Cosmo was pretty small but had been born with ridiculous confidence. I can back that up because when we first saw him at 8 weeks of age, he walked in the room, looked up at us with his round eyes, pooped, took a toy away from one of his much larger siblings, and sauntered off. We were in love.
The little man syndrome was no joke. On our street we have a lot of Labradors. Apropos of nothing, his “hello” was to lunge at them and try to bite their noses. As this was his one and only patented move it did not make him super popular with the other neighborhood dogs.
Cosmo did dominate our female Yorkie, Squeaky, who was faster, bigger and undoubtedly smarter. Well, maybe smarter. At a friend’s house we were throwing soft Frisbees to Squeaky, who was very agile, and would run them down in this giant yard and race back to us. Well, almost back to us. Cosmo would wait patiently until she was a couple of feet away, growl and wrestle the Frisbee away and proudly trot the sixteen inches back to us and drop the Frisbee at our feet. This little “system” went on for about an hour and we could not stop laughing.
When motivated, Cosmo did have a million dollar walk. He absolutely owned the pavement. Our friend and neighbor, Jerry Storey, walked Squeaky and Cosmo for us for years at lunchtime ostensibly for the exercise, but I think it was for the recreation of seeing Cos saunter. Both dogs would go theatrically ballistic when they saw squirrels. One day Jerry and Cosmo saw a squirrel at the exact same time, Jerry let go of the leash and said, “Go get ‘em, Cos.” Cosmo tears after it, the squirrel does the confused squirrel direction change move and he and Cosmo literally do a full-speed, head-on collision. Both flip on impact and, after a dazed moment, the squirrel takes off. Jerry laughed for days.
Whether it was the squirrel, a host of different tumbles, or just Yorkie DNA, Cosmo developed pretty serious arthritis. More spectacularly, he developed kidney and bladder stones and was (through Purdue University’s Veterinary School, the Mayo clinic of pets) in a human hospital twice for lithotripsy. This is the exact same procedure that you or I would go through to have kidney stones pulverized and expelled. Cosmo also had had bladder surgery to remove a large stone, as well as eye surgery for a corneal ulcer. I don’t think Squeaky ever even caught a cold. But he was stoic and happy; he wanted to eat, particularly what you were eating, and he wanted Val around. Everything else for him, including where to pee, was pretty negotiable.
Both of our Yorkies were great. They just were. But there was something about Cosmo that attracted people. Friends confessed that they liked Squeaky but loved Cosmo. They felt bad about it and tried not to show it but there it was. I thought it might have been a gender thing, in that women really wanted to smother him, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even generational because one day a long-time friend came by with his two teenage sons who simply could not get over Cosmo and left yelling, “Cosmo rules!”
Cosmo did rule. The name Cosmo comes not from Kramer in Seinfeld. His naming predates that. Val selected the name from the main character in Topper, the 1937 ghost story comedy. But the actual derivation of Cosmo is from the Greek and roughly translates as “world harmony.” Looking back, that is actually funny, as Cosmo did not give a crap about harmony of any kind. Not one bit.
If you were a big dog he would try to bite you, if you were a squirrel he would try to head butt you. If you were his sister he would kick you out of your dog bed so he could lie down, without hesitation or remorse. If you gave him a new dog bone he would insist on first doing a victory dance around it and then immediately try to steal someone else’s.
If you loved him for fifteen years he would break your heart into a million pieces as he left you.
Cosmo rules.
John Trimble / 2009