boswellsday

happy birthday to my dog

Before I owned a dog of my own, I knew that I wanted to name my dog “James,” after James Herriot. I’ll also admit it kind of amused me to imagine conversations in which I would casually allude to “James” and watch the other person struggle to make sense of my apparently insane significant other’s behavior until the penny dropped that James was a dog. James gets mad when I leave the house without him for long periods of time. Once when James was jealous, he urinated on my pillow. James is constantly barking at me when he wants attention. James crawled under the bed during a thunderstorm and wouldn’t come out.…

But then when the dog made his entrance, he didn’t really seem like a James. He had a name the shelter gave him for listing-on-the-web purposes (two, actually, “Nene” and “Nino”), but it wasn’t really his name.

I tried calling him “Cal” (after Robert Lowell) and then I tried “Flush” (after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog), but I didn’t like either of those. Cal was wrong and if you name a dog Flush these days you will simply and only summon up the image of the toilet. (I tried it once when somebody asked “what’s his name” and the look on her face when I said “Flush” persuaded me instantly that it was not going to work.)

My roommate at the time proposed “Boswell,” and it stuck, though as I have since then have the good luck to become friends with various Samuel Johnson diehards I often feel as if I am operating under false pretenses. The funny part, as I realized a few years later, was that he ended up being named “James” after all, since that was Boswell’s first name.

Anyway, I’ve always put his birthday down as the same as his namesake’s: October 29. It’s probably around the right time.

boswell, the early months

Boswell is probably eight years old now. It’s only looking back at the early pictures that I can tell he was actually really at the tail end of puppyhood then, though at the time I just thought he was severely underfed (which he also was). His life before me is a mystery. He was one of several dogs the shelter had brought from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. When I asked what he had been up to or if they knew his past, they gave me the impression he’d been owned by a dog hoarder, but I don’t know. He was house trained and his manners were excellent. (He got rude later, when he realized he was so beloved he could do anything he wanted.) I hope that if as a puppy, Boswell was owned by somebody who loved him, they gave him to the shelter in question knowing he’d end up somewhere loved and safe.

The odd thing was I emailed the shelter asking for a different dog but they said they had a better match. They were so insistent on this better match that when I agreed to try “Nene” they simply dropped him off at my home without doing much of a meet-and-greet. And then, obviously, he stayed. He was very quiet for the first few months and then one day, he started barking at people if they stopped in the hallway outside the apartment to chat. That was when I knew he’d decided he was home.¹

boswell, of more recent days

The last time Boswell went to the vet, she told me he has a heart murmur, which is apparently very common in small dogs. Even though I’d always known Boswell would die, hearing this news was the first time I really knew Boswell would die.

And yet he could very well live for eight more years—or more!—and he might be fine, really. Little dogs can live a long time. Buster, his pal, is probably about sixteen, and it’s only in the past few months that he’s started to show signs of getting genuinely old (mostly, it shows when he’s finding it hard to get up and down stairs). Still, it was the first time I really had to admit that this was a road that has an ending.

When I first adopted Boswell, I remember having a brief vertigo-inducing moment when I thought about he and I would probably still be together until my forties. It seemed like such a long time. Now not only does it feel like not enough time, it just feels so preposterous to me that the world, having produced something so singular, would allow it to leave.

But for now, the two of us are together. I love him very much. And I feel really lucky to have gotten to know him in my lifetime—even though, one day, which will be much too soon whenever it arrives, we’ll have to say goodbye.

1. I still like this piece I wrote in the early days of our life together.