The Chase for Beauty

I used to be somewhat of a neighborhood cult figure, thanks to Brandy, my English springer spaniel.

When Brandy became a part of my life in the early ’80s, he was a mere seven weeks old. My wife, Deb, and I broke just about every rule training him, beginning the very first day we brought him home to our apartment in Chicago. The private breeder strongly recommended Brandy sleep in a dog crate, explaining something about dogs feeling more secure from predators in enclosed spaces. At 2 am during night one of Brandy’s life as a Mendelson, his howling didn’t sound so secure. Twenty minutes later he was sound asleep—in the middle of our queen-size bed.

When I took him for a walk the next morning, using a leash seemed a bit overprotective. The sidewalks were barricaded from the streets by foot-high snow walls, courtesy of the street plows. And Brandy wasn’t much bigger than my shoe. So we walked leashless to the corner store and back. It was such an uneventful trip that the leash stayed home for the next walk, and the next, and the next.

By the time we moved to Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood, a year and a half later, Brandy—now fully grown—knew sidewalks and intersections almost as well as I did. Our walks consisted of me reading the newspaper while he pranced not too far ahead or behind me.

I didn’t realize that those 20-minute morning, afternoon, and evening walks weren’t inconspicuous. I’d be out to dinner at a Shadyside restaurant or buying a paper at the neighborhood drug store or waiting for the bus downtown, when strangers would approach and say, “Aren’t you the guy who walks that dog while reading the newspaper?”

My walks with Brandy weren’t the only times with him that I left the leash at home. Together, we jogged the acres of wooded trails at nearby Frick Park. (Don’t tell Animal Control.) Brandy loved running there, especially after a rain. He would lag behind me; then suddenly, mud flying everywhere, he’d swoosh by me in full gallop, his mouth seemingly smiling, his tongue trailing in the wind, and his brown eyes wide, wide open.

I think it was television personality Larry King who once said that one of life’s great injustices is that dogs don’t have human life spans. When Brandy died at 13, his running days were long gone. But I remembered how much he loved Frick Park. So on a rainy afternoon I took his ashes there. When I began to sprinkle them along the trail, something incredible happened. The sun peeked out of nowhere and the wind kicked up. His ashes, rather than falling from my hand onto the ground below, took off in the wind, like they were running the path. I laughed and cried at the same time.

Since then, I’m not too skeptical when I learn of mystical occurrences such as what Dennis and Linda Hurwitz experienced and I reported on in The Chase for Beauty.