Life, Love, Losses and Dogs: A Memoir, With Paw Prints

By Thomas Fensch

This is a short classic autography from a gifted writer — the dog he had as a child; his marriage, the dogs he and his wife had together, and the sudden death of his wife; his second marriage and the long slow death of his second wife from cancer. The dogs they had together and the dogs  he had as companions after the d

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Century Books
• Release date: Jan 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781733329354

Thomas Fensch

Thomas Fensch has published 40 books in the past 50 years--his first three were published in 1970. He has published five books about John Steinbeck; two about James Thurber; two about Dr. Seuss; the only full biography of John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, and a variety other titles.

Book preview

I.

Life, Love, Losses and Dogs

Dogs to the left of me, Dogs to the right of me, Dogs behind me ... ... an infinity of dogs ...

Writer and artist James Thurber once said he had owned 40 dogs in his lifetime. An exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much.

Thurber, a native of Columbus, Ohio, was blinded in one eye at the age of six in a backyard game of William Tell with his brothers. These days, his eye might have been saved, but a hundred years ago, by now, the eye was lost. Thereafter, he was warned not to roughhouse, or play sports with others. He became the fragile little boy, an outcast, the odd little child. He was part of a family we now can call dysfunctional. Highly dysfunctional. His father Charles, was meek, mild and underachieving. The father’s career consisted of a variety of low-level political jobs in Columbus. He never took political bribes because the thought never occurred to him. The family was perpetually poor. Thurber’s mother Mame was a born actress, often a practical joker and usually simply manic. (Manic, perhaps, from being perpetually poor.) They kept moving from apartment to apartment, within a square mile or so in Columbus, one week or one day ahead of when a rent payment was due.

What better friend to a one-eyed shy, lost, lonely boy than a dog? Any dog. Thurber usually had a mutt or two or perhaps three, at one time. Thurber knew dogs: their names; habits and their smells. Years later, he could call them up out of the catacombs of his memory. He became a writer, a cartoonist; eventually The New Yorker magazine was his home for years. He wrote about dogs and drew dogs and more dogs, misshapen dogs, an odd cross between a bloodhound and perhaps a basset or beagle. He gave away dog drawings by the hundreds. He gave them away like smiles, it was once said.

But as his fame grew, as a writer and cartoonist, his other eye began to fail. And, at the height of his career, he became blind. He could no longer draw his Thurber Dogs. He had a prodigious memory (inherited, he said, from both parents) and he had to learn to write (compose) short stories, fables and humor pieces and hold them in his memory, then dictate them to a secretary, like a spool of recording tape unwinding through a tape recorder.

Once, an acquaintance congratulated him on such an achievement. Thanks, Thurber said, it took me ten years to learn.

(It never occurred to Thurber to get a seeing-eye dog, perhaps because he lived much of his life in New York City and other places where a seeing-dog would not fare well. Or perhaps he just might have thought being a seeing-eye dog was, well, beneath the dignity of most dogs. He also had long, spidery fingers—he could have easily learned braille, but apparently never did.)

Completely blind, Thurber once owned a Revolutionary War-era farm in New England. One day he could hear his two full-size French Poodles outside. He thought to himself, when they die, I’ll have to bury them under the old apple tree out back.

Then he wondered: what are they thinking? Thurber’s answer: When he dies, we’ll have to bury him under the old apple tree out back.

He was once called America’s Twentieth Century Mark Twain. Thurber’s books are still American classics. One of them was titled simply Thurber’s Dogs.

Whenever I see the sideways figure-eight, the scientific sign for infinity, I think of dogs. The 40 dogs Thurber claimed to have owned and the dogs we have had.

The first dog I remember was Petey. It was black and brown and white. My Father and Mother called Petey a Water Spaniel. (For decades I thought my parents had somehow gotten the breed name wrong. I had never heard of a Water Spaniel. But I recently bought a dog encyclopedia and discovered there is breed called an American Water Spaniel, which is the State Dog of Wisconsin. They can easily be trained to retrieve items from lakes and rivers.)

One time, on a day trip from our home in north central Ohio to Sandusky, Ohio, Petey, on his leash, smelled Lake Erie. He began to run, pulling my Mother along behind. In a semi-panic, she finally let go of the leash. Petey ran a city block, out a dock and plunged into Lake Erie. A Water Spaniel, it was.

When My Father and Mother took me to school and then went to work—they were both professional educators—Petey was left outside. Our home didn’t have a fenced-in back yard so Petey roamed. Months later, my Father and Mother learned to their mortification that Petey spent his days knocking over neighborhood trash cans and eating garbage. He had gotten so big—in my eyes at least—I thought he looked like a Saint Bernard. I sometimes tried to ride him like a pony, but Petey would have none of it.

I found Petey one day, dead in the basement. I don’t know what my Dad did with Petey. We didn’t have a family ceremony and bury him in the back yard. Petey was just gone.

For several years, Petey was the only dog in our house.

Later I wanted another dog. Petey had been my Dad and Mom’s dog. I wanted a dog of my own. I think I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. We got a dog, a brown and white beagle, which I named Sammy. I thought at first Sammy was a boy, but Sammy was a girl. No matter, the name Sammy fit.

I tried to train Sammy, but, in retrospect I was too young. I couldn’t ask for help training Sammy; we didn’t know anyone who trained dogs. I attempted to ride my bike on the sidewalk with Sammy on a leash beside the bike. Sammy was afraid of the bike and either ran into it, causing me to fall, or pulled away from the bike, causing me to fall. I finally hit on the idea of letting Sammy run on the sidewalk while I pedaled in the street, as close as I could to the curb. That seemed to work, but I remember the time that Sammy ran through a front yard-length sidewalk of wet cement, which the homeowner was just finishing troweling smooth. Sammy and I disappeared and I didn’t use that street for a long while, fearing the homeowner’s wrath.

One day I thought that I could pedal my bike five blocks to a neighborhood Mom-and-Pop store (this was decades before convenience stores) to buy a comic book and Sammy could wait outside.

We got there, I parked my bike and told Sammy to wait. In the few minutes it too me to pick a comic book and pay for it, Sammy wandered into the street and was run over by a speeding sports car that didn’t even stop. Didn’t even slow down. We rushed Sammy to the vet’s but it was too late.

I ached then and ache now that I tried to train that little dog when I clearly too young and didn’t know how. I should never have let Sammy go anywhere without a leash. Sammy was the only dog I have ever lost through my own ignorance. I am still haunted by losing that little dog ...

I should have known better, even then ...

It breaks my heart even today.

After Sammy was hit and killed, I didn’t ask for another dog to replace Sammy. My parents didn’t offer a new dog. We didn’t discuss any more dogs.

My Father was a kind and wise man; he originally wanted to be a family doctor, but couldn’t get into medical school during the Depression. He later went to Ohio State University and earned a doctorate in psychology. He eventually became Assistant Superintendent of Schools in our home town of Mansfield, Ohio, in charge of everything except the business side of the school system. In the late 1950s, Ohio State University in Columbus, announced that there would be a regional campus of Ohio State University in Newark, Ohio. When my Father read that, he wrote a reasoned letter to the administration of Ohio State University, on his Mansfield School system stationery, suggesting there should also be a regional campus of Ohio State University in Mansfield. He signed the letter, mailed it and forgot the matter. Six weeks or so later he opened his mail to discover a check for $100,000. The accompanying letter said: Buy land for the Mansfield campus of Ohio State University.

My Father.

The Mansfield campus of Ohio State University thrives today, with a regional community college-type technical school on the same site.

He lived into his 90s, eventually dying of Parkinson’s disease and old age. Well into his 80s, I asked why we never had a dog after Sammy was killed. I asked, in the manner of an adult child trying to reconnect the dots of family history. He was momentarily quiet; in a soft voice he said, it hurts too much when you lose them.

I was momentarily stunned; it was an epiphany. I was certain for decades that he didn’t want dogs because he didn’t like them; but he loved them too much to bear losing any.

Of course it hurts to lose them—to have one killed like Sammy or to put one to sleep; it aches. Many families keep collars and tags and dog coats and favorite toys and blankets that had belonged to dogs now