I used to call Oscar my prize-winning Briard, but he won no prizes and was only half Briard.  About half size, Oscar also sported his halfness on the longitude, for he had one ear sticking up like a proper Briard, while the other hung down like a sheepdog.  This quirky raised ear only added to a disheveled, adorably shaggy look.  He might have hoped for a career.

  But Disney never called so Oscar led a private life circling Fitler Square. Still, he enjoyed a reputation, occasionally even stopping traffic, by his sheer dog appeal.  A fetching goofball for adults, a live stuffed animal for toddlers, he was a gentle happy beast.  In the way that beautiful women can grow aloof as a defense against leering, I think Oscar grew up friendly as a consequence of everybody grinning at him.

  Beneath this affability though lay vestiges of some tortured past.  A refugee, Oscar had numerous stored-up peeves: dribbled basketballs, hot-dog carts, thunder... Once provoked, he would chomp on the nearest soft thing, shake in a frenzy and then launch into a  twirling hover.  Guests found this cartoonishly comical, except our friend Bill when the nearest soft thing was his jacket.  After some further losses, we took pains to supply Oscar with tennis balls and his own throw rug, a worn fake oriental with which he developed a romance and kept a tryst every Thursday afternoon as I took out the trash.

  All right, he was a little strange.

  Unable to train away his eccentricities, we learned to anticipate them.  This worked fine until, some weeks ago, Oscar tried to herd a cement truck that boomed down the street. “Oscar, SIT!”, I shouted, but there was no stopping him.

  Death has been much around us this year, of people, I mean, acquaintances and distant friends, suddenly, gratuitously, gone.  Fairly new to this, I greeted these with a cold pensive disbelief.  I confess it was Oscar though, this lower creature, whose death struck me more forcibly with its dumb finality.  A less important loss, his was somehow the more graphic lesson, perhaps because, unlike the others, he was my daily companion or because I held him expiring in my arms.  Or perhaps, because a dog’s attachment is felt, only felt, but not articulated, never diverted or insulated by language, I had no choice but to face the plasticity of bodies, the fragility of breath.  My live stuffed animal was now a real one, still one ear up, one ear down.

  I always knew the sound of my key was his cue to trot down the hall; now I realize it was equally my cue to expect him to, and so the day becomes a series of signals, each echoed by an absence and then a small grimace of realization.

  These will fade eventually and turn to smiles.  But for now, I am still too much aware that he no longer trots down the hall.  Sometimes, he does so in dreams.  Oddly, these dreams are always in the present: I somehow know he has died and am pleased to find him living again.  I am pleased, but not overly surprised.  It is as though I had only been mistaken, as though it were nothing for him to come back as capriciously as he left.