Bagel, in noble profile
This is a bit of a digression from My Son’s Brain, a story which starts here. When my three year old son, Ben, had a series of suspicious smell hallucinations, I brought him to the E.R. at The Montreal Children’s Hospital. In the last installment, a team of neurologists informed me that Ben’s EEG results indicated very unusual activity, “deep in the brain.” There will be more tests, a 24 hour EEG and an MRI. But in the meantime, they suspected epilepsy.
I’d told Dr. J that there was no one in my family who suffered from epilepsy. But I’d forgotten about Bagel, my parents’ beagle.
If that name conjures up the image of a dense, but comforting presence at a Sunday morning breakfast, nothing about Bagel could be further from the truth. Except maybe the denseness, in his later years, when he became too fat to terrorize our mealtimes with the same intensity of his leaner, meaner youth.
My parents discovered Bagel as a six-month old puppy in an animal shelter in Kennebunkport, about fifteen minutes from their summer cottage. He’d already been brought back twice for “disobedience”, but my mother fell hard for his show hound looks.
Bagel’s coal black eyes, naturally lined with black, were hypnotic. His soft oak brown ears weren’t quite basset hound huge, but big enough that if you didn’t know him well enough, you’d be tempted to take a quiet nap on them. No doubt, somewhere in Southern Maine is a portrait of Bagel’s ancestors proudly sniffing out wild turkeys from the prow of a pilgrim boat sailing up the Kennebec river. But pretty much from the moment he set paw in my parent’s house, the dog was a non-stop holy living terror.
Except when he wasn’t, and for that five minutes a day, he was the most loveable, affectionate, adorable creature on earth.
The rest of the time, he was a nose. A nose that lived most of its life to the soundtrack of Jaws. No matter how many pre dinner protective rituals we followed, Bagel always seemed to find a hole in our defenses: a chair left untilted, from which he could leap onto the table, or onto the kitchen island where the food was being prepared. If we somehow failed to properly assign whose task it was to lock him out of the house at mealtime, a snout inevitably flashed up from the lurking depths beneath the table, precisely targeted at a piece of meat on a plate. In time, we took to eating family meals, slightly stretched towards the center of the table, where we’d, hopefully, pushed our plates out of range.
My parents paid trainer after trainer to work with Bagel. They tried aversion therapy, and took to spritzing him with vinegar and water. They re-organized their family life to send him a different message about his place in “the pack.” But inevitably Bagel would re-organize those rituals right back; because for all our many talents and wonderful qualities, nobody in my family, is, or ever will be, an alpha personality.
The only one who ever successfully dominated Bagel was Blitzen, my Jack Russell, which she did from the first time she visited my parent’s house, as a two month old, five pound puppy. Blitzen was the Justin Bieber of puppies. She was that cute. But she also had the speed and instincts of a rat. If Bagel even looked at her food, within seconds he’d find her hanging, clamped so hard to his upper lip, for a week it would probably hurt him too much to even think about snarling. Needless to say, he fell passionately in love with her. The lovelorn baying that would invariably announce her arrival, followed by the two hours of ecstatic chasing around the house, was almost enough to make us forget the otherwise constant food bullying.
Bagel, getting some love
But while it was nice to see that Bagel had a heart, the dominant body part was always his nose. Until the nose became something worse, the teeth.
Sometimes it was merely fingers getting in the way of a sandwich too close to the edge. But around the time Bagel’s epilepsy started to emerge, he took to unpredictable biting. It seemed to happen most often when he was having one of those rare sweet moments, pupils dilated as though in appreciative love of all we’d put up with, and then with no warning growl, he’d lash out with a vicious snap.
If my parent’s had any thought of finding some kind of Beagle rescue organization, those were dashed when Bagel had his first grand mal seizure.
It started at around the age of three, at least once a month, he would fall to his side as though hit by a car. His body would twitch. In particular I remember one hind leg stretched out long and taught, as though he were half way between being electrocuted and working on his ballet stretches. His bowels and bladder would evacuate, so that when he did come out of it usually about five minutes after it started, he would wake up in a puddle of his own piss. Eventually he would roll back up to standing, his royal white and black speckled haunches settling back to normal, albeit smeared with feces.
The vet put him on phenobarbitol to control the seizures. It didn’t work. He upped the dosage, but warned us that in time it would probably damage his liver. But the alternative was to allow the seizures to progress, each one damaging the brain more deeply and permanently. Bagel was doomed, but my family continued to care for him, each in their own way.
My father began to study epilepsy and was convinced that the biting was probably a reaction to petit mal seizures, hallucinations, like Ben’s smell hallucinations, that were triggering Bagel’s anxiety and aggression. I rolled my eyes, at the time, chalking this theory up to my dad’s life time grudge against behavioral therapy.
My mother simply processed the experience as the inevitable consequences of loving too much. And then proceeded as she always had, to love him too much, until one of her fingers became so infected from a bite, she could barely move it for three months.
My brother, who had a tendency to form, in my opinion, unreasonably strong attachments to our family pets, became committed to the idea that Bagel could be healed by the kind of constant loving attention and holistic therapy that people pay private nurses and occupational therapists yearly salaries to administer.
I quite simply, argued, whenever the opportunity arose, for his euthanasia. But I was never Bagel’s biggest fan. I tolerated him before Ben was born, even during the stage when my mother started referring to him as “the grand dog.” (A name thought up long before the seizures started, and not intentionally directed at either of her childless adult children, of course.) It didn't help while I was in Central America and the only dogs I'd seen for two months were skeletal village spectres or roadkill, that my mother would send me pictures of Bagel suited up in his own lifejacket, heading out for a motorboat trip to Old Orchard.
But my heart did warm to him when he developed his crush on Blitzen. Then around the time Ben reached the age where I had to be constantly on the alert for a dog who might bite my curious toddler for no reason that we understood, I lost whatever theoretical compassion I once had for my foster nephew.
Finally, after he bit a long time family friend, my parents made an appointment to have him put down. But at the last minute my brother decided to take Bagel to live with him. To my brother’s credit, he accomplished a lot with the rehabilitation plan. His acting career gave him time to take Bagel for long walks on Mont-Royal (Montreal’s Central Park, a 4 mile long forested carriage trail also designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted.) Bagel lost about fifteen pounds and seemed happy enough.
Then my brother found a great apartment in a neighborhood about five miles away from Mont Royal. The week after he moved, he brought Bagel back to the park, hoping to keep doing their mountain hike at least a few times a month. It was a cold winter afternoon, with few people out walking, and my brother thought it would be safe to let him off the leash.
But Bagel immediately disappeared into the forest after the scent of a muskrat, or chipmunk, or whatever. My brother spent hours looking for him, with no success. He called up friends from his old neighborhood to come and help. When it got dark the search party gave up. Grief stricken, my brother returned home, only to find Bagel beached on his front balcony, fat as a whale from all the garbage he’d consumed on the five mile trek from Mont Royal to the upper duplex they’d only been living in a week.
That had happened a few months before I took Ben to the hospital. So by the time I was remembering all this, I’d radically changed my opinion of Bagel. The dog was obviously in dog terms, a genius. He was meant for a life at the head of the pack, hunting animals, or maybe as a working dog, finding bodies or sniffing out drugs at airports. Instead his brilliance had been focused on outwitting my family out of sandwiches.
Still, if he had lived a more useful life, I wonder if he would have had owners who were willing to stick it out with him during the worst of times. At holiday season that year, I felt bad, and agreed that my brother could bring Bagel over for Christmas dinner, as long as he was kept locked up in the basement.
I’m not a believer in karma, but as I was numbly processing the information that my son now probably had the disorder of my enemy, I can’t say it didn’t cross my mind that there was some kind of spooky syncronicity to this situation.
To be continued
