Remembering Maybelle

Brett MacFadden
Sep 6, 2018 · 9 min read

​This weekend dear old Maybelle passed away. Everyone thinks this about their dog, I know, I know, but ​Maybelle really was a hell of a dog. A sweet dog, a gentle dog, kind, kind, kind, and yet a dog that sometimes snapped when she shouldn’t — especially with kids — a lifelong problem and source of discomfort. She was roly-poly, and had a pudgy white-haired belly and distinctive way of sitting, where her back feet stuck out past her front legs, so she had a kind of louche, slouchy quality to her. Leigh Anna and adopted her in 2002, maybe 03, from a Milo Foundation event in Berkeley. I thought she seemed kind of depressed, and I wasn’t quite sold. But in time I learned that her mellow demeanor was her best, most essential, quality. Sure, from time to time she’d get ramped up and charge around, but mostly she wanted to chill out, put her head on your knee, just, you know, be.

She had been left at the Milo Foundation pregnant, and soon after she had her puppies, Milo put her and the puppies up for adoption. We inquired about where the puppies were placed, and we learned one was adopted by a couple in San Francisco. We left our contact in case they were interested in getting in touch, and when they did, we learned that one of the partners had a hair salon just down the street from our house. Mundi, the offspring, bore a clear resemblance to Maybelle, though bigger, stronger, longer fur, more wild. Ever since then one of the partners, Christopher, has cut my hair, and even though both dogs have now passed, there’s still some sense of loyalty, of family ties.

Maybelle’s name was Smiley when we got her. At the time I was working on Henry Horenstein’s book Honky Tonk, which featured his 1970’s photos of country music legends. We named her after one of the musicians in the book, “Mother” Maybelle Carter, the matriarch of the legendary Carter family (and Johnny Cash’s mother-in-law). They were both mothers, and Maybelle was a Maybelle more than she was a Smiley.

Dogs give you something to do and someone to do it with. We took Maybelle to Chrissy Beach (a lot), to Ocean Beach, to Fort Funston — where when the wind is good you can watch hang gliders float along the coast. We took her on long and short hikes, to Golden Gate Park, Alamo Square, to Buena Vista — a.k.a. Squirrel Park — where for a period she loved to chase those little fuckers up a tree. Maybelle wasn’t really a chaser and absolutely not a fetcher. Sometimes she’d go for a ball or a stick, but mostly that sort of thing was undignified and better left to purebreds and rascals. Maybelle went on many trips — camping, up and down the coast, once all the way to Canada. She’s been to Oregon more than once. I think she’s been to Colorado. Recently Leigh Anna took her to Mexico. She’s seen things, and she’s smelled them all the more.

Her fur was once impossibly shiny. In photos it looks almost greased. She was crisp, tailored, in black and white, which appealed to the designer in me, but it was an illusion of sorts. On close inspection, the black was heavily speckled with brown. Over time there was more white and less black, but she aged rather elegantly, since it was just the percentage changing from one existing color to the other.

If you have a mixed-breed, people are often trying to decode what kind of dogs make up this particular dog, in the same way you might try and deconstruct the ingredients in a dish. It’s important to people when confronted with an unknown to make it more known. Maybelle looked a little like a black lab, but smaller, and like a border collie, but with short hair and rounder snout. Her ears were little triangles, her torso sausage-like, with thin toothpicky legs. She was a very good size — you could pick her up if you had to, but she wasn’t a lap dog, wasn’t a purse dog, she was a dog-dog. You weren’t out to prove anything with Maybelle—she wasn’t a cute dog or an attack dog or full of tricks. She was a general all-arounder. What my father calls a world dog, referencing the hybrid strays he saw in his years of business travel to Asia and elsewhere. She was independent — happily an only child — and didn’t need a pack, but she had her friends and family: Gatsby, Zoe, Petey, Mundi, others largely unknown from her dog walkers, Charlie and David. Her own private society and community.

If you have a dog for a good long time — in this case 15 years — the dog is not just a dog, but a marker of all you’ve been through. Ups and downs, the dog was there, being dog — sleeping, eating, pet me, the twice-daily walks to Kite Hill — up the hill, admire the view, the soupy fog, always different people with their dogs. Put your hand in the bag like a mitten, pick up the poop, flip it inside out and tie a knot, put in the can. Back down the hill. The California seasons come and go on the hill. The quickness of SF spring, which comes in the winter months. One day after a good rain you see the sprouts. Soon, unbelievably fast, grass all over the hill. Knee high. Green and beautiful for a bit. Wild radishes soon after. Then towards summer it all goes brown (the “gold” of the golden state), and since this small park is essentially just a big bathroom for dogs, things get soon get dry and drab and rank. But in a few months the rains come, the sprouts, the grass. All over again.

Kite Hill in the brown months, 2010

When Leigh Anna and I split up, Maybelle and I did not split up. This was good, it was good to have a dog in those damn days. Up to Kite Hill, down from Kite Hill, morning, night, morning, night. We went on walks all around, we went to places we used to go as three. She didn’t seem confused or upset about the change. She rolled with it.

Maybelle and I met new people, and she liked those people and they liked her. It seemed most everyone liked her. She was the very definition of sincere. For a while there was a dog in the neighborhood that would lash out at Maybelle every time it saw her. This was a known bad dog. Finally, Maybelle lashed back, enough was enough. I was proud of her, but the owner of the dog (a lawyer, of course) called Animal Control, since we never walked Maybelle on a leash. They came by to reprimand us for our bad dog and for being bad dog people. Those people did not like Maybelle, but those people were wrong. Maybelle was a good dog.

Maybelle got cancer. She got very bad cancer in the time after the separation. Lymphoma. The prognoses was not good, treatment expensive and grueling, but I think both Leigh Anna and I needed her to be around. Thousands of dollars. Weekly, or I think even twice a week, I would drive her about 45 minutes south to San Mateo, leave her for her chemo, drive back to the city and then drive back down later in the day to pick her up. She hated the vet, even though these people couldn’t have been more kind and devoted to her. When we got close to the hospital, she would start shaking in the passenger seat. It was terrible, such guilt. There’s nothing worse than bringing the dog to the vet. They know what’s coming and we know they know.

Somehow she survived the cancer, she lived and lived and lived. For a long while she seemed deathproof. Tragically the vet who miraculously treated her later died of cancer herself. How sad and unfair. Maybelle developed a stunning variety of fatty tumors, some were removed when they grew too fast, but others were left in place, so she became lumpy and asymmetrical. She went to the vet for regular checkups, which she hated of course, and took horribly expensive cancer-prevention pills that we bought at Costco, because it was at least a bit less expensive. She was one of the best arguments for pet insurance that has ever been. If Leigh Anna were writing this, I’m sure she could detail the various ailments in detail, as she has a better memory, and also paid for most of them. After the Castro, Maybelle and I spent time in Sausalito and in Oakland, before Judith and baby Neils came into the picture, and then over to Hayes Valley, Maybelle there too. Eventually, though, Maybelle’s old weak spot, a low tolerance for children, became an issue. She started spending more time at Leigh Anna’s, and she got older and older, deaf, a bit blind, sometimes senile and confused, her heart started to fail. She panted loudly and snored like a, well, like an old dog. She walked stiffly, and towards the end just laying down was a slow and painful-looking operation.

We never knew exactly how old she was — when we adopted her they estimated 18 months, just a guess, and when she died, she was maybe as much as 18 years. With the common multiple of 7 to 1, she’d be somewhere around 120 “in human years.” Old! On her last day she could no longer walk. Leigh Anna invited us over, and though we knew we were saying goodbye, we didn’t really say goodbye. I didn’t really say goodbye. Something could change, maybe this wasn’t it, she was not a dog prone to death. Leigh Anna had given her a bath, and she was clean and a little wet, the slightly longer fur around her scruff fluffy and nice. She laid and huffed while we talked around her. I took some photos with the good camera. But by that evening, goodbye it was. I wasn’t there and I’m glad I wasn’t there. I couldn’t take it, the reality of the end, when a friend becomes a body. I’ll miss her. I do miss her. I miss the time when she was young and I was youngish and we both had lots to come. Now she’s gone and I’m oldish, life a little less sweet.

When people have pets and no kids, we compare. Their (dog, cat, rabbit, horse, bird, guinea pig) is like their kid. I’ve never quite agreed with this, and it’s whiff of derision. It’s assumption that a pet is a proto-kid, lesser, practice, but not fully real. A pet is like a kid in that it’s not an adult human, it has no use for money, it doesn’t speak in words, it can’t, generally, open doors. But an animal is also fully mature so much sooner than we are. It reaches wisdom when we are still watching cartoons. Sometimes, like Maybelle, it’s an old soul even before it’s two. The beauty of a pet is sometimes they’re the child, and sometimes we are. We teach them, they teach us, and on and on and on.

Maybelle’s last day, September 1, 2018

Brett MacFadden

Written by

Partner MacFadden & Thorpe Design, faculty California College of Arts, friend to animals.

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