Mrs BZ and I tend to take our vacations on the California coast. We like the ocean, we like the waves, we like the solitude, we like to go places where it’s quiet and simultaneously exposed to the winds and weather of Winter. We don’t take Summer vacations. Summer vacations are for families and the unimaginative. We like to vacation in the winter when it rains and storms and the ocean is in chaos. That’s where you’ll find us.

Having said that, we also rescue dogs. One of those dogs was some sort of a male terrier originally named Buddy. Apparently Buddy had his own local fan club because, after we adopted him and drove down Highway 1 in downtown Ft Bragg, people waved at us and yelled “HI BUDDY.” We were warned: he was this ferocious animal who hated men. Except, uh, not really. He didn’t hate me. We liberated him back in 2010. We were told he was roughly five years old at the time. We think he may have been older.

Here is Buddy on his first car trip from Ft Bragg, leaning into the curves on Highway 20. A great illustration of weight transfer. No kidding. He leaned into the curves. He knew all about weight transfer. And by the way? Mrs BZ changed his name from Buddy to Teddy.

Fast forward to now. Teddy is dying. We know it, we think he knows it. We’ve done our level best in the intervening years, within our limited parameters, to provide him with what we hoped was a better life than he could have found in a shelter which, eventually, would have to kill him.

And now Teddy is dying. Eight years later. We think he’s roughly 13 to 16 years old.

Teddy today. A shadow of his former self.

He eats very little, and gives a few laps to water. We’re afraid he only has a few days left.

In the last month, literally, he has fallen from a fully functioning doggie to a shadow of his former self.

He sleeps 23 hours of every day. He is skin and bones. He lets me pick him up. He can no longer get on the bed without aid — or his chair. When he is on the bed, he falls down right next to me. I mean, right next to me. Either in my face or against my back. And he shivers until he is covered with a blanket. He has no more fat to keep him warm.

He was a lean, mean, Code 3 fighting machine. He was a World Class Ratter. Uh, well, to include cats.

My wife and I watched him rocket up — literally — a vertical cliff in chase of a seagull in 2010. We thought we’d lost him. Thank God we hadn’t. I called him, then, the Anti-Gravity Dog. He damned near levitated going Mach III up that amazingly-steep hill in Mendocino.

Check out this earlier post from 2010. Photographs. The way I want to remember him.

If Teddy survives the weekend, I’ll be surprised.

BZ