Buzz

When I was five-years-old my family got a Beagle. I was staying at my Uncles’ condo for the evening, and my parents rolled in from a charity auction with a “little surprise.” We named him Buzz and for 15 years he was my best friend.

We put him in the middle seat of the car and he slumped his head in his paws. I put my hands an inch above his head because he was asleep and that was the closest I could get to petting him. I shouted at my parents, “I’m crying right now, what’s going on?!? I thought this was only supposed to happen when you’re sad.”

It didn’t make any sense.

The first few days he was home, he peed all over the house and was loud at the most inappropriate times. This instantly made him my best friend.

When I was little, sometimes my brother and I would wrestle. I usually lost. Most times when Buzz saw us “fighting” he’d start barking and put his nose in the middle of us to break it up. Or maybe that was just a mechanism for us to pay attention to him. Either way, it worked.

He bit me, once, when I was young too. It was an accident and immediately after he did it, he stared at me with his big brown eyes and whimpered. I did the only thing I could think of with blood coating my hand; I told my Dad what happened on AOL Instant Messenger (because it was around 2003 and I wasn’t very smart okay? I thought that was the proper protocol for an emergency). That bite ended up leaving a scar which I still have today. Now it’s nice to carry a physical reminder of him.

Buzz would come in my room and listen to every note I played on  the trumpet for eight years and stared at me while I tried to hammer out covers by “The White Stripes” on the guitar for five. On the very rare occasions I brought a girl over to meet the parents, I would watch how she interacted with Buzz more closely than the people who raised me and put a roof over my head.

Sometimes he was an asshole when he broke into the garbage or started barking at six in the morning on a Saturday, but for most of the time, he was the sweetest asshole you’ve ever met.

One time Buzz got famous on Reddit because he was sniffing around to poop and a deer walked behind him and he didn’t notice.

He got on a bunch of websites because of this stupid picture, but eventually I stopped looking at where it went because some people would write nasty comments about him. One guy even falsely claimed that he took the picture and that Buzz was actually his dog. That’s when I learned that humans are wayyyyy worse than dogs.

When he got older he slowed down, of course. He still loved bread, though, and would try to grab anything he could off the table. Even when his hips gave out and even though he was neutered over a decade ago, he’d still hump the air when another female dog came near him– Buzz Lightyear Mulvey was not a quitter.

Losing a best friend is really  hard. There is no good simile or metaphor about time being like a river that can capture what it is. The guy made it past the average lifespan of a Beagle by over two years so even though I couldn’t really be ready for something like that– it was time. Still, there is a weird expectation when you get a dog at a young age– you grow up together and you expect him to be there. It’s completely illogical but there is a part of you that says What the hell man, we grew up together, why did you get old when I am just barely becoming an adult?

I mean, Buzz pounded through an entire bag of chocolate once and if that can’t kill a dog, how the hell are some years supposed to. They did though because I guess time is like a river that can’t be stopped.

But anyway, Buzz was my little man, and I hope he made you happy if you got to meet him.