An Ode To A Good Dog

A brief interlude from posting about crime data for a personal post.

Somebody once tweeted that “the worst part of your 30s is that in your 20s you and all your friends got dogs and…” I’m a recent graduate out of my 30s, but that wise sentiment still holds as I say goodbye to my furry companion of the last 13+ years.

It’s funny how little the foundation of my life has changed over the last 5 years. I have less hair than I did 5 years ago and what hair I do have is grayer, but most things are about the same. My job is the same as it was 5 years ago. I have the same number of kids. I live in the same house with the same minivan (though they’re both dirtier). Thinking back though, I can't help but marvel about that time in one's life when repeated monumental life changes happen in the blink of an eye.

I was 27 in the summer of 2010 and deeply unhappy — unhappy at work, feeling lonely in my personal life, and just generally sad. To attack these problems I changed positions to a more rewarding position at work, started socializing more often, and decided to get a dog. A friend gave me a book about dog breeds and I immediately fixated on the Shiba Inu. I drove to an Amish farm in Pennsylvania one Friday in early October and came back with this:

I named her Tipitina “Tipsy” Asher after the Professor Longhair song that the famous New Orleans music hall is named for. She was terrified that first night, hiding in the corner and barely making a movement. The next day we went into the hallway of my building and threw a tennis ball for the first time. She was hooked, I was hooked, and the good times rolled from there. She showed her brilliance by learning to sit on command in like 30 minutes, and she also showed her stubbornness by making that the last new command she would learn over the next 13.5 years.

Five months later I went on my last first date at an Irish pub in DC’s Chinatown with my adorable puppy as a major topic of conversation. Nobody tells you that your 20s will be dominated by massive anxiety and uncertainty about your future (at least mine were), but all of that disappeared almost overnight in no small part to that little shedding furball.

Shibas are weird, brilliant animals with a strong sense of deviousness. Tipsy loved playing fetch with a ball — her favorite game — and would do it until she collapsed from exhaustion. She hated skateboards, fireworks, and the building’s window cleaners (she tried to hide in the fridge the first time she saw them). She barely ever barked though she let out an incredible Shiba scream from time to time when something terrible was happening like getting her nails clipped. The first time she let out a Shiba scream was her second night with me when she decided she didn’t want to sleep in a crate, and that was the end of crate training.

She could also be quite dickish. Tipsy would bolt out from the front door if given the chance and her second favorite game was running away from the poor sucker who was tasked with catching her. Once, she ran out of a cabin we were staying at in the woods and she went halfway down the mountain before she finally decided to get caught. Another time she escaped from the vet (thanks in no small part due to the helpful gentleman who held the door open for her) and got a giant red “Flight Risk” sticker on her permanent record as a result. She would steal my kids’ food straight from their hands if they weren’t being careful — other than bananas, she hated bananas.

A back injury slowed her down in recent years, a tough break for a creature with boundless energy in her first decade. In later years she would climb the stairs (very slowly), decide she didn’t like whatever I was eating and then demand to be immediately brought back down by scratching at the door until I carried her downstairs.

I'm sure we'll get another dog, and nostalgia for this sweet puppy will eventually replace my sadness. But I'll never have another first dog to make me feel less alone in the big city. No other dog will greet my newborn kids on their first day home from the hospital. No other dog could possibly be the perfect mix of weird, sweet, and adorable that she was.

If there is a next life for dogs I hope she’s bounding through a muddy puddle right now chasing a ball. That little creature made my life immeasurably better, and I'll miss her.