Remembering Ollie Border Collie

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The first time I saw Oliver, he was off to one side of the dog crate by himself, his three sisters all cuddled up together on the other side. I was overwhelmed by the decision. It felt wrong to choose one puppy and leave the others, but Jo, being Jo, went for the loner oddball. She was right.

Ollie came from a goat farm in Ocala. His mama was small and all white and his papa was tall and noble with the classic black and white border collie pattern. The puppies were all variations of white with black mottling. Our whole time at the farm, Papa Border Collie followed us and dropped tennis balls at our feet, a sign of things to come.

Oh my god did I fall in love with this puppy! We didn’t hear him bark for weeks. When it came, without warning or pronouncement, we were thrilled to discover what his voice sounded like. His tail didn’t fluff out for months. When a woman at a dog park asked me what kind of dog he was and I told her he was a border collie, she responded, “I don’t think so.”

He was always a goof. We read and watched videos of border collies learning dozens of commands and having vocabularies of hundreds of words. When I took Ollie to puppy training for a few weeks, he spent most of his time staring googly-eyed at an older female border collie. In the group “graduation” picture, he’s facing the wrong way, his back to the camera.

The grass at Fishweir Park was taller than he was. I’d never had a dog, didn’t grow up with many pets. Now I was reading warnings online about how borders needed jobs and six hours of daily exercise and I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. When he tried to run through the grass, it kept knocking him down. He nipped our heels and chased an empty milk carton around the backyard for an hour at a time.

Jo and I had been together for several years before we married. We wrote our own vows and Jo wrote vows to Emily and Veda, who were 15 and 12. Oliver was a year old. We rented out two 100+ year old beach houses called The Hut and The Lodge at Summer Haven, married there on the sands and hung out with our family and friends for a week. Ollie wore a little tuxedo top with a bow tie. Before I could stop him, he ate something washed up that looked like a giant sponge. Ollie and I walked two and a half miles down the beach to Marineland and back. He’s a main character in my book The Ocean Highway at Night.

He was always a weird dog. He’d often prefer to spend time by himself in a different room. He liked to be close, but he didn’t like to cuddle. I learned these aren’t uncommon traits for border collies, who are bred to take sheep on sojourns of several miles in Scotland and Northern England. In Dublin, we saw so many people walking borders in the middle of the city with no leashes. The dogs knew just what to do.

Penelope came into Oliver’s life when he was a little more than a year old. She was listed as a chocolate lab. Maybe she has some of that in the mix, alongside the hound and pit bull and whatever else. She was the size Ollie was when we’d brought him home. On the car ride back, she sat on her new brother and he pushed himself against the car door trying to get away from her. She’d continue to sit on him on car rides for the rest of his life.

Jo feels strongly that if you have one cat or dog, they need a companion, and Ollie and Penny play-fought all over the house, growling, lunging, chomping playfully at the air, chasing each other, jumping on the couches. (Because yes, we let them on the couches.) Watching them was pure joy. It happened so constantly that we’d not always notice. The mother of one of Emily’s friends asked us once, her voice quivering, to please make them stop. I hadn’t realized it could be seen as other than play. Suddenly we were wildfolk who let our curs kill each other in the kitchen and our house was Wuthering Heights.

Only once in his 14 years did Ollie really let me cuddle him. We spent every Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve sedating the dogs and trying to make them feel safe during the fireworks. Ollie would hide in the bathtub and tremble. Penny would try to dig up the plumbing. One New Year’s Day, Ollie let me spoon him and we fell asleep that way for an hour or so.

We took the dogs on hikes at the Willie Browne trails and in the North Carolina mountains. They swam in the artificial lake at Dog Wood Park. Everything was tennis balls for Ollie. Dozens of them lie around the house. A year and a half or so ago, we retired Chuckit, his ball launcher, because he couldn’t run as far and as long anymore.

He’d developed these large lipomas on either side of his chest. I’d never seen anything like them. The vet said he didn’t think Ollie even knew they were there. I wish we’d had them removed, but we had no idea they’d keep growing and get so big. Kids at the park asked if he was pregnant.

He never complained. His back legs weakened. He couldn’t run as long. We still took him to the park most days. He started to pee in his dog bed at night. We gave him incontinence meds and pain meds and put belly bands on him. Then he couldn’t get up on his own. I made a habit of getting up once and sometimes twice at night to take him outside to pee.

I thought we still had time. I think we deluded ourselves. On his last morning, he went to the park. He couldn’t walk far, but he made a small circuit. His legs were giving out by the time we got back to the car. That night, his front legs couldn’t hold him up either. His tongue turned blue.

I wrapped him up in a blanket late at night and carried him to the car. I cradled him. He lay on his back in my arms like a baby, his precious snout against my face. I can still feel it. The young women who helped us at the clinic were both in tears. He was still breathing, but gone from his eyes. It was very peaceful. And when he was no longer breathing, Jo and I put our faces in his fur and wept and I laid down at his side and held him.

I was always afraid of this moment. I loved him intensely. From the beginning I feared the moment of losing him. In anxious dreams, I’d be walking with him in a city I’d never visited and lose him and look everywhere, up and down strange streets.

So far Penelope seems okay. She’s not nearly as smart a dog as Ollie was. That’s okay. She’s as smart as she needs to be. I swear I could look in Oliver’s eyes and watch him come to understand something. Penny, however, is all body. And maybe that’s better.

The morning after Ollie left us, I woke up from a dream that I’d gone out to the living room and there he was. Like he used to be. Without those disfiguring lipomas. His beautiful joy-giving self gleaming bright in his eyes. And I knew, in the dream, that he couldn’t be there, but there he was. Until I went to touch him.