Eloise Photogravure

May 05, 2022

A book I was going to write in her honor. Never got

around to it. Worst words in the world for a writer.

But I did write this not too long ago…

Eloise Adamantium

We have this pug named Eloise, whom we rescued from the side of a county road in Salem County, NJ. She was standing in front of a guardrail and looking runnerish. So we stopped and tried to approach, reassuring as we asked her to stay still. With typical pug cooperation she lit out across the road away from us and into the path of a large SUV. Correction. She ran headfirst into the front wheel and tire of the SUV, which knocked her several yards across the asphalt. (Didn’t check the hubcap for a dent but probably should have.) When we got to her, me cursing the blameless driver all the while, she was shaking herself and getting ready for another escape attempt. Caught her. She had some cuts but she was doing what we would come to know as a pug squirm. There followed half an afternoon of seeking out a vet open on the weekend and when we did they took her in, stitched her up and told us to come back later. We explained she wasn’t our dog. “Good looking pug,” they said. “Maybe three years old. Somebody is probably looking for her. We’ll spread the word to the pounds and let you know if somebody claims her.”

Nobody did claim her. Well, at the end of the required waiting period we did claim her, paid her hospital bill, and took her home to a house already filled with two rescue greyhounds and assorted rescue cats. Neither one of us knew from pugs. Not sighthounds obviously. Not shepherds or setters. Not terriers. Something completely different. We discovered what amounted to a pug cult on YouTube, people who had pugs and nothing but pugs, who seemed to rule the roost, the refrigerator, and their enraptured owners. Okay, we said. Live and learn.

That was 15 years ago. She’s 18 now. Working on surviving our tenth canine rescue — seven greyhounds and three terriers, all of them agèd or at least aging. She is not a typical pug in two ways. First, she has never once been top dog. She has had to learn to put up with the size and majesty of greyhounds and Scottish Deerhounds. As well as the automatic dominion of Scotties and cairns. Second, she is not fat. (Even the Westminster pugs are fat — disgraceful.) What she is is indomitable, jealous as hell, eternally hungry, and seemingly invincible. Come dinner time, she gets so excited she often head-butts our cairn, who is impervious but offended, because he’s crazed to get dinner too. (When you have old dogs, this is always a good sign. It’s when they stop demanding dinner the way a bank robber demands cash in his shopping bag that you start worrying.) She spends her days like a greyhound, snoozing on the couch, sleeping maybe 14 hours in every 24. Twice a day she jumps fearlessly to the floor, often on her ass, to charge downstairs for breakfast and dinner. When it’s time for other outings, she is almost unable to move, has to be pulled, pushed, lifted, and eased to the floor, where she staggers stiff-legged to the stairs. There are times when she loses her footing on the stairs (no, you can’t help her) and she tumbles a few steps, kind of like a small bouncing medicine ball, arriving at the end just fine.

Here’s the thing. She weighs maybe 20 lbs according to the scale. Our 8-yo cairn Sidney weighs more than 30 lbs (and then some… he likes eating too). Eloise is a lot harder to pick up. She seems to have more specific gravity somehow, like the equivalent of a dog-shaped bowling ball. When she returns after an outing she announces her return to the couch with a pug bark, then — after being hoisted HEAVILY up — a pug hip or body check that can take the wind out of you, and a face washing procedure indistinguishable from a repeated series of head-butts on your knee. Worse, when you are trying to move her off the couch, it’s almost impossible to do. Like she’s magnetized to the cushions.

So I have done some research. Saw all the Wolverine movies. Why did no one claim Eloise, the handsome pug pup? Why did they leave her on the side of a road where her chances of mortality were, well, significant AND deniable? Thinking somebody has been genetically altering pugs, creating a new breed we could call Pugverines.

The only explanation that makes any sense,

We have one. She may never die.

**********

Just sharing. You know. The way we do on Facebook. Eloise is as “Meta” as they come. Have I qualified for the New Age Tech that will save all the billionaires? Sure I have.

We grew old together. Eloise, me, and Pat. Both spry when we met. Both crippled at the end.

Here’s the thing. I have always made my predictions a point of pride for their accuracy. This time I failed. Eloise died this morning at age 19 going on 20. I was wrong. She was human after all.

Time, I suppose, to back all the way up, and see why I made the prediction I did.

The vet said she was about three when we got her after that collision with an SUV, about a month after our wedding. She wasn’t really a fit for us in the grand scheme of things. At the time we had greyhounds, which are the exact opposite of wriggling, eager, demanding, hip-checking, head-butting pugs. Greyhounds love you but maybe not quite as much as the couch and the Heaven of racing no more, because just resting is so, well, restful. Greyhounds are beautiful, even with their ear tattoos and racetrack scars. Pugs are, well, you know, pugs.

We’d seen a TV show once about pugs and their fanatically devoted owners, who seemed to be happily bullied by them, content to let these (not so) little canine martinets run and sometimes even ruin their lives. Was this going to work? Guess it had to. God’s plan and all that. First, though, we had to name her. Took our cue from the only literary source that seemed to apply. Kay Parker’s Eloise.

The one on the left, not the right. She was never a Weenie.

The book begins, “I am Eloise. I am six. I live at the Plaza.” Followed by lots of mischief, skittering up and down halls, between floors, tormenting the Nanny and the Tutor. Were we prepared for such a persona with our racetrack veterans?

I forgot. We also had a Scottish deerhound. Name of Psmith. He was a bit like the P.G. Wodehouse character named Lord Emsworth. Peer of the realm type stuff. He raised his eyebrows at Eloise. Sniffed her a bit, then lay down for a nap. He was four times bigger than she was.

The Empress of Blandings? I kid. Both deerhounds loved Eloise.

He proved to be a calming influence, as were the greys.

Here’s how Eloise might have put it if I’d ever gotten around to writing her book:

“When you’re surrounded by sighthounds, you’re not going to get much more than occasional attention. Dealing with this is not covered in the Pug Handbook, although all-around adaptability is. Pugs are honest. That’s number one on a fairly long list of what you have to adapt to. They’re bigger than you, faster than you, and God knows, better looking, at least in conventional terms. You become content with being background for long periods of time. The fancy people dazzling up and down the Plaza’s corridors and under the crystal blaze of the chandeliers of romance are shadows that you learn are destined to come and go like movie stars, while you keep skittering and mischief-making when you feel like it. So I lived through seven greyhounds, two deerhounds, and three terriers from the barbaric land of Scotland. Survived them all. Loved them all in my own taciturn way. They never undignified me. To my recollection, only the biggest deerhound, Raebert (who was as close to God* as I’ve ever been), ever made space for me on the couch or his bed on the floor.

*Except for Psmith. Who was God without the anything that makes pugs feel small.

And I even consented to posing with Raebert for photos with sunglasses, but they never dressed me up in sissy-girl outfits. They saw the latent clown that exists in all pugs, and I was happy to have fun with them. What I had that the other dogs I lived with didn’t have was near-human patience and longevity. In the end, at the end, they —the humans— will love you for having been with them through such heights and depths of drama, death, beauty, and even poetry. When you know they do finally love you for sure, for your loyalty and quiet love, you can go to your own reward, pug mission accomplished.”

**********

She really was going on 20 when she went to her reward. Not much video, not enough surely, but this is a taste…

So this morning she’d had three bad days in a row. She’d been through the same losses in recent months as we had been. Max the cat, Elliott the cat (a great friend of hers), and Sidney, the indomitable cairn, who died in my lap just like Cassie the cat before him, while Eloise watched. She knew I wasn’t walking much better than she was. There for all the deaths, including Elliott a month before, whose muted dying wails I knew she’d heard before and I heard from her last night.

He’s not torturing. He’s squeezing, telling them to let go.

After Sidney, I guess we betrayed her. Unless we didn’t. We got two much younger small dogs. Mere seven-year-olds.

Tommy the Border Terrier. Legs like Elliott (won’t explain now…).

And a new throw of the dice — Zippy the Papillon….

We weren’t trying to replace Eloise. But maybe she thought so. And maybe she knew they were younger than Scotties and Cairns on their last legs she would have to console us for.

At any rate, as they were ripping and tearing, she began finally to leave us, maybe knowing she’d be seeing us again before too much more time passed. Don’t know, can’t say, although she heard me say on that last night just how much we’d always loved her, throughout those many years of devotion, a canine witness to all our loves and losses among dogs and cats. A few pics to conclude…