Got a Happy Story is a community gathering every Monday night where we share stories large and small that have put a smile on our face. The Happy Story diary exists as a way to anchor the community in hope and comfort while we do the hard work of maintaining a permanent Democratic majority. Everyone and all sorts of stories and pictures are welcome. Consider this an open thread.
Yesterday, I got a call from my ex that one of our dogs, Jasper—one of two we got from the same litter eight years ago--wasn’t going to make it.
Before everyone who is presently thinking that andsarahtoo just doesn’t get the point of Happy Story, hear me out.
I drove the hour out to the house to sit with one of my teen stepdaughters and my two young sons while my ex took the dog and my other stepdaughter to the emergency vet. The house is a neighborhood hangout for most of my stepdaughters’ friends, so one girl stopped in to sit with us. By the time my ex returned, emotions were running pretty high, and we all stood out in the yard sniffling in the dark while the grave was prepared.
"He was such a good boy," I said. And then: "Do you remember how his sister taught him to jump over the babygate between the kitchen and the living room, so he could get snacks for her? Or how he wouldn’t bark to be let out—his sister had to do it for him?"
Everybody laughed, just a little.
"The first time he barked, after you took Savannah to your house, he scared himself because he had never had to bark so loud. He barked at a squirrel, scared himself and ran into his kennel," added one of my stepdaughters.
Everybody chuckled again.
"Remember how he was afraid of the cat?" I said. "Seventy pounds of dog versus eleven pounds of cat, and if she was perched on top of his kennel he refused to come out. He’d cry until someone came and moved her."
At that, everyone laughed a little harder. It had been funny—our great big Springer cross reduced to shivering and whining by a kitten. There was something rather Monty Python about it, and I took a lot of pictures of Jasper shrinking in terror from his itty bitty nemesis.
We kept talking, and thinking. The way he loved balls so much, he would eat them in joy, and then be sad they were gone. The way he would linger under the pantry cupboard if he knew there were jellybeans in there. The way he broke his runner a couple of times a year, but it didn’t matter—as long as you clipped the broken chain to his collar, he was under the impression that he was confined. The way he once ran away to the park across the street and, despite the house being located within sight of said park, failed to be able to find his way home—but that was OK, because when I found him twenty minutes later he had simply adopted a likely-looking family he encountered on his travels. The way he so earnestly—and vocally—believed that this time, every time, he might not survive the bath. The way he very sincerely woke me up at 3 am for months on end to alert me that raccoons were stealing our garbage. The way he could get 90% of his doggie body on the sofa, and still believe that he was not violating the no-dogs-on-the-sofa rule by keeping one paw on the ground.
And as we stood in the darkened yard, sniffling and laughing and hugging and talking, a remarkable thing began to happen. Our makeshift memorial worked, in exactly the way that memorials are intended to—we started to focus less on our tragedy, and more on our good luck in having had such a dog for eight wonderful years.
It was an accident that he came to us—I agreed to take one out of the litter, and I chose his sister. When I was bringing her home to introduce her to the family for the day, his mom’s person said, "Take this one too, just for the day. They play really well together, and he doesn’t have a home yet." Despite my stern warnings—"He does not stay," I told my stepdaughters—Jasper managed to arrive at an arrangement with my then husband within just a few hours. My husband sat in his chair, reading the paper. Jasper—then just eight weeks old—bumbled over and planted himself on the toe of his boot. My husband looked down. Jasper looked up.
"Maybe we could keep them both," he said to me in the kitchen that evening.
More than eight years later, it is obvious that bringing Jasper home "just for the day" was one of the happiest errors in judgment I ever made. He was a wonderful dog—gentle even with the most curious baby, a walking aid for young cruisers who even (much to my chagrin) occasionally let small children eat the kibble out of his bowl. He spent eight years preventing the neighborhood squirrels from enacting their plot to take over the world, and once assisted in home redecoration by wagging his feathered tail in wet paint and then taking off. An avid digger, he was prevented from hitting the earth’s core by the short digging season here in New England, but he was passionate about every attempt. He liked snow, jellybeans, peanut butter crackers, toddlers who throw food on the floor, and the heat register in front of the sliding glass door. He could balance a milk bone on his nose for the duration of his willpower, and he idolized his sister so intensely that he never learned to lift his leg to pee. Beloved by all who knew him, he will be missed and fondly remembered as a part of the family.
We were sad last night, until we started to talk about him, and telling our stories made us feel a little better. My older boy is a first-grader; I let him take the day off from school because he had trouble sleeping. He sat with me sadly this morning, and we drew pictures of Jasper... and we felt a little better. And we felt a little empty at dinner tonight, so rather than our normal routine—to share a fun thing from our day—we shared a fun thing about Jasper. And we felt a little better still.
This is my happy story: for eight years, we had one of the best dogs ever. Thanks for everything, Jasper, and wherever you are, I hope there’s jellybeans.