Nomad had a good heart (except when it came to surviving surgery). He was always open to meeting other friendly dogs and would often veer off on his walk toward a dog he wanted to meet. He was an avid tail-wagger and never aggressive toward others. The only time he showed his teeth was if a stranger got too close to his face.
We almost lost him on the very first day. Josh and I went to the pound during the Holiday Adopt-A-Dog event. He was the only one in a circle of dogs who wasn’t yapping up a storm. Josh liked him because of his mellowness. He was anxious in the car (car rides were never his thing throughout his life). We got him home, put him in the backyard, and he promptly took off through the open gate. Gone in a flash. I ran down the streets but didn’t see any sign of him. I went back to the house where my incredulous 9-year-old son was expecting a dog. “Sorry, Josh. He’s gone.” He looked at me and said, “YOU BETTER FIND HIM.” “Okay, I need your help.” We saw him at the far end of the neighborhood, running on and off the sidewalk onto a busy avenue, with cars screeching. A local neighbor helped us corral him.
He was a mishmash of breeds—Basenji, Chihuahua, terrier. He had brown fur that got whiter as he aged. He had a small head—I told him he had a peanut head—too small for his ever-expanding midsection. He stood on skinny legs. “How are you able to hold yourself up on those rabbit-sized paws?” I would ask him.
He walked funny, likely due to a hip malformation—probably congenital, but who knows—he might have had his leg kicked in when he was a puppy. (His first couple of years were likely rough; animal control found him scrounging under a freeway overpass, and he languished in the pound for months before we got him.) He had an awkward gait; he never walked in a straight line, always with a slight forward/side movement, like a car out of alignment, always drifting to the right.
He loved walks—lots of them. Three a day, an hour at a time, until he got older and couldn’t manage it. Walks at the expense of other playtime, but I just needed to walk, and he was always willing to go. He combed every inch of our neighborhood, with favorite routes at specific times of day. We weren’t super adventurous, so we didn’t take him far afield often, but he enjoyed exploring other parks and neighborhoods when we did. He was a regular at Josh’s youth baseball games and practices. When he was younger, he chased squirrels, rabbits, and mice into bushes, but that interest waned as he got older. He never wanted to be out of eyesight of his family. If it weren’t for other dogs and their scared owners, I would have let him off his leash all the time. He was ever loyal.
He was a scrounger, sniffing at everything. Sticking his nose in the dirt, dragging dust and dirt inside with him. Sometimes his walks took hours because he liked to stop, pee, sniff. Sniff, sniff, pee. “What’s in there?” I would say, pointing at a bush where he had his nose buried, egging him on, dragging out the already long walk. Sometimes he would pull a bone or some tossed scraps out of the bushes, crunch them, eat them, and make me stand there while he plopped down and finished his snack.
We were not great at keeping him on a diet. He ate most foods offered, except vegetables. He had his regular defrosted “special diet” bars (which were actually pretty good for him—he evolved from a burbly stomach). But there was milk, ice cream, chicken, steak, crackers, bread, almond butter, bacon, eggs, salmon, burgers… He loved treats. He liked me to watch him chew on a piece of rawhide, even as he developed a loose tooth that occasionally bled.
He loved his family. He hated when he wasn’t with us, quietly resigned to curling up on his bed when we went to work or school for the day. He looked a bit surprised, maybe disbelieving, when we went out without him at night. He loved being scratched—head, ears, legs, belly, butt, neck, snout. When I came home from work, he was there right behind the door as I entered, wagging his tail. I would set my computer bag down, drop onto the floor next to him, and start scratching him on his backside.
“Want some scratchies?” Of course he did, turning around to face away from me. “Here’s some scratchies.” I taught him left from right. “Scratchies on the right,” I’d say as he twisted his backside to the right. “This is the right.” Switching sides. “Scratchies on the left. This is the left.” Now above the tail. “Scratchies up above.” Abrupt stop. Look of befuddlement from Nomad. “SCRATCHIES EVERYWHERE.”
These were his nicknames:
“Wags”
“Waggy Boy”
“Waggy Tail Dog”
“Waggy Good Dog”
“Stinky Boy”
Here he is, in this corner by the breakfast table, getting the wall dirty. Here he is, sitting next to me at that table as I work. There he goes, into the bathroom for some quiet time. There he goes, out the doggy door for a quick nap in his dog house or a few minutes in the sun. Here he comes, back to his bed, or a quick hop onto his chair for a longer snooze.
Where are you going now, Waggy Boy? Don’t be gone too long.