid them a few hundred bucks, maybe $500.  The breeder’s daughter said she’d be in Seattle in a few days anyway, so we made an appointment to pick her up.

We’d been at my friend Kevin’s birthday party, so I was a few drinks in and Angela drove. We met the woman in a ground-floor apartment off Aurora Avenue, a dismal four-lane highway that stretches through North Seattle.

The litter of puppies was crawling and tumbling around on the floor behind her. They were all about six weeks old, and just tiny, about the size of my foot. Three rambunctious males, and cowering behind them, the submissive runt of the litter, the only female, with a mostly white head. That was our dog.

The breeder gave us papers supposedly proving she was a pedigreed Boston, descended from a mother named Princess Care Bear. They weren’t from the American Kennel Club, but from some outfit in New Orleans we’d never heard of called the Continental Kennel Club. I always kind of suspected that she wasn’t from a farm in Oregon at all, but had been spawned at a puppy mill at some house in North Seattle — a friend of a friend’s wife who lived near there ran one out of her garage, and I think it was kind of common — but it didn’t matter. She was ours.

I remember riding home in the front seat holding her tiny body in my hand as she whined, missing her litter and her mom. I promised her that we’d always take care of her, no matter what. We threw possible names out to each other, and eventually decided on Luna. No particular reason, it just sounded right.

A bandmate of mine, upon hearing we’d gotten a puppy, joked that it was like having a drunk baby in the house — they don’t know anything, they’re clumsy, and they make messes all the time. It wasn’t that bad, but it was far more of a commitment and challenge than we’d anticipated. But we also fell completely in love.

Over the next fifteen years, she gave us so many memories. Like:

• Cowering at the top of the stairs mewling, because they were too big for her to climb down. It took a few weeks for her to learn.
• Imagining that she would sleep on a dog bed on the floor, then going on a business trip and discovering that Angela had invited her into the bed. Once a dog is in the bed, the dog never leaves the bed. She spent most nights right between us, or nestled between my legs.
• Puppies have teeth like little needles, and they fall out, just like human baby teeth. Only because dogs are dogs, they can’t tell you they lost a tooth. So instead we’d just find these little things that looked like grains of rice lying on the floor.
• One time a cooked Cornish game hen fell on the floor and she devoured it in about two bites. She was less than a year old and less than 20 pounds and we were sure she was going to die from the chicken bones and we were horrible dog owners who were going to be scolded by all our friends and families. Nope. She was perfectly fine. Didn’t even miss her next meal.
• I was playing music with my band in the basement, and the loud bass bothered her so much that she climbed up on the door of the open dishwasher and cowered.
• We were getting ready for a party and had left some cheeses out on the kitchen table. She jumped up there and started eating them, moving from most-stinky (Pt Reyes Blue, which she finished) to second-most-stinky (some kind of Brie, which she half-finished).
• Training her to chase a ball in the house to try and give her some exercise during the rainy Seattle winters. She was not a natural retriever, so I had to reward her with treats the first few times so she’d bring the ball to me. Soon enough, she figured it out and would retrieve dozens and dozens of times before getting bored. She’d chase the ball skittering on the hardwood floors and bouncing off the walls.
• Traveling to the beach in Oregon when she was about 6 months old. I had her on a leash as she dragged me to the beach, and I stumbled into a hole, spraining my ankle and putting me on crutches for the next few weeks. From then on, we let her off leash, and she was great — she never ran off, and always came to us when we called.
• When Angela was pregnant with both kids, Luna knew immediately and curled up against her belly in bed instead of sleeping between us. Both times, she beat the pregnancy test.
• When we first took Ava home from the hospital, Luna had this look on her face like her job had just gotten harder. Four years later, when we brought Marlon home, it was the same look only even more stoic. She always stayed near them. Whenever we went camping or traveling with her, she’d position herself between the kids and the door to the outside world, ready to attack anybody who’d even consider hurting them.
• She appropriated a baby blanket from Ava, a turtle head connected to a satiny green and tan square, and used to run around the house dragging it behind her like a totem. We left it somewhere on a road trip to visit my mom in California when Ava was 3.
• She was the fastest small dog I’ve ever seen. She’d run huge circles in fields or on the beach, outpacing every other dog at the dog park except the Italian greyhounds and whippets. Her ears would pin back on her head and she looked more like a rabbit than a dog.
• One day I was walking her in our neighborhood in Seattle and a woman asked me what kind of dog she was. We talked for a minute and I explained why I liked Boston Terriers so much. A few weeks later, she and her husband were walking their own — a male they named Nemo. We became friends with the couple, Sarah and Felix, who owned a restaurant in the neighborhood called Pair. Later, they hired Angela as their pastry chef, and she helped them design the menu for and open their second restaurant, Frank’s, down the street.
• We would dog-sit each other’s dogs. Nemo was bigger and stinkier than Luna, and we used to call him cigar-butt. He had this thing about balloons — he hated them and would always try to pop them. We could occupy him by tying a balloon to the ceiling so it was dangling just out of reach. He’d jump and bark at it, and Luna would bark at him. Luna continued to bark at balloons her entire life, especially the sound of two balloons squeaking together, until she was too old to see or hear them.
• One of her tricks: About a block from the house, I could take her off the leash and yell “go home!” and she’d run as fast as she could, straight for the front door.
• She loved playing with many breeds of dogs at the dog park, but had a particular affinity for bigger dogs like Australian Shepherds, who would try and herd her as she tried to outrun them in these huge sweeping arcs, and for pit bulls, who are half-terrier, half-bulldog, just like she was. We were always worried a pittie would go bad and attack her, but it never happened. The only incident like that was with an Australian Shepherd at Baker Beach in San Francisco, who picked her up by the scruff of the neck like she was prey. I knocked the shepherd down with my hands, picked Luna up, and chewed its owner out for poorly training her dog. It wasn’t fair, but I was upset and my adrenaline was high. Weirdly, she never liked other Bostons much. We took her to a few meetups in Stern Grove but she always stayed on the sidelines and growled any time one of them got too close her. She was unusually submissive and calm for a Boston, so I think she just thought the others were annoying spazzes.
• When we moved to San Francisco, the house sold much faster than expected and we had to pack up and make a lot of arrangements in a hurry. Luna always stayed behind in the house with the dwindling supply of furniture, and had a questioning look on her face. Angela and the kids eventually flew down while I drove our car down I-5 in November, making it over the Siskiyous just ahead of the snow. She was in my lap in the driver’s seat, uncomplaining and wedged up against the door handle, the entire time, 14 hours over two days.
• She loved Ocean Beach and Fort Funston and would run in circles in the sand for hours. She’d get into these trances where she’d dig holes, or try and dig a ball out of a hole only to have it go deeper and deeper.
• One time, I was cleaning the barbecue downstairs and there was a huge pile of ashes. They smelled like meat, so she started eating them. That was one of the few things she ever ate that made her actually sick. She got into the kids’ chocolate Easter and Christmas candy several times, which is supposed to be fatal to dogs, but she never even threw up from it.
• We noticed she was starting to get old about three years ago when her vision started to fade. She’d see me throw the ball at the field, but would set off in the direction I threw it then lose her way. Over time, her vision faded entirely, and she stopped chasing balls altogether, first in the field, and eventually in the house.
• Her vision got bad enough that she was no longer able to navigate stairs. I learned this the hard way on a very hot day when Angela and the kids were out of town, vising her family in Tennessee, and I was home alone with her. I’d just given her a bath to cool her down and she walked into the hallway, then tried to turn into Marlon’s room to lay in the cool carpet. But instead, she mistook the open path to the stairwell for  his room, and went tumbling down the landing. I was sure she’d broken her neck or leg, but she was able to stand and walk and seemed OK. We eventually bought a baby gate for the top of the stairs.
• Her hearing faded as well. At first we thought she was just ignoring us, but then we realized it was serious when she no longer came running when we opened the metal container where we kept the dog food.
• Her walks got shorter and shorter. She used to be able to go over Mt. Davidson off leash, but eventually that became too much for her, and one time she slipped off the path into the bushes because she couldn’t see as well as we thought she could. So we started taking her around the block, always on a leash, then just down to the end of the street, and then finally just let her go to the bathroom in the front yard. Sometimes we’d carry her a block and she’d be able to walk back. Other times, she’d make us carry her both ways.
• A little more than a year ago, when she was 13, she developed this night time habit of waking up several times — at midnight, and 2, and 4, and 6 — and begging for food. Her belly also started to get distended, and her eyes got this reddish look in them. Eventually, we took her to the vet and they diagnosed her with Cushing’s Disease, which is usually caused by a tumor on the adrenal gland, either near her pancreas or on her brain. They did a scan and didn’t find anything on her pancreas, so we assumed she had a brain tumor. But we started giving her drugs for the Cushing’s, and she perked up again and stopped waking us up multiple times most nights. But there were still plenty of bad nights, and she never slept later than 5:30. Often, she started around 4.
• The mornings were her most active time over the last few months. I’d carry her up the stairs, give her her first (or sometimes second) breakfast with her pill, then let her wander around upstairs. She would always push open the doors to the kids’ bedrooms and check on them, at least once, sometimes several times. Most of the rest of the day, she’d sleep, sometimes in weird places like under the piano bench or curled up in a corner. One time, she fell asleep in her water bowl. Another time, she crawled behind the oven and started barking when she realized she couldn’t get out. Animals often try to hide when they’re sick, so we knew the time was getting close.
• A few months ago, right after the coronavirus lockdown started, I was working at home when Ava came downstairs and noticed she was lying funny with her mouth foaming. I roused her and she started pacing, off-balance, and continued to walk in circles like she was in a trance for about an hour. We weren’t sure what had happened, but a couple weeks later she was in bed with us and started having a full seizure, kicking and foaming, then proceeded again to pace for about an hour. We took her to to the vet and as they were examining her she got nervous and had another seizure. They told us what the possibilities were — most likely a brain tumor, but at the age of nearly 15 they agreed it didn’t make sense to spend money on a canine neurologist to get a final diagnosis. They prescribed her anti-seizure medication and advised us to begin thinking about the end. The drugs seemed to work for a while, but she still had at least one more seizure that we noticed.
• On Wednesday night, we were in the car together and her body became strangely stiff. When we got home and let her out to go to the bathroom, she couldn’t stand up and kept listing to the left, turning and falling. Her ear on that side of her head was flopped over and at some point we realized she’d also hurt her eye, probably when she fell. We hoped that she might recover overnight but we woke up and she still couldn’t walk, so we called the SPCA and made the final arrangements to bring her into emergency care. They were extremely sweet and professional about the whole procedure, and I cannot emphasize enough what a great organization they are — please donate if you can and you love animals at all. And if you’re looking for a good vet in San Francisco, there’s no better place.

These discreet incidents don’t really capture the full nature of what it’s like to have a loyal, friendly dog as part of your family for 15 years. The hardest adjustment, so far, is realizing how habitual her presence had become — I still move to let her out as soon as we get home, or expect to hear her snoring, or think I can just walk over and give her a belly rub.

Dogs are strange and wonderful creatures. They’re not people — sometimes they seem like it, and you almost wish they could talk to you, to tell you what they’re thinking, to comfort you by saying the right words, but in fact they’re probably not thinking about much at all. They live in the moment and they make us live in the moment a little more, too.

We’ll never forget her, but at some point we won’t miss her quite so much and we’ll probably be ready to get another dog.