Giant George (6 page)

“Hear what?”

“What that woman over there said!”

“What woman over wh—”

“Shhh!” Christie whispered. “She’ll
hear
you!”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry.” I followed her gaze. “What,
that
woman? The one in the green?”

“Yes,
that
woman. Her.”

“So what did she say?”

Christie moved her
mouth a little closer to my ear. “She pointed and she said, ‘What are those folks doing, bringing
him
in here?’ And then she shook her head. Look, there!” Christie now poked me in the rib cage. “Look—see? She’s pointing at him again!”

I rubbed my rib. “Just ignore her. He’s a puppy, so he has a perfect right to be here.”

She beckoned to George, who was galloping back with his prize. “Hmmph,”
she said, picking up the ball from where George had dropped it. “
She
obviously doesn’t think so.”

“Well, that’s just too bad. He isn’t doing anything wrong.”

I took a look at her as Christie stood and hurled the ball into the air again. The woman’s dog was small and well manicured—like a lawn, a bit like her 1980s haircut. The dog was white, and looked like it might be a Pomeranian. It also,
I saw, had a bow in its hair.

The bow told me nothing, of course—absolutely nothing. But at the same time I really couldn’t help but consider that… well, it
did
kind of figure. Would she, I wondered, view George a little more kindly if we’d taken the trouble to accessorize his head? But no, that was silly; it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.

It was about then that the woman glanced in
our direction,
before turning back to the other owner she’d been chatting with, their conversation clearly still about George. George was still doing nothing other than playing with the other dogs and puppies, and, if anything, was doing so a little shyly. You could see that he was nervous about being there; he was actually a bit anxious about all the other dogs milling around him. With or without
ribbons in their hair, they were still dogs, pack animals with a code of seniority, and among them, George was very much bottom dog. He looked to me about as threatening as a wet paper bag.

“You see!” said Christie again, indignant as any slighted mother.

“Ignore her,” I told her. “George is doing nothing wrong. Besides, if she has something to say about him being here, then she should quit
with all the whispering and pointing, and come over and say it to our faces.” I added a glare in her direction to display my solidarity, and decided that the best thing to do was to dismiss her as a silly, neurotic, overanxious woman.

But what did
I
know? She clearly wasn’t alone in her disapproval.

“That dog shouldn’t be in here.”

It was only a couple of days later, and George and I were back
in the dog park. This time the person was saying it to my face, and it wasn’t the silly, neurotic, overanxious woman. Well, he might have been some of those things, but he was definitely not a woman.

Since I was sitting and he was standing, I blinked up at him, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. “Excuse me?”

“You shouldn’t have your dog in here,” he went on. “He’s too big. This part’s
for small dogs. It says on the sign.”

I stood up. “
And
puppies,” I pointed out, because I’d read the sign too. “It’s also the area for
puppies.
And he’s a puppy. He’s only just seven months old. He’s too young to be in the adult dog area.”

“But he’s too big to be in here,” the man said, clearly implacable. “He could hurt other dogs by running into them—”

“Which he doesn’t.”

“Or treading on
them accidentally—”

“Which he doesn’t do either.”

“But he might. C’mon, here! He’s way,
way
too big. He should be”—the guy pointed—“in
there
.”

But the truth was that far from George hurting or intimidating any other dog, the exact opposite was what mostly happened. The smaller dogs would run both around him
and
under him, and he’d be constantly sidestepping them, anxious and jittery, not to
mention traumatized, as any sensitive guy would be, when some of the adult ones tried to hump his legs.

But it seemed our George, without doing anything to deserve it, had been cast in the role of social misfit. And, bowing to the pressure from other owners, which was becoming oppressive and difficult to deal with, after a few visits during which we took George to the puppy section, we decided
that perhaps we’d better take heed of the comments and give him a try in the large dog enclosure instead.

At least there, we thought, he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and as a big guy perhaps he would feel right at home.
And maybe we wouldn’t feel quite so stressed. It was no fun to sit there and feel everyone’s eyes on us—even less when they started up with all the pointing.

How wrong
we were. This was far worse. The fact is that whatever size a creature is, it’s the maturity that is important, and with pack animals like dogs, this is key. George, however intimidating-looking people seemed to find him, was very much a puppy in the world of the adult dog enclosure, and right off the other dogs let him know that.

Whereas in the puppy part he’d struggled with his size and lack
of confidence, here, even though his size didn’t matter, he was bullied remorselessly from the start. He was constantly buffeted by other, older dogs, who made their authority clear by running fast and bumping into him, sniffing him aggressively and generally acting kind of mean. Any time we threw his ball or his beloved piece of rope for him, there was always sure to be some other dog who’d go
haring after it, invariably, even if he didn’t beat George to it, making it clear that he’d better keep back.

It was hard to police this—they were animals, just
being
animals—but a line had to be drawn, and one day, sure enough, it got crossed. We were at the dog park one lunchtime a few weeks later, when George was attacked by not one but two dogs at once. They were a pair of mixed-breed dogs,
both smaller than George, but adult and very confident.

We’d just arrived at the park that afternoon, and were walking toward the central area, when this guy came in with his two dogs. It all started incredibly quickly. One minute all was quiet,
and George was bounding around happily; the next thing I knew, a terrible commotion had started up, with that all-too-familiar—not to mention horrible—noise
when a dog starts acting really aggressive.

I leapt up, but by the time I was over to the three animals, the first of the dogs was just about to bite George. The other was at his opposite flank, trying to do the same thing, and Georgie was whimpering and trembling uncontrollably. There was no fight in this gentle giant of ours, but his lack of reaction or retaliation didn’t seem to make any difference.

The other dogs’ owner looked as shocked by what was happening as I was. Though he repeatedly yelled at his animals to get off George, neither dog paid him the slightest bit of attention. In the end, it took brute force to drag the dogs off a now terrified George, the owner hauling one of his pets off by the collar, and then, having had no success in getting near the front end of his other dog,
and no other option, yanking him off by his tail.

He looked mortified, and was very apologetic about it all, and immediately put his dogs back on their leashes. As for me, I’d been a dog “dad” for such a short time, I had no idea what the appropriate etiquette was at times like this. As scared as I’d been of what might have happened to poor George, who was shaking, and cowering close at my side,
I figured the whole thing must have come as a complete shock to the other guy as well, so I accepted his obviously sincere apology, and just hoped George didn’t run into his two dogs again. The guy left the park right away.

I gave George a once-over, and no blood had been shed, but he was clearly bruised and very traumatized. His confidence, always tenuous, was shot to pieces, and it occurred
to me that George had been bullied at the park only because we’d let a few dog owners in the puppy part bully
us.
We decided then and there that the adult park was not where he belonged yet, and began taking him back into the puppy and small-dog part, determined to ignore the constant comments and glares from the other owners. The phrase “pick on someone your own size” had a distinctly hollow
ring. Our poor pup was a misfit, it seemed.

Ironically, it was only a few days after the incident in the adult dog section that a guy entered the park with a Great Dane. As dog owners do when they have pets in common, he came straight over to the chain-link fence that separated the big dogs from the smaller ones, beckoned to Christie and me and said, “Hi.” His dog was named Drake and was a handsome
black Great Dane. He obviously also had a great temperament, like George’s—you could see it. He was, his owner told us, about five years old. He seemed enormous to us, and having become so preoccupied with George’s size lately, we asked him how much Drake weighed.

“One hundred and forty pounds,” he said. We were both openmouthed. Yes, George was pretty big, but we couldn’t imagine him ever getting—ever
being—
that
big. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that George could get so huge.

I said so to Christie on the way home from the park. “Still,” I added, “if he gets anywhere near that sort of weight, no dog’s going to take him on—no way.”

She smiled. “What d’you reckon, Georgie?” she said, reaching into the backseat of the truck to pet him. “I think you need to grow some more, sweetie. Then
you’ll show ’em.”

I think somebody upstairs must have been listening.

“You know what?” Christie said to me one day in early summer. “I swear I can actually
see
Georgie growing.”

She’d taken to calling George “Georgie” early on—not something that sat terribly well with me, it must be said. What guy wants to take his dog to the dog park and keep yelling the name “Georgie”
at him? But as he was still (if I was asked to say at gunpoint, at any rate) Christie’s dog, I didn’t feel I could intervene. And it wasn’t even “Georgie” either, girly though that was. She’d taken to pronouncing it “Georg-eeee.”

But she was right. Though you obviously couldn’t see it—that would be crazy—it was beginning to seem as if he’d go to sleep one size and wake up the next day a whole
lot bigger. He’d outgrown what we’d thought was the not-to-be-outgrown Colossus, and we’d given up the whole idea of even having a crate, since there was none—unless I attempted to build one myself—big enough for him to fit into. We’d progressed from the largest crate available
anywhere
to a single-sized bed mattress, which was positioned at the foot of our bed for him to
sleep on. He still preferred
to spend a chunk of the night curled up in bed
with
us, but if things got too uncomfortable—for George, that is, obviously; we, as parents, just had to deal with it—he’d happily stretch out on his own bed.

Christie had made the observation about George’s amazing growth rate on the heels of another conversation. She’d come in from work and was taking her shoes off while I told her how I’d seen
George make a dent in a corner of the kitchen wall just by wagging his tail as he passed—unbelievable but true. We had the evidence of it happening, which we showed off to my folks when they visited, like a proud mom and pop showing off a kiddie’s growth chart.

So it was doubly good that our house was part home and part building site. With your home in such a state, you tend not to get quite
so annoyed if your enormous puppy inadvertently lays waste to all your stuff—not that we had much stuff lying around, in any case. Again, like parents with a toddler, we had soon cottoned on to the fact that our rapidly expanding mutt was still very much a juvenile and still behaved in mostly puppyish ways. He would bound around like Bambi, skittering on the newly laid—and very shiny, very slippery—wooden
floors, hurling himself with boundless enthusiasm at everything he fancied, be it “Mom”—whom he adored—or a Ming vase. We weren’t exactly the Ming vase kind of people, admittedly, but if we had been at any point, we sure wouldn’t be anymore.

As if sensing he was being talked about, George ambled up to Christie, got up on his hind legs and licked her on the face.

Dogs have amazing senses generally,
of course, but it was
evident that two of George’s were fast becoming superior. Like all dogs, he was really good at hearing things we couldn’t, and he had a highly developed sense of smell. George particularly loved the way his mom smelled, and, boy, was he keen to let her know it. He would seek out and lick any single fragrant thing off her: her face cream, her perfume, her makeup, her body
lotion—any trace of anything she put on her skin. George would lap it up like a cat laps up cream. And he could smell it from an incredibly long way away. She could put some stuff on in the bedroom and George, from, say, the backyard, would pick the scent up and come right along and lick her clean in an instant. If we were going out for the evening, she’d have to factor in extra minutes to dodge his
attentions so she could get out unscathed.