When I Sat with Nala Dog While Her Family Was in Tel Aviv
By Chris King
April 9, 2026
It was my sister Susan who nicknamed me Brother Dog, a moniker that has clung to me for half a century. Sometimes it is abbreviated to Brother, sometimes to Brodog, sometimes to Dog. When I first opened an email account to network for some political refugees from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, who had received political asylum in St. Louis, I snagged the handle brodog@hotmail.com as a very early adopter of Hotmail. That was the email address the Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka responded to when I connected him and rebel Radio Kudirat to the Ogoni leaders in St. Louis. Another journeying friend once ended up in the Hill Country of Northern Mississippi, moonshine and blues country, where he knew I used to spend my summers and was widely known. He said he was surprised when he asked around and no one had heard of me. I told him to ask if they had seen Dog, and then everyone said they heard I had left New York and was back in St. Louis again.
The Brother Dog nickname came from my boyhood propensity to drop on the ground at the first sight of a dog and roll around with it in the dirt. In my maturity, I am more likely to encounter a strange dog on a leash while I am wearing clothing that I would prefer not to besmirch, particularly in the middle of a workday when I frequently see dog walkers on the streets of the St. Louis County seat. If the dog walker looks anything other than uptight, I will stop them and say with the utmost politeness, “Excuse me, but even on a leash, wolves are not allowed on the streets of Clayton.” This typically buys me the coat pet and ear scratch I am craving. If I sense the opportunity, I will hoist the dog up in my arms. If that goes well, I may move on to my final bit, which is to say to the animal, “I don’t have time for 10 kisses, just one.”
However, I do not own a dog and have not owned a dog in a long time. Generally, I do not like yards with fences or to restrict an animal’s movements with electricity. Then it has come to my attention that dogs do not live nearly as long as people. Owning a dog is just investing in grief. I am one of the planet’s most loving dog uncles, though, and a busy pro-bono dogsitter.
The sister who nicknamed me Brother Dog (and calls me that exclusively to this day) has moved, as one does, to Florida, beyond the scope of my dogsitting. When she was still living on her small farm in Saint Jacob, Illinois, I was a frequent live-in dogsitter. She and her husband traveled often to visit one of their two children in Colorado or Mississippi—or to Michigan for my sister’s father, who, it turns out, was not my (dead) father, which we learned only a few years ago (that is another story). For some years now, my sister has had two dogs, an uncomplicated beagle named Tupper and a big, moody, morose, unpredictable, surely formerly traumatized mutt named Dre, known to me as Dreybe, rhymes with baby.
Dre was a frightful bite risk to everyone other than my sister and her immediate family and, as such, a difficult animal for dog-sitter recruitment. The first time I accepted this notorious and dreaded assignment, I took along my mother’s dog, technically named Peanut but known to me as Sausalito Terrible, a high-strung, obese runt with a fearsome small-dog complex. Though Dre could have snapped off Sausalito’s noisy little head with one pinch of his jaws, the skittish bigger dog let the tiny, shrilly barking menace herd him into the back bedroom, enabling me to enter the house without being attacked.
Once I had slept in the house with Dreybe many times over multiple dog-sitting gigs, which doubled for me as rural songwriting retreats, I earned the rare confidence of this surly hulk. He began to slouch his way at a glacial pace in the dead of the night to my recumbent form on the couch, where he would stand gloomily alongside me, welcoming a few weary pets. His despair appeared to suggest it was the darkest hour of the night, and the people he needed were not there, but I was there, and I, too, faced the darkest hour of the night. Then he lumbered back to the back bedroom, where he would rule the house in the morning with a rumbling groan.
You know how in family obituaries they sometimes single someone out as a “special aunt,” or “special cousin” or “special nephew”? I had that kind of special relationship with a dog one time, a dog I dogsat down to her very last day. It is this feeling of wanting to remember Nala dog that has me telling dog tales today.
Nala’s known life started as a stray dog on the streets of Tel Aviv, Israel. A kind woman picked Nala up off the side of the road and later moved the dog from Israel right next to the home where we raised our daughter in Chesterfield, St. Louis County, Missouri. The woman, named Reut, agreed to follow her new husband to America with the stipulation that Nala dog must move with them.
The man of the house, named Dror, caught my eye one day when he was drinking beer in the backyard— separated from our yard by no fence, naturally—before noon one Saturday. I might have one Bloody Mary on one morning before noon in any given year, but I have an affection for judicious day drinking and was charmed at the sight of my new neighbor tippling with a friend on a beautiful late morning. I walked over to introduce myself and to suggest that a little later on, some other Saturday, we might get together in my yard for the same pastime.
When Dror took me up on that offer, knowing they were from Israel, I prepared some of my friend-of-the-Jews bona fides. I came on strong about the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, my former life as a world music critic with many stories archived on the definitive websites devoted to klezmer music, and my outer-orbit fanboying of Marc Chagall, why I most want to visit Israel, because Chagall did so much site-specific work in Jerusalem. Dror chuckled and said, “You’re a little too into the Jewish thing for me. I love living in America. Let’s watch Pulp Fiction.” He soon took to calling me My Brother from Another Mother, thus settling on the Brother half of Brother Dog as his name for me.
Before I started following dogs on Instagram who avidly watch filmed entertainment and appear to respond to the same dramatic cues as a person, Nala would sit on the couch beside me and watch films. She had sharp, definitive tastes. She loved French modern cinema and any movie made by The Beatles—and nothing else.
When the time came for Dror and Reut, the woman who rescued Nala dog from the streets of Tel Aviv, to visit their family back home, I was the natural choice to dog-sit. I so much enjoyed spending day after day with this noble animal. Nala was almost supernaturally silent—I am not sure if I ever heard her make the tiniest whisper of a sound—and she had one steel-blue eye, which gave her this mystic tinge. She always looked like she was staring off into places you could not see.
Before I started following dogs on Instagram who avidly watch filmed entertainment and appear to respond to the same dramatic cues as a person, Nala would sit on the couch beside me and watch films. She had sharp, definitive tastes. She loved French modern cinema and any movie made by The Beatles—and nothing else. When I sat with Nala while her family was in Tel Aviv, I would bring stacks of modern French films and Beatles flicks, and Nala would sit next to me watching those movies, grinning and absorbed in every frame. But should I deviate to any other kind of entertainment, she would get up, step down to the floor, lie down on the floor, point her rear end toward the television screen, and snooze through my true crime documentary.
When Dror landed a better finance job in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was sorry to see my brother from another mother, Reut, their children, and Nala dog leave the neighborhood. The brothers kept in touch via WhatsApp messages. Then Dror called me out of the blue to say they were getting ready to go back home to Tel Aviv, and he was thinking that, as old as Nala was getting to be, this would be the last time they went home while she was alive. He knew it was quite a drive to Charlotte from St. Louis, but he wanted to give me the opportunity to spend that time with Nala as we always did when their family traveled overseas. I decided I could not say no.
I thought it was cool to drive all the way to Charlotte to spend time with my special dog friend while her family was in Tel Aviv, so I was yapping to my friends about my upcoming adventure. One of my best friends, a retired St. Louis police officer (who was very helpful to me and others during the trying times of the Ferguson unrest), made me repeat myself.
He said, “You are going where to dog-sit for your friends from Israel?”
I repeated: “Charlotte, North Carolina.”
He said, “When?”
I told him my dates in August.
He said, “That’s weird. I am dogsitting for my son in Charlotte, North Carolina for exactly those same days.”
It was sweltering when I got to Charlotte. An interim local dog sitter left Nala with food in the house waiting for me. I was not prepared for how much older she looked and felt. I started to appreciate Dror saying I would not get another chance to hang out with Nala during his family’s next biennial excursion to Tel Aviv. No doubt, Nala did not look like she had two more years to live. When I took her out into the heat for a walk, I wondered if she would make it two more days. The poor dog just stood and stared like she did not know why she was there or what she should be doing. I once rambled the woods and towns with this lithe animal, but now she could not make it to the corner before she wanted to turn around, go back inside, curl up, and sleep. She slept all day.
Naturally, my buddy Kevin’s unmarried young son lived closer to the action in Charlotte than Dror and his family, so I drove into town to visit with Kevin and Tex, the son’s dog, a Golden Retriever who loved clumsily. Nala once rode all over town with me in a family car, always left behind for my use when they were in Tel Aviv, but there was no thought of getting Nala dog out of the house and into a car anymore. She was asleep when I left and asleep when I came back. My buddy Kevin grilled salmon for us, and we tasted some delicious local ales from Charlotte’s runaway craft brewery scene. Kevin had left an old, dying dog of his own back home in St. Louis County with his wife, who was on a kind of dog death watch, so he was empathetic to my stories about Nala’s abrupt decline.
Nala was stiff to the touch the next morning when I got out of bed. I do not believe I will ever forget the rubbery feel and response of Nala dog’s right hind leg in rigor mortis. I called Dror in Tel Aviv to deliver the sad news, and he said he would talk to his family, then call me right back.
I knew from other Jewish friends that they tend to bury their dead within 24 hours, so I expected it would fall upon me to dig the grave and lay the dog to rest. Dror did deploy a couple of friends in Charlotte to help me with Nala’s internment. These younger men were visibly in more impressive physical condition than me, and they both said they would rather dig graves all day long than pick up one dead dog and drop it in the ground. It took some time to dig the dog’s grave, with several breaks in the labor, so I did have opportunities to turn a shovel to the ground and contribute in a small way to the grave digging. My instincts told me that was something I should do.
I thought helplessly of Brian Henneman, the songwriter frontman in the Bottle Rockets and before that Chicken Truck. In Chicken Truck’s heyday (the early 1990s), Brian was a gravedigger and the band’s bass player, Bob Parr, was an ambulance driver. Brian liked to say they were in direct competition. I remembered being at the military cemetery in Accra, Ghana, when we were laying my father-in-law, Kpakpo Mensah to rest. Two of the dead man’s special drunk cousins from the village hopped in the grave before the gravediggers could start shoveling the dirt back in around the casket. The special drunk cousins poured libations to their dead brother and left food for his spirit in the corners of the grave before cooler heads graveside chased them up back onto the solid ground of the living.
I tried to think of anything other than that we were digging my friend Nala’s grave.
When we figured we had dug down far enough to honor the dead, it was left to me to go back in the house and upstairs to the spot on the carpet right outside the children’s bedroom door where Nala had fallen asleep for the last time. It made sense that she picked the spot outside the room of the children for her final sleep. I held my breath and picked her up with gloved hands and placed her in a large black plastic bag. Just as Nala had never made a sound in life, she left no sign of her passing on the carpeted floor where she had died. There was no mark or fluid of any kind associated with her death. I feel as if I held my breath the entire time I carried Nala down the stairs and out into the backyard and across the yard to the grave and placed her inside it.
My sister, the one who dubbed me Brother Dog, now said I was “Doggy Kevorkian” (after Dr. Jack Kevorkian, aka Dr. Death, the assisted-suicide maverick).
I said, “It was Nala’s time, I just happened to be there. I spared the family having to see her dead or dig her grave.”
“Doggy Kevorkian,” my sister said.
My buddy Kevin, still in Charlotte on his own dogsitting duty that outlived mine, quipped that maybe I had seen enough of Tex, his son’s dog, for this trip to Charlotte.
I told him, “I now can say I offer full-service dog-sitting, from the litter to the grave. I will feed your dog, I will walk your dog, I will watch French modern cinema with your dog, and if your dog dies on my watch, I will dig your dog’s grave, I will bury your dog.”
“Me and Tex are good for tonight,” Kevin said.
Now my new special dog friend is a basset hound named Beavis. There has been no talk of my being needed as a dog sitter for Beavis, but then I do not know Beavis’s people all that well and he is, in effect, a local celebrity. I see Beavis at my favorite tap room, at Narrow Gauge Brewing in Florissant, St. Louis County, Missouri.
Beavis comes into the tap room with one of the bartenders, Bozz, who is responsible for my special friend. As you might imagine, when a basset hound waddles into a brewery, he is the cynosure of all eyes and hands. I would hate to think I am just being competitive—trying to stand out from all the other nameless, faceless craft beer drinkers who worship and adore Beavis—but I find myself reverting to the childhood habits that brought me the name Brother Dog to begin with.
I end up on the floor of the brewery, rolling around with Beavis, holding each other in our arms, or spooning. I am fortunately not an especially lonely or unhappy man; I have rather a lot of good company and love in my life, but never, never, never do I feel less alone or less sad than when I am rolling around on the floor of a brewery with my special dog friend, the celebrity basset hound, Beavis.
