Gidget: Rewrite

When I was in third grade, my parents got divorced, and my mom got a dog and a new boyfriend. Eleven years later, and my dad still hasn't had a new relationship, or anything other than fish to keep him company in the 50s house he lives in. The divorce happened around the time my mom was shopping for a cat; the beast she eventually bought only knew a divided home, and loved no one but me. When she eventually ran away, no one made posters. It seemed I was the only one who cared.

After, she just slapped a dog-shaped band aid on my wounds and called it even. 

I loved the pug puppy, but my brother and I were still afraid of her. We hadn't had a dog before, and even though she was tiny, bug-eyed, and lazy, her claws and teeny, pin-prick teeth hurt us occasionally. For the first few weeks, we ran from her, terrified that she was going to draw blood. Perhaps it wasn't her, but was some lingering fear from the furry, grey devil who had just taken her leave from the household. Maybe, in retrospect, we were afraid of the change she represented. My brother was only young, four or five years old at the time, and he likely wasn't thinking that deeply. I probably wasn't thinking that deeply about it. 

It was a safe fear, though. She was something we could channel all of a child's terror into. We were just discovering the world together; I was more sheltered than he was, but it was the divorce that launched us into reality. Fairy tales were crumbling around us like old castles, and we learned that love doesn't always hold people together. 

Gidget loved us despite all of our hangups about her. It was silly, that we were afraid, given that she was so kind compared to Heidi the demon cat. She chased us when we squealed and ran from her, yipping happily, big eyes bulging out of her tiny skull, tongue lolling out of her open mouth. Back then, her black fur was soft and shiny, although now it's going brown along her spine and more often greasy than not. 

It evolved from a fear into a game of “Poison Dog,” where she had the ability to kill us with merely a touch. We ran, giggling, and trapped her under baskets while she just panted and spread out across the floor under the basket, waiting to be let out. When we did, we would sit on our mother's bed and lean over, lifting it up and releasing her, but she was too small to get to us from where we were. She would run around the perimeter of the bed, looking up at us with excitement shining in her brown eyes. 

She's not like that anymore. 

Now, with arthritis aching in her joints and a flap of skin hanging from her right back leg, she spends more time in bed than anywhere else. Her little, curled tail still wags vigorously when she sees me, although her hearing is completely gone. She doesn't bark anymore at noises outside of the house; she only does so when she sees the other dogs barking. My mother bought her a comfortable dog bed in December, and she splits her time between that and underneath the dining room table, to hide from her bulldog bullies. 

The game was a play at real fear. We were just getting a sense of the things that were out there, the divorce showed us the reality of relationships, and television taught us the rest. I started reading books at a higher level, getting into themes that I didn't know how to deal with quite yet. Gidget was an escape. She gave me love when my parents fought over differences in raising me, over custody, over Jason. He's now my stepfather, and one of the worst decisions that my mother has never made. But without him, I wouldn't have my two little sisters, so I suppose there's a reason to thank him.

We dangled our legs between the spaces of stairs and let our dog chase us like a real threat, some imitation of a prey and predator chase. The reward for our predator was cuddling and petting, rather than our bloody meat for dinner. I don't think she would have had the guts. She still wouldn't. It was the thrill of fear without the danger of being murdered. 

As we grew up, new things took the place of our pug fear. Horror movies were our new game, scaring us with things that weren't likely to hurt us, like werewolves, or ghosts. It was a slightly different version of the same thing, but our awareness of the world grew. Fears blossomed with new information. The basics, of course, were ingrained as soon as we could understand them: death, murder, abduction, starvation, homelessness, large animals. They only added on, elaborated themselves, layering on top of one another until we were swamped in fear. Mine differed from his, of course, because he didn't care how high up it was, but I wouldn't mind being in a closet for a while. When I got bit by a wolf spider at thirteen, I never looked at another arachnid the same way again, but after being stung by a wasp in the eye, Brian cringed at the sight of bees. 

Gidget grew older with us, grey hairs around her face, forming a beard and eyebrows that looked constantly quizzical. She had her own fears, although they came later. The smallest dog in a group of three, her two bulldog roommates constantly picked on her. Being chased around the house wasn't as fun for her as it was for us, perhaps because along with the very real threat of being drooled on was the strength of an English bulldog's jaw. 

Gidget is old. Eleven years old, twelve in October. Her acceptance into the family was a change, along with everything else that had been going on, but she's also been through a lot. The average lifespan of a pug is twelve to fifteen years old, and she already has problems. She's been around for over half of my life, for most of my brother's.

Change is difficult. I haven't given much time to thinking about what life is going to be like without her. Before, she was riding in on a wave of changes, lives reshifting and forming around one anther. Her presence was a barely distinguishable event when she joined our family. But with her leaving, she's creating change all of her own. 

I'm terrified.