Can I tell you about Lucy Boxer?
No, not the fictional one who lives with Nana and Mort and Ophelia in Stafford Falls. I mean, the real Lucy Boxer, the one I knew and loved and who inspired the fictional one.
My partner is a dog walker and she specializes in individual walks which means that usually the dogs she takes on neighbourhood rambles are either not so spry or maybe don’t get along well with other dogs. Lucy Boxer was one of her very first clients.
Lucy was a gorgeous, gruff girl who was about nine when we met her. Apparently as a puppy and younger dog she had been filled to overflowing with constant energy – Lucy’s mom told Mariann about how she used to take Lucy to the park where she’d chase balls and run for three solid hours and then, when her mom would drag her exhausted self home afterwards, Lucy would still be bouncing off the walls with exuberance. (Her mom took up running not long after she got Lucy. This was probably not a coincidence.)
Lucy loved to eat. Usually food, but really, almost anything she could find, including cough drops, bars of goat milk soap and the liquid that collects in overturned garbage can lids on hot summer days (“garbage juice,” her mom called it.) On one occasion when she was left alone in the kitchen for just a few minutes too many Lucy consumed an entire maple syrup basted roast chicken that was cooling on the counter. (Her mom immediately phoned the vet and the vet told her that the next 48 hours weren’t going to be pretty, but she was going to be okay.) That particular recipe was henceforth always known as “Lucy’s Chicken.”
I stayed over with Lucy once while her mom was out of town on business and Mariann was double booked with dog-sitting jobs. I ordered myself a pizza for supper and it being January, the delivery guy got stuck in the driveway, so I stowed the pizza on a table I judged to be quite inaccessible to Lucy and her arthritic hips and I popped out to help the delivery guy push his car out of a snowbank. Not sixty seconds later, I opened the door to see Lucy scarfing down the last bits of the small Hawaiian pizza I’d so carefully put out of her reach. She’d eaten some of the cardboard container, too but she had taken the time to spit out every single piece of pineapple into a neat little pile. (She would eat roadkill and garbage juice – but apparently not pineapple.)
The thing about Lucy was that you had to be in The Club, which is to say, you had to be on the Lucy Approved List. Club Members included: her mom, her mom’s friends, Mariann, me, small children, women with strollers, the odd elderly person and anyone who happened to be carrying Milk Bones. If you were in The Club, she would do a little dance when she spotted you, she would lavish you with kisses, she would shout her joy to the heavens and let you pet her velvety ears.
But if you weren’t in The Club…well, you’d better just keep moving, mister. This unfortunate group included skateboarders, all delivery people, the mail carrier, Jehovah’s Witnesses, trick or treaters and generally any other sketchy character who dared to ring the doorbell of the house she was guarding. What’s worse was if you hadn’t made the cut, she would let you know it, in no uncertain terms. Her bark was ferocious but her stare was deadly. Lucy had the most intense stare of any dog I’ve ever met. She didn’t just look at you – she eyeballed you. You felt it.
She had a particular intolerance for this one dog that she’d meet almost every day on her walks. Edgar the Pug had a tongue that always hung out of his mouth in a way that unfortunately gave him the air of not being the sharpest tool in the shed, and Edgar always seemed to irritate Lucy beyond measure. Every day when she spotted him she’d give him an earful and then every day her fury was quickly tempered when she remembered that Edgar’s walker, Mike, had pockets full of liver treats.
She had a good, long life, Lucy Boxer did. She loved and was loved. As she aged, she suffered from the usual litany of geriatric dog complaints – her back end weakened and her hips got sore. She fell down a bit but it never once seemed like she felt sorry for herself.
Then, not long after her 12th birthday, she seemed to falter and it turned out that she had an aggressive cancer. With her advancing age, there was not much to be done but to cherish every possible moment with her. Extra walks, visits and field trips were organized, and treats were dispensed with abandon. The last day I saw her, we walked very slowly to the park and just sat together in the sun for a long time.
Finally, when it was time to let her go, Lucy’s mom brought her to the vet. Later, she told us that she’d sat with Lucy in the car outside before she brought her in. She’d explained to Lucy that the vet was going to help her go to heaven and that everything would be okay, but she’d asked Lucy to please send her a sign from the other side to let her know that she was all right.
It snowed in Ottawa that November night. The first snow of the season and an unusually early one. The next morning, aching with grief, Lucy’s mom pulled back the big living room drapes and peered out the window at the street that Lucy had patrolled for so many years. There on the sidewalk in front of her house, in six foot high letters, someone had stomped out “I ❤️ You” in the new snow.
What has always touched me about this story – it’s the part I like to think that I would’ve written, if I’d been given the chance – is the fact that Lucy’s message was not “I am okay, I got to the other side!” but was instead, “I love you.”
We don’t deserve dogs.
P.
P.S. FYI, the fictional Lucy is going to live forever in Stafford Falls…