Giant George (17 page)

“Gibson,” said Dana, who’d just emerged from the house with a bowl of freshly made popcorn. “His name was Gibson.”

“ ‘
Was
’ being the operative word,”
added Paul. “He just died.”

I shook my head. “That’s a shame.”

“But he held the record for four years, apparently,” said Dana.

“So how tall
was
he?”

“A little over forty-two inches,” said Paul. “To the shoulder, that is. That’s how you measure them, apparently—to this very precise point on the shoulder. You think George could top that?”

I glanced over at him. Who knew? I shrugged. “I have
absolutely no idea.”

“Lee!” called Paul. “Honey, you got a tape measure in there?”

We didn’t know if George could beat the record, of course. Not at that point. We’d gotten the tape and measured him, but not knowing exactly where the measurement should be taken from—a “shoulder” not being a place with a lot of obvious precise points—all we could say with any certainly was that he seemed to be
around
that sort of height. And despite the whole idea of it being kind of fun, I had other, more important things on my mind, like the fact that I was about to become a dad.

Three Friday-night happy hours later, however, Dana had an update for us all. She came with a bunch of copies of something she had found online, buried in the news, while she’d been having lunch. Dana worked in PR and marketing,
so she was pretty on the ball about what was happening in the media. “They obviously move fairly fast,” she said, handing things out to us. The piece she’d given us was an Associated Press article she’d come across about a woman who was claiming that her dog was now the tallest in the world. The dog, who lived with her up in North Dakota, was a Newfoundland, who was also named Boomer, like
Dana and Jim’s Lab. He was a lovely-looking dog, but the tallest in the world he was not—his height from floor to shoulder was just thirty-six inches.

“Thirty-six inches? Three
feet
?” I said, incredulous. “But that’s
way
less than George is to his shoulder.”

“Exactly,” said Dana, laughing. “That’s
exactly
what I thought. I mean, there’s really no contest here, is there?”

“Doesn’t seem to be,”
I agreed.

“None at all,” Paul confirmed. “None whatsoever. You know, Dave, you really should look into this a bit further. Why don’t you go take a look at the Guinness World Records website and see how you can make a submission? I think it’s a pretty straightforward business.”

“And it would be fun, wouldn’t it?” said Dana.

“Great fun,” agreed Paul.

“A project,” I agreed. “An official happy
hour project.” I raised my glass. “Okay—let’s do it. Here’s to Team George!”

Christie was in bed fast asleep when George and I got in, so I poured myself a glass of wine and opened the Chinese takeout I’d grabbed on the way home. I then fired up my laptop on the kitchen counter and read up on Gibson and this North Dakota Boomer for myself.

There wasn’t much more to tell. Gibson had been a harlequin
Great Dane—a beautifully marked dog, with black and white patches—and he’d lived in Grass Valley, California. Right away you could see he would have been our boy’s equal in height, but George definitely had him on weight. George was at least seventy pounds heavier than Gibson, and you could tell he was much more massive generally.

Gibson had died of bone cancer, apparently, at around seven years
of age—not old for most dogs but a pretty good age for a Great Dane. He’d have been much loved, I didn’t doubt, because these dogs are so lovable; I imagined he’d be badly missed.

I then googled Boomer, the Newfoundland from North Dakota, but there was less to learn about him. Another beautiful animal, certainly, but Dana had been right: there was no contest between them; George was so obviously
the much taller dog.

As if to confirm it, George, who’d come to join me in the kitchen, now placed a questing snout down onto the counter, in the hopes of charming me into donating some food. I swiveled the screen of my laptop so he could take a look for himself.

“What d’you think?” I asked. “You’ve got six inches on this North Dakota Boomer, you reckon?”

In response, George swiped his tongue
across the granite top, sweeping up all the rice that had fallen from my box.

Our daughter decided she wanted to come join the party right in the middle of yoga.

Christie had been attending prenatal yoga classes once a week for much of her pregnancy. She’d always enjoyed yoga and this class was specifically aimed at pregnant women. It would, apparently, help with her labor when
the time came, and she thought it was kind of neat that she would tell our baby about all the things she’d been doing when she was still in Christie’s womb.

Today Christie had felt funny right off the bat. She’d been doing squats early on and had felt a bit strange, and then, once she got down for the relaxation phase at the end, she’d become aware she might be leaking. Understandably, she really,
really hoped no one would notice, but while she was putting her yoga pad away more fluid leaked out over the floor, so there was no way she could keep this to herself.

Naturally, Christie was mortified. You read all the time—well, it seems women do anyway—about the many embarrass
ing possibilities for early labor, and all you want (and all you pray for) is that, when the time comes, it’ll happen
in such a way that you won’t suffer public humiliation.

But, in that regard, it obviously wasn’t Christie’s lucky day. One minute she was elegantly lowering herself to the floor, the next—well, almost the next, and certainly as a result of it—she’d created a pretty big puddle on the floor. Still, as I helpfully pointed out, at least it was prenatal yoga, and not the ordinary kind, so there hadn’t
been any guys there.

Sorting herself out with the minimum amount of fuss, Christie explained what had happened to the instructor and reassured her that she’d be okay. She then called her ob-gyn to warn her she was coming, and then me to put our plan into action.

It was clear she intended to retake control of the situation, after having had it so abruptly snatched away before. No, she didn’t
need picking up from yoga, and yes, she was absolutely fine—right now, anyhow—and the easiest thing, given we were currently slap bang in the middle of the rush hour, would be for me to go home, grab the bag she’d packed, which was in the hallway, drive to the hospital with it and meet her there.

While women, I’m sure, harbor all sorts of secret anxieties about the huge leap into the unknown
that constitutes giving birth, men, in their turn, do their part. Mainly, it must be said, they are real experts on the stress front. And, yup, right now I was feeling pretty damned stressed.

Like any other man, I made the trip to the hospital with my head buzzing with unspeakable scenarios. There’s nothing to beat labor for full-on intensity, I’m sure, and let’s be honest, the women of the world
are welcome to it, thanks. But, at the same time, giving birth is pretty scary for a man too, because there’s pretty much
nothing
you can do. Nothing you can do to help the process, barring just being there, and not a lot you can do to influence the outcome.

Naturally, as I drove toward the hospital, the outcomes that weighed the most heavily were the worst-case scenarios that I simply couldn’t
shake from my thoughts. What if this? What if that? What if the other suddenly happened? The list of possible complications seemed endless. I’ve since found out that I wasn’t alone in this, of course, because I’m told almost every other man feels the way I did. But at the time all I could think of was what a
huge
thing it was, this whole business of bringing a new life into the world. We’d been
taught that particular grim lesson already. There were just so many things that could go wrong here.

So when I arrived at the hospital to find Christie checked in, looking calm and not even mildly in agony, my racing brain calmed down no end. She told me what had happened at the end of her yoga class, and that she’d been examined and it was all systems go.

She’d been admitted around six thirty
in the evening, and within no time at all, she began having contractions. We were transferred to a private room and settled down to watch TV; they’d told us it would probably be a while before things got
going and she wanted to catch the latest installment of
Project Runway
. But then they decided to press on and give her an epidural and, within minutes of having it, she began to sleep.

“You think
George will be okay?” she asked me just before she drifted off. “I mean, at some point he’s going to need to pee, isn’t he?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” I said, immediately worrying about that.

“But what if…”

“Shhh,” I said. “Stop worring. He’ll be fine.”

And he was fine when I got back to him, if a little put out at the hour. It was really late, well into the middle of the night, but it
was the first time I’d felt able to leave Christie, and only then because the nurse promised that all would be well and nothing would happen while I was gone.

I let him out and you could tell he needed that pee real bad; you could literally see the expression of relief on his face. He was less thrilled, of course, when I prepared his food and water and then headed straight off out the door without
him.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I told him, conscious of what a good job he was doing looking lonely and abandoned and making me feel like a heel, “but your mom needs me, and if I don’t get back before she wakes up, we are both going to have our heads on the block. I’ll get back just as soon as I can, promise.”

He looked completely unimpressed, and not at all enthusiastic about the prospect of being
abandoned again. Probably
just as well, I decided, as I climbed back in my car, that he didn’t know what was coming next.

Our beautiful daughter was born at twelve thirty in the afternoon of September 4, 2009, and we named her Annabel Mary, after both of Christie’s grandmas. It was a lovely name, and a great tribute to two wonderful women, but it didn’t come without careful negotiation. I liked
Shayley, but Christie didn’t. She preferred Quincy, which I liked even less—it sounded much more like a boy’s name to me. So in the end we compromised—always a good thing to do at such moments—and the happiest day of our lives could begin properly, though not without a touch of anxiety.

Christie confided that even as she gave birth to our precious daughter, there was a part of her heart that
was back home with Georgie, concerned for the state of his poor bladder. And not just his bladder, either: we were both well aware that the happiest day of
our
lives might feel like a pretty grim one for him. It was something we needed to keep in mind.

Since Christie was staying in the hospital for two nights, it was up to me to prepare him for the arrival of this new family member. I hadn’t
been complacent about it either. I’d read up some, and I knew that there was potential for discord. Amiable, even-tempered and obedient as George was, I knew from finding out about the experiences of other dog owners that I couldn’t take his acceptance of Annabel for granted. Great Danes are well known for being emotional dogs, who form
strong, lifelong, unbreakable attachments to the humans they
live with and love. They are also vulnerable to all manner of stress-related ailments, as we already knew, and the last thing we wanted was for the arrival of our baby to cause any sort of upset for
any
of us.

To this end, I decided to use psychology. On the night after Annabel came into the world, I had Christie hand over her first crib blanket. I figured that, scent being so important to dogs,
if I could prepare George by first introducing her smell, then at least I’d have laid a little of the groundwork.

It was late when I finally got home from the hospital, so right off I was at a disadvantage. He was at the door to greet me as soon as my key turned in the lock, but once it was clear that I’d failed to bring his missing mom back, his expression was a picture of bitter disappointment.
Where was she? What exactly had I done with her? And where had I
been
all these hours? These and other similarly probing questions were writ plain as the nose on his disgruntled face. He then turned away and loped off down the hallway.

This clearly wasn’t the time to bring out the blanket, so I followed him into the kitchen instead. “Hey, Georgie,” I called. “You feel like a walk? Just the two
of us? Go on out and get ourselves some fresh air?”

This did at least produce some enthusiasm from him. So much so, in fact, that I knew I was on to a winner, and, since it was such a lovely late-summer evening, I decided to spoil him and get the golf cart out too.

He was so excited at this prospect that he started barking,
and I could hear the thunderous noise booming through the hallway of
the house as I reversed the cart out into the road. He was beside himself, I knew, by the time he heard the sound of it out front, and once I’d parked it and opened the front door, he streaked out like a rocket and jumped straight into the front, immediately moving across to the passenger seat—
his
seat. Right away he was ready to go, with his head—which was now so big it stuck out through the
front space—poised to catch all the exciting evening scents.