Suburban Goddess

When I was a sophmore in high school, I brought home the ugliest, tiny, terrier-mixed-breed-yap-yap dog. He had belonged to my boyfriend’s aunt, a 350 pound heifer who accidently sat on the 2 pound dog and broke his front leg. Since they were redneck, and the dog was “broke,” they decided to put him down. So the morning of the planned doggie execution, I skipped my first class, drove my Hyundai to Jabba’s house, and stole the dog.

My parents’ first reaction was swift and sympathetic. “Hell, no!”

I had to plead for this poor dogs’ life. He was so ugly, he could hardly be called a dog. But eventually I convinced my parents that returning this poor pitiful creature to Jabba would certainly seal his fate as alligator food, and they relented. And that is how Peanut came into our family.

As the years progressed, Peanut became my mom’s constant companion. He wore a tiny spiked collar, a testament to the fact that size does NOT matter. If you looked him straight in the eye, he would growl ferociously; if you threatened my mother, he would lunge for your throat with his tiny needle teeth. He had contracted some bizarre flea disease in the first year of his life, a debilitating muscle disease that, in theory, killed the host within two years. That theory held true for his entire litter; all six died within that two year span, except Peanut. Our family veterinarian warned us repeatedly, don’t expect him to live much longer. On occasion the disease would flare up, and Peanut would limp around on three legs, which automatically spawned a wave of sympathy treats from my mother. Years continued to roll by. Sometimes I would watch Peanut limp past my mother, only to put the “lame” leg down when she wasn’t looking. I was absolutely amazed by the manipulative power this dog possessed. I actually came to admire him. I could almost see his fuzzy little doggie lips curl into a smile when I regarded him with suspicion, releasing the stench of rotted shrimp from his aged, yellow teeth.

About four years ago, the veterinarian’s diagnosis was not good. Peanut only had a month to live. Apparently, nobody told Peanut. The veterinarian would look at the dog in absolute amazement everytime my mother brought him in. “This dog should have been dead YEARS ago.” Well, he continued to thrive, taking it one day at a time.

I got the email yesterday that my mother finally had him put down, and I was stunned. The dog was 15 years old. He had managed to thwart death for 13 years, only to die by lethal injection in the end. I asked my mother, “Why? Why did you do it?”

“He was suffering. It was his time to go.”

I thought about all the times I watched that dog manipulate my mother to get his way, and I had to wonder, was it actually real this time, or did his plan go terribly awry? Either way, Peanut has gone to a better place, and another chapter of my life has now ended. One more tie to my childhood has been severed.

This entry was posted on April 27, 2006 at 5:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.