This piece is a work of slightly bitter whimsy that comes from the realisation that my dog is getting old enough, that his time remaining is quite clearly limited. And yet again, that is another equally bitter reminder that one of the basic realities of choosing to be a pet owner is having to accept the inescapable fact that Nature has decreed that they shall always have shorter lifespans than we do.

At the same time, it’s also often a stark and bleak reminder of what eventually awaits us all. Over a long enough arc, we will get there too. In the case of my dog, I’m not exactly sure just how old he is as of the time of writing (November 2018), although when I adopted him in 2010, I was told that he was approximately 2 ½ years old, although he may have been a bit older than that.

The only things I knew for sure about him, was that he was a cross between border collie and black lab, and that, like pretty much every other lab or lab-cross male who was whelped over the past seven or eight years, he was (of course), named “Marley” when I got him. Just like all the little kids now in school, who are named Edward, Jacob, Isabella and Katniss. I also instantly knew that he’d spent those first months of his life being allowed to pretty much get away with murder, as he was almost completely untrained when I got him. Barely even housebroken. Over a year of non-stop and extraordinarily frustrating effort on my part eventually changed that, though.

I very rarely call him “Marley”—usually only when I’m annoyed, and trying to get his attention. Generally, (especially when he’s a good boy), I just call him by his pet name of ‘Puppicus’, as in: “Who’s a good Puppicus? You’re a good Puppicus!” I think I picked up the comical, pseudo-Latin nomenclature from a crudely-drawn, mid-nineties Nelvana cartoon called “Flying Rhino Junior High”, the comical ‘villain’ of which was this super-genius kid named ‘Earl’, who ran a reality-altering supercomputer in the school’s basement, and his only friends were a genetically altered rat named “Ratticus”, and a cryogenically-frozen hornet named “Hornicus”. Two other outside references in the piece are Crosby Stills & Nash’s song: ‘Just a Song Before I Go’, which was on their 1977 album: CSN, and the online meme: ‘Your dog wants steak!’

It’s kind of depressing to see the doggo getting older, and stiffness settling into his joints, along with all the other assorted ills of age, but I suppose I can take some levity in a joke that my roommate made one day, when he cracked that as long as Puppicus can attend to his self-appointed daily task of keeping his testicles polished to an acceptable sheen, his life will have meaning. :P

(Yes, I know that’s rather crude, but admit it: you laughed!)