Measuring the passage of time through Fix’s old age

This column began many years ago – so many, in fact, that it reminded me of the time when we didn’t yet have a dog.

There were so many that I used to fill columns with complaints about my children’s incessant pleas for a dog. Especially the incessant pleas from one of them, the older sister, who was nine at the time and had started wanting a dog when she was around nine months old. This column is so old that it recounts the day we went, completely unaware, to the dog shelter just outside the city to meet the ‘lovely dog’ found in an online advert (I’d Googled ‘small dog Rome’ one evening), only to find ourselves face to face with a strange hot dog, or perhaps a seal. He was running across the lawn during his half-hour of exercise, wagging a stump where his tail should have been, and was not particularly interested in us. He had already been through a lot; he had nearly been killed by a pack of stray dogs. And yet there he was, trusting, not quite content but almost, willing to chase a ball. How could we not fall in love with a short, trusting dog shaped like a hot dog – and a seal, too? After a week we took him home; he threw up in the car, then he started smiling and hasn’t stopped since. Ever since then, the most frequently uttered phrase in the family has been: ‘Has Fix gone out?’ Ever since he’s been with us, time hasn’t been our own any more; it’s become the time when the dog needs to go out, hasn’t been out yet, has just come back, or nobody fancies taking him out. And so we argue or make promises: ‘If you take him out now, I’ll take him out twice the day after tomorrow.’ ‘If you don’t take him out, I’ll kill you.’ If you take him out tomorrow morning—it’s Sunday—then I’ll give him a bath and dry him with the hairdryer.

So many years have passed that now this ever-so-lovely dog, who despite his short legs used to run as fast as the wind, is elderly, blind and keeps bumping into walls.

Occasionally his hind legs become immobilized, and occasionally he feigns such immobility: when he is tired, when it is raining, or when he chooses to portray an injured seal. He continues to resemble a hot dog, and he continues to wag his tail whenever we address him, call him, or place him on a leash.

Over the years, he has tolerated sharing his home with an excessive number of cats; he has tolerated their constant theft of his bed; he has tolerated their consumption of delicious foods that he is forbidden from having, lest he vomit. Once an anxious dog, he is now an elderly, deaf, and anxious canine who perceives our emotions simply by passing by.

I would like to ask him: Fix, what do you think of us? What did you think that day when you saw us arrive, looking so awkward? What did you think when you got into the car, with a ten-year-old girl in your arms? What did you think when we arrived in Greece? Do we seem daft to you sometimes? As for that last question, I am certain, judging by his lopsided smile, that the answer is: yes. We appear foolish to him because we do not relish standing motionless on the pavement sniffing a corner of the wall; we appear foolish to him because we spend hours holding an object that we occasionally point at him or press to our ear, but most of the time we simply stare at this device in a daze instead of chasing a ball, sleeping, or sniffing rubbish on the ground. We have seemed daft to him for many years, yet he continues to love us madly and forgives us when we take him out far too late in the morning. Our time has become Fix’s entire life.