Clear Creek Annabel Lee

Clear Creek Annabel Lee

From where I’m seated at my desk, I can just see out the windowpanes of my office door, into the backyard, where my dog Annabel is greedily devouring dogshit. Like she can’t get enough of it. Which she can’t. This is a daily occurrence now. I used to try and stop her. Yell like a lunatic from wherever I was in the house, spill out the back door clapping and shouting no no no! But I’ve given up. Now I just try to pick up the dogshit before she gets to it. Of course, this is a fool’s errand. We’ve got three dogs. It’s a nightmare back there within hours. And if it snows, forget about it. It gets stuck in the ice. You go out there with your little green, compostable baggies and try to be proactive, and the shit just tears apart on you, the smell unlocked fiercely into your face. No sir, nothing you can do but sit back and wait for the thaw. Then, in spring, release your new collection of poems, Snow Melting in Backyard; Hellscape of Unearthed Dogshit.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but my dog turned twelve and promptly started eating her own feces. So, I think the real maxim there is never stop learning.

Annabel is fourteen now. Eating shit isn’t her only setback. She’s near deaf, has cataracts in both eyes. Her hips are bad and get worse over the course of the day. I take her for acupuncture. Me and a woman named Dede sit on an old comforter and pet Annabel while little needles supposedly relieve her pain. I don’t know if it’s working. At night, when we head up to bed after watching TV in the basement, I have to push her up the steep staircase of my old house. She just can’t pull it off alone. She’s toppled back down them before. Sometimes I look over at her standing there and her back-half is sunken, legs askew to try to get some relief. Poor thing. I wonder how much time she has left.

I took her to the vet a few months ago. She’d had a few bouts of incontinence in the night, which subsequently ceased. But I was concerned. The doctor looked at her hind paws and showed me how her middle toenails were worn to nubs from dragging. Some sort of indeterminate lower back/hip pain. He said we could do x-rays and all that to find out more, but really, she’s a fourteen-year-old retriever. What more is there to say? He told me he had similar breeds, and that it’s always so hard to know when to put them down. His rule of thumb was when there were more bad days than good, it was time. Currently, I’d say the good days outnumber the bad 4-1. But still. It’s not encouraging to have to keep track.

I always told myself when she started to fade, I would make it quick. No suffering, no indignities. She lived at the top of her game, why a slow, painful limp to the end? Now it’s not so simple. For every time her back-end slides out on the wood floor, she’s got her front paws on the counter at dinner time. I grab a tennis ball and she’s rearing to go, literally jumping into the air like when she was a pup. She only has one speed. It’s all so easy when it’s theoretical, but when you’re looking at your best friend of nearly fifteen years and they’re gazing back at you adoringly like what are we doing next, bud you can’t even imagine it. But it’s creeping up on you. On her. On us. And I barely remember life before Annabel.

Stop it, Adam. Stop the death waltz. Wah, wah, wah. You’ve had fourteen years and counting with Annabel, far more than anyone gets with an eighty-pound dog. Stop the pity party. Don’t be pulled into that. This is a celebration, a tribute. Eulogize her living. Capture her and be grateful, you black cloud. She’s still here. Bask in that.

I open the door to my garage office, clap so she hears me, and she comes loping in, licking her chops from her most recent shit-feast. I don’t let her touch me or my pant leg. Best to let the saliva clean her mouth out for a few hours before I’ll be accepting any kisses. She circles into the doggy bed beneath my feet, under my desk, settles with a laborious sigh, and within minutes she’s sawing logs. Sleep, AB. Sleep. Let’s remember the good times. 

Such a strong dog, so stoic; silly and dumb, sure, but nobility embodied, a striking bitch. People used to stop me on the street to compliment her.

“Is that a Chocolate Lab?” they ask.

Pshaw. No. Not at all. Chocolate Labs have flat coats; Chessies have wire-y hair, to wick away the water. They also have webbed toes, which help them swim. And they have big, strong chests to break the ice. They were bred to hunt ducks, in the Chesapeake Bay. They were the first American dog, tracing their lineage all the way back to a shipwreck off the coast of Maryland in 1807. And now stern men from those parts chew tobacco and shoot ducks from their boats, and the Chessies leap into the water after the felled fowl. They swim dead at that dead bird, gum it into their mouths—never a toothy bite that would cause damage, mind you—then they bring it back to their owner, scramble back onto the boat, and wait for their next task, gleefully. So no, this isn’t your basic-bitch Chocolate Lab. This is top-notch water dog, a dog bred for a purpose, a specimen, a duck-hunting machine. Thank you for asking.

“Oh. Well, do you duck hunt?”

Pshaw. No. Not at all. My mother is a pescatarian, who worked at the Denver Zoo; she finds homes for every stray she encounters. We love animals, we don’t kill them. We invite them into our homes and let them piss everywhere. Then my mom spends thousands upon thousands of dollars so the American Kennel Club will give them medals.

Now before you start hurling wild judgments and accusations about my family’s show-dogging ways, let me just say this: we get it. It’s an utterly ridiculous hobby that Best in Show skewered with such pinpoint accuracy I don’t even consider that movie a mockumentary; I consider it a scripted documentary about the sick fuckos that inhabit that strange world. Like us.

But what do you want from us? The kids all went to college, and my mom filled her empty nest with purebred dogs (though she typically also has a rescue as well). And that was over twenty years ago. There’s no turning back. This is a slice of our life now. So just deal.

To be fair, I think my mom flirted with the notion of showing dogs long before we left the house. Our first purebred was a Chessie named Lily, a thick, stubborn, sweetheart of a dog, that we got when I was in middle school. Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, my mother fell in love with the breed. They’re common around the Chesapeake Bay, but relatively rare everywhere else. So, when she tracked one down in Colorado, purchased it from a breeder with official papers and everything, it all felt special. Nobody else’s dog came with a preface. Of course, we had no pompous institutions to judge Lily’s worth at the time, so we sought our approval elsewhere.

My fifth-grade earth sciences teacher was a man named Mr. Mckenna who was from Maryland originally, and damn proud of it. He hunted ducks and knew well the value of a good Chessie in a boat at dawn. When I told him that we had a new Chesapeake Bay Retriever puppy in our house, he couldn’t believe it.

Here?! In Denver!?

Indeed. He demanded that my mother bring her in. She jumped at the opportunity. And on the day of Lily’s visit, I kid you not, Mr. McKenna showed us a film reel. Like it was World War II. He threaded the film through the projector, and after a brief ad encouraging us to support the boys fighting Nazis abroad, we all sat in the flickering light of a short documentary about the crabbers and fisherman and duck-hunters of the Chesapeake Bay. It was a strange, anthropological snapshot of solitary men in weathered shacks and boats, telling us all about their vanishing way of life, in varying degrees of indecipherable drawls. Every one of them had a Chessie.

I’ll never forget this old, black fisherman, in dramatic close-up, seated next to his Chessie. He was singing, over and over and over, like a koan.

Chesapeake Baaaaaaaaaay, Chesapeake Boooooooooorn

Chesapeake Baaaaaaaaaay, Chesapeake Boooooooooorn

And it was beneath that backdrop, as well as the checkered Maryland state flag that McKenna pinned to his classroom wall, that my mother presented Lily to my fifth-grade earth sciences class.

“As far as I can recall,” Mr. McKenna said, tears welling in his eyes. “This is the first time a Chessie has ever been in this classroom.”

I’ll never forget that day. The ceremonial solemnity with which McKenna heralded the dawning of our new Chessie, like she was a visiting dignitary. It made an impression on everyone there. I remember thinking that my mother had hit upon the greatest breed of dog that ever lived. I don’t know if I ever stopped thinking that.

Of course, that was Lily’s last classroom visit, as she soon began biting specifically children, and whenever friends came over we would have to lock her in a room, where she would hurl her body against the door over and over again in a disconcerting, ceaseless series of slams.

Again, confine your stones to your pockets, naysayers; this was not Lily’s fault, nor ours. Aggressivity is an occasional breed trait. Or did you not pay attention to McKenna’s film reel?! They have to defend those fishermen’s shacks! That’s why you have to really pay attention to the temperament and disposition of the parents in the bloodline when looking to acquire a top-notch, family-dog Chessie. Which is exactly what my mom did, when she got Sylvia, years after Lily, while we were all in college, and my mother’s American Kennel Club journey began. 

I could go on and on about Sylvia, her clumsy entry into the world of show-doggery, her ascension, and eventual titles. I could tell you how she was the best chest-nuzzler, how she tucked her snout beneath your neck and pushed her weight into you like a hug. Suffice it to say Sylvia was the sweetest dog I’ve ever met. And prior to her untimely departure at six—a strange, hole in her heart, a tragic abnormality—my mother had the foresight to breed her. Top-notch semen was acquired, then inserted into Sylvia in a strange ceremony sponsored by Eukanuba and narrated by John O’Hurley. A prize litter was born. I was free to take my pick, and thusly Annabel came home unto me.

Or shall I use her show name? Clear Creek Annabel Lee. Annabel Lee, of course, being my favorite Edgar Allan Poe poem, and Clear Creek Kennel being the name of the LLC my mother formed to breed Sylvia. There’s no physical space associated with said kennel; this is just how the dog show world works. Everyone forms their little corporations, typically named after hollows or bogs or other nouns that conjure genteel tranquility, but actually represent means of transferring money between white people. And on February 17, 2013, Clear Creek Kennel earned its second champion (the first of course being Flannery, the pup my mother kept from Sylvia’s litter). Annabel was number two. I’m looking at the framed certificate on the shelf across the room now. I slid one of my favorite pictures of her into the frame.

Owned by Adam Cayton-Holland. Clear Creek Annabel Lee has been officially recorded as a champion by the American Kennel Club.

There’s a certification number and everything. It’s legit. Not like all those counterfeit AKC Champion papers people try to pawn off everywhere you go, at seedy dive bars, in the stands of NFL games. This is the real deal. Annabel earned it. My mom put up the funds. Her friend Bruce showed Annabel in competitions, often while I was on the road doing gigs on the weekend. I merely had to take her to a handful of classes out in a warehouse on the prairie, where strange people with strange dogs learned how to trot in satisfying circles, and Annabel earned her initial show stripes.

After she became a certified champion, we never showed her further. That was enough. We just wanted the badge. And though I rarely bring her heavyweight title up, occasionally, if someone really wants to get down in the pretentious muck with me, and start talking smack about purebreds, I’ll casually inform them that Annabel is an AKC champion, and instantly I’m wearing a peacoat and a scarf while staring wistfully toward the horizon. And if they mount up and are like, so what, my dog is an AKC Champion too, I’ll tell them about my mom’s pointer Josh, and his dominant performance at the Westminster Dog Show. It’s at precisely this point that everyone watching the exchange slaps their hands to their cheeks like no he didn’t, and I drop the microphone, and am heralded as the new champion, like at the end of 8 Mile, and yeah, that was a huge victory for me, but I’m just trying to squirrel away money for studio time, dog. This dream is way bigger than petty AKC shit.

But Annabel is about so much more than framed certificates. What a journey we’ve had. There were the requisite difficulties as a puppy. She destroyed everything in my house. Purebred or no, she was a dog, and a bad puppy at that, and I can remember nearly weeping with frustration over beloved t-shirts and shoes and furniture. She kept peeing in the same goddamned spot, in the corner, over and over and over again, warping the wood. It was infuriating.

But I think in a lot of ways, those are the moments where you and a dog really come to terms with one another. Where you’re really tested. When you’re there, on the floor, with a roll of paper towel, and a glass of water, and whatever cleaning spray you’ve got in the house at the time—Windex, that weird all-natural stuff that smells way better, but doesn’t really do the trick—and your dog is right there with you, watching you clean up their mess, sheepishly. Curling her lips up high on her teeth in that guilty-dog grin. That’s a pure moment, an honest place. Your cards are on the table, as are theirs.

I’m sorry, your dog says to you with their eyes.

I know you are, you think telepathically. I know you’re trying.

I am, says your dog. I really am. I love you.

I love you too.

And even though you’re pissed off, and close to snapping, you realize how absolutely full of it you are, that you’re a softie, that you will never do anything but love this dog. So, get to it, already.

Till death do us part.

Things got better. I took her to puppy kindergarten. She stopped going to the bathroom inside. Learned to sit, give high fives, spin in circles, wait. She was so eager to please. More than anything, I learned to occupy her, work her, exhaust her. This was a purebred hunting dog. She needed activity. I took her to doggy day care on days when I was at work, so she could at least play with other dogs when I wasn’t around. Two of her brothers from the same litter went to the same day care, and the three purebred oafs dominated the jigsaw, rubber-mat play-space.

On weekends, I used to take her to Cherry Creek with a tennis ball, just to try to wear her out. Cherry Creek snakes right through the city. It’s pretty urban, well traversed by bikers and joggers, with lots of unhoused in tents and under overpasses. But if you go far enough east, there are spots that remain wild. Spots where Denver vanishes. You have to scramble down a steep bank or two, but if you’re willing to seek it out, scratch up your forearms and shins a little, you and your dog can disappear beneath the city and have a slice of nature all your own. Cottonwoods and tall reeds, sandbanks, crayfish, and turtles. Annabel loved it. I’d throw that tennis ball with her for hours. When she was done, she’d let me know by losing focus from the task at hand, grabbing a comically large stick in her mouth and trotting around awkwardly, trying to balance herself and it.

I’m done, Dad. No more retrieving.

It was our secret spot together. A boy and his dog. Sure, I was in my twenties, but in those types of moments, it’s always a boy and his dog.

I remember I took my little sister there with us once. She brought her pit-mix Wren, a sweetheart of a dog. We tromped around with our pant-legs rolled up, and we threw them the tennis ball over and over. The dogs were having a blast but Wren, an ever-excitable dog, was ratcheting it up. She became fervent with the competition over that ball. We thought they were just rough-housing like dogs do, but on one throw Annabel got to the ball first, and Wren got too worked up, and next thing we knew Wren had Annabel’s neck in her jaws, and her head underwater. Annabel’s brown torso was flopping around like a fish, and instinct kicked in. I sprinted over to them, and I grabbed Wren by the collar and forced her head underwater too, so that she couldn’t breathe, and I held her there, until she loosened her death-grip on my baby. I swear to god I would have drowned Wren right then and there if I had had to. I was a mother lifting a minivan off her child.

Wren eventually let up and I pulled Annabel into my arms and her neck was bleeding pretty bad, but she was okay. And I kept telling Lydia that. She’s okay. Annabel’s okay, Wren too. Dogs get into it sometimes. It’s not your fault. Or Wren’s fault. She just got excited. I had to jump in before things got worse. But Lydia was ashamed. This was all toward the end. When I was just trying to find ways to cheer up my dying little sister, who’s brain was turning. Who could only see all the gloom everywhere, all the misery and all the walls closing in on her. And I thought taking her to our secret spot, where you feel like Huck Finn, down away from it all, would help. And then all that happened, a short, violent, intense scene, and Lydia was so fucking sad, and it just seemed like another terrible thing in a cascading string of them, and rather than uplift my sister the experience crushed her further. Here was a loss, yet another, one more step in this death march towards our ultimate loss, of her, my little sister.

Goddamnit! What is wrong with me? Why does it always get so sad? Focus. Happy. Happiness. Annabel. The best fucking dog. 

One time, two friends and I came home from the bars at two a.m. and wanted to keep the party going. One of my buddies casually revealed that he had shrooms on him, and we were like why would you only share this information now? So, we ate them because we were young and stupid, and we all tripped balls, and the two of them eventually wanted to go on a walk. I trekked into the night with them, but a block away I wasn’t feeling it, and they were, so we parted ways on our nocturnal sojourns. I went home and put on this red, checkered hunting cap, with the fuzzy ear flaps, Elmer Fudd-style, and I played music. For hours. Annabel sat on the couch with me, and I scratched her chin, and cuddled with her and just talked with her all night long. In my psilocybin haze I felt so close to that dog. And I felt her reciprocate. Like she understood where I was coming from. Like we were on the same wavelength. And even though Annabel probably just appreciated the impromptu, all-night, lovefest, I never forgot that night. Part of me thinks she didn’t either.

Goddamn, she must have thought. My owner is a drug addict. But he’s my drug addict.

I don’t know what I’m going to do when she’s gone. I used to think I’d go down to Mexico for a while. Mourn. They understand death better down there. Or perhaps that’s just my gringo fetishization. Still, I remember reading a book called Pedro Paramo in college, by Juan Rulfo, and being floored by the depiction of the dead alongside the living, all equal characters in a swirling, surrealist narrative. That felt like such a happier way of thinking about death. And while so much of that cultural perspective has been minimized to skeleton artwork at an airport kiosk, I found myself in Mexico during Día de Los Muertos once, and it all felt so much more profound than that. It felt like death was just a part of life, not in a defeatist way, in a celebratory way. In a way that recognizes and embraces it, and reduces fear and foreboding. Día de Los Muertos makes death feel like another rung on a ladder, one you keep coming back to, to get your footing.  

So, upon Annabel’s death I envisioned myself wandering the streets of Guadalajara or Oaxaca or Leon, drunkenly looking for the ghost of my beloved dog.  

Or I thought maybe I’d cremate her. Bury some of the ashes in my yard, then take the rest to scatter into the Chesapeake Bay, her ancestral homeland, a place she never visited, but a place I knew beat within her. An indie film about a man scattering his dog’s ashes.

Chesapeake Baaaaaaaaaay, Chesapeake Boooooooooorn

I’d watch that movie.

Those seemed like fitting tributes for this gift of a dog, a dog I’ve gotten to share the last fourteen years with. But those were all visions from before the life that I live now. I’m not going to be able to take the time away from my family to go mourn my dog. I’m just going to have to be sad and go about my daily life. A life I love. A life I cannot believe Annabel is still around for. Her mom died at six; freak occurrence or no, in the back of my head I always feared that same fate for Annabel. But there was Annabel on the day my sister died, on my wedding day, on the day each of my sons was born. They each have learned to crawl toward her, then on her, then pull her tails and ears, and she’s just taken it all without protest, her sterling disposition shining through in the kindness and patience she shows for my children, whose smell she probably recognizes as part of me, part of her, part of this family.

How lucky am I? Annabel lives and breathes, and every morning when I wake up and roll over, she’s right there, her snout at the edge of my comforter. I put my arm out and she nuzzles my hand immediately, huffing in excitement to see me again. She turns her head so that my fingers scratch down her snout to behind her ear, just the way she likes it. She’s been waiting for me to wake up for who knows how long.

Morning! I love you! Let’s start the day!

I suppose when Annabel dies, I’ll probably look at all the photos I have of her, thousands of them. And I’ll watch all the videos. And I know I’ll keep coming back to one. Social media always summons it for me, on the annual anniversary of the date my wife filmed it. One year ago today, two years ago today. The algorithm has tracked how my eyeballs have scanned it so many times, so it keeps shoving it down my throat, through my phone.

It’s from when we lived in LA, my wife and I, and our three dogs—Annabel, plus my wife’s two pups: Charlie and Sammy, little guys, a Sheltie and an American Eskimo, respectively. We would take them to the dog park in Huntington Beach, right on the water. A strip of shore where dogs can play and frolic in the waves.

In the video, Annabel stands at the shoreline, as the waves collapse into the sand. She’s looking at me, waiting for me to throw a stick, bursting with anticipation. I hurl the stick as far as I can out into the water. She watches it, waiting to see where it lands, then, once she’s tracked it, I swear to god she waits for the incoming wave to crash, so she doesn’t have to fight her way through it, to spare herself the energy. Annabel grew up in Colorado. She’s a landlocked dog. She knows nothing of waves. And yet here she is, waiting one out, her genes taking over, a full-fledged wave expert. It’s just in her. A few bounding leaps and she’s off and swimming, her head getting smaller and smaller, until she gingerly chomps on the stick, turns, and brings it back to me, her head getting bigger and bigger, until she’s close-in enough to stand, and she shakes her wet coat in the surf. It’s a clinic. An entry in the encyclopedia. F, for fetching.

What I remember about that day is that for a moment, a small crowd gathered and watched my dog at work. Just took in the majesty of it all. One man asked me how I got her to do that. I tried to sound matter of fact as I told him, to not let my bursting pride swell into arrogance. I never had to teach her a thing.

I’m sure I’ll come back to that video over and over. Someday, probably not too far off. The day when I wake up and put my hand out and no dog is there to take it.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

But today is not that day. Today my best friend sleeps at my feet, right now, occasionally whimpering and twitching her right, hind leg in dreams of great fetches past. I think I’ll wake her up. Merely getting up from my desk won’t do the trick anymore. She’s too deaf. So I’ll go over to her and rub her furry side, and she’ll shoot up with a start, then her eyes will sparkle, relieved as the realization of my presence washes over her.

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

She’ll desperately scramble for something to retrieve for me, a shoe, a sock, anything. She does it every time I walk back into the house after any amount of time away, a retriever, ever eager to retrieve. I always laugh when she does it. How many times have I laughed at her impassioned retrievals? Thousands. They’re so goddamned earnest.

Come on, ole-timer, I’ll say. Let’s go for walk.

And if I’m feeling really sentimental, maybe I’ll let her poke around the backyard for a minute before I put the leash on her. See if there’s any more shit she needs to eat.