Mickey

Looking back on that entire three-week period of the summer of 2015, it seems clearer now that I was always going to be the one to take Mickey to the island myself. It would be too cliché, of course, to say that “I needed him more than he needed me.” But, in a broader sense, both of our lives at that point complemented each other’s in enough ways that anyone else would have been redundant.

By that summer it had become quite clear to everyone that Mickey did not have much time left. Even my mother, so talented at ignoring or convincing herself against bad news, could no longer deny that Mickey was now 13—an advanced age for a dog his size—and dealing with a myriad of health issues that included the chronic arthritis that kept him from the lengthy forest treks that he had been so known for in a previous life.

The trip had, of course, been my mother’s idea. One of the happy-go-lucky impulses that she comes up with within the course of her day-to-day life in an attempt to relegate all of the less pleasant aspects of life into harmless background noise. And, to be fair to her, she was dealing with a lot that summer. My father’s increasingly severe Parkinson’s disease, despite only being diagnosed less than two years ago, was already progressing to the point where he needed a wheelchair to get around anywhere longer than the distance from their front door to the curb via the front walkway on their house. This left my mother as his primary caretaker, a role that she embraced with all of the silent duty of a stoic lapsed Catholic, despite her own number of more minor but still present issues. Her bad knee. Her autoimmune disorder. The fragile nature of her health as her own age progressed while life dumped more responsibilities on her in retirement. Etc.

So, when she was no longer able to deny that her beloved Mickey was nearing his final journey across the infamous “rainbow bridge,” it made perfect sense that her way of coping would be to plan one final adventure for her fur baby. This adventure, as it turned out, could take place nowhere else than Put-in-Bay, Ohio, a small, lakeside resort town on the eponymous island in Lake Erie (actually, the island’s name is “South Bass Island” technically, though in common usage the town and island are one and the same). The island, a short ferry ride from the northern tip of Catawba isle peninsula near the city of Port Clinton, had been a go-to vacation destination for our family during countless summers across my youth. Only a few hours of a drive from our native Pittsburgh, the island represented enough of an isolated, relaxing aesthetic and a strange, exotic vacation adventure to take its place as the family’s “secret hideaway,” a location whose significance was most prominent for my mother.

It wasn’t long after we adopted Mickey in 2002 that he joined us on the island. The small cottages that my mother would rent for the family did, it turned out, allow dogs, assuming we were willing to pay an additional cleaning fee and security deposit (which my mother always was). And so, in the glory days of his youth, Mickey, the golden hound with his alien features, boundless energy, and strange, earthly wisdom went cavorting in the clear waters of Lake Erie and drew his paws along the strange, isolated grasslands of the island itself.

Thus, before he left this world for good, the least my mother could do was give the goodest boy one last island adventure.

“You’re joining us there, right?” My mother asked me over the phone. This was a few weeks in advance of the trip, when she was already in her hyperactive planning stages. I, still a graduate student but feeling more wisdom than my years, came close to offering a few objections that didn’t seem too unreasonable at the time (and would seem even less unreasonable later on). But I could catch the tone in my mother’s voice, and knew, from more than 20 years of experience, that little to nothing I could say would deter her from the plans she was in the process of setting in motion.

“How many people are going to be in the cottage?” was the only question I managed to ask.

“That’s what I was going to ask you,” she replied. “I need to know if you’re coming before I book it so I know how many rooms we’ll need. You and your brother can have your own rooms, of course. Mickey will sleep with dad and me.”

Hearing her voice through the speakers of my cheaper, 2008 flip phone, I felt my mouth twist.

“How would I get there?” I asked.

“It’s not too long a drive from Chicago, is it?” she asked. “I assumed the ferry port is about halfway between Chicago and Pittsburgh.”

“Yeah, I think,” I managed. “I don’t know if my car can make the journey…”

I heard her breath intake on the other end of the line. I braced myself for the emotional guilt trip she was about to send my way. “But don’t you want to see Mickey again?” she asked.

“Before…”

I knew she was never going to be able to finish that sentence.

“Fine, fine, I can make it,” I said. “If it’s before the summer semester starts.”

“Yay!” my mother said in her bright, faux-childish glee. “Mickey will be so happy to see you! I’ll tell him you’re coming.”

After several more minutes of talking about my college studies, my summer job at the University of Chicago library, and whatever other little necessities a mother tends to worry about, I had hung up the phone, leaving myself with several minutes to wonder what would go wrong with my mother’s plans.

I would get the answer three days before I was supposed to make the drive from Chicago to Port Clinton.

“We have a problem,” my mother said when I picked up the ringing phone. I sucked in an anxious but not surprised breath. I could hear already the slight slur in her voice, indicative of her omnipresent prescription pain medication working its way through her system, probably at a dose a bit higher than was recommended by her doctor. “I hurt my knee again,” she said.

“Oh,” I managed.

“I don’t think I should go to Put-in-Bay with Mickey,” she said. “I need to look after your dad, and he doesn’t think he’s up for it now.”

“ ‘With Mickey, ’” I said. “Is he going by himself?”

“Well,” she began. I already knew what she was going to ask before she asked it.

And so, instead of making the four-hour drive from Chicago to Port Clinton, my crappy 2000 Ford Taurus and I ended up making the nine-hour drive from Chicago to Pittsburgh, knowing all the while that we would have to swing back to the island the next day.

“Thank you for this,” my mother said when I arrived at my childhood home. “Your brother can’t make it, I don’t know if I mentioned that. It’ll just be you and Mickey on the island. I hope you’ll make sure he has a good time.”

“Don’t worry,” I said in a monotone. “I will.”

Mickey, sitting on the lawn and looking up at us with his stoic, deep gaze, was dressed in his antique Harley-Davidson collar and matching bandana, his leash hooked loosely around his neck as he smiled with his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth a few droplets of drool conjured by the summer heat falling from his mouth and into the lawn.

Mom bent down and kissed him on his furry head. “Goodbye Mickey,” she said. “Steve’s going to show you a great time on the island. Have fun!”

Mickey lifted his head and licked her face a few times. I noticed a few tears streaming down her cheek, and turned my head away.

Within an hour I was back on I-79, going once more in the direction of the Lake Erie Isles of Ohio, with Mickey’s massive, fluffy form perched in the backseat, his head out of the open window and his tongue dancing in the gusts of wind blasting across the car as we barreled down the highway.

Of all of the dogs we had during my childhood (and, really, of all the dogs I ever encountered in any close proximity), Mickey was the strangest-looking. For one, he was massive. When we first got him in 2002, he was just the tiniest thing, one of three remaining puppies whose pregnant mother had been found as a stray and taken in by a rescue organization. Though details of his lineage were scarce, the rescue assumed that he was most-likely part Labrador, and this his adult size would likely not go much beyond the scale of a normal yellow lab. Within a year, he had maxed out at around 180-pounds.

“He must be part mastiff,” our vet told us. “That, or a goddam Saint Bernard.”

Whatever genetic diversity he had was not exactly cleared up by his appearance. For the most part, his fur was yellow. Except, of course, for the random fleck of black fur along his tail. And the white fur on his chest and stomach. And the reddish fur along his back. In addition to whatever puzzle that was, there was also the fact that his tail curled upward in a strange, off-kilter curlicue. His face vaguely resembled that of something like a Great Pyrenees or Bernese Mountain dog, save for the fact that his nose (or his “snoot” as my mother affectionately called it) stretched out at a length that was just a little too long.

“That’s probably the muttiest mutt that ever mutted,” as our vet put it.

Still, for whatever strange breakfast blend of breeds he was, he remained, as my mother always said, “the best dog ever.”

In terms of temperament, Mickey was a case study in contrasts, met only by his unending loyalty and drive to do the most good in any situation. As per his size, he possessed one of the deepest and most terrifying barks that any of us have ever heard (like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades, as my father put it). This was put to good use in the one anecdote where he saved my mother from a supposed mugger who jumped at her while she walked Mickey around an old abandoned movie theater. For this, he was rewarded with two cheeseburgers from Wendy’s (although, in later accounts, my mother became less clear on whether the supposed attacker actually posed any kind of threat, or if he was just an overly ambitious panhandler).

And yet, Mickey possessed all of the qualities of gentleness as well. One summer, in 2005, my mother came up with the very maternal but not all that wise idea of fostering a rescue mother dog and her seven puppies. The fear, of course, was whether Mickey, by then already the gruff elder statesman of our house (dog emeritus, as my dad called him), would adjust to the puppies, or turn things sour. This was answered almost immediately, when Mickey gave the puppies the only sniff he ever needed to judge character, and then launched himself into an epic play session with the gaggle of seven tiny, energetic puppies. So enthralled was Mickey with his new litter that he, in essence, became something of a surrogate mother for them, ultimately spending more time playing and caring for them than their own tired, overworked worked mother dog cared to.

And then, I found myself alone, in a three-bedroom cottage overlooking the placid waters of Lake Erie, alone save for the hulking mass of dog that sat next to me in his elder, decaying joints and fading eyes, smiling nonetheless into the late evening sunset of the summer. He was perched in his wagon, the same wagon I had managed to drag on its overtaxed wheels that buckled under Mickey’s weight. A summer breeze picked up and blew across both my hair and his fur. Mickey let out a short, tired bork at some Lake Erie carp that surfaced in the water a few feet from us, then lost interest.

“I really don’t feel like an adult,” I told him. I have no idea, even now, who I was really speaking to, or what he was supposed to say. But, he listened, nonetheless.

“I’m still just a moody teenager, under it all,” I said. The sun was close to disappearing below the barely-visible strip of the mainland across the water, and the earliest of the summer solstice stars were beginning to come out above us. I looked down at him, sitting in his wagon, smiling his same old goofy yet wise smile, drooping his long tongue out of the side of his mouth, sending an occasional wad of drool down onto the grass below us.

“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “You’ll be gone soon enough. To somewhere better, I assume. I’ve got to stick around for decades, dealing with this shit.”

The wind calmed, and a cluster of soft cumulus clouds floated past, silhouetted against the burning orange of the evening summer sun. Without warning, a sudden sadness appeared in my chest, coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

I suddenly understood those tears I had seen on my mother’s cheek.

“…will you wait for me?” I asked at last.

Mickey licked my hand.