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    Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs
    Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs
    Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs
    Ebook145 pages46 minutes

    Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs

    By Michael S. Williamson and Gene Weingarten

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Featuring sixty black-and-white photographs of old dogs shot by Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Michael S. Williamson and narrated by Washington Post staffer and columnist Gene Weingarten, this is a perfect collection for dog lovers that celebrates “man’s best friend.”

    Anyone who has ever loved an old dog will love Old Dogs. In this collection of profiles and photographs, Weingarten and Williamson document the unique appeal of man's best friend in his or her last, and best, years.

    This book is a tribute to every dog who has made it to that time of life when the hearing and eyesight begin to go, when the step becomes uncertain, but when other, richer traits ripen and coalesce. It is when a dog attains a special sort of dignity and a charm all his own.

    If you've known a favorite old dog, you'll find him or her on these pages. Your dog might go by a different name and have a different shape, but you'll recognize him or her by the look in an eye or the contours of a life story. There is the dog who thinks he is a house cat; the herder, the fetcher, the punk and the peacock, the escape artist, the demolition artist, the patrician, the lovable lout, the amiable dope, the laughable clown, the schemer, the singer, the daredevil, the diplomat, the politician, the gourmand, and the thief. Plus, as a special bonus, you will find the first Latvian elkhounds ever photographed.

    Old Dogs is a glorious gift book and a fitting tribute to that one dog you can't ever forget.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateOct 7, 2008
    ISBN9781416565963
    Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs
    Author

    Michael S. Williamson

    Washington Post photographer Michael S. Williamson was born and raised in Washington, DC. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Williamson has covered a variety of global events over the last thirty years, including the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Philippine revolution, strife in the Middle East, the Gulf War, and conflicts in Africa and the Balkans. At the Post, Williamson works as both a photographer and a photo editor. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his daughters, Sophia and Valerie.

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    4.5/5

    24 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very sweet book. I enjoyed the photos and stories. old dogs and old cats are the best.
    • 5/5
      "Old dogs are sweetly vulnerable.They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust.They are funny in new and unexpected ways.But above all, they seem at peace." (From the introduction)Profiles and photographs of canine elders.....5 ★ FAVORITE

    Book preview

    Old Dogs - Michael S. Williamson

    Remembering Harry

    Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog.

    Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, those frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, my back bowed, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree, hydrant, or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had turned his walk into a simple process of elimination—a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs.

    On these walks Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry’s size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had once done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

    Improbably, unprecedentedly, Harry sat. For ten minutes he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his ears alert, his tail atwitch. Our walk home was almost…jaunty.

    Some years ago, a humor contest in The Washington Post invited readers to come up with Item One from an underachiever’s to-do list. First prize went to:

    1. Win the respect and admiration of my dog.

    It’s no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find you brilliant even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you even if you are a genocidal maniac: Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.

    Consider the wagging tail, the most basic semaphore in dog/human communication. When offered in greeting, it is a dog’s way of telling you he is pleased with your company. It cannot be faked. It is hardwired, heart to tail, and its purpose is to make you happy. How many millions of dogs and how many millions of people had to love one another over how many millennia for that trait to have survived?

    As they age, dogs change, always for the better. Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing—his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness, his unequivocal love. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce.

    Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy, and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these things are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But above all, they seem at peace. This last quality is almost indefinable; if you want to play it safe, you can call it serenity. I call it wisdom.

    Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that for better or worse our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreate—all of it.

    Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How, then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, remembering, rejoicing, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia?

    I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend

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