A Long Dog Story

Chapter 4: Butterbean and the Dark-Dark

Long Dog Story Chapter 4

The Side Eye

Every female Dachshund I’ve ever known, owned, or met had a great side eye. Butterbean was no different. When she was sighted, she could throw that side-eye over one shoulder like a champion on the mound checking the bases before his third strike fastball.

She might not agree with a command: “Stay!” “No!” “Quit begging.” Side eye. If you were walking too slow for the hurry she was in, or too fast for her to get a good sniff of that fresh pile of poop a neighbor dog left behind, her side eye would hit you square in the middle of the forehead. Her side eye was my third eye, and I knew instantly I had displeased her in some way.

My friend, Marianne, could capture the essence of your dog (many are the happy dog owners who bought or were given a painting of their dog companion) in stereo color. You could hear your dog sing in agreement when you hung that little beauty on the wall. I am the grateful, proud owner of two, one of my dog, Blue, in his Arkansas Razorback blanket, and one of Butterbean with her most famous expression, the side eye.

When I was a cop working for Fulton County PD in Atlanta, we would have to pass night firing as part of a semi-annual training with our Magnums, then later, our Baretta’s. We also trained with shotguns, which leaned between the passenger and driver’s seat of every patrol car. If we failed any part of the process, we would have to take the class again.

I enjoyed the range. I liked to shoot. But for one of the more insane sergeants, who was our instructor and range master, range day was a day off for me. The Sarge was actually a really good range master. His policy was that if you turned toward him with a loaded weapon pointed up range, or in his general direction, he would shoot you. We didn’t feel special. He told every class that.

I was a good shot. I walked away tired and sweaty, smeared with red clay dust after a day at the range.I stunk of gun powder and my own perspiration as I pocketed another expert marksman pen. Luckily, night firing did not count into your score. Night firing was a different beast altogether. I always had to take that course twice.

Here’s the skinny on good night vision. You learn to look from the corners of your eyes, using your peripheral vision, as opposed to straight at the target. Stare into the shadows and catch the man-shape in the corner of your eye. Fire.

Sergeant Moore would yell, “Eat more carrots!” He yelled everything—“Quit drinking caffeine!” The guy was insane. We were cops. Most of us worked at night. We hung around the Waffle House and Dunkin’ Donuts. Of course we drank caffeine. What I researched and practiced was using my peripheral vision.

If you are familiar with the Pleiades, test this. Find those Seven Sisters, which believe it or not, you will spot from the corner of your eye. When you look at the Pleiades Constellation straight on, the sisters disappear. Turn your head a little, use your peripheral vision. They reappear.

You can improve night vision by wearing a hat with a blackout strip that prevents you seeing an object without using your peripheral vision. Once you’ve done this a few days, tripped over a kid’s toy, turned your ankle on the dog’s bone, or run into an open door jamb giving yourself a black eye—if you aren’t seriously injured—you will see better in the dark. DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.

What does this have to do with Butterbean’s side eye? When Butterbean went blind and could not use her side eye to telegraph to me what she did not like, we had to invent new signals. While she developed a radar system for navigating in her dark world, I was wearing one of those crazy hats trying to learn how best to stay in touch with her in the dark.

Soon enough, Bean could feel the walls from six inches out. She new how big her yard was and could walk the fence line without running into it. Only squirrels could throw her off, and they tormented her mercilessly. I came to hate those squirrels. I kept yelling at them, “I am an expert marksman!”

They can count themselves lucky they are alive today to steal from my bird feeders and chew the wires to my Christmas lights in half. They’re mean and vengeful creatures, lacking compassion. They taunted my blind dog, chattering at her from just inside the fence. When she gave chase, they ducked through the wire at the last minute. She never gave up. On the last day of her life, she made a mighty attempt to catch a squirrel.

I learned everything I needed to know after my dog went blind. It was I who had to learn to see in the dark. Bean was my teacher. I watched her closely, listened, and talked to her a lot. I had to learn to PAY ATTENTION! A quick turn of the head, the long slow pull of a taut leash, like a catfish on a line swimming away with the bait, were her new side eye.

Bean was patient with me, a slow learner. I was the world’s worst seeing eye dog. As soon as we stepped outside, my ADD kicked in and I attended to everything but what was right in front of, or behind me. Once I started across the boardwalk that bridges a gap between house and driveway, I was studying the side yard, the shed, the neighbors across the creek. Yeah, her leash was in my hand, but I was distracted. Halfway across the boardwalk, Bean dropped anchor, dragging our forward motion to a halt.

I’d say, “Come on now Bean,” and give a slight tug to the leash. “Bean,” I would plead, “please,” only to turn and find her trotting two feet below me in the flower bed. It’s so darn easy to walk off a ledge when you can’t see it! This happened more than once while I was in training. Luckily, it wasn’t far to a soft landing among the flowers, so it did seem a pretty safe place to learn. Still, I felt bad about it.

At first walking blind Bean was torturous, a slow stroll at best. There was no building up a head of steam when the hill got steep. We took it one aching step at a time, with pauses for reading sniffs and snorts along the roadside. So I bought a pair of ear buds and listened to my favorite tunes as we grueled our way around the neighborhood. I thought it would make our walks a bit more pleasurable.

Butterbean was having none of it. During this extremely short period, I was the recipient of a lot of side eye behaviors. She hated it when I talked on the phone or listened through my earbuds to a book or music. She tolerated a co-walker, but didn’t like it. She tugged on her leash or would come to a complete standstill and refuse to move. I thought I might get away with a kind of karaoke, listening to music on the phone so she could hear it, too, and singing along as we walked figure eights along the roadsides, but no. She stretched her long body and leash as far away from the sound as she could until my shoulder ached.

“Alright, alright,” I told her. “I get it. This is your time and I must attend to you and only to you. Queen princess,” I grumped, but I never had another problem walking her.

Butterbean taught me to pay attention: to finch chatter, nuthatch complaints, the Towhee, bluebird and cardinal calls. I heard the cicadas’ hum as soon as the insects got their wings. The drumbeat of the red-bellied woodpecker and the wild-jungle call of the pileated woodpecker accompanied our quiet steps on pine-needle paths.

Butterbean breached no trespass on her property. Losing her sight did not change this trait. No squirrels were allowed on deck and certainly nothing larger. She didn’t like being startled. Everyone should come to the front door and knock properly. One September afternoon, an adolescent bear hopped our backyard fence in broad daylight. He knocked the bird feeder to the deck, straddling it, and boldly licked up seeds. I bring the feeders in at night because of our famous garbage and seed-foraging bears. None had ever been so bold as to cross the fence during daylight hours.

Bean burst out the back screen door in attack mode, but I reached the bear first and shoved the crazed dachshund across the boards with one foot, leaving no more than six feet between me and the adolescent male. I was terrified for Butterbean, and stomped and waved and cursed that bear until he reluctantly exited the yard. He side-eyed Bean first, his interest piqued, before meandering down the ramp and hopping the fence. He headed for the hills. The next morning, I imagined all the savvy bears watching from above as the humans below faced off Helene. As we floundered, drowned, lost homes and roads and cars, they voyeured our tragedy. Munching on garbage can leftovers and shaking out half-empty bird feeders into fat paws, they grumbled, “Well, we tried to warn ‘em.” At some point, all of WNC, both human and wildlife, would go hungry in the fall of ’24.

Although Bean learned to navigate her home and yard incredibly well within a few months of becoming blind, there were a few stumpers. If awakened from a sound sleep, she would bump into the coffee table or a doorway. Sometimes she would not be able to find her pad in time if I wasn’t there to let her out. She got excited hearing the word “treat,” and would careen around and, well, blindly, run into her crate or bump her head on the sofa. When I came home from a trip, my pet sitter learned to leash Bean as she heard us pull into the drive. Leashed, my blind doxie would not become a pinball bouncing off the walls as she made her way to the door. Often, she stood three feet to the left or right of me, bouncing up and down for me to pick her up. That was always a heartbreaker.

Bean had only one fear. She was afraid of what I called the dark-dark. Although hers was a world lived in the shadows, her circadian rhythm was intact. She knew when the sun dropped below the horizon and dark curtained the outside world. She hated for me to be away from her during the day’s transition to dark-dark. I tried to avoid being away during those hours. If it could not be avoided, I would come home to hear her softly yowling or moaning on the other side of the door. I learned to talk to her before I unlocked and entered. “Bean, it’s me, Papa. I’m home.”

I transitioned interior discussions with myself to conversations with her. I told her everything that was happening, everything I saw, everything the neighbors did, everything that happened while I was at the Y or out shopping. I “showed” her the fresh red cardinals born that year, the creek running clear, the grass greening, the broken faucet. I admit I lied about not looking any older after radiation and that I was still as attractive as ever; that really, I would rather just be with her. This was mostly true. She ran with it.

There was touch. I held her more. I cradled her in the deck rockers in the evening. I slept with her. She had always liked her crate, but after blindness, began to protest its confinement. One night I thought she had been electrocuted by the little dog warmer I kept plugged in for her comfort. She rocked and rolled and thumped around in there until I was sure she had been shocked and threw away a perfectly good heater. After that, she slept with me every night.

And there was, last but not least, taste. Butterbean died with a cabinet full of expensive treats that would have titillated even the pickiest canine gourmand.I was not sparing with these treats and she became a little rotund. Together we had been through an awful lot of trouble. She deserved treats. She loved treats. So shoot me.

With Bean’s help, I learned to see in the dark. Because seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing. She believed we could still communicate. She never doubted it. I did, but only briefly. As time went by, we learned to communicate with fewer and fewer physical signals. We spoke to each other in the language long forgotten by so many humans; a form of communication much like Nature herself telling the bears before Helene struck, to “Eat first, then run! Run for the hills!” It’s a psychic language spoken as part of a sacred bond between two parties. Some might call it the language of love. Ir is intrinsic to our natures if we listen. It is deeply intuitive. It’s this language that lingers, even after the beloved has departed.

Love will not stop heartbreak, however. One might even say, true love invites a broken heart. It is a testament to love, then, that we prepare a place for our inevitable heartbreak—turn out our Sunday best, prepare the favorite meal, put on our softest comforter, before the hammer’s blow. Neither Bean, nor I, could stave off our last confrontation with the dark-dark. As usual, she met it with more grace than I, but you know, it’s always easier to leave than to be left.