Logan

Months and months ago I was talking to my sister Kelsey about my dog. “Maybe I’ll take a road trip out to Utah this summer,” I said. “Then I can take Jin with me and you could actually meet him.” I’m not entirely sure when that hypothetical idea became a given. Somehow in the course of talking with my family “if you come out here” became “when you come out here,” and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the initiator of the linguistic shift. But since I liked the idea, I went with it, and on Wednesday evening last week my roommate Stephanie and I loaded the luggage and the dog in the car and headed out west.

Jin did really well in the car, though not so well at my grandma’s house—he’s not allowed inside, and he began systematically destroying the back gate when I left his sight the first night. So he’s been banished to the kennel (a nice, clean, friendly one), with visitation privileges. I’m allowed to take him out any time during office hours, which means my family still gets to meet him and to play with him at will during the day, and then I am able to leave him and spend time with my family without worrying.

But my entire last blog was about Jin, and this time I want to talk about the other dog. My parents are up here for the week as well, because my brother Eric is riding in the Tour of Utah, and when they drove up on Saturday, they brought along our family dog, a chocolate lab named Logan that we've owned from a puppy.

Logan is a little over nine years old, and has always been big and hyper and lovable (except for that brief period of time when he was small and hyper and lovable). I’ve never really lived with him for long periods of time, so I won’t deny that sometimes he gets on my nerves when he jumps on me as I walk in the door, or hangs around the table begging for food, or drops his slobbery toy in my lap. But I’ve still always enjoyed having him around. Jin won’t fetch, but Logan loves to chase balls and sticks and even logs twice the size of his head. He likes to roughhouse indoors, and I always make a point of playing with him when I’m at home. He’ll come hang out with me in my sister’s room while I’m reading or on my computer, flopped down on the floor next to me. He likes oranges, and there are always oranges (some right off the tree in our own backyard), so I’ll peel oranges as a snack and share them with Logan—one for me, one for him, two for me, one more for him.

When I went home for Christmas in December Logan was slowing down a little, and had put on a few pounds, but he was still himself, a puppy at heart in an aging dog’s body. Throughout the summer, however, my mom has been sending all of us periodic email updates as Logan’s health has rapidly declined. Right before my family reunion, Logan made a remarkable recovery, and then a couple weeks ago he made a remarkable un-recovery. We think he may have a brain tumor. By the time he stumbled out of my parents’ car on Saturday evening, he was a shell of the dog I remembered. Where he had been getting a bit portly, he is now skin and bones, and he lumbers about unsteadily on his feet, as though he is drunk. He’ll walk around looking lost, will start at one end of the yard and then stop halfway across the lawn as though he can’t remember where he was going, or why. It’s such a sad sight, and such a contrast not just to the dog I remember from Christmas, but to my own young, healthy, energetic hound.

Logan may not last the vacation. And if he does, I suspect that he will not be around much after that. I don’t feel the same sense of devastation that my little sister does. She lived with Logan throughout high school; I only spent vacations with him. I have memories, but they are not as extensive as the memories of other members of my family. He has been a peripheral part of my life, not a central part. I will be sad when he passes away, but I will probably not cry. It happened more quickly than any of us expected, but we knew it would happen.

Still, dogs and other pets become members of the family, if more temporary. The first pets I ever owned (excluding goldfish) were hamsters, and I cried when they died. I had fed them and played with them and cleaned their cages, and had taken their tiny lives into my own hands, and though I knew they would die eventually, the loss felt very personal. Someday it will be the same with Jin, though I prefer not to think about it. I feel protective of him, and sometimes find myself speaking of him like a proud parent would speak of her son. I feel happy when he greets me at the door, and sad when I have to leave him in someone else’s care. I love knowing that he is lying at the side of my bed at night, whether it’s in my apartment in Ann Arbor, or a dog-friendly hotel in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa, and that he will be ready and eager to greet me when I stir in the morning.

Logan is to Jin as, I think, a nephew would be to a son. I will not feel the sense of personal loss I would feel with Jin, but I will feel sad, and I will sympathize with my family's sadness because I will understand how personal his passing is to them. And, right here and right now, I will dedicate a blog post to Logan, because he's been a good dog, and we'll miss him, and our home in California will be quieter and emptier without him.