One of the ways that time has crept up on me is evident in my dog. He has a puppy’s face, and it seems not long ago at all that we drove to a distant kennel on my son’s seventh birthday to pick up our Beagle/Russell mix because, I am slightly ashamed to admit, he was on sale. Dogs of his ilk can be quite expensive, but little Simon was already six months old, so he was marked down.
Destiny came in the form of my frugality, but we ended up with a very cute and likeable doggie. I always think of him as young because of his baby face, but a few months ago I noticed that he was limping. When I took him to the vet, she felt his little bowed legs gingerly and then nodded. “He’s beginning to show signs of crepitus,” she said.
Crepitus? This was a particularly horrible-sounding diagnosis that somehow made me think of crumbling, disintegration—an unfortunate blend of “creepy,” “crap,” and “decrepit.” Instead, it is the grinding of joints against one another when cartilage has worn away. This was bad news for my beagle.
The vet recommended that I start giving my limpy friend glucosamine—human or dog form would be fine. Ironically I already had a bottle on hand for my own aging joints, so now Simon and I take the same pills. They work surprisingly well—his limping has decreased greatly—but now that I’ve been introduced to crepitus I know that age lurks in him, and his other signs of decay seem more apparent to me: longer naps, less spritely running in the yard, less chasing of squirrels. It’s sad, when I contemplate his recent puppyhood, to think that he’s suddenly an old man.
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