The Origin Story of Benny, My Firstborn Son
My dog is turning 13 and all I got him is this stupid essay (and a hat that he hates).
Content warning: This essay briefly discusses animal abuse.
When I think about where I started the journey to parenthood, I always end up back at Benny. He’s my dog.
Benny weighs about 25 pounds and is a direct descendant of Satan himself. He loves to lick upholstery, for reasons that have never been immediately clear. If you leave food on the kitchen table unattended, he will levitate up there and devour it.1 He stole most of a pepperoni pizza two months ago. He goes on a walk like a man on a mission, sparing no time or attention for his many human admirers.
He’s weirdly attuned to human emotion when it’s just the two of you, though. He can tell when you’re sad, and he won’t leave your side if you’re sick. He’ll also bark at you if you don’t feed him his dinner promptly at 3pm, which is how early he eats it now because he’s worn my husband down by strategically and systematically being annoying as shit.
He’s the softest, fluffiest dog in the world and keeping up with his hair is a full-time job. I can tell when we’ve fallen too far behind because little black tufts of fur start to roll across the house like tumbleweeds. We’ve broken a couple of vacuum cleaners that say they’re built to handle animal hair.
I was 22 years old when I adopted him. I’d just reluctantly moved back home to Ohio after chasing my dreams to California post-college graduation, where I couldn’t break into tech or get a retail job2 and ultimately ran out of money.
I couldn’t face the idea of moving back in with my parents and returning to the hometown I’d fought so hard to get out of, so instead I moved in with my on-again/off-again boyfriend and his roommates as he finished his last semester of college. I landed a job working remotely from Athens, Ohio, as a copywriter for a small marketing agency. I thought about California every day.
It seemed like everyone on the West Coast was so happy. It also seemed like everyone on the West Coast, coincidentally, had a dog. And a dog was attainable. Adopting a dog was an adult thing to do, and I was dying for confirmation that I wasn’t fucking it up as an adult. So I started scrolling Petfinder every night, wine in hand, until one night I saw Benny.
The dog rescue had him listed as a 10 month old corgi-Pomeranian mix, though I found out later he’s actually a pom-chihuahua-dachshund-terrier mix.3 I drove three hours in the pouring rain to meet him. He licked my face and peed on my feet a little, and that was it. I was in love.
He keeps my blood pressure up because he’s always doing something idiotic and death-defying. We spent my 30th birthday at the emergency vet because he took off into some brush after a varmint and came back out limping. (After a checkup and some x-rays, the diagnosis was a twisted knee. He made a full recovery before sunset.) A few years earlier, he’d slipped out the back door of the house I grew up in and escaped onto the 80 acres of surrounding farmland. (I found him 15 minutes later wading happily in a muddy creek.)
Benny turns 13 this year, and he’s a little old man these days. His muzzle is more grey than black, and he sleeps a lot. His night vision is bad. We used to go hiking most weekends, but now we stick to walks around the block.
After I adopted Benny, things did not go smoothly. He chewed on everything: his crate, my underwear, my Macbook charger. He wasn’t good with other dogs. He had separation anxiety. I took him on a plane to my family Thanksgiving; he barked the entire flight and snapped at one of my relatives over a piece of turkey. He ate an entire sock somehow, necessitating a very expensive and traumatizing trip to the emergency vet.
My ex and I agreed we needed to do something about Benny’s behavior, but our opinions about appropriate discipline differed dramatically. My ex didn’t agree with my gentle approach. He would sometimes get frustrated and hit Benny when he misbehaved — not a swat with a newspaper, but hard enough to make him yelp in pain.
I did eventually convince him to stop. I don’t remember much about that argument, except the seismic shift after I finally found the courage to spit out the words: “Don’t you ever hit my dog again.”
When we split, he kept our apartment and most of the furniture. I kept my dog.
Some things Benny has experienced:
He has lived in at least nine different houses or apartments in two different states.
He has visited a few of the world’s largest objects, including the world’s largest rocking chair in Casey, Illinois, and a giant quarter in Everett, Pennsylvania.4
He has flown to two of three Washington DC-area airports.5
He’s hiked Hocking Hills in Ohio, Red River Gorge in Kentucky, and a segment of the Appalachian Trail in Maryland.
He’s also been to: Lake Tahoe, Point Reyes National Seashore, up the California coast to Mendocino, down the coast to Carmel, and across the desert to Las Vegas.
He has waded in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as many lakes and rivers.
He visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater but had to stay in the parking lot. He hears it’s beautiful, though.
In 2016, I met my husband, Chris. He had a dog too, a purebred corgi named Grizzly.
Grizzly was insane.
Imagine a dog that’s having a really bad time on shrooms every waking moment of its life. That was Grizzly.
Grizzly did not like: other animals, most people, bright lights, riding in the car, shadows, the oven, the sound of a gas burner lighting, when you had food and he didn’t, when things were happening outside (any things), and more than anything in the world, he fucking hated plastic trash bags. You might be wondering, “What about when you had to take out the trash?” An absolute scene, every time.
Benny was immediately obsessed with Chris and generally annoyed by Grizzly. Grizzly was quietly hostile to Benny but sweet to me. But they learned to coexist without much incident.6 Grizzly even taught Benny to howl, a move he learned from Chris’s parents’ beagle.
The four of us became a blended family. Our dynamic worked, and we lived chaotically but happily together. There was a lot of dog hair. A lot of poo bags. A lot of barking. A few years in, we moved to California. Grizzly was heavily tranquilized for the journey, which he detested but ultimately survived. Benny rode shotgun.7
The boys really thrived in California. Chris and I did too. And in late 2021, I gave birth to a human son.
The dogs weren’t really sure what to make of him, but they both seemed to grasp almost right away that it was an extremely high stakes situation. They were cautious but curious, and eventually started to realize they could get some runoff attention if they lingered in the baby’s halo. Grizzly started participating in tummy time.
And then six months after the baby was born, Grizzly died suddenly in his sleep. He was nine years old. Losing him was devastating, like losing a family member.
I don’t know how dogs conceive of things like life and death, but I know Benny isn’t stupid. He realized immediately what happened to Grizzly, like he could smell it. His demeanor changed. He seemed different, almost stoic. He went into emotional support mode. He wouldn’t leave Chris’s side.
He wasn’t an out-of-control puppy anymore, and hadn’t been for years. He was 11 years old. His face had greyed, his attitude softened. He could go to the dog park now, though he still hated planes.
And it didn’t take him long to figure out that a baby is just a small, loud person who doesn’t know how to do stuff yet.8 Slowly but surely, he adjusted to a new life again.
And now we’re here. My human son is almost two, and my canine son is about to turn 13. I used a dog age calculator and it claims that in human years, Benny is approximately 68 years old, which is actually younger than I assumed. It seems like he gets a little visibly older every day.
When I think about the decisions I made in my 20s that led me to where I am now, adopting Benny is at the top of the list. On my worst days, he gave me a reason to get out of bed (figuratively, but also in the literal sense that if I didn’t get up he’d shit in my house). He taught me how to unselfishly care for another life and prioritize someone else’s needs. He’s the reason I realized I might actually have a maternal instinct, and that if I enjoyed raising a dog so much, I might really enjoy raising a little person who could actually talk to me someday.
I joke that Benny has to live forever, but I know someday sooner than I’d like, he will not be with me anymore. I don’t take for granted the time we’ve had together, though. I know not everyone gets 12 years with their pet.
Every morning my alarm goes off at 6:30 AM. I hit snooze, roll over, and get a face full of the stinkiest fish breath I have ever smelled. And I hug my little dog while I thank the universe for one more beautiful day together.
He doesn’t actually levitate, that would be silly. Realistically it’s more of a parkour.
I had years of experience working at my hometown mall and couldn’t land another retail job, even as seasonal help. It was a real blow to the ego.
We gave him one of those doggy DNA tests, so hopefully none of his doggy relatives ever commits a heinous doggy crime because he’s in the system now.
Unclear if the quarter is the world’s largest. Also while researching this footnote, I learned about the World’s Largest Quarter Pounder in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Benny has never been to Dulles and at this rate probably never will, as he is not eager to get on a plane again.
They did occasionally get into a dust-up and turn into a dog tornado, all claws and teeth. Also Benny bit Grizzly on the face one time. Okay fine, it was two times. He’s not on trial here!
Benny always rides shotgun. If a person is sitting in the passenger seat, he will sit in their lap.
Also he’s discovered that if he hangs out near the baby during mealtime, a LOT of food will rain down on his head.
This was so well written!
Dogs getting into mischief with critters must be universal. Ever since Vinny got in a fight with a raccoon and came up limping (he apparently just pulled a muscle per the vet), we have a nightly ritual where I check the backyard with an obnoxiously powerful flashlight before we let him out.
Best in the biz (the dog biz)