The News Of Gretel From her owner- My sweet doggy, Gretel died peacefully last week at the end of an unseasonably mild later February afternoon, whig we spent together in the backyard. Gretel snoozing in the grass, her nose still dusted with dirt front two nights prior when she buried a pug ear, and me at her side on a sleeping bag, the low-slung rays of the winter sub warming us and illuminating the translucent wings of newly hatched moths hovering, backlit, in a low constellation over the lawn. Squirrels teetered along the top of the fence and scampered up and down the yet-dormant oak tree towering just beyond. Mourning doves, perched on the back-alley wires, courted and cooed. A roommate, one of Gretel's newest best friends forever, sat with us for a while, stroking her and reminiscing with me. And the final dog-walker she knew stopped by to give her a gentle clobber of an embrace. His was the last in a weeks-long procession of goodbye visits, some brief and others days-long, all joyful surprises for Gretel, who despite her much weakened state was often moved to pounce on her tennis ball or seize her feet antler, steadying it between her paws and gnawing away lustily in the excitement of seeing an old friend. At the right moment, a vet met us at the spot where Gretel was nestled in the grass to ease the end of a #life. The mourning doves paused, Gretel passed away. After a rough start in #life, Gretel had a good run. As a young dog in 2002, she was rescued from the shelter, along with a rotund grey cat and a lean orange one, by her first people, who loved and cared for her for many years. They, and Gretel, were my roommates when I returned to DC in 2003. Gretel came to be with me for the rest of her #life in the summer of 2007. Gretel looked tough on the outside, intimidating, even, with hackles raised, tail erect, and eyes and ears trained forward, but she was endearingly timid on the inside, her many fears attesting to that rough start, even if the details are little known. She was scared of the usual things—thunderstorms, Fourth of July firecrackers—but also hiccups, subway grates, sewers, squeaky noises including but not limited to office chairs in need of oiling and rubber-soled shoes on linoleum floors, and the beeping of the oven coming to temperature, past experience having confirmed that sizzling items within could set off the smoke alarm. Frightened, she would slink away, the poor sweet chicken. My amateur attempts at cognitive behavioral therapy were to no avail. (“Okay, Gretel, say the smoke alarm does go off. Then what? Let’s talk about the worst-case scenario.”) She gave delirious greetings, whining and squealing in delight at the arrival of a friend, her muscular body bent at the middle into a horseshoe as she leaned her weight into your legs. If you sat on the floor with her, she would turn, turn, turn and drop, body-slamming you on the way down for as much contact as possible. She mistrusted toddlers and young children in their impulsivity, but on the first morning of a visit with my brother and new family, she entered the living room, strode purposefully to the spot on the floor where their four-month-old son was on his belly practicing push-ups, and gave him a gentle lick across the forehead, inducing wide-eyed blinking by the wobbly baby and an exhale by the rest of us. Gretel had dozens of canine friends, including the incorrigible Maggie, but most of those friendships were conducted in her other #life, her #life with dog-walkers. On one summer visit, though, she became best friends with my sister’s young husky, Dahlia. They played endlessly, fake-growling and grabbing and gnawing at each other’s front legs to try to wrestle the other down, mixed with interludes of napping, positioned so they could gaze sleepily at each other. Gretel adored cats and had three feline roommates over the years: CJ, Gizzy, and Bobo. Gizzy, and later Bobo, both of them soft-bellied senior citizens in the Gretel years, were skeptical of her exuberances and merely tolerated her, but the younger leaner CJ was a ready playmate. On a lazy morning, he would catch Gretel’s eye from a high perch and give his tail a provocative swish, eliciting a short muffled yelp from Gretel as they commenced raucous chase through the dining room doorway, down the hall, into the living room, and around again, their claws tearing grooves in the soft pine floorboards. She made rumbling sighs in the back of her throat—a doggy purr—if you sat next to her when she was curling up for bed and stroked her ears and gently rubbed her eyes. In short, Gretel was a lover, not a fighter. Nor was she a mischievous dog. On the contrary, she was highly motivated to do the right thing, to be a Good Girl. A plateful of juicy sausage and rice left on the living room floor while I ran back to the kitchen for a beer would be safe in her presence. Her mortification was great on the handful of occasions when circumstances beyond her control prevented her from doing the right thing, such as the time when left alone in a vacation rental, she became so anxious that she had no choice but to strew, with urgent precision, the contents of the kitchen trash about the small cottage. Another time, too, while visiting a friend in Massachusetts, she was left alone in the house. When we drove up later that day, there was Gretel, trotting across the back lawn, tail high, whining and talking in greeting, so pleased to see us. Evidently, she had clawed her way through the sliding screen door and escaped, and though that gash in the screen must have caused her some remorse, so many hours had passed by the time we returned that she’d forgotten her transgression and was simply enjoying a summer day at the edge of the woods. Gretel’s world was very much her own that day. She loved tennis balls. Bright-green ones just out of their vacuum-sealed tube were especially good for working the jaw muscles, but there were discrete pleasures to be had from tennis balls in all stages of existence, not least the shredded, moldering carcasses that she was so talented at finding in the leaf litter of Rock Creek Park. If I had a dollar for every tennis ball… She liked melon. We often went to the equestrian field in Rock Creek Park on a hot July day and cracked open a cantaloupe or watermelon to share. She did not like dog parks, so we did not go to them. To the very end, she had a thick coat of shiny black fur, a white undercoat, belly, and sort-of-star of her chest, and café-au-lait legs, paws, chest, and throat, with two tan circles over her eyes. She was not very tall, but she weighed a brawny eighty-five pounds at her fittest and measured a full four feet long from top of snout to tip of tail, as was discovered with some young friends and a tape measure during an evening of inquiry into Gretel. This was determined to be her most impressive measurement. It was also determined that her tail was surely full of rocks, because what else could account for the bruising thwack, thwack, thwack of a greeting that threatened to knock you off your balance? Or the heavy thump, thump, thump from somewhere deep in the house that announced her delight at your arrival home, even if she was, after all, engaged in serious napping and would be unable to meet you at the door? She was a stellar hiking companion. Our everyday haunt was Rock Creek Park, but Gretel also hiked Mt. Bierstadt in the Colorado Rockies and Little Devil Stairs and White Oak Canyon in Shenandoah. She swam in the kettle lakes of Cape Cod and the creeks of northern Ohio and a muddy bayou in Houston, Texas. She dug holes halfway to China in the sand on Assateague Island in Maryland. Our all-time favorite place was a pool of water deep in the woods of Rock Creek Park, a short way down from the horse stables. We had games for just that spot. I would throw a stick and she would tear down the trail to retrieve it, turn to make a dash back for the pool of water, zigging or zagging at the last moment to evade my tackle, and plunge in with a great splash. Half-submerged, she would gnaw on the stick for a moment and then bring it back to me to do again. Or we would play catch-me-if-you-can around the girthy tree at the edge of the creek. Circling and circling, she would chase me around the trunk, and then stop frozen and breathless with anticipation on her side of the tree, ears cocked for a telling movement on my side. Finally, unable to bear the suspense any longer, she would dissolve into a fit of high-pitched yelping until I revealed myself, to great relief and tail-wagging. Other times, she would simply catch my eye and throw her front legs and head down low, her body rising up to her tail in an exclamation point of an invitation to play, and then take off running, crashing through the leaves on the forest floor, her tail arched in excitement, thrown first to one side, then to the other, for balance, like the rudder on a boat, as she slalomed through the trees. The last time we visited that spot in the woods, a barred owl hooted from a soaring tree-top perch and peered down, unperturbed, as we passed below, round discs of eyes black to us against the gray sky. Over the years, Gretel howled four or five times in her sleep, always in the darkest wildest hour of night, her snout lifted star-ward, eyes open but unseeing, lips forming an “o” to let out a single long mournful howl that would startle me awake. To my knowledge, she never once howled in her waking #life. In the last six months of her #life, Gretel got her dream den: a closet in our upstairs bedroom sized as if custom built to fit her doggy bed, which was then topped with an old blue quilt. Winter coats hanging from a single rack above made a soft low roof. For the last four nights of her #life, though, Gretel used a makeshift step built from a file box and yoga mat to climb into my bed (old dogs can learn new tricks), where all four feet of her—black snout, graying chin, warm brown eyes capped with tan spots, silky soft ears, four lovely paws, their pads edged with tufts of delicate white fur and punctuated with coal black nails, and of course a tail full of rocks—stretched out in full, leaving little room for me, which was no trouble at all. Goodbye, Gretel, you were a Good Girl!