Good Boy, Beau. Stay.

Beau was a gift on my 40th birthday from my closest friend and her husband. In the nearly 15 years since he arrived, nine pounds of belly fat and needle teeth, he has grown ancient by the standards of his breed. And I have grown older. My memory stutters. My knees hurt. Without my reading glasses the words on a page look like ants at a picnic. But my blood pressure is low, my bone scan is good and my mammograms are uneventful. I love my kids, and they love me, and we all love their father, who is still my husband. When I was a mixed-breed puppy, I could never have imagined how simple and basic contentment could be.

And that's what I've learned from watching Beau: to roll with the punches (if not in carrion), to take things as they come, to measure myself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise my nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically, holler, "I smell bacon!" I'm not what I once was, and neither is he. The geese are making a mess of the pond, and the yellow Lab gets to run every morning with her master while Beau waits patiently for both of them to return. Each morning I check to see if the old guy is actually breathing, and each day I try to take his measure—is he hurting? Is he happy? Is the trade-off between being infirm and being alive worth it? And when the time comes to ask myself that same question, at least I will have had experience calibrating the answer. Sometimes an old dog teaches you new tricks.

© 2007