I can’t tell you how many times I wrote a column with my dog, Brewster, by my side. Sometimes by my feet. Sometimes curled up next to me on the couch if I wanted warmth and company. He was complicit in much of what I typed, aiding and abetting and abutting. So blame him.
He was a mellow guy. He was part corgi, and the part-something-else seemed to overrule a corgi’s natural need to speak up. I don’t need all my fingers to count how many times he barked in his life. He was shy around strangers, and I think he majored in sleeping in college. After getting a big buildup from my daughter, who saw humor and possible human characteristics in the dog, Brewster finally met my son-in-law, who wasn’t quite as impressed as the rest of us.
“What is this dog’s purpose in life?’’ he said.
Neither my daughter nor my son-in-law was wrong in their assessment.
But to answer the question, Brewster’s purpose in life was to be there. And now he’s not. We had to put him to sleep Monday, less than two months before he would have turned 16. It’s strange to be writing this without him next to me. He was there for so many games on TV. He was there when I wrote about Chicago’s teams. Surely he knew my decades-long frustration with the Bears. I’m pretty sure he raised an eyebrow when, beyond exasperated with the play of quarterback Justin Fields this season, I called for the Bears to go with Tyson Bagent, an undrafted rookie from a Division II program.
The thought bubble above his head read, “You’re on your own here.’’
We adopted him from a corgi rescue in Indiana when he was 5. While my wife drove home, he sat on my lap, hiding his head between my knees almost the entire way. We were told he’d been a country dog, and it took time for him to get used to the trains near our house. Eventually he came around.
Brewster was sneaky athletic. One day, my wife tossed a ball in his presence. He stared at her, as if to say he was above that sort of thing. But it was all subterfuge. She threw the ball again, and this time he took off like a race car, fast and low to the ground. But race cars can’t do a 90-degree turn on a dime, and Brewster could. NFL scouts would have marveled at his ability to change directions. “Fluid hips,’’ they would have said. We learned this the hard way. Most dogs never catch critters in the backyard because, though they might be able to run fast in a straight line, they can’t keep their speed when those critters take evasive action. Brewster caught a squirrel and a rabbit. Out of respect for the next of kin, that’s all I’ll say.
He once dropped a No. 2 in the backyard, used his back legs to kick grass to cover his accomplishment and then did a victory lap around the perimeter of the fence. This seemed so out of character for our reserved guy, like a librarian bringing a radio to work. If he could have draped himself in a flag and soaked in the adulation of the crowd as he ran around the track, a la Usain Bolt, I believe he would have.
We bought him a life jacket once, not because we thought he might be Michael Phelps underneath all that shyness but because we thought he might enjoy swimming in the Wisconsin lake we liked. He didn’t. Lying in the sun on the dock was more his speed. As he got older and became more confused, he sometimes fell into that lake. And swam perfectly. Imagine our surprise.
Fellow Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander, an artist and a poet, once gifted us a painting he had done of Brewster. I don’t know if the dog was religious, but Telander painted him with a cross on his collar and a halo around his head because I go to Mass on Sundays and because why not? I wonder what he would have put on Brewster if I was into, say, chainsaw wood carving.
Brewster was the antithesis of today’s society. He didn’t want to be noticed. He didn’t feel a desperate need to share his version of the truth. He was content with just being. There’s value in that. So while I hammered away at the laptop, he was happy just being attached to my hip. It’s what corgis do. They lie down with their butt next to their charges, protecting the herd. Might as well get some sleep in while you’re at it.
One warm day, I let him out of the house and got lost in writing my column. Usually, I’d hear his collar jingle on the back stairs and go get him. It finally dawned on me that I hadn’t heard him in at least an hour. I looked out the window and there he was, a front paw somehow stuck in his collar. Rather than bark, which he clearly thought was bad form, he waited patiently to be rescued. The Quiet Man.
He always did the right thing and obeyed all rules because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Except that time he ate one of our son’s plaid boxer shorts. I looked at him differently for a few weeks after that, and I thought I detected something like a bad-boy’s glee in his eyes. We agreed to not talk about it anymore.
By the end, it was rough. He was mostly deaf and had some dementia. His back legs were failing him, a common malady in corgis, we learned. When he was younger, I would time him when he ate. Like everything else about him, it was clockwork. It took 30 seconds every time. But in the last year, it took him about a half hour to get through his food and water. He needed help standing for that long. We had to massage where we thought his bladder was for him to be able to do his business. I called it the Heim-leak maneuver.
I can picture another thought bubble above his head: “Must be a slow news day.’’
I don’t think so. But it is a lonely day.
