We Laugh and We Cry

We Laugh and We Cry

Kim’s best friend Cecil died this morning. He had a heart condition for some years and despite Kim’s best efforts to medicate him, exercise him, cook healthy fresh food for him, and brushing his teeth every evening to keep the plaque monster at bay, he still died. We can’t be sure, but the very empathetic vet who cared for him in his last hour said he believed it was his heart giving in which was the cause of death. I don’t know how large Cecil’s heart was, but he swelled the hearts of Kim and me and all who encountered him including several of his caretakers.

I met Kim in 2005 and after a whirlwind romance we quickly became inseparable. We married almost two years later, but by then knew each other very well. It was clear to me that Kim had one of the biggest hearts I had ever known. She seemed to have a limitless capacity for love, which I now know at my mature age is not the norm and is quite extraordinary. It was clear from the start that she adored animals of all sorts even though she had no pets and had only last had a dog as a child back in Wabash, Indiana some forty years prior. I too had had a dog (technically my sister’s dog), a mutt named Puddles for the obvious reason. I had a relationship of mild annoyance with Puddles since he worked hard to break up any baseball or football game my friends and I tried to have. These were the days of free-range dogs and Puddles did not appreciate being locked in the house for any amount of time. My heart was somewhat hardened to keeping pets and I think I probably made that known to Kim, not so much with a vengeance, but more in passing and over time.

In our early days together, Kim and I had company at our South Street Seaport condo quite often. The next generation was coming of age and while Kim had no children (nor had she previously been married), she did have two nephews, Will and Josh. Both young burly rugby-playing young men decided somewhat sequentially to come East young man and find their fortunes. As the Alpha Male of the house it was incumbent on me to label them the Jabrone Brothers in the best or Tarzan and outer-borough tradition. We still kid WIll that he stayed with us for a year. He says it was two months. I suspect it was somewhere in between. Josh had no such compunctions, he settled in for a good long year of being attended to by his sweet Auntie Kim, who doted over him and couldn’t cook enough food for him or do his dirty-socks laundry often enough. Josh was there so long that we had to banish him to the living room to make room for my daughter Carolyn, who came to live with us in the City during her post-graduate year.

It was at the end of that year when Carolyn had decided to get her own studio apartment and was set to move out that things started to change. When I asked her if she had saved any money from her meager salary of $34,000 at Scholastic, the children’s publishing house, she told me she had saved $27,000. To this day I have no idea how she pulled that off, but it was clear she didn’t need my financial support any longer. As we sat around contemplating our upcoming quasi-empty-nest status, a random and uncharacteristic thought occurred to me. I told Kim to sit down and hold onto her hat. She looked at me not knowing what would come out of my mouth next. I said to her out of the blue that I thought she needed to get a dog.

You must understand, this was a woman with a vast love of animals that had not been in a position to have a pet for forty years (remember, she was a traveling minstrel of the musical-theater variety). After watching her head do a 360 degree swivel, I saw her immediately start Googling for rescue dogs. There was a three-legged, one-eyed Shitsu named Bella, but there were three takers ahead of Kim. Then she hit on a rescue site that had a Bichon/Poodle mutt who had been picked up on the streets of the Bronx. His name was Brandon and he had just gone into a foster home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We went to go see Brandon the next day and what we saw was an energetic scruff of a dirty white dog that had just been spayed and was still full of beans (he had been crated all day and was none too keen on that program). Kim fell in love with him right away and on the ride home she called to say she would take him. We then set about finding a better name than his foster name of Brandon. By his looks he should have been Spike or Ralph, but we somehow came up with the unique and British-sounding Cecil. It seemed right immediately.

Cecil came home with us the next day and the rest is history. Literally. Two years ago when I had some spare time, Kim asked me to write a book about Cecil to be titled Eat, Play, Poop: Rescuing Cecil, which I dutifully did and self-published as a 90-page libretto (available on Lulu Publishing for a discounted $5.99). It should have been called Ode to a Pampered Dog because it chronicles the life of Riley that Cecil stumbled into by becoming Kim’s source of boundless affection. Over the next eleven years Cecil lived primarily in one of three NYC apartments (one in South Street Seaport, one in Bay Street Landing, Staten Island, and one on Water Street near the Battery). But Cecil also crossed the country with Kim at least four times to spend time at our home in Escondido. He went with us to Ithaca for the few weeks worth of vacation days we spent in that bucolic setting. He was watched by Janet, Ashley, Kristoffer, Natasha and eventually Colleen when Kim had errands to run or vacations to take (Cecil never did do being alone very well).

Last December, in his thirteenth year (the average lifespan of pure-bred Bichon’s, which DNA testing showed Cecil to, in fact, be) Cecil made what we knew would be his final trip West in the car with us. This was not because we anticipated his death, but because we were closing up shop in NYC for ourselves and our City dog and retiring to sunny California. Cecil loved the sunshine out here as most of us aging folk do. He loved living the life of leisure on the deck, on the terrace and on walks around the neighborhood with its vast array of flowing shrubs and trees. Kim noted that she thought he was very happy out here. What I can say is that he was only happy when he was with Kim and he would have been happy anywhere with her.

After getting a bath yesterday and running up the driveway like a pup, Cecil went to bed with a belly full of table scraps, as usual. He had had his medicine, loving administered by Kim. He had his teeth brushed lovingly by Kim. He plopped down in one of his six beds around the house, next to Kim, which was always the determining factor in his choice of bed. This morning he did not wake easily and when Kim saw him in some degree of distress she did not hesitate to scoop him up bed and all and whisk him to the vet. She hoped it was a bad stomach, but she sensed it was more than that. By the time I joined her there she got a call from the vet saying that Cecil was in cardiac arrest and they were trying to revive him. They were not successful and Cecil was taken away from us. He brought us joy and laughter and now tears. As Kim would say, there will be a hole in her heart for Cecil forever. We laugh and we cry, we live and we die, the dog barks and the caravan rolls on into the lonely night.