The Beagle
Chronicles

BY WAYNE WOOD

For most of my life I have had a beagle around the house.
As a kid, we had Puddles, a puppy with big brown eyes whom my uncle brought over on my Mom’s birthday. He claimed that Puddles was Mom’s birthday present, but he had a big smile that told me his real purpose was to give my brother, Tim, and me a dog.
Puddles was a cutie. We took her with us on camping trips and to the Little League park where Tim and I played ball, and wherever she went, she was the center of attention. Nothing draws an appreciative smiling crowd like a beagle puppy.
My Mom and Dad kept custody of Puddles when Tim and I moved away, and she lived out her years with them.
The first beagle that Sharon and I had together was William, a stray that we found on the Vanderbilt campus one lunchtime in the mid-1980s. He was hungry, painfully skinny, and was following a family with a child until he spied us. We couldn’t ignore his sad looks and we ended up taking him to the vet’s for an assessment.
The vet told us that William—I’m not sure that we had named him at that point, but he definitely looked like a William—was blind in one eye, pretty much toothless, arthritic, hard of hearing, and had a bad case of heartworms. Several hundred dollars later we had us an ancient beagle who was gaining weight and was happy as an old hound could be.
The decision we made that day to take him into our house was one of the best of my life, and I know Sharon would agree. He was nothing but trouble—he was dirty (he liked to dig holes in the yard and lie down in them), shed all over the place, and constantly demanded attention (his poor sight and hearing made touch especially important to him, and once you started petting him he never wanted you to stop). But what a great heart and spirit he had. He lived with us five years before his old body’s problems caught up with him, but I’m glad he had five good years at the end of his life because he was a great guy and he deserved some good times.
A few years later we got another beagle, this time a puppy, Tyler. He was three months old when we got him, and except for those first three months, we had him his whole life. When he was a puppy he would play with our other dog then, a hound of indeterminate lineage named Natchez, by grabbing her collar and pulling her around. I think she enjoyed the game sometimes, but sometimes Tyler was a little much.
In fact, Tyler was pretty much always a little much. He would also use his sharp little teeth to grab the rug we kept inside the front door and race through the house with it, sometimes tripping over it and tipping over, but always jumping back up again and running ahead, his ears flapping. He was so happy that he served as an excellent example of exactly how happy a creature on this earth can be. One reason we love dogs, I think, is that they can be so unreservedly, unselfconsciously, happy. Beagles are great at looking sad, of course, with their big eyes and droopy ears, but beagles are also great at looking happy. More often than not, Tyler was happy.
House training little Tyler took a while. It took him a few weeks to grasp the concept, but even after he did he was trouble. For months he would wake me up at 4 a.m. every day and ask to go outside. I guess he was making the point that if we wanted him to ask to go outside, we had to be willing to take him there. At that point his little bladder just wouldn’t hold him for eight hours. So Tyler and I would wander outside and absorb the ambience of the East Nashville night. The things we do for dogs.
About three years ago Tyler was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, a type of brain tumor, and although he had some problems along the way, the last three years or so of his life were still good. He got, if possible, more demanding. If we weren’t in the living room at the time he thought we should be, he would go in there, lie down on the rug, and bark. It was tough work keeping Sharon and me in line.
This past summer the Cushing’s caught up with Tyler. We had had him for 14 years—a good long life in beagle terms—still it was hard to do the right thing and tell him goodbye. He couldn’t walk, his pleasure in life was gone, and it was clear his time had come. For the fourth time in my life, I held a sick pet, told him goodbye, and thanked him for his time and love, as our vet humanely ended his life.
It was not an easy call, but it was the right one.
Another tough call—not as gut-wrenching, but still tough—is picking out the right time to get another dog after one has died. Different people seem to have different ideas about the right interval.
It came to this: we missed having a beagle around the house. Our other dogs, terrier mixes Sugar, who is almost 17, and Stella, 12, were restless and out of sorts. They seemed to miss Tyler, too.
One day Sharon came home from work and I told her I had been looking at beagles on the Internet. And worse, I had found one that I wanted to find out more about.

His name was Jake.
He is about three years old and was at a small, family-run beagle rescue place in Columbia. The Web site said, “Jake is a special fellow, since he has only three legs. He was injured in a mowing incident prior to coming into our rescue…he has 100% recovered from the horrible incident and goes about his business as if he still had all four legs.”
Maybe I’m a sap, but something about that story and the accompanying picture of a happy beagle with his ears flapped back and his tongue lolled out made me want to drive to Columbia and get him right then.
You can’t do that, of course. You have to apply for adoption. You have to give references. Your vet has to vouch for your character.
So it was a few days later, late on a Friday afternoon, when we met Jake, along with Tracy, the young woman who, with her husband and daughter, runs the beagle rescue place. She helped Jake out of the backseat of her truck, handed the leash to Sharon, and he was off to the races. He is missing his left front leg, but his back legs seem to have strengthened in compensation. It’s like he has springs in his legs.
We must have looked OK to Tracy, because she let us take him home. It’s been a couple of weeks now, and having Jake in the house has had some effects. We walk the dogs a lot more, because Jake’s energy level demands it. Sugar and Stella enjoy the extra walks, but guard their bowls jealously against Jake’s incursions. He’s a busy guy, checking out everything that’s going on. He stands up and begs and knows exactly how cute he is.
In fact, Jake is a wonder. Nobody has ever bothered to tell him that having three legs is a problem, so for him, it’s not. (He’s a hound dog and inspirational example—all in one!) He can outrun me without half trying, can happily run up and down the stairs in the house at breakneck speed, and the next thing you know he’s curled into a ball and is having sweet beagle dreams.
If you are thinking of getting a beagle, here’s what you need to know: beagles are trouble.
Puddles was trouble (her name is a good hint at this). William was trouble. Tyler was trouble. There is no doubt about it: Jake is trouble.
Sharon just looks at him sometimes and gives a wry laugh.
“You got us into this,” she tells me in a joking-accusing way.
By “this” she means trouble. I hope about 15 years worth of some of the best trouble we can find.

(Wood is editor of House Organ, Director of Publications for VUMC, and author of Watching the Wheels: Cheap Irony, Righetous Indignation, and Semi-Enlighted Opinion, which is a collection of past columns.)

Hold the Stuffing
to have midseason, final weigh-ins

Hold the Stuffing is an annual event at Health Plus to encourage staff and faculty to maintain their weight from Thanksgiving through the first week of January. The typical American gains weight over the holidays, but last year Hold the Stuffing participants lost weight.
Here’s how it works: participants weigh in the week before Thanksgiving, and then again the first week in January. (There is also an optional midpoint weigh-in so participants can see how they are doing.)
Those who are participating in this year’s event, which is to say those who weighed in with Health Plus at any of the Hold The Stuffing stations the week of November 14 to 18, need to maintain their weight, hold any gain to less than two pounds, or lose weight over the holidays to win a prize from Health Plus. This year’s prizes are a choice of a Border’s Bookstore gift certificate or an exercise tube, complete with workout plan.
Here are the midseason and final weigh-in sites and times. Contact Health Plus at 343-8943 for more information.

Midseason
Dec. 12–16
5 a.m. to 8 p.m. (8 a.m.–2 p.m., Saturday)
at the Health Plus fitness center in Memorial Gym.

Final Weigh-ins
Jan. 3-9
5 a.m.–8 p.m. (8 a.m.–2 p.m., Saturday) at the Health Plus fitness center in Memorial Gym.
Jan. 3
6:30–8:30 a.m.—Preston Research Building Lobby
3:30–5 p.m.—Central Library, Goldberg Conference Room
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.—Chestnut Street, Plant Operations
Jan. 4
7 a.m.–1 p.m, 4 –6 p.m., 11 p.m.–1 a.m. (1/5)—Courtyard Café
Jan. 5
8–10 a.m.—Crystal Terrace Room 701
11 a.m.–1 p.m.—Food Court, Children’s Hospital
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.—Chestnut Street, Plant Operations
Jan. 6
11 a.m.–1 p.m.—Baker Building Lobby
Jan. 9
7:30–9 a.m.—Peabody Library, Room 114
11 a.m.–1 p.m.—Medical Center North, Room S-3407
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.—Chestnut Street, Plant Operations