Giant George by Dave Nasser & Lynne Barrett-Lee

Author:Dave Nasser & Lynne Barrett-Lee [Nasser, Dave & Barrett-Lee, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781455525089
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2012-04-10T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

From Little Acorns

Life goes on. It has to. Because all things must pass.

It was something I remember being told all my life, but now I understood it as a reality. Life held bad times and good times, and if we expected to enjoy the good times, then we must live through those bad times as well.

Though we would never forget the pain of losing Sebastian—Christie especially—as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, we gradually began to put the whole ordeal behind us, and look forward to the future with optimism and hope again.

They say something good always comes out of something bad if you look hard enough, and, in some ways, that was true. Though it felt slightly melancholic to anticipate the coming Christmas—recalling the previous Christmas and all those hopes not yet realized—we felt more like a family, even so. George had matured into a wonderful dog, and was now such an integral part of our little unit that we couldn’t imagine him not being there. This was especially true for Christie. There was no way you could overstate how vital a part he’d played in helping her get over what had happened to our baby. It was almost as if it had made a man of him.

He was two years old now, and still he was growing. By Christmas 2007, when I took him for his checkup, he weighed in at a whopping two hundred and fourteen pounds—the same as a large adult male human. To think he’d grow any bigger was mind-boggling; he was such a huge dog already.

He was now completely comfortable in his ever-expanding skin, and had developed a really lovely personality. Though it was amazing to see such a big animal be so gentle, we figured that was the whole point, really. He was a gentle giant precisely because he had nothing to prove; he could take on the world, and he knew it. He didn’t need to be aggressive, or pushy, or run around asserting his authority. In dog terms, he really was top dog.

He was also, officially, top eater and top pooper, and attending to his needs, at both ends of the spectrum, were, since I was the one who was most with him on weekdays, a big part of my daily routine. He would get through around one hundred pounds of dry dog food per month, plus the occasional treat of beef jerky and meat sticks, and if he had his way—and this is still the case today—he would happily eat double that amount.

Naturally, what came out of the other end of George came in equally impressive amounts. His poops were huge. They could weigh about four or five pounds and could easily fill a five-gallon bucket in a week. To deal with them we fashioned this great set of tools, basically a stiff rake and a snow shovel—you don’t see a lot of snow in Arizona, it’s true, but I managed to track one down online—and between them my tools did a pretty good job, even if people did sometimes stare.

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