Gene Weingarten - Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs

This is a tribute to old dogs, a celebration

of their special virtues.

All dogs profiled in this book were at least 10 years old

when their portraits were made.

If you ask us which of them are still alive, our

answer is: They all are.

May old dogs live forever.

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog.

Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, those frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, my back bowed, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree, hydrant, or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had turned his walk into a simple process of eliminationa dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs.

On these walks Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harrys size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had once done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Improbably, unprecedentedly, Harry sat. For ten minutes he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his ears alert, his tail atwitch. Our walk home was almostjaunty.

Some years ago, a humor contest in The Washington Post invited readers to come up with Item One from an underachievers to-do list. First prize went to:

1. Win the respect and admiration of my dog.

Its no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find you brilliant even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you even if you are a genocidal maniac: Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.

Consider the wagging tail, the most basic semaphore in dog/human communication. When offered in greeting, it is a dogs way of telling you he is pleased with your company. It cannot be faked. It is hardwired, heart to tail, and its purpose is to make you happy. How many millions of dogs and how many millions of people had to love one another over how many millennia for that trait to have survived?

As they age, dogs change, always for the better. Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealinghis unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness, his unequivocal love. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce.

Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy, and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these things are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But above all, they seem at peace. This last quality is almost indefinable; if you want to play it safe, you can call it serenity. I call it wisdom.

Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that for better or worse our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreateall of it.