All bark and no bite (no matter what the judge claims...)

My arrivals in Florida are usually marked by the spastic, desperate, uncontrolled ecstasy of my brother´s cast-off pitbull mix, Phantom. This dog has been obsessed with me for eight years after I spent a summer walking and feeding him, conferring me with "human being who makes the world go around" status and leading to baby talk and bacon bribes in failed attempts by my brother to win back the dog's affection.

Last night, however, when I opened the door to the house and braced myself, throwing myself on the ground behind my suitcase to avoid death by mauling, I knew something was wrong when, despite the customary noise of dog nails scrabbling madly on tile, I was barely even injured. Phantom had run one measly celebratory loop around the kitchen and back. He sounded like a donkey with bronchitis. His posture was decidedly stiff and his tail was not beating me senseless but agitating like an electric toothbrush with half dead batteries. On my knees, his face in my hands, I realized that his brown and white speckles were now gray and white and the faintest blue ghosts of the cataracts of the future shone in his eyes.

My mother looked at my visible distress, shrugged, and pointed out rather brutally "He's old."

Eleven months ago, last September, he wasn't old. I KNOW he wasn't. He scratched the shit out of me when I walked through the door last year.

Calculating the years, I realize that Phantom is now over 9 years old. It was nine years ago almost to the day when he first came padding in to our living room on too-big feet, sniffed around, and peed on the floor.

This was the dog who followed me around the house shadow-like and whose eyes widened accusingly when I so much as took a shower, much less went out to buy coffee. He slept with me, even on my twin-sized mattress, my body twisted in the shape of the number four to fit on the bed around him. It was my job to take him to the vet once a year, risking death by dog fight when he savagely tried to attack (slash was deathly afraid of) everything on four legs. I trained him to sit and to come here, instructions he followed in the house only, and then only if he was sure he was not in trouble. If he was worried he was being asked to come because he had done something wrong, he patheticaly scrabbled onto his back to show me his pink and naked belly skin, thus proving how utterly at my mercy he was. Or pretended to be to avoid getting in trouble.

This was the dog who ripped the leash out of my hand (back before I wised up and bought the indispensable Gentle Leader) one Christmas morning in a brave attempt to protect us from the elderly man fishing on the bank of the fake lake behind our house. Phantom scratched him with his teeth (ok, some people would call it a "bite" but that implies a depth to the injury that was not inflicted in this case) and circled him while barking menacingly. Unfortunately, the grandafther had just gotten out of surgery the day before and his son wasn't pleased by Phantom's vigilance. When he turned to me, pointed at the dog and boomed, "that dog needs to be put to sleep," I locked myself in my room with Phantom, reassuring him in whispered hysterics that I wouldn't let anyone touch him and planning wild escapes to New York involving the theft of my mother's car. Once there we would live in some desolate part of the south Bronx or in New Jersey so that we could afford a yard. My mother screamed impatiently at me through the door -- "You care more about that damn dog than the old man! He could have had a heart attack." But when I was still sobbing three hours later behind the locked door, she finally reassured me the police weren't there to take him away to die but only to photograph him and charge her a huge fine.

This dog cannot get old and die! I love him, and no one I love has ever died on me in my twenty nine years of life. He can't! He can't! He can't!