Giant George (7 page)

What he most loved, however, was when she blow-dried her hair. Christie wielding a hair dryer was nirvana to George, and would send him into raptures of excitement. Whereas some animals respond to the sound of a food can or package being opened, George would canter to wherever the sound of the hair dryer was coming from. He was like a homing pigeon,
and, once again, it was all about smell, about the way her hair, treated with whatever conditioner she’d been using, would fill the air around her with its scent.

On the other hand, although I had all the Brownie points for looking after George all day, I was also the bad guy—a lot. All I did—and I could see from George’s eyes that this really annoyed him—was to make a series of horrible, ear-splitting
noises.

When George was with me while I was at work, which was most days, I was usually drilling and hammering and planing and sawing, or using the air compressor, the pressure washer or the vacuum. And when I was at home, it was more of the same—a wall-to-wall diet of truly dreadful rackets: more hammering, more drilling, more planing and sawing, more pressure washing. I was pretty sure he took
it very personally. If there was a noise George didn’t like, then I’d be making it, for sure.

I began to figure that it worked in the same way as it did with Christie: I made a noise, he made it clear he didn’t like it on principle and stomped off, tail down, in a terrible huff. I swear that if he could have, he’d have put his paws over his ears. As it was, he had this irritated “harrumph!” sound
he’d make instead, which did the job almost as well.

So far, this was all pretty normal dog behavior. When your nose and your ears are as acute as a dog’s are, you tend to be sensitive about that kind of stuff. But George also hated water, which
was
odd. Dogs are supposed to like water—they are natural swimmers—and images of dogs playing in the ocean are classic, as are dogs horsing around under
sprinklers, fording streams, tails wagging, and shaking themselves dry and dousing everyone around.

But it wasn’t for George. He found all water deeply unsettling and hated getting his giant paws wet, which seemed a shame, because the Arizona summer was in full, scorching swing. The saguaro and barrel cacti were in bloom, the olive and mesquite trees lush as well. Finally, we could take advantage
of the pool in our yard. It was one of the features that,
though pretty old, actually worked. It was a real blessing, because when it’s 111 degrees, and you want to be outside, you need shade and you need water—lots of it.

George didn’t like this one bit. If Christie and I went in the pool, he’d start acting anxious, putting his head down low and barking pretty constantly, pacing up and down
the pool rim as he did so. No dip in the water ever went unaccompanied by this very vocal expression of his disapproval at our antics; it’s something that continues to this day.

To be fair, I might have had a hand in his continued terror. One day that summer I made a decision. It seemed completely crazy that our pet didn’t like water. I thought
all
dogs liked water, just as all cats did not.
I’d also always thought that if you put a dog in water, he’d start to swim. Wasn’t that what the doggie paddle was all about?

Of course, I didn’t know anything much about it. I just figured that the solution lay in letting him see how good it was. Once I’d done that, I thought, we’d be on our way. It was important that he should be able to cool off in the pool with us. Arizona summers are relentlessly
hot, and it seemed crazy to have our fella mincing around on the hot patio stones, in a flap, every time Christie and I wanted to take a dip.

In short, I decided that if George was
made
to get in the pool, he’d discover his true identity as a water-loving animal, and swim like he was born to. I was determined about this. Now all I had to do was get him in, but there was no question of carrying
him in. So, without telling Christie (whatever my logic, I was pretty sure she’d say no to this), I kind of nudged
him in with me one morning by coming up behind him, then looping my arm tightly around his flank as I jumped in myself.

I wasn’t at all prepared for the reaction to this stunt. George was as mad as mad could be. In fact, if he had had the power of speech, I’m guessing the air would
have turned as blue as the Tucson sky. As it was, we must have lost a good few gallons of the pool water as he thrashed about, the whites of his eyes showing, his limbs kicking out like four pistons. Not knowing quite what to do next, and being showered with pool water, I half pushed and half steered the seething mass of legs and ears and fur, until eventually I steered him to the steps at the
shallow end, where he scrambled frantically, and furiously, back out onto dry land.

Hearing the commotion, Christie, who’d been doing some tidying up inside, now appeared at the bedroom patio doors. “What on
earth
is going on there?” she exclaimed, looking horrified.

George was shaking himself dry at an incredible rate—he looked like some sort of mad canine washing machine hopped up on caffeine.
Christie looked at me now, figuring out where he’d been. “He went
in
there?” she asked me incredulously.

I nodded.

“Seriously?” she asked, shaking her head. “Who’d have thought it?”

I got out myself, then walked across and gently patted George’s damp flanks. He looked seriously pissed off.

“But I don’t think he liked it,” I said to Christie, who was still shaking her head.

“I can’t believe
he actually got into that pool willingly.”

“Me neither.”

“Incredible.” Then her eyes began to narrow. “Dave, you didn’t…”

“Didn’t what? What, push him in? You kidding?”

At which point, I figured I’d better quit while I was ahead. Perhaps it was true: not all dogs
did
like water.

But if George’s second-worst place to be was by the pool, standing watch (the first, as I found out, was
in
the
pool) then his favorite place, bar none, was bed. But, once again, he was outgrowing his. He still just about fit on the single mattress, but only in one position. He could sleep that way or not at all—or with us, in our lovely king-sized bed.

“With us,” for any length of time, was fast becoming untenable, as with George sprawled between us, like some overindulged prince, we both spent half the
night clinging onto the edges of the mattress. So, one day in early August, we took a drive to a bed store to get him something slightly bigger and more comfortable of his own. We had no real plan as to how we’d fit it in the bedroom, but worked on the basis that however much we lost in floor space, we’d at least make up in bed space, which meant sleep space, which mattered, we both agreed, a whole
lot more.

“You have to be kidding me,” said Christie, as we pulled into the parking lot. “One hundred and forty-seven? He
can’t
be!”

Earlier I’d been with George to have his checkup with Doc Wallace, and I had just filled her in on the staggering news he’d told me. “He weighs one hundred and forty-seven pounds,” I said. “Honest.”

I could see Christie shake her head out of the corner of my eye.
“But that’s bigger than that other Dane we saw at the park, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “You mean Drake? Yup. He was one forty, wasn’t he?”

She nodded. “Exactly! But he was a five-year-old dog; George is still only close to nine months old! He’s going to keep growing for more than two
years
yet! Just how big is this dog of ours going to
get
?”

The truth was that George had soon closed in on Drake,
size-wise, and what had seemed an impossibility a scant couple of months back was not a shock to me when Doc Wallace told me. When you see something change daily, that change is almost imperceptible, but when there’s been a gap, you see it right off. I didn’t need Doc Wallace to tell me the numbers when he’d weighed George—just his expression when he saw George had been enough.

It had also become
evident that George was growing up fast. In the space of a few weeks he’d begun to tower over most of the other dogs in the dog park. And with the increase in height, and in maturity, had come a very visible increase in confidence. We finally decided it was time to move him out of the puppy park and let him mix with the adult dogs again. Now
that he was older, he settled in well there. He was
never aggressive and never tried to dominate the other dogs; it was great to see he wasn’t being pushed around anymore.

He also seemed to have a real intelligence about him, and had learned a new phrase he loved: “dog park.” All I had to do now was say those two words and he’d become real excited, alternately bounding around and watching me intently, until his enthusiasm was rewarded when I got
out his leash. I could barely open the truck door before he’d have scooted in.

Still, both Christie and I were silent for a few moments as we took in the enormity of his incredible growth spurt, and the realization that he’d probably be growing
for at least two more years
. I parked the truck in a bay and switched off the engine. “Maybe he’s just a
really
fast developer,” I said. “Maybe this is
it. Maybe he’s done with growing already.”

It was so ridiculous an idea that it hardly needed saying: it was like saying the moon was made of green cheese. “Or, maybe,” said Christie, climbing out and pushing the door closed, “he’s just going to be one hell of a big dog.”

It’s got to be said that most people don’t run around buying queen-sized mattresses in bed stores for anything other than
humans. And it’s also true that when humans buy mattresses, they generally buy box springs and bed frames to go with them. But we just wanted a mattress—for our dog.

The assistant in the bed store didn’t know this yet, so when he bounded up to see if he could help us, he naturally assumed
that the mattress we were currently lying on to try out was, as was usual, intended for us. And as it hadn’t
taken us long to choose it (it was big enough and cheap enough—job done), we got off it and I said to him, “Fine. We’ll take it.”

“Certainly, sir,” he said, looking extremely cheerful. It was obviously a slow day for bed sales. “So,” he went on, noting down the details on the mattress ticket so he could go to his computer and check on stock, “have you decided on a box spring and bed frame to
go with that?”

“We don’t need either, thanks,” Christie told him. “Just the mattress.”

“Just the mattress?” He looked deflated now.

“Just the mattress,” I repeated.

He looked even more deflated. We’d held so much promise, yet here we were letting him down, big-time. He tried again. “You sure you folks don’t want—”

I shook my head firmly. “We only need the mattress. It’s not for us,” I explained.
“It’s for our dog.”

His eyes bulged. “For your
dog
?”

He looked down at the mattress, then back at us, and back at the mattress again, his face a picture. “For your
dog
?” he said again, and you could see his mind working. “As in
a
dog? Dog singular?”

“As in dog singular,” confirmed Christie. “He’s a big dog. He’s pretty much outgrown his single one.”

The assistant took a last look at the mattress,
and us, before going off to see if he had one in stock that we could buy and take with us right away.

“From what I’m visualizing, does the word ‘big’ even cover it?” he asked us as he left.

We exchanged a glance, then shook our heads. It probably didn’t.

In the truck on the way home, George’s new bed strapped carefully in back, we laughed at the idea that our “baby” had grown, in less than
a year, from a tiny ball who sat trembling in Christie’s lap on the way home from the Phoenix airport to an animal so big that he now needed an entire queen-sized mattress to sleep on.

Perhaps now that George had it, we both agreed, gratefully, he wouldn’t need to spend a big chunk of every night curled up in
our
bed, which was a bonus, whichever way you looked at it. First it meant we might
all get some better quality sleep now, and second, though we were not really thinking about it quite yet, it might give us the space to put our minds to the business of making human babies without our canine one coming between us.

But what was a natural transition as far as we were concerned was about to become a
big
concern for Georgie…

They say size isn’t everything, and they’re wrong. In some areas of life, it’s all about size, and let me tell you, when one hundred and fifty pounds of dog gets a twinkle in his eye, size absolutely does matter.

Not having had experience with teenagers, except for being them ourselves (and we were both
good as gold, obviously), we were kind of unprepared for the sudden change in George. Yes, we’d known it would be coming, and we’d known we’d have to deal with it, but the reality, now that our canine friend weighed nearly as much as I did, was a zillion times more challenging than we’d anticipated.

It was August 2006 when we first realized our boy had hit doggie puberty. It seemed almost like
an overnight transformation in many ways—one minute he was a puppy, full of joie de vivre and energy, finding happiness in the simple act of grabbing hold of life; the next, he was rambunctious, moody and almost psycho. Mostly, instead of grabbing life by the lapels, he was grabbing onto legs—table legs, chair legs, human legs, he
wasn’t picky. Our puppy, like any archetypal pimply adolescent
kid, had discovered how life came to be. In short, our gentle George had discovered his manhood.