All he wanted to do was to bring happiness and teething relief to a little puppy someplace. Endorsed by the American Kennel Club, this little bear toy came into our home courtesy of my sister Christina. While I thanked her for the gift, I predicted a short stay in the house.

The following pictures were taken over the course of ten minutes; swear to god. And Hooper was kinda mellow tonight.

If you ever get a squeaky thingy stuck in your anus, Hooper is the guy to get it out in record time:







And there you have it, the deconstruction of Teddy. What a great night.

Hooper has been hanging around the joint for a month now. He’s changed our lives.

First off, Brenda now gets up at 6:30 a.m. regardless of whether she wants to or not. She’s the designated dog driver in the morning, and she’s seen some amazing sunrises and met freakish yoga people. Me, I have the night shift, and walk Hooper immediately after arriving home from work. We’ve met cyclists and weirdo dalmatian owners.

We’ve met a lot of dogs and dog owners in fact, and I know more of the neighborhood dogs by name than the owners; Morgan, Shylo, Hannah, Buster, they are all familiar faces. So are those of their owners, but I’ll be damned if they are anything other than The Lady who Owns Morgan and Hates Hooper for his Goddamned Energy, The Dude Who Owns Shylo, The Grad Student Who Owns Gorgeous Hannah, and The Self-Appointed Dog Training Genius Who Owns Bratty Buster.

Speaking of the use of the word “owner” in the context of dogs and their, uh, owners, it seems that hippie town Boulder prefers the term “guardian” for people who own their dogs. Whatever. Look, hippie, I love Hooper more than you ever will love your Grateful Dead mix tape, and besides, I have a receipt for Hoop. A receipt. So, shut the fuck up.

Hooper knows stuff. He looks to us for permission to eat and to walk through a door. He also just took a piss in the guest bedroom, so he knows how to do that too. This is unfortunate.

Hoop has gained some weight, but I think he will top out at fifty or so pounds, which is perfect. I think he will end up looking like a perpetual Lab puppy, which is perfect.

Did you know that they give out treats at the Good Times in Boulder? Well, they do. Hooper & I found this out today, mostly to Hooper’s delight. Most people driving around town also seem to melt in the presence of Hooper’s little face gazing out the rear quarter window of our Golf.

Hooper’s looking fairly dead on the floor right now, and Brenda’s looking equally expired on the couch eighteen inches from me as I type this. Currently, life is good.

Announcement:
Friends and family members, who may be thinking of buying a DVD copy or one-sheet for the 1978 film “Hooper”, thinking it would be a great gag gift for us, don’t do it. Because I already did.

Kinda makes me want to get him a cape and name him Underdog.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

After half a day as Primo, Hooper is once again Hooper, the name he was granted at the shelter. It just fits, we’ve decided. And, we can call him HooperSuperDuperPooper this way, which is like, excellent.

Besides, unlike most people, when I first heard his name I did not first think of lovable Mister Hooper from Sesame Street, I of course thought of the beer-swilling, bar-fighting rocket car-jumping stuntman Sonny Hooper, played by Burt Reynolds in the 1978 film by the same name. You probably didn’t see it. That’s OK, but I still recall the credits rolling to a song with the lyric “there ain’t nothing like the life of a Hollywood stuntman”. And Hooper the Dog definitely resembles a stuntman when he goes barreling down the stairs; a successful outcome usually seems unlikely.

So, yeah. Hooper. Hooper Primo King-Guglielmetti. Now all we have to do is train him to wear a cowboy hat, blow bubbles with gum, and drive a rocket car.

We brought him home today. He was manic for an hour and I thought we’d made a huge mistake, but he calmed down and he’s sleeping in his crate in the bedroom right now. I’m downstairs typing this because I don’t want to wake anyone.

He’s adorable. He’s afraid of his own reflection in the oven door; he walked into the sliding glass door and the glass around the gas fireplace, but to his credit he only did both of those moves once each. When I go upstairs to pee, he runs downstairs to the front door. He responds to “anh-anh” when he eyes the couch, he’s starting to associate treats with good deeds, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing yet. And we also decided on a name, a name I was kicking around today but finally tried out on Brenda just tonight: Primo. Brenda loved it and we started trying it out on our new smelly houseguest.

Primo. First. Emma came first in our lives, but Primo is our first dog, our first boy. And he farts. I love him.

Primo.

(as good a name as Primo is, this dog is Hooper; read on…)

After our heartbreaking experience at the shelter on Sunday, I woke up Monday to an email from my friend Elissa who works at the Humane Society; Emma’s ashes were ready to be picked up. So yesterday after work I headed back to the shelter, to pick up what was left of Emma in a little cardboard box. I instantly felt guilty about having been there the day before, to look for new animals while Emma still hadn’t been returned to us.

It sounds exceedingly corny, but I think we needed to wait for Emma to come home, to lead us to the next animal to care for.

I say this because with the little cardboard box cradled in my left hand, Elissa and I strolled down to the dog adoption area to see if anything new had arrived. Of course I knew some had, since I had the RSS feed for the Humane Society’s adoptable animals loaded in my feedreader and I had been keeping one eye trained on it all day. And that is why I knew that there was a little five month-old Labrador & Border Collie mix named Hooper milling around in there somewhere.

Didn’t take me long to find him, and it took even less time than that to fall in love with him. I went home, got Brenda and we went rocketing back to the Humane Society, where we petted little Hooper and immediately placed a hold on him. Having been neutered that day, we could not take him out of his kennel, so we came back today on my lunch break and spent some leash time with him, melted a little more, and decided to commit to this insane agreement to raise a dog. We’re looking forward to it, we are doing all we can to educate ourselves, and tomorrow when he comes home we’ll start the grand adventure.

This is not an impulse thing. Brenda & I have wanted a dog for a very long time, but living conditions and Emma’s independence had made that a non-option until now. We know these breeds are high-energy. We know we’ll be walking him four times a day. We know he will eat stuff he’s not supposed to, and crap it out the other end where he’s not supposed to. We know there’s a lot more to know and learn. But we’re ready to have a go at this. A crate is set up. Chew toys and kibbel are in da house. Tomorrow night, we bring Hooper home, and start thinking about his new name, but I have to say, Hooper—the name and the dog—is starting to grow on me already.

Emma is gone, and there isn’t a damned thing we can do about it. I miss her; there are a hundred things a day that remind me she’s gone: the ingrained look-down before I take a step, for fear of stepping on her; the look to the bathroom to make sure she’s there, before I close the closet door; the corner of the wall rubbed raw from her little chin. The howling emptiness of the spaces where her litter box was, and where her food and water bowls were.

It sucks.

We are working our way back.

A week and a half after putting Emma to sleep, Brenda & I find ourselves brimming over with energy, an unclaimed love that needs to be swallowed up by one or more new companions. The initial feeling is one of replacement, but that is wrong. Emma lived 17 years and had a great life, and despite our desire for her to live three to ten years more, she did not; we did what we could for her, she died peacefully, and we will carry the guilt of watching her die forever, nonetheless.

Now, it’s time to unload all this pent-up love on one or more new creatures, and it’s fraught with issues.

I love cats, but I also love dogs, and so does Brenda. Most of my life I lived in places unsuitable for dogs, but I managed to have my experience with both good and bad specimens. A Beagle who couldn’t be controlled, a Doberman who scared everyone but loved us all. But after that, it was cats for me, and I loved every one of them. Apartments are what they are, and one thing that that is is a good place for cats—not dogs. So I got used to the idea of cats. Emma ended up spending 17 years showing us how insignificant dogs were, but now that she’s gone we’re wanting that great big gigantic canine 24/7 problem more than ever.

And so we headed to the Boulder Humane Society today.

We’ve been trolling the websites for the last week or so, and today we headed to the Boulder Humane Society (with our friends Bill and Lauren) to see if there was a match. “Happy” the Plott Hound mix, was our chosen “possible match”. The damned thing bit my lip after 45 seconds of interaction, but we still spent an hour with her and walked her around a while. Brenda helped me realize this was not the animal for us. Bill and Lauren also came to a similar conclusion about the pup they tried out. Brenda & I spent a lot of time soaking in the emotions of the many cats housed there, as well. It was a heartbreaking way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

We’re more steeled than ever to get a dog, and have spent the bulk of this afternoon looking at the various shelter websites. We’re convinced that we’ll be good parents, but the questions abound. Do we get a dog, and, if so, do we get a little one or a big one? Do we get a cat at the same time, and if so, do we get a couple while we’re at it? If so, do we get a kitten and an old fart? a couple kittens??

We want to get it right the first time, and I can tell you I can’t endure a lot of trips to the shelter. I gotta go; lots of promising pups and kitties on the websites…

I have so, so many things to say about Emma, but for now I just wanted to share all the photos we’ve been looking at the past couple weeks. I’ve scanned a bunch of photos from the pre-digital years, and compiled a few other ditties from Emma’s “modern era”. I’ve uploaded them all to my Flickr site and created a photo album—or “set”, in Flickr parlance—for you to enjoy.

It’s pretty amazing to watch the evolution of this cat—and her owners—as she moved through her life. All told, Emma had nine different permanent addresses in three U.S. states, wore two different collars (both short-lived), endured and survived two apartment building fires, and received in excess of 300 toy mice as Christmas presents over her years. Looking at these photographs tells a great story; Brenda & I have looked at the slideshow of these pictures a million times over the last few days and they bring back so many memories of our relationship. I’ve added captions to many of the photos (and plan to add more in the coming days, as well as update the dates and location information) in the hope that you all can absorb just a little bit of what Emma meant to us.

Enjoy.

For those of you new to Flickr, I recommend you click the “view as slideshow” link that appears in the upper right corner of the page, and then hover your mouse cursor over the image that appears. You will see an icon with the letter I in the center of the photo; if you click that, the image titles and captions will appear overlaid on the photos. Then you can enjoy the show complete with commentary. There are tons of other ways to enjoy the Flickr content and please browse the site for more information on ways to do that.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

You spend sixteen years with someone, you learn to read signs. The funny thing is, your optimism also gets the better of you. And so, we’re playing that game now. Good moments are blown way out of proportion, bad moments are horrifyingly painful to watch—and quickly pushed back to the cobwebs of the brain.

Spent half the day at the vet today. It’s the same old shit, same conversations I had three years ago regarding my father. The word “disease” being said far too frequently. Emma’s not doing so well.