The Price Of Love

(One of my fav articles from Readers Digest, a long long time ago...)

If only I could keep the kids from naming him. That would be the trick.
“No family needs two dogs,” I began dogmatically. And so I invoked the Bauer Anonymity Rule, which prohibits the naming of any animal not on the endangered species list. That includes anything that walks or squawks, sings or swims, hops, crawls, flies or yodels, because at our place a pet named is a pet claimed.
“But we gotta call him something,” our four children protested.
“All right, then, call him Dog X,” I suggested. They frowned, but I thought it the perfect handle for something I hoped would float away like a generic soap powder.
My no-name strategy proved a dismal failure, however. Long before the pup was weaned, the kids secretly began calling him Scampy, and before I knew it he had become as much a fixture as the fireplace. And just as immovable.
All of this could have been avoided, I fumed, if Andy, a neighborhood mutt, had only stayed on his side of the street. But at age 14, this scruffy, arthritic mongrel hobbled into our yard for a tête-à-tête with our blue-blooded schnauzer, Baroness Heidi on her AKC papers, who was a ten-year Old Maid. Before one could say “safe-sex,” we had a miracle. We were unaware that Andy left his calling card until the middle of one night during our spring vacation at the beach. I thought the moaning sounds was the ocean. But investigation revealed it was from Heidi, whom Shirley, my wife, pronounced in labour. “I thought she was getting fat,” I mumbled sleepily.
When morning brought no relief or delivery, we found a vet who informed us that a big pup was blocking the birth canal, which could be fatal to Heidi. We wrung our hands for the rest of the day, phoning every couple of hours for an update. Not until evening was our dog pronounced out of danger.
“She was carrying three,” the doctor reported, “but only one survived.” The kids took one look at the male pup, a ragamuffin ball of string - red string, brown string, black string, tan string, gray string - and exclaimed, “Andy! He looks just like Andy.” And there was no mistaking the father. Heidi’s only genetic contribution seemed to be his schnauzer beard. Otherwise, he was an eclectic mix of terrier, collie, beagle and setter.
“Have you ever seen anything so homely?” I asked Shirley.
“He’s adorable,” she answered admiringly. Too admiringly.
“I only hope someone else thinks so. His days with us are numbered.” But I might as well have saved my breath. By the time Dog X reached ten weeks, our kids were more attached to him than barnacles to a boat’s bottom. I tried to ignore him.
“Look at how good he is catching a ball, Dad,” Christopher pointed out. I grunted noncommittally. And when Andy’s folly performed his tricks - sit, fetch, roll over, play dead - and the kids touted his smarts, I hid behind a newspaper.
One thing I could not deny: he had the ears of a watchdog, detecting every sound that came from the driveway or yard. Heidi, his aging mother, heard nothing but his barking, which interrupted her frequent naps. He, on the other hand, was in perpetual motion. When the kids went off on their bikes or I put on my jogging shoes, he wanted to go along. If left behind, he chased squirrels. Occasionally, by now, I slipped and called him Scampy.

Then in the autumn, after six months of family nurture and adoration, Scampy suffered a setback. Squealing tires and brakes announced that he had chased one too many squirrels into the street. The accident fractured his left hind leg, which the vet put in a splint. We were all relieved to hear his prognosis: complete recovery. But then a week later the second shoe dropped.
“Gangrene,” Shirley told me one evening. “The vet says amputate or he’ll have to be put to sleep.” I slumped down in a chair.
“There’s little choice,” I said. “It’s not fair to make an active dog like Scampy struggle around on three legs the rest of his life.” Suddenly the kids, who had been eavesdropping, flew into the room.
“They don’t kill a person who has a bad leg," Steve and Laraine argued.
Buying time, I told them, “We’ll decide tomorrow.” After the kids were in bed, Shirley and I talked.
“It will be hard for them to give up Scampy,” she sympathized.
“Especially Christopher,” I replied. “I was about his age when I lost Queenie.” Then I told her about my favorite dog, a statuesque white spitz whose fluffy coat rolled like ocean waves when she ran. But Queenie developed a crippling problem with her back legs, and finally my dad said she would have to be put down.
“But she can get well, “ I pleaded. I prayed with all my might that God would help her walk again. But she got worse.
One night after dinner I went to the basement, where she slept beside the furnace. At the bottom of the stairs, I met Dad. His face was drained of color, and he carried a strange, strong-smelling rag in his hand.
“I’m sorry, but Queenie’s dead,” he told me gently. I broke into tears and threw myself into his arms. I don’t know how long I sobbed, but after a while I became aware he was crying too. I remember how pleased I was to learn he felt the same way.
Between eye wiping and nose blowing, I told him, “I don’t ever want another dog. It hurts too much when they die.”
“You’re right about the hurt, son,” he answered, “but that’s the price of love.”

The next day, after conferring with the vet and the family, I reluctantly agreed to have Scampy’s leg amputated. “If a child’s faith can make him well, “ I remarked to Shirley, “then he’ll recover four times over.” And he did. Miraculously.
If I needed any poof that he was his old self, it came a short time after his operation. Watching from the kitchen window, I saw a fat grey squirrel creep toward the bird feeder. Slowly the sunning dog pulled himself into attack position. When the squirrel got to within a dozen feet, Scampy launched himself. Using his hind leg like a pogo stick, he rocketed into the yard and gave one bushy tail the scare of its life.
Soon Scampy was back catching balls, tagging along with the kids, running with me as I jogged. The remarkable thing was the way he compensated for his missing appendage. He invented a new stroke for his lone rear leg, moving it piston-like from side to side to achieve both power and stability.
His enthusiasm and energy suffered no loss. “The best thing about Scampy,” a neighbor said, “ is that he doesn’t know he has a handicap. Either that or he ignores it, which is the best way for all of us to deal with such things.”
Not that everyone saw him in a positive light. On the playground, some youngsters reacted as if he were a prime candidate for a Stephen King horror flick. “Look out,” shouted one boy, “here comes Monster Dog!” Tripod and Hopalong were other tags. Our kids laughed off his detractors and introduced him as “Scampy, the greatest three-legged dog in the world.”

For better than five years, Scampy gave us an object lesson in courage, demonstrating what it means to do your best with what you’ve got. On our daily runs I often carried on conversations with him as if he understood every single word. “I almost shipped you out as a pup,” I’d recount to him, “but the kids wouldn’t let me. They knew how wonderful you were.” It was obvious from the way he studied my face and wagged his tail that he liked to hear how special he was.
He probably would have continued to strut his stuff for a lot longer had he been less combative. In scraps in which he was clearly overmatched, he lacked two essentials for longevity – discretion and, partly because of his surgery, an effective reverse gear.
One warm August night he didn’t return at his normal time, and the next morning he showed up, gasping for air and bloody around the neck. He obviously had been in a fight, and I suspected a badly punctured windpipe or lung.
“Scampy, when will you learn?” I asked as I patted his head. He looked at me with those trusting eyes and licked my hand, but he was too weak to wag his tail. Christopher and Daniel helped me sponge him down and get him to the vet, but my diagnosis proved too accurate. By midday, “the greatest three legged dog in the world” as gone.
That evening Christopher and I drove up to the vet’s office, gathered up the black plastic bag that held Scampy and headed home. Scampy’s mother had died at 15 a few months before; now we would bury him next to her in the woods by the garden.
As we drove, I tried to engage Christopher in conversation, but he was silent, apparently sorting through his feelings. “I’ve seen lots of dogs, Christopher,” I said, “but Scampy was something special.”
“Yep,” he answered, staring into the darkness.
“He was certainly one of the smartest.” Christopher didn’t answer. From flashes of light that passed through the car I could see him dabbing his eyes. Finally he looked at me and spoke.
“There’s only one thing I’m sure of, Dad,” he choked out through tears. “I don’t want another dog. It feels so bad to lose them.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. Then, drawing on a voice and words that were not my own, I added, “But that’s the price of love.”
Now his sobs were audible, and I was having trouble seeing the road myself. I pulled off at a service station and stopped the car. There, I put my arms around him and with my tears let him know – just as my father had shown me – that his loss was my loss too.