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multimedia blog Saying goodbye to the Roo Dog Nigel Parry, Monday, May 5th, 2008
 "Something jeweled slips awayRound the next bend with a splash Laughing at the hands I hold out Only air within their grasp All you can do is praise the razor For the fineness of the slash 'Til the rose above the sky opens And the light behind the sun takes all" —"Rose Above The Sky", Bruce Cockburn. How do you begin to process loss? One of my closest friends, a freakish-looking small red dog, was run over by a car within minutes after escaping from my backyard on April 25th, 2008. I had known the three-and-three-quarter-year-old Roo Dog since he was just a tiny, few-week-old bundle of fatty rolls, and even then he was full of light and fun. When I peeled what was left of him after ten days in the middle of the busy intersection of Lyndale and Groveland in Minneapolis—a shoe-sized piece of red leather with his collar and tags wrapped around it—I finally was forced to confront the fact that one of my best friends wasn't coming home. People who don't own dogs never quite understand this. But the Roo Dog was no big, dumb, smiling yellow Lab. He was a small, 12 lb miniature pinscher—one of the more 'beyond your control' dogs that you can let into your life. "Minpins" are known as "the king of toys", and they are a fearless little dog that has absolutely no sense that they aren't Rotweiller-sized when the shit goes down.
Rooster was always a gentle soul, who surrendered at the point he realized that he wasn't going to get away with being irritating. Intensely smart and hyper-aware of their surroundings, Minpins are extremely 'present' companion animals, who endlessly entertain the humans they meet along the way with their cartoon character ways. They take no crap from people but at the same time they love them to death.
There's a lot of cash spent on pets in America. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. I've read screeds against this fact. But the fact is that to keep a small dog costs you no more than a dollar a day, including annual vet bills, and necessary heart worm and flea medicine—yet their impact on your life is profound. Doctors talk about how pet owners have lower blood pressure but for me, the Roo Dog quite simply made me a better person. He got me out of the house 5 times a day and gave me something concrete and living to be responsible for—a little creature to look out for. His intrinsic cuteness necessitated interactions with whatever communities I lived in and visited. From St. Paul, Minnesota to Harlem, New York City to Los Angeles, California—Roo was a rock star. He won the heart of one Muslim friend who was frightened of dogs. We joked that Roo was "The Muslim-slaying dog".
"Hey man, what kind of dog is that, it's really pretty." If I'd eaten some All Bran that morning, I would probably have uncontrollably shit myself with laughter on the spot. The cliché film tableau evaporated in an instant. The Roo Dog was a disarmer, a crosser of boundaries, in the context of Harlem an anti-racist tool, and his power came from him being a little lamb that wouldn't hurt anyone—while maintaining an assertive personality that warned people he'd get to know them on his own time. In the month I spent in Rikers Island in early 2007 (read "From Ramallah to Rikers Island: A New Journal Series by Nigel Parry from the World's Largest Penal Colony" here), other prisoners recognized me as being from their neighborhood—largely because of the distinctive Roo Dog. This was important and helped keep me safe in that dangerous environment.
The squirrels will miss him. I used to let him off-leash in public parks, knowing that the squirrels would head up a tree and he would go no further than a frozen quivering statue at the bottom.
In dog parks, Minpins and the similarly small Italian Greyhounds are like little bolts of lightning. They'll rile up the big dogs to chase them and take off. Of course, in the end huge dogs like German Shepherds are going to catch up with them due to their superior power but Minpins aren't dumb. Right around that point, they'll cut a corner, which they can do with their tiny mass, and the big dog will overshoot by about 15 feet before it can even stop and turn round to chase. Minpins and their Italian Greyhound cousins wiped the dog park gravel with bigger dogs. And you could see them laughing as they left the big dogs behind in their own dust. After watching Minpins in close proximity for several years, you began to realize that they really did have a sense of what impact they had on the world around them. It wasn't anthropomorphizing. They really were as smart as hell and they figured out over time our buttons—probably about to the same degree as we figured out how to "tame" them. Roo was always an uncharacteristically 'sticky' Minpin, and was not prone to running off. Even in a safe, isolated, cabin and forest environment, he'd be close by. I'd spent a lot of time training him off-leash, precisely so that he was ready for the times that leash catches pop off, or if I dropped it. "No street" was something I drummed into him from the beginning. Speaking to the woman who saw him hit by the car, it was clear that he had been totally spooked by something—by the look of the geography, probably a car on one of the two highway on/off ramps he'd had to cross to get to the point where he died. He was running around panicked.
We all searched for almost two weeks until I got the call. Posters in the neighborhood; talking to neighbors; flyers handed out to all local dog owners; visits to the Animal Control office and Animal Humane Society; fax and e-mail reports to tens of vets and shelters; postings on Craigslist.org, FidoFinder.com, DogDetective.com, America's Lost and Found Pet Database at www.lostfoundpets.us; and even a "pet amber alert" in which a company called FindToto.com called 5,000 of my neighbors in a radius around the area in which he was lost. The next day, all three dog owners I spoke to in the local park reported getting calls from the service, so it clearly delivers as advertised. I logged some helpful information for people with lost pets in the Twin Cities here. There were a lot of "What Ifs?" during that period and a lot more last night, after I finally found his body and collar with the help of the neighbor who had seen him hit and later saw the posters. But he's gone. And he's gone because I didn't pay attention for five minutes out of three years and eight months of looking after him. When I think of that tiny window that let in so much pain, and the society and times we live in, I wonder when the truck is going to roll over America, because we sure as hell haven't been paying attention—and not just for five minutes, but for decades.
No matter how screwed up life got, no matter how hard things were, Roo was always there. He slept curled up next to my feet and under the covers throughout his life. He earned his keep even just through his role as a canine hot water bottle. Throughout years of marathon-length effort undertaking activism for the seemingly doomed Palestine and—later—Iraq and Lebanon, Roo was there as a grounding and decompressing device. The little guy helped me get through summer 2006 when I was photo editing for two news websites focussed on the human cost of Israel's wars against Lebanon and Gaza, and working 8 hours, sleeping 4 hours two times in each 24 hour cycle for two months straight. It was the Roo Dog who helped me get through this sleep-deprived period of maximum stress during which I was exposed to an endless stream of images of destroyed homes, bombed bridges and other civilian infrastructure, hell-like landscapes, and the corpses of dead children and dead babies. The people of Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon owe a word of thanks to the Roo Dog. He was there for them, even if neither he nor they knew it.
When he was born, Roo was covered in rolls of fat. Angela, a friend and his breeder, said that "his rolls of fat had rolls of fat" and she nicknamed him Buddha. It was the first one, of the many Minpin puppies she bred and cared for, that she actually delivered herself. Before I got Roo, my ex and I already had one red Minpin, called "Dingo". We had kept the Australian animal theme going. The name worked on a variety of levels, as Angela noted that in his early days he didn't walk but rather hopped everywhere. Later, when the ex and I split-up and Roo was separated from Dingo, his name began morphing. He became Rooster, the "Little Red Rooster". He was such a freakish-looking cartoon character that people couldn't help but make up names for him. My friend Duncan dubbed him "The Roo of all Evil" and, later, "Roostafari" (all Minpins need a DJ name). Over the last year I called the Roo Dog "Monkeydog" a lot but then again I call everyone "Monkeydog". Roo was first though.
He'd bark at everyone who came in the door of whatever place I was living in. If he knew you well, he'd stop barking quicker. If he didn't know you at all, he wouldn't stop. In the long entrance corridors with blind spots in the artist coop he lived for half of his life, this was useful. It got to the point that I could differentiate which friend had walked in the door, depending on how long he barked and the quality of the bark. I had a totally shitty 2006-2007, largely because of the wars, including the following couple of months during which I was incarcerated. When I finally got out, and limped back to Minnesota from New York, Roo was sent back to me from a friend who had been looking after him. He was different for a while. Dogs don't do well when separated from their main humans. Then we had the best summer of his life. The weather was great, there were multiple trips to the Wisconsin cabin and the beach, there was a lot of grilling outside.
Roo conquered a fear of water and learned to swim a couple of days before my June 10th birthday. It was the best present ever. Chasing sticks and squirrels were the Roo's primary vices, and it was sticks that finally convinced him to set aside fear and swim. He loved to chase sticks into the water and it was pretty funny watching this small dog dragging back even large branches that were floating in lakes. He would do it relentlessly. He used to just walk out into the water for its own sake.
In the freezing Minnesota winters, Minpins aren't so happy. They're relatively hairless, with very short coats. This is why people put clothes on their dog. Or rather, this is the only good reason that people should put clothes on their dog. Despite the cold, the Roo Dog loved the snow. He wouldn't do the bootie thing, so winter walks would be limited to the time it took that he could manage without his paws freezing. If all four got frozen at once, he'd fall over on his side and cry miserably.
Roo certainly was a character. A lot of people who knew him well will miss him. There is much more I could write about the Roo. When you spend almost four years with any creature living in your home, you get to know them well. And they get to know you well. But it's time to let go of him now, even though that is one of the saddest things to do. But first, the thank yous. To Angela, who got the Roo into my life and gave me great advice in the years after to help me look after him, thank you so much. You're an angel. To all the people who ever looked after Roo or called him their friend, thank you. To Kate, the woman who saw him run over, saw the posters, called me, and even met me to point out the spot where he lay—that I could have walked past one thousand times yet have never noticed—thank you very much. You were really upset and didn't want to be the bearer of bad news, but you saved me a lot of grief, and closure is always a good thing. I'd have looked for Roo for years otherwise. Now I can just look up or look within. To all the people who helped me to look for the Roo Dog and help others to look for their lost pets on a daily basis—the people from animal shelters, emergency vets, the Animal Humane Society, the people and pet owners on the Minneapolis-St. Paul Craigslist, all the people who maintain online lost pet databases, all the bloggers who posted his lost pet image, and all the people who wrote kind words when I posted the bad news, thank you. To the Roo Dog, it goes without saying that I love you. Thanks for everything, little guy. I know you'll have fun in chasing cloud squirrels in God's dog park. You were the best dog one could hope for and I'll miss you. But as Tina said this morning, I followed your story right to the end and because of that both you and I can rest. Trees are cool, so there have got to be trees in heaven. And where there's trees, there's sticks. I'll throw some again for you one day, little guy. You can count on that. In war, you lose things you love. And I have come to recognize that normal life is war. Webmasters wishing to link to this story can use the following permalink: http://nigelparry.com/saying-goodbye-to-the-roo-dog RELATED MATERIAL On Miniature Pinschers and Ski Movies... Video of Roo playing with his nephew Jazzer. More From This Section  • E-mails: The Kindness of Strangers (Wednesday, May 7th, 2008)  • Saying goodbye to the Roo Dog (Monday, May 5th, 2008) • Art: "Australian Camouflage" (Thursday, April 24th, 2008)
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