The Life and Times of Thurber James Michener

Obituary of a Beloved Dog

When he came to me sometime in 2007 it was during the short stint when I lived in the Mt Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. My usual home of choice back then was a magical, wooded, small old mill town just outside the city that functioned very much like it was cut off from the rest of the world. His given name was Scruffy. It fit the look of his coat, for sure; dirty blond with streaks of white and, unless groomed, a mess. He was officially a mixed mutt of some kind of terrier and some kind of dachshund. Despite being a perfect dog, he had somehow been through two families before me. The family that raised him from puppyhood eventually had a baby who turned out to be highly allergic. I can only assume they were heartbroken to let him go. I was told they also had cats, who essentially raised him judging by his overly dignified mannerisms. He trotted lightly as if en pointe with his head and bushy tail held high, and throughout the day would daintily lift and lick each paw clean, over and over. He was even-tempered and very rarely barked unless he was startled, or if I deigned to leave him tied outside of a coffeeshop for three minutes, when he would mewl mournfully on and off until I returned. When other dogs barked or growled at him, he would stare at them in silence as if startled by their uncouthness. In truth I believe he believed he was a cat. His second family told me he was two years old, and had put him up for adoption because they worked long hours, leaving him alone for hours in the double digits; “he deserved better” they said, truthfully. I got him groomed and gave him a more dignified name — something to live up to rather than live down — and dubbed him Thurber, after the humorist who often sketched and wrote lovingly of dogs.

At the time I was attending the Maryland Institute College of Art, and because art school, we could bring our pets to class as long as they were registered (complete with a neon dog bone tag displaying the school logo). Few of my peers took advantage of this, as many lived in student housing, so there was the guy with the parrot, the girl with the lizard, and a few dogs running around campus including Grisby, a professor’s beloved French bulldog who used to charge at a bemused Thurber, snorting and honking in the style of the breed, then run off, satisfied that Thurber had been sufficiently dominated for the day.

Thurber was gentle to a fault. Small excitable children would pull his hair and he would grimace patiently while the adults moved to separate child from dog. We were walking down the street once and a loose pit bull came racing toward him, teeth bared. Thurber bowed his head in complete submission and prepared for the worst, making no movement and letting out a soft whimper as the dog drew blood from his ear, his owner running and yelling behind him, and me jelly-legged and useless, trying to pick him up out of harm’s way in slow motion, as if in a dream with weighted noodle arms. He knew how to behave around cats, letting them know that he was there if they were interested in being friends, but that otherwise he’d leave them alone.

Thurber’s innate quietness and focus earned him the title of my best student from more than one professor, for he would often sit in a chair next to me or on the floor, and mimic the attention the class gave to the speaker — except did a better job — tracking his or her with his head and eyes to the point of the professor breaking lecture with an uncontainable smile or giggle awarded in his direction.

The exception to this was one of my art history classes that was helmed by a pair of visiting professors from Germany who were very serious (in a parody of Mike Myers’ black-turtlenecked Sprockets kind of way) and seemed angered by this non-distraction distraction — this coup of unsettling cuteness — and in our second week of class, without any prior hint of disapproval of myself, nor my dog, the female of the pair screamed at me mid-lecture such things as DO YOU NEED ATTENTION SO BADLY THAT YOU MUST DISRUPT OUR CLASS WITH THIS DOG! Thurber and I quietly got up before she was even done and amid whispers and stares from our horrified classmates. I spoke with the department chair who had heard the screaming from his office nearby (and who knew Thurber’s temperament and unblighted reputation) and I reflexively dropped the class.

About a year before graduation I was assaulted by a former friend, and two years after that I could no longer stand to live in the small town that bore so many of the scars. It was the place where it had happened, and infinitely more painfully, the place where I was disbelieved, mocked, and shamed for my pain by its familiar townspeople, some of whom had been mere acquaintances with whom I had always been friendly, some of whom had been friends for a year to ten years; yet who were, as ever, too wrapped up in their own assumptions, prejudices, and pettiness to contemplate the complexity of something they simply had not witnessed, and I had. In the full expression of Small Town Americana, as if with pitchforks and torches, they had bothered to put together a patchwork of a story from the gossip itself, attaining all “sides“ and opinions of everyone who wasn’t there, except for the only one that mattered — mine. The few beloved souls who stood by me, each in their own way, were not those whom I had known the longest or had been closest to as you might expect, but simply those who had taken and more importantly — understood —sociology and/or gender studies, or those whose own past experiences informed the empathy the others so deeply lacked. Thurber became my constant in deeper ways I will never fully be able to describe during this time, and responded to each new wave of betrayal and pain by being in touch with my feelings; as though he were one of my limbs or internal organs. I’ve never had a dog so deeply bonded to me and so aware of my state of mind, and because my trust in the community I had loved, had so dramatically faded, I placed all the love I had left in this dog, knowing he could never hurt me unless he was parted from me, like my own little pantalaimon. He licked my tears and put his head on my chest or dove between body and arm and seemed to make it possible for me to breathe. He followed me around extra closely, he was happily affectionate when I was happy, and gently affectionate when I was sad. I came to understand that the magic of this town I had loved, was merely how I had seen it — along with everyone else who comes to love a place to the point of fiction. Every American small town has a dark underbelly once the veil of what feels so deeply like community is lifted, so easily and under the slightest pressure. When I saw it for what it truly was without that love, I left with an effort that would not have been possible without my constant. All eighteen pounds of him in fur, bone, blood, and a love of bacon and peanut butter.

New York greeted us fully — as it does for so many folks blessed with a rich inner life and their complementary, innately contented dogs. A lot of people come to New York expecting it to give them something beyond itself. The trick to the Ephronian magic is ironically to love it for everything it is without you in it. Thurber and I rented a small room in Spanish Harlem from a Chinese girl about my age who worked as a Scottish barmaid (in a kilt and everything). I walked Thurber around the Harlem Meer on that clear and cold first night, bundled in a puffy coat and looking up at the stars competing in vain with the lights of the city, both mingling together indistinguishably in reflections on the dark body of water, thankful for the scope of that city and its cloak of anonymity in numbers — glorious numbers — that she offered in such contrast to my former life. Sometime the next week I emerged from a little coffeeshop to find Thurber sitting on the bench just outside the window with a charming old man in tweeds, who chatted with me a bit and described him as the perfect dog, with the perfect name, for the perfect city. Each day thereafter was an adventure, me and my beloved dog, walking miles and miles of a bright, bustling, diverse, gorgeous city and soaking it all in with relish and glory. Thurber was a hit with these millions of strangers. He was a child-magnet, especially as I was now dying the little natural tuft of white hair on top of his head candy pink and blue, which Thurber put up with magnificently. I learned not to take him with me when I was on any kind of schedule, which was not that often due to the perennial underemployment of one with an art degree. On the 6 train near Wall Street once, he lost the battle after a long day of walking and fell fast and deeply asleep in my arms with his head draped over my shoulder, despite the loud and rough rocking of the train, melting the whole car full of suited professionals with awws and clucks and giggles, including one otherwise formidable gentleman who said, in a thick New York accent from a set of sparkling porcelain teeth, “Tough day on Wall Street for that little one too, eh?”

Many bodega owners beckoned in a mix of gestures and broken English, that he come inside too, rather than leave him tied outside when I would stop in for a 95 cent cup of coffee. A street vendor would ask if Thurber could have a free hot dog. He once humped a wealthy-looking poodle in Central Park, during a monthly early morning event called Bagel Bark which was a doggy meetup in Central Park with free coffee and bagels for their humans. We moved to a slightly larger room on Roosevelt Island, with two young Turkish diplomats who liked cooking and going clubbing. The island, a long thin noodle of land from which you can easily observe Manhattan on one side and Astoria on the other, suited us very well. Thurber and I rode the bright red aerial tram over the East River so many times and the novelty never got old. He was, for the two years we lived in New York, as much a New Yorker as any dog could be.

Bodega Dog

A seemingly perfect job brought us to the opposite coast, and Thurber boarded a plane with me to become a pair of San Franciscans for a job with a startup that was the reality show I was not expecting. It was a small group of people living and working together, offering each other constant weed or ecstasy; the CEO having just turned old enough to drink and lacking the requisite experience. It lasted five weeks, and then we found ourselves stranded in this new city that was so unlike New York or Maryland. Thurber and I made the best of it and decided to stay awhile, and see how things work out. We shifted from Airbnb to Airbnb month to month, sometimes staying in hacker houses with characters who stole our food out of the communal refrigerator. Even the worst of it was bemusedly surveyed, as if Thurber and I were merely watching it all unfold before us, a never-ending reality show about San Francisco life that was always on. We were happiest wandering the city, watching people, as we had done in New York, or dipping our feet and paws in the cold ocean, shivering in the fog. While carrying him across the Golden Gate once I noticed a sign forbidding dogs ten seconds before I sheepishly passed a police officer, who patted him on the head and said “Cute little rule breaker” and continued on, hashtag cute privilege. A drunk guy on one of San Francisco’s rather pitiful systems of public transit, shouted “GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR LITTLE SQUIRREL FOX!” as we departed the train, in brilliant reference to Thurber’s meerkat-like physicality.

Then one day, I met an engineer named Jason, and Thurber had a daddy. Jason introduced us to his three-ounce parrot who dominated the hell out of Thurber, boldly running up to him once in awhile and biting him on the nose while Thurber ran away, evidently both creatures unaware that Thurber could end the green feathered life in an instant. Shortly thereafter we moved in with them, into a big house in Petaluma, which is all chicken farms, vineyards, sunshine, and families with children, about 45 minutes North of San Francisco. When Thurber protested at the intruder in what he thought of as his bed, Jason built him a kind of raised crib or co-sleeper complete with steps, so that he could sleep next to me on the other side of the bed.

One night when we were discussing how alarming it is to watch how fast Thurber eats, scarfing down his kibble so quickly that he was often in danger of choking, Jason decided to build him a kind of automatic food robot. The acrylic and metal boxy result, with visible electronic parts, had a red cone-shaped hopper which you filled with a scoop of dog food, then you pressed a large red button to start, and a spiral auger would carry a few pieces of kibble at a time into his bowl, little by little. Thurber was fascinated with this purring god of food distribution. He would stare at it, wagging his tail and waiting for the next dose of kibble. He had such a Pavlovian response to the little robot noises it emitted, that once he managed to start the machine himself with the hopper empty, his tail wagging in pride and expectation. We ran over to quickly add food to the machine, howling with laughter but wanting to reward the sudden stroke of dogbraining.

The Thurber Feeder 5000

About two years ago, Thurber had a seizure in the middle of the night, waking us up with the most terrifyingly pitiful howling sound, like a human child screaming, his mouth frothed and his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and all we could do was wait it out, take him to the vet the next day, hear that he may be older than we thought he was, and be given medication. From there, he slowly declined. His eyesight and hearing faded, he could no longer stay in his bed at night but would flop right out of it, potentially injuring himself. Or he would get up in the middle of the night, wander into a corner, and whimper, believing himself to be trapped there because he forgot how to turn around. More vet visits. We were told he might have dementia from one vet, he might have brain damage from another. Jason built a larger bed for him with wooden bars on it like a crib, so that he could sleep without falling out or wandering off and hurting himself.

The Thurber Asylum

We started putting him in cloth and velcro diapers full time because he no longer seemed to remember his training, and we tried desperately to time his poops. To his credit, and honest to god, the first time he woke up having shit his bed in the middle of the night, was the night Donald Trump won the election. I will always remember that night. It was surreal and disquieting anyway, but around 4AM we woke up to the yelp that told us something was wrong, and our noses told us what that was before we reached his bed. After that, he shat the bed at least once a week, sometimes days in a row, no matter what we did to try to get him to do it sometime during the day. Often he slept right through it, rolling around in it all night until morning, when I would be faced with giving him a bath and washing everything.

💩💩💩

He started getting stuck in corners for twenty minutes at a time during the day, but he didn’t cry. He would just stand there, staring at the wall for twenty minutes. “There goes Thurber, looking out the window” Jason would joke. We joked a lot about all of it, cause it was the only way we could stand constant reminders of his mortality.

Six months ago he started walking in small tight circles. At first, he did it only a little bit, turning just enough to notice the pattern. It was always to his left. Before long, he’d be at it for hours, even to the point of exhaustion when his back end would drop and he would continue to drag his lower half around, like a disoriented mermaid on land. On the plane to Nova Scotia, where we spend Christmasses with Jason’s family, he needed to spin so badly he tried to do it on the plane, and the only thing we could do was take turns manually turning him in quiet circles, on our laps, and hope no one on the dimly lit plane noticed or protested. We began to understand that however this translates in the dog brain, it was as though he essentially feels dizzy when he is still, and needs to spin to not be dizzy, to feel normal. All of this was heartbreaking, and we went to the vet over and over again in the hopes of finding some way to keep him comfortable. “He might be as old as eighteen” one finally said. This changed the conversation, as we thought he was closer to 12. It makes sense, really. With two families before me, some of the math may have been a little fuzzy on both ends, and there we were with an elderly dog we thought was middle aged.

Jason, who has ruined all other men for me for a lot of reasons, but chief among which, because of the love as a verb he gave to my beloved dog, once again built Thurber something that made his life better; a kind of automated dog bed turner robot that you plug in, which turns the dog for him while he rests at varying speeds and in his preferred direction. The invention made Thurber so much more comfortable, and he could finally spin around in circles without effort. We would look at it too long and begin to feel dizzy, but to Thurber, it was the greatest thing in the world. He spent hours and hours, in the days leading up to his death, resting peacefully in this ridiculous contraption we called the Dementia-Go-Round, a dreamy look of contentment and relief on his face that made us laugh and cry in equal measure. Our only regret was wishing we had thought of it months ago.

Prototyping the Dementia-Go-Round

Thurber continued to decline quickly, and started yelping with pain or confusion or both, in the middle of the night. He was no longer interested in food, so we fed him baby food out of a squeezable packet, the nozzle placed in his mouth like a bottle. We spent several fitful nights being woken up by his crying, and would burst into tears because we were helpless to make him comfortable. Our regular series of vets maintained it was all just part of the brain damage or dementia, but one finally referred a doggy neurologist. When we took Thurber to see her this past Tuesday, she told us that this was almost certainly a brain tumor. The only way to find out for certain was to put him in an MRI, but because he was likely so much older than we thought, and had so many other issues including a heart murmur that was worsening by the day, joint pain, blindness and deafness, we were looking at spending a couple thousand dollars just for the closure of knowing for sure what had already happened, all while subjecting him to more discomfort. So we chose to end his pain. A kind woman in scrubs came to our house the next morning to find Thurber resting comfortably on his now Brain-Tumor-Go-Round. I scooped him up in my arms and held him while he received the first dose that put him to sleep, and when he was out he got the second dose that ended his beautiful eighteen pound life that had given me so much. The woman left for ten minutes to give us some time. The familiar heaviness of his little sleeping body in my arms that I have been privileged to know for a decade, morphed into the unfamiliar, strange heaviness of a limp sack of mere liquid and components that lack the tension of things with life, his large round eyes glazed thickly with a new and foreign emptiness, his head unsupported by what suddenly felt like a fur-covered paper bag where his neck had been, absurdly tied to an unequally heavy head that lolled horribly as we propped it back up under my chin, so that we could hold him a few more minutes, heaving with sorrow, the residual warmth of his body leaving his ears first, as we stroked them for the last time. The kind and empathetic woman, who is in exactly the right industry, returned with a small pad and a blanket. Thurber’s shell was carefully laid upon it and gingerly swaddled. I watched as Jason lifted the bundle to his chest, hugging him tenderly as though Thurber could somehow feel it, and carried him out to the waiting car. This was, irrationally, the worst part. For years I had worried about him, fearing his loss, kidnap, accident, every nightmare scenario; and now someone I had met less than an hour ago was driving his body away to be kept in a cold place, then burned, the ashes placed in a piece of ceramic which I will receive in roughly two weeks’ time. The rational mind attempts to counter, to tell me he can’t feel any of it or be afraid like he always was at the vet. These thoughts are what we are left with. The past few days we’ve had to deal with his things as they present themselves to interrupt any attempt at normal activities with fresh impulses to sob. The opened bag of unfinished dog food in the fridge, his collection of medicines in the kitchen cabinet below the shelf with the whiskey glasses, his two beds, the little inventions that improved his life.

Never do you regret the inability to communicate properly with a dog like you do when they are dying. We had our own systems of communication of course, and they were more than enough the rest of the time. I tried to tell him how much he meant to me every day, and I tried to tell him again at the end. But because he can’t fully understand, I am telling you instead, how loved he was. And maybe I can get to a point where I can assume he always knew.