2023-06-22: Duncan Abner
Remembering my companion of almost 18 years
Allison came out to Southern California in April 2005, leaving pastoral Upstate New York for the Whittier experience. She spent a couple of months looking around for work, doing working interviews all over the place: right there in Whittier, Pasadena, Glendale, Rancho Santa Margarita…a few other places. She ended up at Best Friends Animal Hospital, up in North Hollywood, working a slightly shifted schedule that made that a do-able commute from Whittier. She warned me, even before we moved in together, that she would want to get a dog. I was fine with the proposition, though I did say that while I didn’t really care about size or breed, that it might be good to have a dog that had a a calm disposition because I worked from home and needed to be able to manage the dog and my job at the same time.
Duncan was born in early August 2005, as far as we can tell. He was a Maltipoo, mostly white with a little peach coloring that came and went a bit over the years. And he had what you would call an eventful early life. To this day, I don’t really know all the specifics, but he apparently went through four homes over the course of a couple of months. He was cute as all-get-out, but also a little high strung in a way where he had a hard time fitting in. Eventually, he was relinquished at Best Friends and Allison’s coworker, knowing she was looking for a dog and had some relationship with his previous owners, said “your dog is here.”
And he was. Last Sunday, June 18, 2023, we had to say goodbye to him and, honestly, if I think too hard about it even now, I still get very sad. But he lived 17 years and 10 months, which is a long time for a dog, even for a Maltipoo, one of the healthier breeds. The convention is that dogs are “seniors” once they get to age 7; we got almost 11 years after his seventh birthday. A lot of people think informally of dogs as getting about 15 years if all goes well—Duncan made it way past that. I’m sure it helped that his Mom was also his doctor, but I would like to think that we all helped him to enjoy a long, full life.
When he first came to us, his name was “Cubbie.” The name didn’t really feel right to me. He was an objectively small dog, and that would seem to fit “Cubbie,” but we weren’t especially fans of the name—or of the Cubs—and so went ended up trying out a few others. We couldn’t quite sort out whether “Duncan” or “Abner” fit him better, so we settled on “Duncan Abner,” which, of course, became “Duncan” 99% of the time.
While we were both happy to have him around, Duncan and I had some static for the first six months or so. He was, as I noted, high strung, and, I was working from home, looking after him entirely when Allison wasn’t around. His charming but needy personality was not exactly a perfect fit.
We came around to an arrangement at around six months. One of the things that drove me nuts initially but that I came to appreciate is that if he did do something naughty, I would raise my voice and hope that he would leave me alone for a couple of minutes to cool off. That wasn’t how he saw it, though; it didn’t really matter how upset I might get, he would just sit there and look cute and vaguely regretful and, I suppose, try in his way to make it up to me. Worse still, if I left the room, the little bugger would follow me around. It drove me nuts, but part of our eventual agreement was his not being naughty quite so often and my letting him hang around even when I was a little angry that he had done some young dog thing.
We crate-trained him at the beginning. For a while, he just looked like a little fluffball in the corner of the crate, but he got bigger fairly quickly. By the time he was six months old, he could stand on his hind legs and grab the top of the crate, which had to be a good 30 inches up or so. He always thought he was bigger than he was.
He wasn’t bad in the crate. He seemed mostly ambivalent about it as a puppy, but we would leave a little ramekin with him with food or water and he took the habit of getting up a little before 6 am—way before Allison and I would typically have been awake—and clanking the ramekin against the side of the crate like one of those old-timey prisoners banging his tin cup against the bars of his cell, forcing one of us to get up and take him out. It wasn’t too long after that where we reserved the crate for travel and for plopping him on top of after a walk to wipe down his paws.
He was needy in that way, maybe even a bit of a Type A personality, not the type to go wander off on his own. He liked playing, he was affectionate, and liked being around people—though if there were new people, he might bark for a minute to let you know that there was a stranger around. He liked his toys, enough that every once in a while he would have one that was more or less his “woobie.” He could also be a little bit of a terror on some toys, destroying them faster than you would imagine a little guy could. But he was cute and demonstrative and did things that, if you are a dog owner, make you happy to be a dog owner.
Part of that was dog training. The training took place not far from Allison’s work, at Moorpark Park. So we took him to puppy class every Saturday for a couple months. As an aside, Steve Carell’s apartment in The 40-Year-Old Virgin was directly across from where we met for dog training; when I finally Netflix’ed the movie (with Duncan!) about a year later, it was wild to see a place I’d spent a few hours as one of the main settings for what had briefly been the most popular movie in the land. Anyhow, puppy class probably helped a little, though more in developing some basic puppy behavioral rudiments as anything else. Duncan, though smart, was an indifferent student; he was the type of dog who wanted to do the thing he wanted to do. This carried over to the commute. He was perfectly happy to go for a ride, even for 30-45 minutes each way, but he would start whining in complaint the minute we hit traffic, which a drive through Downtown LA—even on a Saturday morning—will typically include in some measure. I don’t think it ever failed to amuse me that he felt about traffic the way the rest of us do.
For graduation day, all the dogs got a little shared puppy cake as a treat. We cut the cake up into portions and there was just a little bit left at the end. Duncan, who might have been 5 pounds soaking wet at that point, tried to chase all the other dogs off the remaining cake, despite many of them being larger, and one that had to be at least eight times his size. Again, he always thought he was bigger than he was.
At least one argument for the name of the history of the Poodle breed is from the German meaning “to splash,” and that certainly fit Duncan to a T. Where Jet, the Shiba Inu, hated the rain, Duncan was happy to be out in the rain and just trot around in it, puddles and raindrops made him equally happy. That didn’t necessarily extend to the bath, but he certainly was always up for a good play in the rain, at least until he got much, much older.
Poodles do have a reputation for being smart, along with being friendly, and he was that, too. Even if he was sort of an indifferent student in his puppy class and we never had him doing agility or anything unusually intellectually taxing for a dog, he definitely had his ways of communicating. He was good about letting us know when he needed to go out, to the point that when I was working, he would come get me in my office if he was somewhere else in the house and I didn’t respond to him right away. Until they stopped agreeing with him later in life, we would give him baby carrots as a treat, usually associated with either a sit-stay-down or a shake. After he’d come to understand the process, he could be very impatient. The minute the bag of carrots came out he was apt to just alternate between sit and down or, even more amusingly, try to shake with both hands at the same time, which looked a little like the smallest Maltipoo pugilist you’ve ever seen.
We took him with us on the first vacation we went on after he joined the family, to go see Allison’s family for Christmas in 2005. Allison’s family is in Central Jersey (yes, I argue that there is such a thing as Central Jersey) and that was the one time we flew into JFK rather than Newark. Allison gorked him enough that he was asleep most of the time, but he was small enough as a baby that we could comfortably put him under the seat in a carrier and he did pretty well on the plane. And yes, he did put the facilities on both ends to good use without making a mess in the carrier on the way. In New Jersey, he did get to enjoy a lot more real estate than he’d been accustomed to that point, but it was also winter in New Jersey for a little Maltipoo, so keeping him warm was periodically a challenge. There was also one day where my father-in-law and I went to go run a few errands and Allison was home with her friend, Jeanine, who was visiting. My in-laws had a full-sized Golden back then who took off after Duncan at one point, including your typical movie-level chase around the Christmas tree, and Jeanine was rewarded for rescuing Duncan from the melee by having him pee all over her. In his defense, there had to be a size ratio of something like 12:1 between his aggressor and him. But he did make it home in one piece.
We also took Duncan and Jet to Palm Springs with us for a long weekend one summer, when the daily highs got up to 117 and even the overnight lows never dropped much below 100 degrees. We ran the air conditioning the whole time and I still think the house was at least 90 the whole trip. We managed to find ways for it to be fun—that it would be hot in Palm Springs in Summer was not a shock—including giving the dogs a spin in the pool. Jet wasn’t having it at all, but Duncan did alright. He was always intrepid like that.
For most of the rest of our travel, Duncan and his brother ended up staying with my parents. They’re on enough land to have a backyard that was more fun for the dogs than were the little patches of grass in our old development (both of the boys certainly made the most of wandering around the development, too, it should be said). My parents at least were polite enough to say that they enjoyed having the dogs around as periodic guests, even that they missed them a little bit when we took them back home. We also were in the habit of bringing the dogs with us when we visited my folks for many years, which was a great arrangement for everyone involved.
If he wasn’t an agility dog or a therapy dog, he did get out into the world a little. Allison has done a bunch of presentations to kids over the years about being a vet, not least to classes with Elizabeth and Sebastian in them. And she would bring Duncan along as a model/hypothetical patient. He always liked attention and was good with little ones, so it was a natural fit for him to be useful.
He was also very good with our kids. He had to make some adjustments to getting used to living with another dog, but having a little human and then two took even more adjustment. The kids loved the dogs, but were not always gentle with them. Jet might give them a wide berth if they seemed a little unruly, but Duncan lived for unruly and was happy to have people around who were much closer to his size. If anything, it was an opportunity for even more attention. And for the kids, the dogs provided a chance to learn how to care for someone else.
He was a very healthy, sturdy dog. He could—and would—run like hell for a surprisingly long time if you encouraged him, sometimes even if you just didn’t actively try to stop him. We lived in a two-story condo in Whittier that had a landing halfway down. Probably my most vivid memory of Duncan is him coming downstairs—because we were calling him to eat most often, but this could happen for all sort of other reasons—where you would hear him head down the top half of the stairs at full tilt, slide a little in the turnaround, take a step or maybe two down the second half of the stairs and leap at full speed to the floor below, landing hard enough that you could hear him exhale from the force of the landing. It was wild.
I think 1B to the 1A of him taking flight is that, when the floor in the dining area was carpeted (we replaced it after a while), he used to love to run laps. Allison and I would stand in the wider area around the dining table, nearer to our living room, and he would run around and then bark at us when he approached, only to disappear back around the table to come back and bark again. There might even be a (playful, gentle) swat at his hindquarters when he came around, which would made him gather himself up a little to bark at us even louder on the next lap. And he could do this for a long time. I guess it’s just a kind of ordinary play I am describing here, but it’s hard to convey how much fun he seemed to be having for all the running and barking and carrying on. And then, when he’d finish, he’d suck down a ton of water, just radiating heat.
Of course, we also played our share of fetch. I gather that not all Maltipoos are big on the fetch thing, but he was almost always ready to play. As a smart guy, he was quick to catch on when we messed with him, not throwing the ball or whatever other shenanigans we were engaged in. He would look around for a little bit, but then come back quickly, seemingly impatient with whatever we had done to try to trick him.
He had some real search skills to him. He was apt to find some toy that had gotten lost in some location where he needed some help to get it and so he would wander off to the spot and then he had a little whine built for the occasion to let us know that our services were required. Allison and I came to ask “Did Billy fall down the well?” whenever he did this. Sometimes what he needed was obvious, but often it was not and I came to marvel at how the hell he could possibly know that something was there. More than once, it took me a while to figure out what he was after, to the point of not believing that he had actually found something, but he was literally never wrong about it. After a while, we came to understand that if we couldn’t figure it out right away, there was going to be a bit of a puzzle to it—sometimes one he would have to help us with. There was always something there.
Dogs may be considered “senior” when they get to 7, but Duncan had to be maybe 11 or 12 before I really noticed him slowing down. He did start taking the second half of the steps more conservatively a little before then. His top speed was probably a little less than it was at half his age, but it wasn’t something I noticed. He was as active and engaged a little guy at 12 as he was at 2. He did start losing his hearing once he hit double-digits. While he was resourceful about finding other ways of navigating the world as his hearing left him, he once had a very sensitive pair of ears, to the point that I once had to carry him home on a walk because they were putting a roof on the clubhouse in Whittier and they were making an ungodly racket in taking the old roof off. But he was able to adapt to these challenges as he got older.
It wasn’t until around his 14th birthday when we got a scare, but it was a good one. I was helping Allison do his anal glands—I took the easy end—and she started crying a few seconds in. He had a mass of a type and in a location that suggested that it was likely to be malignant. Given his age, there wasn’t a great case to be optimistic, but he dodged a bullet by having just a plain old benign tumor that was not especially difficult to remove (by a hell of a specialist, at least). Pretty much every day since then has felt like bonus time. We did have another mass removed back in October; at that point, he was old enough that we were concerned with anesthesia and all the trauma of surgery, but he made it through without any trouble at all and endured the Cone of Shame long enough to heal up nicely. While I understood intellectually that he was getting older, for a long time, he felt like the dog who was just too tough to ever leave this Earth.
His canine “brother” came along when he was two. Jet is his own remarkable story, and I won’t try to tell it all now, but it was a bit of an adjustment for Duncan. Duncan and I had our bond by that time and while our new interloper was definitely cute—and, more to the point, was the calmer, less needy dog I had hoped for from the beginning—Jet was also a little larger than Duncan. To this day I think I may have interrupted the natural order of the world a little. I didn’t want the new guy (Jet) to mess with my little buddy (Duncan) too much. I mostly let them try to sort it out (I wasn’t breaking up fights or anything), but, in the end, Duncan ended up being a little more the Alpha Dog than Jet—and I’m not sure that would have happened if I hadn’t tried to try to even things out a little when Jet showed up.
They were very different dogs, mostly things that would be typical of a Maltipoo and a Shiba Inu. Where Duncan loved the rain, it took everything he had to get Jet to go out. Duncan, ever active, didn’t mind being a little dirty, where Jet was fastidious. Duncan was very extroverted, very human-focused, where Jet tended to be a little more reserved. They were very Felix and Oscar. And yet, they spent most of their time together. Not just that they were in the same house, but if one was in the living room, the other one wouldn’t be far away. If one of them came to visit me in my office while I worked, the other one would almost always show up shortly thereafter. When it was bedtime, they would both make their way to our bedroom. They didn’t really play together very often, but they lived together very closely. Where you would think food would be a problem, for most of their lives, we were very fortunate in that we just free-fed the dogs and kept the water fountain full. They would reliably eat and drink what they needed and both of them were near an optimal weight. Late on, we did have to switch up to feeding the boys individual wet food and Duncan could get a little jealous then, but even that was a mild management issue for a typical pet parent. It was always a fun relationship to watch.
My most vivid memory may have been at the end. When Jet’s time came, in October of 2020, Duncan stayed with us as we said goodbye, all of us sitting on the floor around Jet. After Jet had passed, it took us all a while to let go, of course. But when we got up, Duncan assumed a position right next to his brother, just watching over him. I don’t want to ascribe more to Duncan than is reasonable, but he did seem to understand that it was a time when he needed to be there—and so he was.
If we are being honest, as he got older, Duncan got a little cranky. He always had a little bit of that in him, though he learned pretty young that if he was unhappy he should do a “warning bite” rather than an actual bite. As an old man, if you did something to him that actually hurt, even though it would be inadvertent, there was certainly a chance that you could get a real bite. Not in the manner of an aggressive dog, mind you—I always felt that the Old Duncan in cranky mode was like that legendary bit from the Seinfeld episode “The Marine Biologist”: “The sea was angry that day, my friends…like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.” He could be the old man at times in his last couple years, but it was a fairly harmless, almost affable kind of grouchiness. I think was just a little bit of a personality that was directed to other people, to the world. And the old guy would get a little pissed when it wronged him.
Duncan was born in August of 2005. At times, I think I still don’t fully appreciate how long ago August 2005 was, so here’s a frame of reference. It was in some ways not an especially auspicious month; Hurricane Katrina happened at the end of it. To the good, we should recognize that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched on the 12th. We lost Mo Mowlam, Peter Jennings, and Gene Mauch. George W. Bush was president and Barack Obama was in his first year on the job as Senator. Tony Blair was still Prime Minister, though his popularity was starting to wane. Angela Merkel, who was Chancellor forever, would take over from Schröder at the end of the year.
When we play this game, we tend to rely a lot on cultural references, so: Apple had just introduced podcast support in iTunes, so some of those early podcasts like “Buzz Our Loud” and “Daily Source Code” started finding their homes more easily and what is now a massive industry was getting underway. Joe Rogan was calling UFC, doing Fear Factor, and making a guest appearance on The Chappelle Show back then. He hadn’t even started the podcast that has earned him nine figures and may or may not eventually sink Spotify.
The three number one movies of the month were The Dukes of Hazzard, Four Brothers, and the aforementioned The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Revenge of the Sith; The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire were all coming a little later on in the year.
CSI was relatively early in its run and the dominant show in the land. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Weeds, and Peppa Pig all debuted. The Sopranos was in the long interregnum between season 5 and the extended season 6, The Wire was between seasons 3 and 4, and Six Feet Under uncorked its legendary final episode. In prestige network television, The West Wing was going into its final season; Lost was still somewhat comprehensible, starting its second season; and 30 Rock, which ran for 139 episodes, won 16 Emmys, and finished its run more than 10 years ago, was still a year out from launch.
In the world of music, Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” was in the midst of a long run at #1, to be replaced by “Gold Digger” (what a trip Kanye has been on…). Rihanna released Music From The Sun. Rock Star: INXS was in the middle of going from a standard-issue reality show to a ratings bust to a niche phenomenon. Long enough ago that the winner, J.D. Fortune, was in the band for six years, was replaced, and the band has still been retired for a decade. I went to Rush’s last show on the R40 tour about eight years ago; they were on the R30 tour in August of 2005.
My time with Duncan includes more than a third of my life. When we got him, it would not have been unreasonable to think of me as a fairly young adult—that’s certainly what I thought of myself. I was still in grad school, learning some of the things in my professional life I would lean on a lot later. I had the sleep habits of a younger man, for sure. Since then, I’ve gotten married, had two kids, bought a house, switched jobs a few times, and have welcomed new family (and family-ish) members into my life while losing loved ones.
I don’t want to quite put myself out to pasture, but I meet the standard qualifications for AARP membership now, beat fellow Long Beach native Cameron Diaz to the Brimley Cocoon Line by a few days, and may have gotten the odd (if generous) senior discount over the last couple years. Some of that latter bit might just be a reflection of a failure to preserve myself adequately, but I am in a different phase of my life now that I was when Duncan entered it, to be sure.
For me, this is the most profound way I can mark the time. My father passed away in November 2018, which feels simultaneously as though it just happened and like something in the distant past. I’m sure a lot of you can relate. When we got Duncan, my Dad would come up to fix stuff in the condo (we were renting from them). As I noted, my folks looked after the dogs when we decamped on several trips; it wasn’t really until Jet needed some extra medical support that we started making other plans when we traveled. And yet that, too, is now in a past that is not so proximate.
Part of what makes this hard for me is that I have spent as much time with Duncan as just about anyone else in my life. I have been working from home for all but a couple of years of Duncan’s life. My wife and parents probably have a little more time with me and my actual children will presumably get there. But, with the exception of a little bit of work travel and vacation, I’ve spent large chunks of every day with him for nearly 18 years. And so I mourn losing not only a companion of many years, but also someone who gave me ready access to a younger me, at least in shared memory. A couple hours before we had to say goodbye to Duncan, Noah Smith published his recollection of his pet rabbit (and exploration of why rabbits make great pets) and, at one point, says “Rabbit-keeping is about turning a cruel world into a gentle one.” Dogs aren’t prey in quite the way rabbits are, so the dynamics are different, but Duncan was just a sharp, funny, sweet soul that he deserved the best life he could have. I know we tried hard to give him as much as he gave us.
For now, we grieve, but also remember. Duncan, we love you.