Reflections on 44 Years of Dachshunds and Counting

While he eats a bacon cheeseburger with extra bacon, my husband likes to joke that when he dies young, I can then marry a rich man. When he repeated this joke at a decadent, boozy dinner in New York City with our best friends, I announced that my next husband would be a dachshund. Everyone at the table laughed, but I wasn’t joking. I imagined myself in my older years living in a Parisian apartment with a gorgeous, beefy dachshund who would lounge on velvet pillows. I would take him everywhere in public, and crowds would part when they saw us coming.

My dachshund Olive

Maybe this will make more sense to you when I tell you that my first love was a red dachshund named Westy. He was a Christmas gift from my parents to me and my sister, when I was 7 and my sister was 5. On Christmas morning, I was too scared to hold the wriggling puppy, though later we became inseparable. All of us adored this dog, but it was my secret opinion that he loved me best, and that I loved him best. I could not get over his sheer beauty. He was the color of rust and very shiny, with a pink tongue that hung out when he raced around the back yard. At night, my parents placed him on the foot of my bed to sleep, but once we were alone, I allowed him under the covers. I told him I loved him at least twenty times a day. If there was ever an occasion to cry, I used his floppy velvet ears as my tissue.

His shape pleased my aesthetic sensibilities; I could not stop admiring his impressive nose and his lean, long figure. His short little legs were simply darling, and his thick black nails reminded me of crayons. There was a category, dogs, which were almost always great. Then there were little dogs, which were even better due to their pickupable bodies—and finally there were dachshunds, magical creatures whose very presence tantalized young children. Many decades later, when I walked my three little dogs through a suburban neighborhood, it was the dachshund that everyone raved over. Children would yell out from across the street, “I love the black one best!” referring to my black and tan dachshund, Olive, who carried her 8-pound figure with style. If I were judging based only on looks, I would have to agree. Ever since Westy, my eyes sought out that long and low shape. If I happened to glimpse a dachshund in my peripheral vision, I halted suddenly to get a better look, even while driving. Many near crashes happened this way.

It was dangerous to be so much in love with dachshunds, in more ways than one. When Olive passed away, my husband and I were bereft. We had dachshund paintings and figurines all over the house, but no dachshund. No dachshund getting bratty during dinner time, no dachshund climbing onto the purposefully low bed, no dachshund whipping her tail in glee or burrowing into the crook of my elbow for a snuggle. No dachshund needing to be carried in her wiener sling at the end of a long hike. It was nearly too much to bear.

In the months after losing Olive, I began to stalk a dachshund in my neighborhood named Jade, who lived five blocks away on Rose Street. I started walking my dogs on this street just to get a quick glimpse of Jade through the front gate, her red and black coat gleaming in the sun. Some days she was inside the house and I could only hear her bark, which like most dachshund barks, was resonant and demanding. My dogs were rightfully peeved at me. Here we were, free to walk anywhere in this urine-rich environment, and we were treading the same well-worn route, sometimes only to gaze at a chair cushion that had been placed on the ground to accommodate Jade’s lack of ups. My dogs deserved better from me.

Walking the Rose loop to see Jade, I felt like a jilted ex-boyfriend, harmless but definitely desperate. Who had heard of a dachshund stalker? I worried that Jade’s human parents would realize what I was up to. Then one day, seeing Jade out walking with her mom, I ran up and confessed everything, about Olive dying and how since then I had been “visiting” Jade. The woman thought I was a little crazy, but she got it. She was in the club that included everyone besotted by dachshunds, and we were bonded for good.

It so happens that I’m beginning this essay on October 28, which was Westy’s birthday. He would’ve been 44 years old today. I know that’s too old for any dog to live, but my heart is unreasonable; I still want him back. I had 16 ½ years with Westy, from ages 7 until 24. He witnessed me as a girl, a teenager, and a young woman. The day my sister and I put him in a pink baby dress was the only time I ever saw my mother and father laugh together with pure abandon. I hold onto a dream of heaven for only two reasons: Westy and Olive. I would gladly give up my atheism just to encounter them again.

In the months before my father died of cancer, he talked to me a few times about dachshunds. Pain medications gave him wild dreams, and in one dream, he told me, “a dachshund was heavily involved.” Those were his exact words, and I typed them on my phone to remember. From his hospital bed, which would become his deathbed, my father talked about the dachshunds he knew as a child in Stoneham, Massachusetts, around 1950. The dogs lived in a house across the street, a friend’s house. My father claimed that these dachshunds were big, 40 pounds a piece. I said I doubted they were so big. Westy was a big dachshund, I said, and he was only 17 pounds. But my father insisted. They were 40 pounds each, he said, and they were maniacs. They ran loose in his friend’s house, barking their brains out and going potty on the rugs! It seemed that these low riders were the real bosses; humans were only their servants. These were the first dachshunds my father ever knew, and for some reason, this was the breed he chose when it was time to get a dog for his daughters. It sounds like an odd choice, but he did not have to explain it. I had seen and loved all creatures with this sacred form, even the ones who acted like assholes.

My father with a dachshund

When my dad spoke about the dachshunds, I was surreptitiously recording him with my phone. I haven’t watched the video yet; I fear it will make me too sad. For a while, I was upset that my father had no words for me before he died. He had nothing he wanted to say to me, no loving sentiments or wise words for my future. But he had spoken to me in our family’s common language, the language of dachshund appreciation. It was the only language that we all knew how to speak, and so much of it happened without words. Every time I pass a dachshund on the street, I feel a thrill, as though I’ve spotted a rainbow or a rare butterfly. I think the rest of my family feels it, too. Can you believe it? A dachshund! Right here on earth with us mortals, less than a foot high but walking so tall! Look at that shape! Isn’t life amazing? I say to myself, and my father agrees.