People say she was such a sweet dog. I tell them, no, you are not even close. She was the best dog who ever lived.
The ones who don't own dogs, who never have, require convincing. They don't get it. They think I'm just being hyperbolic. But the dog owners understand. They, too, know what it means to have the best dog who ever lived.
When Rose was young, back in Eureka, Illinois, I used to take her for walks over toward a cow pasture a few blocks from our house. She regarded the cows with awe, until one day when she decided to sniff the fence. I didn't realize it was electrified until too late. I could never get her close to the cow pasture again. As soon as she realized we were headed in that direction, she would stop walking and I couldn't pull her any closer.
A few years later, I got a Mylar birthday balloon. The next day, while I was gone, the balloon, floated around the house in the gentle breeze of the forced-air heating system. When I got home, Rose was shaking like a leaf, terrified by the monster that was pursuing her.
My boyfriend John, who was a big fan of vintage piano music recordings, called her Rosina Lhevine. She came to answer to that name, and since she adored John, she responded eagerly to it. Eventually, after John and I split up, she forgot that name. I tried calling her Rosina Lhevine a few years later, and she didn't respond at all.
John and Rose and I drove from Illinois to the east coast one year during Christmas break. We went to my sister's house in Baltimore before heading up to New Jersey. Rose had her first encounter with Troy's cat. In her puppy-like eagerness to play, Rose managed to exasperate the cat in short order, and it lashed out with a hiss and gave her a scratch on the nose. Rose spent the rest of our visit avoiding that cat for fear of her life, and from then on she regarded all cats with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.
Once John brought over some homemade cornbread, one of his favorite foods, to share with me. We left it on the kitchen table in a plastic bag while we were doing something else. When we came back it was gone. We found only a few crumbs at the top of the stairs, Rose's favorite spot. No baggies. Just crumbs.
Rose loved tissues and toilet paper. She was unable to resist them. She pulled them out of wastebaskets. She unraveled rolls of toilet paper, and if I left the closet open where I stored the spare rolls, they might be chewed to smithereens.
When I took Rose for walks around Greenlake, she seemed to prance. People often commented on it. If she saw something or heard a noise in the distance, she stood up on her hind legs. She seemed to be able to balance on her hind legs almost indefinitely.
She was still a puppy when she was twelve. She barely slowed down at all. When we were outside, parents with toddlers would tell them, Look at the puppy! I called her Baby, because she was such a baby, with her deep-seeded fears of balloons and tricycles and cats and tupperware.
After Rose had a series of seizures last August, she didn't handle stairs very well. Sometimes when I was upstairs cooking or eating or watching TV, she would sit at the bottom of the stairs and bark, but I couldn't coax her to try the stairs. If I did, she'd make it up two or three of them and give up, sometimes sliding backwards to the bottom. But in the last month of her life, she started coming upstairs again. Even the night before I had to say goodbye to her, when no doubt she was enduring some measure of pain, she came upstairs and sat with me while I watched "24."
Rose was the best dog who ever lived. But in the end she let me down. Surely the best dog who ever lived should have lived forever.
