Buzzsaw Haircut

Tashi: one dog's life

By Cole Louison

My grandfather had a dog named Tashi. I don't know where this name came from or what it means, except that the name had a sort of exotic or ethnic ring. That is, it sounds like a fancy name that means something fancy in another language, or at least it did when I was six years old when Tashi came into my grandparents', and therefore all of our lives.

The dog's name is important in relation to my grandfather, Carl, who is a very conservative, hard-nosed man. He had grown up in Massachusetts, eaten squirrel and homemade sauerkraut during the depression, went to a business college in town, joined the navy, and married my grandmother when he was 20 and she was 19. He worked in various areas of the selling field and eventually opened his own real estate business, which made him wealthy up until he retired in the early '90s. Lately he spends his days playing golf, reading and doing crossword puzzles.

His children are Betsy, Peter and Curt. Their family dog was Gus. Once at a holiday party, someone brought a poster of a computer-generated series of dots that unveil a three dimensional image as the observer stares at the picture. My grandfather was the only one in our extended family (25 people or so) who could not make it work, and stormed out of the kitchen after a few minutes of unsuccessful coaching by the rest of the family.

Also important is understanding the persona of my grandfather before Tashi comes into the picture. When we were kids, my grandparents were night and day. Nanny was essentially warm, gentle and soft, and never expressed anger towards anyone. My grandfather was colder, easier to upset, and more vocal about his annoyances. He held us all when we were babies and that was about it, though he always paid special attention to me because I was a boy.

Tashi however, was a different story. He was introduced to my grandfather one afternoon when my cousins and grandmother returned from the mall with a new, white Lopsa Apso that was the size of a guinea pig. Apparently, my grandfather saw the dog and said, "I can't send that face back to the mall."

My family lived in Buffalo and were visiting my grandparents in Rochester when I first encountered Tashi. I was probably five and had never been close to a dog before. And I even ran up the stairs when Tashi walked over to smell my foot. Within in a few days though, I was no longer afraid of Tashi and developed two relationships with him: Charity and torture. My grandmother always had a box of Milk Bones handy, and let me feed Tashi, who eventually would come when I called him over to the Milk Bone cupboard. During that same visit to my Grandparent's house, I also learned that Tashi was terrified by my grandfather's new Polaroid camera. I didn't even need to take pictures; all I had to do was hold the camera over my face and watch through the exaggerated plastic square as Tashi ran in terror, sometimes yelping as I chased him.

It might have been out of youthful cruelty that I played so many tricks on Tashi, but my father had it out for the dog for different reasons. Tashi kind of bothered me but my father seemed to greatly dislike the dog. Several times my father tripped on Tashi, who often slept next to chairs or in popular walkways in the house, and in stumbling to regain his balance, would half try to kick and stamp the groggy dog. One adolescent summer, my cousin, a friend of hers and I were sitting on the couch on the raised porch while Tashi slept by the railing. My father walked by and for some reason was carrying a double-pronged fork we used for grilling hot dogs. Without a word, he walked up to the railing and poked Tashi in the ass with the fork, sending Tashi into the air, galloping for the door. Later that day, the subject of my father came up and my cousin's friend said: "Your Dad stabbed the dog with a fork." This was probably the first time any of us ever saw the situation as anything other than a joke at the expense of a small, seemingly retarded dog my grandfather loved above all other things. To this outsider, my dad was a sicko who decided to pierce the flesh of a defenseless animal.

My father cited his reasons for hating Tashi: He was always in the way, he was an overgrown, inbred hamster and not a well-disciplined dog like Gus, he was filthy and often dragged his ass across the carpet. Beyond all that though, I tend to think it was my grandfather's undivided attention he so often paid to the dog, and not to his family that bothered my dad and a lot of our family.

My grandfather, who I've never seen fix his own cereal, had a ritual of giving 'zort' to the dog after every meal. These were bits and pieces of whatever was served for dinner, cut into tiny bites for the dog, and mashed into pulp in the later years when Tashi was too old to chew. More than anything, this upset my father. He could not stand the idea of a dog, not just a dog, but a filthy, lazy, blind, deaf and what he called retarded dog, getting choice cuts of meat from meals my father only got at my grandmother's house.

One night after a pork roast dinner, my father walked into the kitchen to find my grandpa putting a decent helping of the meat into Tashi's dish. My father stood there and waited for my Grandpa to leave. When he did, he swatted Tashi over with his foot, grabbed the contents out of the dish, and shoved them in his mouth.

Tashi's hard luck stopped being funny one night when I was 14. My grandparents had a carpeted staircase with a turn at the bottom and the first time I ever saw Tashi fall down those stairs was the first time I realized he was getting old. Tashi could climb stairs fine, but needed help getting started. On this occasion he was barking at the top of the stairs and I walked up, picked him up, and set him down on the first step. He stood for a second, tottering a little, then tried for the next step, rolling over onto his back and down the rest of the stairs, banging against the railing, screaming until he hit the wall where the stairs turned. I thought he was dead but Tashi hopped down the last step and out into the kitchen, leaving me imagining what would have happened if he had not gotten up and walked away.

Soon after Tashi fell down the stairs, he started slowing down. He would walk with no one but my grandfather and he took longer calculating his jumps onto the couch and sometimes didn't even bother. When I held a Milk Bone over his head, rather than standing back on his hind legs and taking the treat from my fingers, he would do a sort of wheelie, lifting his front legs briefly off the ground with his mouth open, emulating the once impressive trick he learned from the taunting of the grandchildren. The last time I attempted the trick with Tashi, I was probably 16. He jerked his head a few times, but all four of his twinkie-sized legs stayed on the ground. I finally had to place the treat in the dog's open mouth, which with much effort, he bit in two, before dropping the pieces onto the carpet and slowly walking away.

I don't know how my grandfather would have reacted if he ever witnessed his dog being tortured. I imagine it would be like a lot of parents walking into a room to find a relative hurting one of their children. But because he always had an eye on Tashi, I wonder if my grandfather knew about the dog's mistreatment. I doubt it, though, because he was so confrontational and because Tashi was so important that my grandparents have left their grandchildren's birthday parties early because the dog wigged out if he was by himself for too long.

Once he got too old to run and play, Tashi became unimportant to the kids, and more important to my grandfather. In his later years, Tashi stayed on the floor next to my grandfather's chair in the den. My grandfather would read or do a crossword puzzle with one hand, and stroke the top of Tashi's head with the other. He did this because Tashi had lost his hearing and sight, and would randomly howl if he sensed he was alone. The noise was more like the siren of a fire engine than the cries of a small, once-white dog with his eyes full of glowing cataracts. Whether Tashi knew it or not, his shrieking was empowering. He could hardly eat or walk and his barks were choked in phlegm, but at our cottage in the summer, Tashi's howling would wake everyone. The babies would start crying, my father would start cursing, and my grandfather would get out of his bed and make his way over to Tashi's, where he would talk softly and gently pet the dog until he stopped wailing and laid back down.

Until I went to college, death left our family alone for the most part. My guinea pig had died when I was nine and the next year my great uncle, who I never spent much time with, had passed away. When Ping, my grandparents cat, had been put to sleep around that time, my grandfather never batted an eye and in fact pushed for the cat's final trip to the vet because her constant meowing bothered him so much. My grandmother, who cried when Nick's dog died on "Family Ties," finally gave in, compensating by having Ping cremated so her ashes could sit in a tin box by the fireplace.

The idea of putting an animal to death rather than letting nature take its course gets a lot of flack, but it's a practice I can't argue with after seeing Tashi fight out the last days of his life. He died the summer after my freshman year in college, but had not been able to jump or run since I was 16. It got to the point where my grandfather had to carry Tashi outside to go to the bathroom and sometimes from the spot by my grandfather's chair to the kitchen for mealtime. The shag around the dog's mouth and underside had dreaded into small, brown icicles and his useless eyes watered in their pink sockets, creating the illusion that Tashi was constantly crying. When he did walk on his own, one of his now brown legs dragged behind him, completely lifeless.

None of this mattered to my grandfather. Even from my grandmother-the epicenter of our matriarchal family--he would not hear of putting Tashi to sleep. I don't know what it took, or from who--maybe the dog-that made my grandfather give the go ahead to take Tashi in. I was away for three weeks in July and when I came back, Tashi was gone and my grandfather was more reclusive, more inward, and totally crushed.

He never said anything to anyone in our family. Everything came from my grandmother, who said she didn't know what to do because she had never seen my grandfather so down for so long. Time didn't seem to be helping the situation. And this situation was different from past deaths that my grandfather had dealt with. Unlike the death of Charlie Farley, his neighbor and close friend for nearly 20 years, no one sent cards or condolences. This was either because the people who didn't know my grandfather well enough felt like Tashi's death was not significant enough to be sensitive about, and those who knew my grandfather and his relationship with his dog knew it was just too painful and intrusive to break into the level where my grandfather lived for a month after his dog of 15 years died.

Cole Louison was third runner up to first in show at the Westminster Kennel Club's World Dog Competition, second only to The Junkyard Dog and Snoop Doggy Dogg.