R.I.P. Best Dog In The World

So Puck stayed in the kitchen, and walking him became the first task after coming home from school everyday. We were tired, hot, latchkey kids, and we were greeted with huge enthusiasm whether we were up to it or not. Walking Puck consisted of a wild run with abrupt, violent stops throughout the neighborhood (I recall leaping over him to avoid a crash when he stopped on a dime running downhill. He kept us in shape.) Puck had to pee on every tree, and he had to release poop in small, evenly distributed amounts, so that he could cover every median in the neighborhood. To this day I have never seen so many neat little piles of poop generated by such a small dog. We got an industrial strength pooper-scooper.

Puck was not down with snow. 1996.

You could lift him off the floor this way. 1997.

In a strong wind, "Big Ears" probably could've taken flight. 1998.

During the day, maneuvering his pen around, he chewed through a vacuum hose and actually made a small hole in the kitchen wall. And yet, when he was allowed to hang with me and my friends at a slumber party out in the living room, he realized immediately that this was a huge privilege and behaved like an angel. He curled up on the couch and submitted graciously to cuddles and accidental squashes without a peep. Our two outdoor cats were free to crawl right over him if he were in the courtyard with them; if ever accosted by a small child on a walk, he stopped and patiently waited out the awkward patting and ear-pulling. He never bit anyone, he never acted maliciously; I once accidently stomped on him so hard that I almost cried in my apology, but he just climbed into my lap and licked my face. He was not even a face-licker.

(We called it even - he once jerked his head back so hard when I was holding him that he nailed me in the chin. I saw stars. His was a compact, dense little skeleton...)

Throughout his life, Puck believed he was a big dog. When we temporarily moved in with my mom's boyfriend who owned two Akitas, Puck realized that big dogs were the thing. He developed attitude. On walks, whenever he entered the vicinity of another dog's territory, regardless of how peaceful that dog's owner would insist it normally was, ferocious barking and teeth-gnashing would erupt in Puck's direction. We used to imagine he was secretly flipping them all off somehow. Or maybe the testosterone was just wafting off into the air around him. If he saw another dog out on a leash, he went into hysterics and started speaking in tongues, forcing us to scoop him up and head in a different direction, just to end the chaos. ...Usually with him howling over our shoulders as we ran away, mortified.

He pulled on the leash so hard, he was constantly strangling himself on walks, tongue hanging out like a rabid dog. I cringed in shame when a passerby once commented, "Dude, get that dog some water." He dug under the fence in the backyard he shared with the dimwitted Akitas (one of them liked to chase the Goodyear blimp in the sky) and had wild adventures, resulting in a phone call from the pound, or from some kind employee at TRW who found him in the parking lot and put him in her car. When we retrieved him from the pound, he caught sight of us and set up a howl that got the whole place going. We snatched him up and left apologizing, everyone's ears ringing.

At the dog park, if two big dogs started fighting ferociously, Puck streaked towards them and jumped right in the middle. He chased Great Danes and Huskies, and instigated many brawls, long strings of excited drool swinging out behind him. People always stopped to laugh and ask what kind of dog he was.

In his kitchen-pen days, my mom played tapes of NPR's "Thistle & Shamrock" to wake up, so every morning he was greeted and fed to the sounds of Celtic music, a genre that continued to perk him up and invoke hyperactivity for the rest of his life. He had an amazing memory and was a creature of habit. On walks, God forbid you should try to take a different route than the last one. He hated baths, but after his first few, he started jumping right in, because he knew the routine. In one house where he slept out on the patio at night, all my mom did was turn off a few lights, say "Puck!" and point outside, and off he would go.

If we had to sneak any medicine into his food, Puck licked the bowl clean and left a shiny, flattened pill at the bottom. If we forced the pill down and rubbed his throat until he swallowed, you still found the damn thing hacked up out on the patio later. The poor baby became plagued with skin problems and allergies in his later adult life, often sporting the cone and submitting to antihistimines that made him goofy. He became quite skilled at using the cone to dig in the ground and whack the doggy door open. He developed cataracts that reinforced his slightly crazed look from puppyhood.

Aging gracefully (and with a new weapon). 2006.

Puck lived to be 16 years old, his black fur turning almost completely white. Even in his last year, he still hopped up whenever the leash appeared, and made good friends with a puppy in the neighborhood, who came running out to play with him on walks. A few weeks ago, an untreatable pneumococcal double ear infection took over, and the vet said they would normally have to cut the infected tissue right out of his ears, but he was too old for the operation. He went deaf, he stopped eating completely, he stopped pooping. He spent all his time rubbing his ears on the floor and making miserable noises at my heartbroken mom. She had him put to sleep last Tuesday.

We all cried. My brother wrote from overseas to ask us to stop emailing the details because it "hurt too much". My mother, lover of all animals, said, "Please don't surprise us with another dog or a cat," and I understood. You can't replace someone like Puck. R.I.P.

All photos by Simone Snaith and family for LAist.