Pup & Grandpa: A Tale For The Aging

I took our new puppy for a walk around the block one day last week, and presumed I could keep him safe.

As I look back on what happened, little Lucca may wonder the opposite: if he can become the caretaker, and keep me from harm and pain.

And I question, in taking on parenthood as a septuagenarian, if I have bitten off too much.

Our outing took us on a sidewalk near East Rock Park, and had been uneventful, though if you know about pups, you may rightly conclude there wasn’t much discipline on display.

Lucca, a four-month-old Italian water dog, knows not the meaning of the English expressions, ​“Heel” or ​“Would you mind terribly, dear fur ball, walking in a straight line?”

No, everything has to be investigated along the way. As his breed (officially Lagotto Romagnolo) is meant to hunt truffles, which don’t exist in these parts, he has had to make do.

So he roots through trash, picks up discarded face masks and gloves, upturns piles of leaves, believes every stick or stone on the ground is a culinary triumph, is not offended by the presence of a used condom, rips up plastic newspaper wrappers and, once, dug up three buried but cooked sweet potatoes.

His routes to these treasures require a zigzag and weaving technique even as I attempt to proceed in straight-ahead fashion.

Near the Leila Day Nursery, Lucca cut across in front in front of me in that quick sprint of his, pulling the leash as he went.

To those readers who know the laws of physics, the result was predictable. To those who are not scientists, I’ll offer the simplest of explanations: I tripped.

But it was no ordinary trip. More of a tumble and a flight, And, probably against all acrobatic advice, I broke the fall on the cement of the Cold Spring Street sidewalk with my left kneecap.

For a while, I didn’t move. My first thought was, ​“Do I still have a grasp on the leash?”

No, I didn’t.

I was aware of heavy traffic on Cold Spring, and that on occasion a driver will mistake that short strip for the back stretch at Talladega.

I scrambled on my good knee and two skinned hands to grab the leash. Blessedly, Lucca came to me.

Though his expression seemed one of compassion, the curriculum at Puppy Kindergarten in Hamden had not yet covered First Aid training. So Lucca could not ease either my physical pain, which was considerable, or my mental distress, which was even more acute.

Why Lucca

For what right did I have, at my age, to bring up a puppy for the first time in my life? Moreover, is it even possible for me, along with my wife Suzanne, to make Lucca happy and keep him safe?

Here was the original idea: We knew we had a lot of love to give. Our combined grandchildren are all grown now: job-bound college grads, or college students, or ready to go off to campus.

They flourish without our outdated advice, and we had carved out enough memories together over the years to savor indefinitely. Besides, the pandemic over the past year made it impossible to celebrate their milestones together. 

Yet there remained a need at this end. We have read that canine love may be just the thing to alleviate the aging process.

Even so, nowhere in the literature is the suggestion that people in retirement years can easily raise a dog so young.

That isn’t to say we came to this without credential. Though I am a neophyte at this, Suzanne can claim experience, if long ago. Memory of any pup eating the household Persian rugs has faded.

She says in those days, before America could boast a $99 billion pet industry, her young’uns had no toys manufactured to keep them from chewing whatever was in range of their mouths. 

At his tender age, Lucca can’t yet tell the difference, apparently, between a manufactured chew toy and my ass, which he tried to take a chunk of though I don’t have much back there to spare, I’m told by observers. 

Don’t get me wrong. Lucca is a love. He is a social animal, getting along well with other pups and with pedestrians, large and small. He will let us cuddle for at least 45 seconds, on occasion. And he stares at us in the most attentive way, cocking his head as we try to explain concepts such as, ​“Stop being a terrorist.”

What makes the training stakes high in this case is that I have one more chance to parent, and do it better from the start. I was 25 when I became the father of a child.

When Amy was only 3 years old, her mother died of a brain aneurysm. In the following years, my effort at parenthood was at best adequate. As a result her own formative years were fraught with difficulty and loss.

I was exhausted, clinically depressed, and spent much of my time and finite energy at a newspaper office or chasing women who I mistakenly thought would make fine substitutes for her natural mother. A futile business.

I can see, in the need to nurture Lucca, a chance to bring what I wish I had known then to this new challenge.

To be sure, my daughter, with grown kids of her own, has become a caring mother of two children and an entrepreneurial success, staging homes and designing interiors in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, and of late we have become much closer.

But it has all taken a long time. In the case of Lucca, time is not in our favor.

It is, of course, not the same thing to raise a pup and a human. But there are parallels: safety, consistency, affection, exhaustion, discipline, big bills, worry, occasional success and failure, and 3 a.m. cries.

Lucca was a little dumpling when he came to us. And when I saw him for the first time at the breeder’s house, he looked me straight in the eyes, and I imagined him thinking, ​“I have seven litter mates, and they’re all going to spry young couples. What am I getting into?”

What he’s getting into is this. He has come to a love nest where he is adored, and that will one day require him to comfort one or the other of us after crushing loss.

I believe he will be up to the task, if we are wise enough to be patient, to allow him his puppyhood even as we try everything we can to train him properly. Our breeder tells us that getting it right now will pay off later when we really need it.

Can Do

But it remains difficult. On the Cold Spring sidewalk, injured, I was the crier. If not out loud, at least within.

“Can I do this?” I thought.

That’s when a Yale student came by and offered her assistance.

Then she said, ​“Oh, my. What an adorable dog.” And then walked off in a straight line toward her own future.

I thought: Well, there is a lesson to this. And I could see in Lucca’s bright eyes, as he cocked his head, that he will one day understand it.