Tuesdays With Hadley (Cigar Smoke 11-20-08)

My dog, Hadley, is getting pretty old. He’s about 12 now, and the lifespan for Airedales is between 11 and 14 years. So, because he’s a very smart dog, and because he uses a really big calculator with extra large paw buttons, he knows he’s pretty much a fellow single-digit traveler, much like his single-digit (in expectancy and IQ) owner.

Old Airedale Face has a few medical problems. He was born blind in his right eye, but except for the occasional clunking of his head on an unseen fence post to his right, it’s never really bothered him much. And he did break a hip when he was younger and it never healed right. But up until about six months ago, all in all, he was hanging in there pretty well.

Then things took a more negative turn. He’s got severe arthritis in his back legs and he can barely get up now. He just struggles and struggles and it’s painful to watch. I still take him on hobbles every morning, but he can’t walk far. His legs are unstable and he stops a lot. Reminds me of someone I know.

For the past few months he has not been able to control his bowel movements. He leaves us little “Easter eggs” every day now. He has his doggie bed in our bedroom and every morning we get up and expect to find more Easter eggs. And in keeping with the holiday spirit, Hadley usually gives us something to find.

And it’s not just at bedtime. Marge and I will be watching “Mad Men” on TV and one of us will smell something, and then we’ll look around and see Hadley over in the corner whistling and cocking his long head to the side, and we know it’s time to get out the Easter Basket.

A lot of times he doesn’t even know he’s going. He can be lying down, and almost defy the laws of physics. One time I was sitting on the couch and petting him, and he was licking my face from the front end and depositing on my toes from the back end. I think there’s a message there.

And sometimes he’ll just be walking along without a care in his canine world, and he will be leaving a trail of non-omelet eggs. Marge or I will be running right behind him, yelling tender love yells, and suggesting that he wait for another five seconds and do it outside. But Hadley is his own Peter Rabbit, and he defecates to a different drummer.

Well, after about a half a year of this, and after a number of carpet cleaning bills, and after a general exhaustion of our obscenity options, and after Hadley had laughed at the doggie diapers we got him, we made the decision to at least control him overnight. So we made a little dog segregation area in one of our bathrooms, and we put his bed in there, and we put in a metal gate thing to block him from doing his fecal fun on the carpet. We figured it would be easier to just pick up the eggs from the bathroom tile floor.

We figured wrong. Because Hadley’s legs were so bad, he couldn’t get any traction on the slick tile and he couldn’t get up, and because there was no lack of eggs on the said tile, well, many of the eggs became accessories to Hadley’s fur, paws, side, back, butt, stomach, haunches, toes, tail, and teeth. And maybe even worse, Hadley hated it in there.

So I did something a Republican has never done before — I went to a Home Depot. I had two custom pieces of outdoor carpet cut into the exact sizes I needed. And I bought a carpet cutter tool just to be manly. And, yes, as long as I was there, I ate one of those healthy Home Depot hot dogs.

I bring all the stuff home and here’s what I do: I put Hadley’s bed back in our bedroom so he will love us. I put the two sections of outdoor carpet over our good carpet in an L-shaped area going from his bed around our bed. I close the bedroom door, and I put up the metal gate thing on the other end of the L-shaped carpet section. We now have an Easter egg acceptance area that rocks with both canine consideration and fecal utility. It was Easter-egg-proof. Not a square inch of good carpet to be even aimed at, let alone targeted successfully.

The perfect solution — Hadley loves it, Marge loves it. I love it because I thought of it.

So last night was the first night we used it. Everything went great. Hadley did not whimper. Marge was not fumbling around with the divorce papers. Me and my snore machine were sleeping. It was beautiful.

And then we noticed that the closet door was slightly nudged in. And we gently pushed back the door. And there, lying on the only exposed six-inch area of beautiful, formerly fecal-free carpet was, shall we say, an egg of a different color. The only six inches in the entire room, and Hadley had butt-nudged the closet door to expose it. It was incredible.

Yes, Virginia, there is an Easter Bunny.