Competitor Blog - Team Tango, January 30, 2006
Posted on 01/31/06 5:08 AM| by Will
January 31, 2006
By Anna DeBattiste
Tango, my elderly, mixed-breed dog, has been our team mascot for almost four years now. It isn’t because she trains with us, or because she’s a trail dog, or because there’s anything about her that would reasonably remind you of adventure racing. It started out simply because I was sitting at my computer one day, racking my brains for a team name to enter in the Lake Tahoe Primal Quest lottery, and time was running out. Tango was sitting patiently at my feet waiting for her walk, and it popped into my head that Team Tango had a certain ring to it. Not that any of my teammates have ever agreed with me on that point. They’re usually afraid that everyone will take us for Latin ballroom dancers.
Now that I think about it, Tango got her name in a similar haphazard fashion. It was May of 1990, the day of my 25th birthday. My boyfriend at the time, Richard, had gone to the store to get last-minute supplies for my birthday party. I was sitting on the lawn at my family’s New Hampshire lake house, drinking a beer and shooting the breeze with neighbors when he returned and dumped a puppy in my lap.
“Happy birthday,” he said with a grin. “I tried to find a pay phone to call you, but the old farmer who was giving away puppies at K-mart said he wouldn’t hold her for me, so I took a chance.”
I was furious. We already had one dog, and had discussed getting a second one several months ago. We’d decided it wasn’t a good idea, with both of us just out of college and unsure where we might be living a year from now. I couldn’t yell at Richard in front of all these neighbors, but I vowed I would corner him later.
“She’s adorable!” said one of my neighbors, lifting the wriggling puppy out of my lap. I was seething, but I had to agree. She had German Shepard coloring, and a little pug nose. Every time someone took her out of my lap, she struggled to get back to me. It seemed she had already decided something.
My best friend Kevin, a pilot, set about the task of naming her. He went through the phonetic alphabet from the beginning: “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…” When he got to the letter ‘T’, I stopped him.
“That’s it!” I said without hesitation. “She’s Tango.”
Richard never got yelled at. By the time I got him alone, I had already fallen completely and irrevocably in love with my new dog, and she with me.
Tango will be sixteen in April of this year. She has arthritis, and she’s deaf, and she can’t really climb stairs anymore without my help. Last week, our vet told me that Tango’s heart rate was abnormally low, and she went in for an EKG. Now we’re waiting to see a cardiologist to find out how bad the news is. But Tango has moments of gladness when I know she still wants to be here with me. She’ll spin in a circle when I carry her in from the snow and she feels the warm air hitting her face, and catches the smell of her home-cooked chicken and rice breakfast. She still jumps for a treat, even though it usually makes her fall down. People may scorn me for clinging to her little life, but if she can have a pacemaker without too much risk from the anesthesia, I’ll do it.
We humans like to say, “Life is short”, repeating the cliché as an excuse for anything from “Eat dessert first” to “Let’s defy our spouses and spend ten grand and ten days racing through the wilderness”. But is anything really as heartbreakingly short as a dog’s life?
