Get Happy

My first dog is a beautiful black and tan Pekingese. My mother got me one because she had a beloved Peke growing up and had a love affair with them ever since. Her father names him Abbie, “Because he’s just like a Jew, you can’t hurt his feelings.”

Clearly, Hjalmar knows little to nothing about dogs and Jews.

A few of the Eclov’s friends are still not used to dogs in the house, or bathrooms for that matter. Hjalmar himself is uneasy about the inside bathroom, having grown up on a farm with an outhouse. At one dinner party, a woman sneers at Abbie as she arrives at the house and calls him a filthy mutt who should be outside. Once everyone is seated at the dining room table, Abbie finds his way under it and throws up on her feet.

Over the years, my mother talks about Abbie a lot. The only thing she says about other dogs is that if you are in need of one, there’s a field in town where stray dogs congregate. You go there and pick one. Often they stay but a year or two.

Going through old photographs, I make a surprising discovery. Shirley and her parents have six other dogs besides Abbie over the years: Tinker, Lindy, Comfy, Warrior, Rove and Jojo. They also have a cat named Purrkins. I’ve never heard of any of them.

Shirley’s father arrives home one day with a Pekingese puppy in his pocket. In the late 1920s, Pekingese are still considered luxury dogs. The West has never even heard of the breed until the British and the French storm China’s Summer Palace of the Forbidden City in 1860 during the second Opium War. Not very many Pekes get out of China as countless dogs are killed to prevent commoners and foreigners from having them. Ultimately, enough dogs are brought out and bred. They become a sensation in the West.

I wonder how Pops is able to lay hands on such a treasure.

We name my puppy Happy. He and I bond from the very beginning and it’s true that he doesn’t think much of my brothers. Of course, they don’t think much of him either, so they tease him. He’ll snap at them when he thinks they go too far. Happy and I spend much of my early childhood together. Two incidents stand out, though. In one, the cocker spaniel—dumped on my mother by Pops—tears Happy’s eye out in a fight over a treat.

Happy recovers well from it and in a couple of months his black fur grows over the wound. And in another incident, Happy is hit by a car.

The initial prognosis is dire and the vet’s first inclination is to put Happy down. I won’t allow it. I plead with my mother to give me a chance to nurse him back to health. Neither she nor the vet look pleased about it, but I prevail. The vet hands us bundles of supplies and we head home, me sitting in back with the dog. My brothers think I’m an idiot.

I make a bed for Happy right in my room upstairs. He isn’t going to go out for at least a few days so I lay down the diaper-like papers the vet has given us. I feed him, clean up after him, help him walk, eventually get him outside, and further down the line, he’s climbing the stairs. I pet him to sleep.

Against all odds, Happy makes a full recovery.

To this day, Jake, in his early 70s, will say: “We were all excited to get another dog and what’d we get? That goddamned Happy!”