it began in 1995. joe and i fled san francisco and landed in a farmhouse on what had once been my grandfather’s farm. cleared land in eastern north carolina meant long, low horizons and one day we saw a blur streaking across the fields, a dog like none we’d seen before: a terrier, broad in the chest, daintily pawed (he seemed always on tiptoe, cantering like a horse), white with black markings. . . and that snout.

 
a distinctive profile, aznavour-esque, made for rooting things out. we, in a very short leap of imagination called him ‘long nose’. instantly a daily visitor, curling up by our fire, vanishing on an inscrutable agenda, and impressing us with tidy comportment.
he was, we learned, my cousin’s dog, from across the road (a road where my people had lived for hundreds of years, and so to have a cousin, an aunt, an uncle over or down the road implied no daily connection.)
our first smooth fox terrier was a loaner dog; a bigamist, who treated us like his secret, second family, bestowing himself within a pattern and for reasons that seemed mysterious (though which i now, twenty years in hindsight, recognize as no more than want of a second supper).
after a few months we packed up the farmhouse, said tearful goodbyes to ‘long nose’, and moved back to charlottesville, into an apartment that, sneakily, did, then did not allow dogs, our vow to have a fox terrier all our own put bitterly on hold.
in 2002 we bought the house on lexington avenue and began our search. the fox terrier, at the turn of the previous century one of the most popular dogs in america, had fallen from favor, a further indictment (as if more were needed) of our national diversion from the path of good sense. reputable breeders were few and far between. we haunted the internet for months before, unto champions in florida was born a son with a flaw– a hiatal hernia, like an ‘outie’ belly button, purely cosmetic, yet even if corrected surgically, enough to keep this likely lad from the show ring. a discount dog, an irregular, marked down and going fast. we leapt.
or, more specifically, joe leapt. onto an airplane, toting an empty dog bag that would come back full of puppy. it was september 10, 2002, a day short of that first anniversary, when getting on a plane bound for the atlanta airport to hand off an envelope of cash in exchange for a dog seemed– well, dubious. and yet.
i first saw kipper in the driveway behind the house at 709 lexington avenue. at nine weeks, his nose so greatly outweighed the rest of him you could not but laugh. ‘why the long face/ mister smooth fox terrier?’ asked roger angell, the poet laureate of the breed. even then, as a pup, kip had a serious demeanor, enough to stop your laughter, a sense of self so indestructible that your goofing on his nose bounced off him and stuck to you.
slowly we learned him:
tennis-ball-aholic: i wish i remembered the first time he latched onto the devil’s candy. if i threw that ball once, i threw it (no joke– i did the math) a million times. i remember a day-long garden party, starting in the morning and stretching on past midnight, where people came and went, and kip, hour after hour, found a fresh patsy to toss for him. for 14 hours without intermission, thousands of roundtrips on that single day, stopping only when i’d snatch him up, march him inside and set him in front of his water bowl. then, straight back to work. may we all find avocation and occupation joined so seamlessly and with such endless, renewable joy.
dog hypnosist: never one much for barking, instead, he fixed you with his gaze and silently bent you to his will. i was powerless to resist, never unclear about his requirements.
mooch: dog would eat anything– bananas, lettuce, half a red velvet cake. his curse/our blessing was his short stature. had he been able to reach table tops– well, as they say, don’t go there.
garden hoses: the mortal enemy. more specifically, the water emerging from a hose. he tried so hard to kill that water, biting and snarling in mortal combat. again, you might laugh. until you recognized a kindred spirit in his relentless battle against a perhaps-mistaken foe. what if he did think it was a snake? who’s to say he was wrong and i was right? he found a nemesis that could never be stopped or harmed, whose coiling perpetuality suited his need to unleash his inner killer, with no harm done, and a good bath to boot. never mind who’s laughing– who’s the smart one, the buddha?

but meanwhile back to chronology, and some hard truths.
for his first seven years, kip was not my dog; he was joe’s. joe lived like he was dying because, more emphatically than most of us, he was. joe stayed close to home, and so did kip, and all day, every day, they were together. when joe was poorly, kip was a good nurse dog, coiled up on a sick bed when i left for work, when i came home in the dusk. i worried less, through the magic of transference. kip became my– what?– my talisman, my doppelgänger, a vessel for my worry and guilt. he was there when i could not be, because someone had to go off and earn the bacon. he recognized his end of that bargain and carried it out with faithfulness that’s a cliche, until you’re its beneficiary.
that sunday morning joe died, we were at home, just the three of us in the room, then just the two of us. it was the only time i saw kip lose his equilibrium. he encountered a mystery and was undone by it.
as was i. in the days after joe died, i made a terrible choice. i could not conceive of this dog, who had never not known human constancy, in a kennel or box as i went off to work each day in a place littered with staples and nails, with carpet and elevators. so i did what seemed like the smart thing– i gave kip to joe’s mother. she needed some constant consoler, and i knew he was up to the task.
it did not, thank god, work out. joe’s mom reported that kip spent all day, every day, standing at the door, looking out. i saw no way forward.
and then aunt phoebe intervened. phoebe frosch, in an act of such profound empathy and kindness that, even now, seven years later, i can only write of it through tears, saw from her house on the other side of my backyard that i was in a bad way. she worked from home and offered to care for kip all day, every work day, for love. i knew phoebe, of course, but not well. she quickly became my best friend and lifeline, the first person i saw each morning, the last one each night. kip came back from west virginia. each morning we trotted over to phoebe’s house together, each night we trotted back. slowly, as i grew more confident that there’d be life after joe, kip went from being his dog, to being mine. it was a subtle shift, far from instant, rising as much from me as from him.
a year and a half passed this way. phoebe and i each sold our houses within a week’s time. kip and i moved downtown into the pink warehouse, and he became a truly urban dog, the sidewalk his buffet. he came to work with me, until i left my longtime job, then found new love, then followed that love from my longtime town to atlanta and the schoolhouse.
kip, with john and john, with toon, then with sadie, was in his prime at the old inman schoolhouse. two fenced acres, eighteen granite steps up and down which he chased that tennis ball, huge windows of sunbeams to nap in all the day long, the rotating cast of good-natured schooligans– scot and stephanie, abby and andy, dave and anne and pete, for a moment just neighbors, all with dogs, then year after happy year, a pack. for several of those years i was an antique dealer, roaming the south in a car or truck or van, kip by my side, the perfect gentleman, welcome in (almost) every shop or flea market, never once jostling the goods. dog was my co-pilot.

it was when he stopped fearing the thunder, about a year and a half ago, that kip showed the first signs of aging. he’d always cowered from start of storm till its end. we figured pretty quickly he’d lost his hearing. he slowed, subtly; grayed, handsomely. then three or four months ago, around the time of his 13th birthday, he began to lose weight, a little, then a lot. he became ghost dog, a startlingly thin animal. i took to watching as he slept to be sure his breath continued.

and at last– the poop. indelicate, yet incomplete without, permission to skip ahead, and so forth. kip’s weight loss came hand-in-rubber-glove with volcanic incontinence. after tests, the vet said ‘exploratory surgery’; we said ‘thank you, no.’ we took up or blockaded the carpets and waded ahead. i insisted on doing the clean-up; john, bless him, let me. you see, i have this theory: poop equals love. whose butt, without pay, are you willing to wipe? that is who you love. for most of us, it’s a short list. it quickly became a science– basin of hot water dosed with mr. clean (lemon), a scrub brush, dedicated rags, and febreze. gloves for the big messes, but eventually too much hassle for three and four times a day. my hands are chapped as i write from constant washing. i work from home, and as the weeks turned into months, i began to change my job title from writer to ‘dog orderly’.
it. is. what. we. do.
so yesterday, i posted on facebook for the first time in a while, then took the dogs out for their long session. kip, who’d had to be carried up the stairs for a while, now needed to be carried down the steps. he stumbled over curbs, staggered like a drunk, and the question went from idle to urgent. i called the vet, asking questions i already knew answers to.
then i played catch. it took him maybe half an hour to retrieve the ball a half dozen times, a task that would have been a minute’s work the year before. but still, hungry for it, greedy for it, he insisted. our ritual was always to take the ball from him on coming inside (no balls in the house), and he never failed to fight it. until yesterday. after that last session, he set the ball down at the gate, of his own volition. so then i knew. i came inside and bathed him– never his favorite, even less on wobbly pegs. i dried him off, then wrapped in the towel, we both slept fitfully till john came home and drove us to the vet.
in the car, i struggled with that impossible question– am i doing the right thing? slowly at first, then more and more– the answer came to me– that is an impossible standard, not for us to know or judge. would he have had a few more days or weeks? maybe. would my sense, his own sense of his self have diminished over that span? probably. mostly we don’t get to know, not in this life at least, if we’re doing the right thing. we do, instead, the best we can, the best we know how, and hope it turns out to be right, on some scorecard we glimpse only slantwise.
here’s what ii do know:
that when in the car, on the way to the vet, i asked that question out loud, my husband had the wisdom and grace and compassion to answer out loud and clear, “yes, you’re doing the right thing.”
that when the needle came snickersnack, kip’s breath faded at once, and we were once more in the room with a mystery.
that we have pets just so we can rehearse that mystery in ways that do not break us, but that ready us for ends of things, things if not larger, then longer and more self-aware.
that the ancient pact man made with wolves–‘i will feed you, and you will, in turn, treat me as a god’ is the one of the closest brushes we get with the awesome– that which produces fear and wonder such to make one tremble.
that kip the fox terrier, 27 pounds in his prime, 11 pounds at the end, a wisp of skin of over skeleton, was a living bridge, taking me from joe to phoebe, to john, from toon to sadie, from charlottesville to atlanta, and for that i will never forget him.
dog is my co-pilot.
good dog.