Our dog Finn passed on this weekend, and I wanted to set down some of the things I remember best of him.
We got Finn on Halloween of 2007 from the Peninsula Humane Society. It’s always been a bit mysterious where he came from. He was, by all appearances, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, which is not a terribly common breed anywhere, and particularly so on the West Coast. He had been picked up as a stray (and had the worms to show for it). How a year-old Toller came to be walking the mean streets of San Mateo was a conundrum. My personal theory is that he was a nobleman of faerie, bound to an animal’s form for some roguish transgression or another.
He must have had some sort of home before he came to us, because he was perplexingly civilized. He took to basic commands very quickly, and came to us double secret housetrained. By this I mean that once, a few weeks after we got him, we went on some errand which ran longer than we thought, so he was locked up in our apartment for much longer than a dog can fairly be expected to hold his business. When we got home, we discovered that he had, completely on his own initiative, gone into the bathroom and pooped in the shower.
He was also an absolute glutton; you could get him to do almost anything for a treat, and we had to be extremely thoughtful about where we left food unattended. I remember one time, when we were still learning about his piratical ways, Jen left a cake on the counter while we went out. When we returned, the cake was just as we left it, except for the spot nearest the edge of the counter, which had been delicately and painstakingly licked clean of frosting.
The thing he absolutely could not be deterred from eating, however — his divine ambrosia — was the mud at the dog park we took him to for his first year with us. We lived in Menlo Park that year, and there was a well-attended dog park within walking distance, so visits there were a frequent occurrence. Finn loved all dogs, and he would play with anybody. There was a regular crowd there that we got to know, them and their dogs. It was probably the neighborhood community I’ve been most involved in to this day. I remember one guy named Jim who stood out because he didn’t actually have a dog, he just loved coming and hanging out with the dogs and the dog owners. I never found out what his story was; he was a strange dude, in an affable way. I like to think he was Finn’s inverse, a dog cursed to dwell in human form. Jim and Finn had a certain simpatico.
But the high point of the visit for Finn was that mud. There was a specific spot, in the lowest part of the park where rainwater gathered and the mud was sodden and clayey, and he would furtively dart in there to take a bite and run away before we could chide him.
It was not great for his digestion, though, that and the aforementioned worms. I remember on many, many nights, at 3 or 4 in the morning, I would wake up, feeling that distinct sensation of being stared at. I would turn to look to the side of the bed, and there in the darkness, the slight sparkle of eyes.
“howr,” he would say, the quietest of growls, “howr.” And I would haul myself out of bed to take him around the corner and let him do his business.
He was tremendously sweet with us, and with other dogs, but all other humans were suspect. He barked his head off at anyone who came anywhere near our front door. We eventually got him to ease off once guests had been duly sniffed and barked at, but it took years. I remember one New Year’s party where one of my friends had managed to get Finn to submit to petting, and he was lying there blissed out with the attention, when suddenly he remembered himself and leapt up to bark at her some more.
There aren’t as many good stories from the years after we got used to him, or he to us, but he was always just an amazingly sweet and kind dog. He would try to be helpful, and figure out what we wanted from him, in a way I’ve never seen another dog do. He was endlessly patient with our boys’ toddlery assaults. And he had the best soft, feathery ears I have petted. I do not think we will see his like again.
