The Ballad of Jordan Underfoot

If you’ve never had a dog before, adding one to the family unit will almost certainly completely restructure your life. Once you're all settled into the new rhythm you’ve negotiated together, the next thing to do is . . . to get another dog, right? Because who wants consistency? That, apparently, was our logic as we decided to make one fluff monster into two.

We set our sights on the Pug Rescue Austin list of available pugs, pug crosses, and generally weird-looking little gremlins. Getting a pug is like getting a tattoo. You get one, just to see if it’s working for you, and then you want a new one immediately after. And then another. And then…well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We signed up to The Process – pay the fee, have them call our references, open ourselves up to a home visit, then pick from the menu of available mutts. And this is what we found: there are a lot of old pugs. Pugs 10 years and older made up the majority of the pugs on the site. And nothing looks as old as an old pug. An old pug is older than Yoda.

We narrowed our search down to three. One was a bouncy three-year-old; one a blind two-year-old; and one an older eight-year-old.

I didn’t really want anything bouncy; a blind dog felt like it would need more time and attention than we had to offer; and what do we know about looking after an old dog? We decided to find out.

Ms. Jordan was tiny, blacker than a deep hole, with a distinguished halo of gray around her muzzle. From a distance, she looked like a magically shrunken Doberman – sleek black fur and long, thin legs, her tiny curly tail nearly invisible against her back. Her head was round, and she had an occasional tendency to bare her teeth at unfamiliar dogs...we think she might have a bit of Chihuahua in her. Which, sadly, makes her a “chug”. But we never let anyone call her that.

We took her for a two-week trial run. Really, does anyone give up a pug after having all that attention for two weeks? Do we live in a society where such a thing is possible? I don’t even want to think about it.

We met her, along with her foster couple, in a nearby park. Her first act on meeting John Henry was to make a serious attempt to remove his nose with her tiny front teeth. Her first act in the apartment was to jump up on the sofa and pee defiantly on the new pillow we had bought especially for her. Both acts were of course red flags, but both also turned out to be one-off markers of her domain. She was adopting us, and she communicated perfectly as to who was in charge. Her fosters were away for two weeks, so we were stuck with her no matter what for at least that long.

We were not experienced dog owners – pretty much everything I knew about dogs came from (up to that point) our one year with the sainted John Henry. And he was a young, man dog. Jordan, being an older lady, presented subtle differences. She perhaps did not love to eat (or live to eat) like JH. She was shorter, so she couldn’t access some of the higher levels that JH could reach. She didn’t understand the link between “SIT” and snacks. And, because, at time of adoption, she was 56 in human years (I know this has no basis in science, but we are in a post-science age), I figured if she didn’t always want to sit when she got a snack, then that’s a decision we had to respect. When I get to 56, I’ll snack however I damn-well please, too.

We thought Jordan had a hip problem. She occasionally hopped and lifted her back left leg uncomfortably. So, we took her to the vet, who adored her immediately and assured us she did not have a hip problem. She did have a knee problem that apparently a lot of small dogs have. If she had been younger, we’d have been looking at an operation, but at her age the doc recommended that we treated it with pills and diet. Which of course we did. She didn’t seem to be inconvenienced with her knee, although she did sometimes lose control and use our bodies as crash mats as she rushed in for attention, because she couldn’t slam on the brakes in time. But she kept up with her new younger sibling just fine.

Oh, and then there was the breath. Her breath was...full of character. Again, the vet assured us that there was nothing wrong with her teeth, but we should have them cleaned sooner rather than later. Weirdly, although the smell was intense, we adapted to it surprisingly quickly. New guests to the apartment, however, were warned to be aware and beware of Jordan’s first kisses.

So, we easily slipped into the role of being a two-pug family. One more step in S.’s stated ambition to own all the pugs. No more pugs until we get a house with a yard, I demanded, because walking two dogs is a skill; more than two felt like madness. And that’s how it turned out to be.