My Sweet Dog Luci Is Ten Years Old

Notes on a dog and a man who loves her.

As hinted in the title, my sweet dog Luci has just turned ten years old and- no- I can’t believe it.

I remember the first time I laid eyes on Lu. I had gotten in the habit of going on Petfinder late at night and plugging in different breed combinations to see what dogs would come up. It seemed like a more wholesome use of the Internet and an important use of my time.

“I bet a Pit Bull and Boxer mix would be pretty adorable,” I thought one night.

I typed it in and boy was I right. A photo of a tiny Luci- at the time named Laurel- popped up and she was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. I looked to see where she was and was delighted to find she was at Waggytail, my friend Holly’s dog and cat rescue in the East Village. Holly had been gently nudging me to foster one of her dogs for years so it felt like fate.

After a flurry of dog-based text messages, I had arranged meet one of Holly’s friends, who had been watching Laurel for a bit after she’d rolled into town in a puppy-stuffed van from Tennessee (a popular birthplace of rescue dogs, it seems) a few days earlier, on a street corner in my neighborhood for the puppy handoff. It felt like some adorable drug deal. If dogs were drugs. Which they are.

Laurel was two months old at the time, but for some reason my first move was to take her to the neighborhood pet store to buy here a gigantic collar worthy of a fully grown lion. My second move was to walk back to the store and get a much smaller collar.

My third move, of course, was to come up with a new name for my new pup. Laurel sounded too responsible, like she might be skilled at doing tax returns or something. I wanted a dog who was up for mischief and ignored fiscal responsibilities altogether.

My friend Joe Franklin, the late TV and radio talk show host whom I wrote about here a few entries ago, had died a couple weeks before I got Luci. So, for a couple days, I decided to call her Little Joe Franklin- Joe for short- in his honor. But Joe sounded too much like no, a word I anticipated using a lot once Luci arrived, so I figured I should keep thinking so as not to confuse her as she adjusted to her new digs.

At the time, I was doing my WFMU radio show and decided to ask listeners for dog name ideas. One listener wisely suggested Danzig, as I regularly played Glenn Danzig-based music by on my show. It felt like a contender. But then my friend Walter pointed out that Danzig was “too on the nose” and thought I might go the more subtle route by calling my new pup Lucifuge, after Danzig’s second album, Dangiz II: Lucifuge, of course. But it turned out Lucifuge was a demon in charge of Hell’s government, which felt like way too much pressure for a dog, so I decided to shorten it to Luci and it stuck. We’ve been getting up to mischief ever since.

Back in college at Fordham University in the Bronx, I used to attend Sunday masses said by Father William O’Malley, who famously (at least to us Fordham students) played Father Dyer in The Exorcist, which is awesome. One Sunday during his homily, Father O’Malley said that it wasn’t possible to truly love a dog or any other animal for that matter. True love was only possible between humans, he told us. I took him at his word, partly because I tend to think cast members from movies about demonic possession are right about most things, but mostly because I figured it was easier to not get hurt if you believed such a thing (The less you love, the less you grieve, right? Right?!).

Not long after we got Luci, I told my girlfriend’s mother about what Father O’Malley had said in church all those years ago.

“That’s a buncha baloney,” she said.

I knew she was right because I loved Luci the second Holly’s friend dropped her into my arms.

In recent years, despite what the vet calls her “impressivley athletic physique,” Luci’s face has gone from fawn-colored to a frosty white, something that bothers me only in that it reminds me that she won’t be around forever.

Recently, my buddy Pete was taking Luci for a stroll around the neighborhood when they passed a man with a prosthetic leg sitting on a bench.

“She’s old!” the man said without prompting.

“So?!” Pete snapped back. “You have one leg!”

When Pete told me about it I knew he loved Luci too. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me love Pete even more.

There’s the old expression “Where does the time go?” But when I think about Luci’s milestone birthday, I tend to think “Why does the time go?” Still, as I’ve been sitting on the couch writing this, Luci has been repeatedly getting me to throw her squeaky rubber ball into the hallway, where she’ll intentionally drop it down the stairs, run down and grab it, and bring it right back to me so we can do it all over again. And it’s in these moments that I start to think maybe time doesn’t even exist. We’re just here, both of us playing ball, one of us drinking coffee, and the other farting like she’s being paid to do it.

Happy birthday, sweet Lu. I love you.