Frodo Plakanis-Tyrrell: Companion, Friend, First Love

            I remember the first time I cried with joy. I was eleven, sitting on a family friend’s porch with my parents when a sweet, sad-eyed hound dog puppy came up to me and put his head in my lap. Within seconds, he became my first love. My parents had already planned on taking him home with us, but wanted to see how we interacted first and when they told me he was mine, I felt it. There’s something about tears of joy. You’re overcome with happiness that’s so intense it almost feels like pain, and when the tears come out you feel a little embarrassed, crying like a little girl. But I was a little girl, and this was my first dog. An obsession with Lord of the Rings led to a serious discussion about whether Boromir was a reasonable name for a dog, and my parents finally convinced me to settle on Frodo.

            Frodo was not an easy dog to handle. I’m pretty convinced he’d been beaten at some point before he either was abandoned or ran away, which is pretty common for hound dogs with brutal redneck owners. I’ve seen massive men in cutoff tees and barreling pickup trucks treat their dogs with a stunning gentleness that’s damn near inspiring, and I’ve seen beautiful, loyal puppies with optimistic tails wagging, their bellies full of worms, abandoned on roadsides all over East Tennessee. People are a mercurial kind of animal, and it seemed Frodo’s previous owners were on the heartless end of our emotional spectrum. He flinched if you moved towards him too quickly, and raised voices (at anyone in the house) sent him into a corner, tail tucked between his legs, eyes begging forgiveness. He ate absolutely everything, from pillows to garbage, and we came home to a mess almost every time we left the house. For awhile it seemed we wouldn’t be able to handle such a lively dog, and I struggled with the idea that I might lose my first love before the summer was up. It seems that Frodo was struck with keen powers of insight just as it neared time to make a decision, however, and he straightened out so fast you’d have thought he was a different dog. For a little while, at least.

            That same summer, I got into a pretty serious bike accident. I flipped over my handlebars and skinned my knee to the muscle, fractured my wrist, and tore several of the muscles in my left shoulder. My knee was so bad there wasn’t even anything left to stitch up, and I was resigned to the worst nightmare an active eleven year old girl could imagine-I was stuck at home, unable to even walk around without searing pain in my leg. I remember sitting on the couch, miserable, watching Dances With Wolves for some reason (as if I wasn’t depressed enough). Frodo came up to me and nudged my hand for some petting. When he saw me flinch, he pulled back for a moment, then tentatively sniffed my scraped hand and injured knee. He looked up at me with sad, tender brown eyes and gently settled against my other leg to keep me company. I cried.

            Over the years, that gentle, steady understanding became a huge source of comfort. Frodo was with me when I lined my driveway with paper lanterns, decorated my house, and waited patiently as only five of the thirty people I’d invited to my eighth grade birthday party showed up. He was with me when I cried over boys, when I came home from my sophomore year at Yale and saw that I’d failed a class, and when I found out that people in my life hadn’t made it through the night (which happened more times in a couple of years than it ever should to a single human being in a lifetime). He always got it, always looked up at me with those warm brown eyes, and sat down with me gently until my crying subsided.

            Over the years, though, we had our share of struggles. Frodo had a wild side that couldn’t be tamed, and while he refrained from eating shoes and pillows, he expressed himself by learning how to open doors and sneak past us to run joyfully into the grassy wide open. His joy was unfortunately not contagious, and we spent many long hours combing our neighborhood for him, hoping fervently that he hadn’t wandered onto the busy highway by our neighborhood. He always came home though, either by trying to sneak back into the house when we opened a door (as if we wouldn’t notice!) or by curling up peacefully on our stoop for the night, greeting us joyfully in the morning. He loved rolling in all manner of horrible things, and he loved sleeping on my bed. Often one right after the other. Even when he was clean, his sleeping on my bed caused a midnight wrestling match that often ended in my getting frustrated and finally banning him from the bed, though usually one look from those sad brown eyes broke my heart so badly I let him back up anyway. He was a smart little thing.

            Frodo also had his share of health problems. He suffered from serious seizures, sometimes in clusters that went on for well over an hour, and as if the seizures weren’t awful enough, the only way to stop them involved shoving Valium deposits up his anus, which was unpleasant for everyone. He usually had the seizures when he got excited about something, so he nearly always had one when I came home, usually shaking him so badly that he fell off the edge of my bed in the middle of the night. I felt so horribly guilty knowing that my returns were responsible for exacerbating his illness, and I always felt so helpless when they happened, watching him shake and foam at the mouth. Once my parents watched him roam around the backseat of our car on the way to the vet, howling and disoriented, as their fear grew that something was horribly wrong. Eventually the true culprit of Frodo’s odd behavior made itself abundantly clear. My dog was balls-out high from his doggie dose of Valium.

            The summer between my junior and senior years of college was an exciting one. I was a ziplining guide for a month and a half before I left for Prague to study abroad. The job was awesome, and it was only a two minute walk from my house, which left me with a great lunch hour to walk home and talk to Tom online while he was in Oxford. One afternoon, as I walked through the woods with a group of clients, sweating and beaten from our long tour in the sun, a familiar face popped up out of the grass and bounded up to greet me. Frodo had somehow escaped from the ever-tightening dog security at my house to come visit me at work. Embarrassed, I apologized profusely to my clients, found some spare rope in the back room, and led my dog home, trying to decide if I was more angry or amused. I decided to go with amused.

            My first few days in Prague were a blur-trying to figure out my surroundings, buying a temporary phone, and surviving on the party schedule of a college student surrounded by European nightlife. My parents were a nightmare too, constantly Facebook messaging and emailing me, bugging me to call them as soon as I had a phone set up. Complications with my phone card went on for days, and finally I figured out a way to Gchat with them, though their webcam wasn’t working so it was a strange hybrid of video chat from me and reading text from them. The conversation started out a little stilted as I expressed how busy I’d been and how obnoxious their constant badgering had been. In a few moments, though, that badgering made all the sense in the world. Only a few days after I’d left home, Frodo had escaped for one last joy run. He’d been getting out a lot and returning later and later, and this time seemed just like all the others. When my dad heard the crash, he thought vaguely that Frodo might have gotten onto the highway, but it seemed so unlikely considering all the years he’d come home safely. It was only after our neighbor next to the highway came to our door telling us that our beloved hound was laying in the road in terrible condition that he realized he’d been right. My parents managed to get him to our house and tend to him the best they could, but the flecks of blood around his mouth told them they didn’t have much time.

Frodo died surrounded by people who loved him, at the home to which he never failed to return after his long runs, and he was buried in our front yard under his favorite tree with his collar and leash, wrapped in a bed sheet that smelled like me.

            My parents watched, helplessly, as I sobbed. I was across the world and I had no way to cope with the fact that I’d lost my dog. The one-way video chat played out like some kind of bizarre movie as they wrote back to me at lightning speed, trying to convey the support and love that no words can provide. I spent the next day in a daze, my eyes swollen from crying all night, feeling lost, angry, and completely devastated. These feelings were only compounded by what I heard from my family not long after: the bastard who killed my dog was suing us.

            It doesn’t matter that he and his wife were an elderly couple driving their motorcycle at night in the rain through a deer crossing at at least the speed limit, if not over, when they hit Frodo. It doesn’t matter that the man driving hadn’t even buckled his helmet, so it went flying when he crashed. It doesn’t matter to these heartless, cold people that my parents had done everything they could to keep Frodo inside that night, yet he’d still managed to escape. It doesn’t matter that these people mangled and killed my sweet, loving dog while I was worlds away and unable to say goodbye. They came after us anyway. They came after our car insurance, even though our cars were parked firmly in our driveway that night. Now they’re coming after our homeowners insurance, and according to a very vague law in Tennessee, they might have grounds to sue us for every hard earned cent my family has ever earned because they hit and killed a member of our family.

            I’m angry. I’m angry at Frodo for trying so damn hard to take that last run. I’m angry at Prague for being so far away from Tennessee when I needed to be home. I’m angry at myself for kicking him off the bed all those times, for ignoring his wagging tail when I was too busy to stop and pet him, and for not looking harder for him when he took his long runs. But most of all, I’m angry at the man whose carelessness killed my dog, who has the balls to come after my heartbroken family for all we’ve got. Losing my friend, my loyal companion, and my first love is the definition of “Pain and Suffering.”

            Keep your dogs inside, guys. Love them, even when they drive you crazy. Let them have an extra piece of chicken every once in awhile. Treasure them. Keep them safe. For Frodo’s sake, let your dog know he’s loved. I promise that if you do that while they’re on Earth, he’ll keep them company in doggie Heaven. Because if dogs don’t go to Heaven, I sure as hell don’t want to go either.