ALL CREATURES, LARGE, SMALL OR OTHERWISE
It used to be axiomatic--at least until a few months ago--that people who utilized the Miller Animal Hospital in West Hollywood were people whose relationship to their pets was particularly . . . intense. “Animals don’t get sick on schedule,” Dr. Michael Miller, who retired at the end of June after 44 years in veterinary practice, was fond of saying. As a consequence of this philosophy, he didn’t give appointments; and as a result of this fact, a nonemergency visit to Dr. Miller might routinely involve upward of 2 1/2 hours in the waiting room.
There was an alternative system that consisted of “passing back” your pet and then consulting with Dr. Miller’s disembodied voice via phone line. But this system, too, was set up on a first-come, first-served basis, so it rarely functioned as a major timesaver; and it was so contrary to the gestalt of the place (and the people waiting to see Dr. Miller shot you glances of pure hatred for getting to go ahead of them) that mostly you saved it for when you were truly pushed.
The compensations for these inconveniences were enormous. Dr. Miller, a man with a shock of crinkled, electrified-looking hair and a rapid-fire, warp-speed style of speech, given to wearing high-necked, side-buttoned white smocks that lent him the air of a character out of “Uncle Vanya,” remembered every detail of your pet’s history. He kept each scrap of correspondence, including postcards and holiday greeting cards from years before, meticulously paper-clipped to your medical folder. If, out of some combination of affectation and genuine desire, you were encouraging your child to think about becoming a vet, he would cheerfully demonstrate the use of the otoscope and then insist on her inspecting the ear canal with it herself. Especially leery of the effects of anesthetic on animals, he abjured surgery as a first response, so that if he ever did end up recommending it, you felt the procedure was warranted. He addressed the animals directly, as sentient beings--”Just one more injection, sweetie,” he might say. “Try to hold still.”
And he remained on call until preposterous hours. Our first dog, an imperious and charismatic springer spaniel that my husband and I worshiped, practically to the point of idolatry, came down late one Saturday night with such a severe attack of gastroenteritis that, terrified, we called Dr. Miller’s answering service to see what emergency facility was recommended. “Are you regular patients of Dr. Miller’s?” asked the woman at the answering service. “He’ll want to know about this.” Sure enough, one minute later, the phone rang. “What’s up?” Dr. Miller said.
We had been introduced to Dr. Miller’s practice by our friend Barbara. A supremely urbane and knowledgeable woman, the daughter of a mayor of Beverly Hills, the former assistant to a prominent gossip columnist and half of a glamorous media couple, she possessed such elegance and sardonic wit that her tenderheartedness toward animals always seemed vaguely incongruous. Nonetheless, the first summer we lived in Los Angeles she drove me back and forth twice a week to pick up our dog at the Leo C. Reigler Center at UCLA, the site for radiation treatments for a malignant tumor Dr. Miller had discovered and removed so that proper cuddling would be possible on the ride home.
Virtually no clients of Dr. Miller’s would have found that in the least bit odd. For, perhaps not surprisingly, a clientele with the ability to spend so much time in a veterinarian’s waiting room tended to consist of people without the burden or challenge of 9-to-5 employment. This category included both ladies in Rollses with champagne-colored toy poodles and people in shabby clothes with five cats. Because of its location--the northwest corner of Robertson and Melrose, in an exceptionally ugly tan stucco building from the era of avocado green and harvest gold--the hospital attracted a disproportionately large number of retirees, as well as actors and musicians between engagements and--especially during the mid- and late-’80s--a substantial contingent of young men accompanied by Great Danes adorned in iron-spike collars. But there were also always people, usually owners of multiple breeds and species, who had just driven in from Ventura or San Bernardino.
Over the years, as with all institutions, the waiting room accumulated its own set of rules and rituals. There was, for example, a culturally specific conversation -- fervid, rambling, anthropomorphic, charged with a type of strangers-on-a-train intimacy -- that you invariably fell into with the person sitting next to you on the vinyl banquette. There was the complicated code (almost identical, you would later learn, to the etiquette required vis-a-vis other people’s children on the playground) that governed the showing of an adequate appreciation of other people’s pets. (If you couldn’t sincerely express a compliment, some acknowledgment of essence was still required. “He certainly is lively!” would be one way of handling it, or “Goodness, doesn’t she have a shiny coat!” In a pinch, mere polite inquiry--”Is that a Persian? Boy or girl?”--was better than nothing.) There was even a physical gesture one came to think of as the waiting-room stroke; it combined a caress of your pet with a surreptitious primp job, including the removal of any unsightly eye-gunk or drool.
The staff was presided over by the unflappable Meg, a diminutive, snub-nosed, freckled-faced blond, who brought her golden retriever to work and, throughout a decade or so, never appeared to age beyond 16. She functioned as an efficient and diplomatic triage nurse, sizing up situations at a glance and occasionally intervening in the first-come, first-served protocol--although rarely without crooking an inquiring eyebrow toward the person whose turn it would have been--when she felt circumstances warranted it.
The casual interaction between clients and staff was so much a part of the Dr. Miller experience that when, in 1985, following the advice of an efficiency expert, he remodeled the waiting room to include a 5-foot-high Formica and frosted-glass partition with four little openings like tellers’ windows (these were often kept shut, causing the room to resemble some unfortunate combination of medium-security facility and after-business-hours suburban bank), the distress and shock of the clients was immense. A number of people stopped coming altogether, and those who remained as clients tended to sit in stunned and seething silence under the fluorescent lights, or to stand muttering fiercely in the queues now required to inform the staff (many of whom, newly arrived and seemingly clueless) that you were even on the premises.
Gradually, however, a new dynamic arose: The irritation provoked by the changed setup provided a focus, a ready topic for conversation. There was a certain exhilarating feeling of us-against-them directed at the hidden staff (nobody could actually bring himself to blame Dr. Miller directly). Eventually the conversational rhythm of admiring/acknowledging comments, thumbnail biographical sketches and helpful hints resumed in modified form that, though it no longer involved the staff, in some ways bound the clients closer together: We were survivors.
It was 10 years and three months ago that Dr. Miller phoned us at 4 a.m. from the hospital, where our first dog was close to completing a 48-hour period without a recurrence of epileptic seizures, and said in a stricken tone of voice, “We lost her.” (He let us in at 7 the next morning to hold her one last time.) It was 12 years ago, at the same time of year, that Barbara died of complications from the multiple sclerosis whose symptoms she had begun to notice, and furiously deny, the summer she was driving me back and forth from Reigler Center. Our second dog, another springer spaniel we love deeply, though without the besottedness that marked our feelings for our first, is herself approaching middle age; I have heartlessly “passed her back” at Dr. Miller’s any number of times. The 2-year-old I hoped would become a vet is now an acerbic teenager who seems entirely indifferent to animals, at least to dogs, at least to ours, whom - except to make her the subject of the stray derisive remark -- she actively ignores. Dr. Miller wrote his clients a farewell letter of such touching sweetness and concern that it consoled them slightly. June, however, was a fairly gloomy month around Robertson and Melrose. He has sold his practice to a veterinary group that seems thoroughly decent, and that gives appointments.
It must be that, even as adults, there are stages in our lives when we’re especially susceptible to imprinting. What else could account for the fact that, remembering holiday parties at their houses or parts of vacations that we’ve spent together, we continue to think of certain couples as being married, when they’ve been divorced for years and married to other people? Or that we see small faces superimposed plain as day on the hulking figures of our friends’ children? It’s as if there were some kind of permanent, parallel reality beneath the reality we actually observe around us, underlying it the way Greenwich Mean Time underlies various time zones across the world -- the reality that seems to obtain in the moments when we first swim up from sleep. For me, in this coexistent reality, Barbara is still alive, living in the gray house on Benedict Canyon with the red geraniums in front, and our first dog is still alive, and our daughter is still of a size to climb right up onto the examining table next to her, which is just where she is standing when Dr. Miller comes bounding in, chuckling and rubbing his hands together, and shows her how to use the otoscope for the first time.
