Bea
Nearly sixteen years ago, we adopted Bea—our Lhasa Apso—or more accurately, Peter adopted Bea during our second overseas tour in Moscow, while I stood by with a long list of reasons of why this was a terrible idea. Peter: I’m going to get a dog for us. Me: Just don’t get one smarter than I am.
I had grown up with dogs–my mom had even bred and shown Boxers. Our last family dog was a female German Shepherd, Scarlett. She was loving and funny and all the things dogs are, but wow, let’s just say, she trained us.
We dragged her out of the burn pile after she rolled in ashes to counter the alkaline of skunk spray. (I’m telling you, she knew chemistry.) She decided when it was bedtime for the entire household. She launched herself over ever-higher fences my dad built, and she demanded a toast tax anytime my mom reached for the toaster. We gave her tomato juice baths as part of her continuing anti-skunk spa routine. Once, with wet hair, I chased her across the street into the neighbor’s yard in my pajamas. She wanted to tear apart any religious person who dared knock on the door. Mostly, though, she convinced me that dog ownership was best left to people with enough upper-body strength to drag 60 pounds that wants to go the other direction, had lightning-fast reflexes to deflect collar-grabbing, and didn’t mind early-morning barefoot sprints.
So Peter promised he wouldn’t get German Shepherd.
He got us 13 pounds of shaggy Tibetan calm. Our friend Matt, described Bea as a Buddhist nun dog.
Though calm, Bea was no pushover—she quietly evaluated everyone’s energy like another kind of embassy security guard. She could tell if you were cool by sniffing your shoes. She considered it her job to guard whatever monastery we moved her to. When we brought out her travel crate and her one-inch-thick dossier of international doggie-travel papers, she knew: wheels up.
In Bucharest, she bonded with my mom, laying on an embassy-provided sofa and launching all four paws off the floor to bark at the trash guys.
She was with us when we arrived at the Tahoe house the first time. She could see through walls and knew when coyotes were on the forest path next to the house. In her later years, we knew she was losing her hearing because snored though a bear break-in.
When we did homeleave from Kyiv, Bea summered with her other favorite family at their dacha. She developed a life-long love of motorcycles and hotdogs because of BMW-riding Kyril and his generous wife Lena. One time we needed to get Bea home so we put her in a taxi and she rode happily sitting on the driver’s lap. Slava Ukrainia, says Bea.
In Muscat, she loved our housekeeper Kumari who prepared her dinners of sandwiches and Sri Lankan chicken. She loved seeing Beth because she knew it meant a walk along the beach. When I was unexpectedly evacuated from Oman during COVID and Peter had to go to Pakistan, our friend Susan cared for Bea for months. Susan helped her negotiate a truce with cats, and sent a photo of Bea, the previously classified cat-hater, sitting on a sofa coexisting with the former enemy. She was a true diplodog.
She sat under cafe tables in Paris, and enjoyed the view from our Airbnb in Sicily. She sailed on the Queen Mary. Twice.
In London she tolerated the arrival of an outwardly adorable, inwardly passive-aggressive King Charles Cavalier. Of all her London activities–riding the bus, going to the fancy dog groomer named Paisley, she liked sniffing her way through Battersea Park’s Winter Garden the best, and if she could always avoided the cobblestones of Kersley Mews.
By the time we moved here to Morocco, Bea was mostly blind and selectively deaf. In the new house, she could go up the marble stairs but not down, and trapped herself upstairs numerous times a day. Shadows made her flinch, so we started strolling with her in her doggie poussette, rolling past the neighborhood cats she could no longer see while they stared at the old lady in the pram. She loved the outings. Loved getting out to sniff most of all.
Sailing transatlantically on the QM2 for the second time last summer | Riley Ganz photo
When Scarlett died my mom said, “I was ripped up for a long time.” She never got another dog. I thought I understood what she meant, but I didn’t, really. Until a month ago, after a sudden illness, Bea, the best good girl, laying on the of our government-issue sofas with us one evening, died. I haven’t seen her in a month now, and I keep looking for her in her basket or maybe out on the terrace in the sun warming her bones. I miss her every day and I’m keeping her alive by telling her stories.
I still love her so.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 