Let’s say it all begins with chance. The humane society just happens to be open, and I just happen to be driving by it, at precisely the same time that I had been thinking now might be the time to come into possession of a dog. What dog? Well, not any dog; my dog. The one that has my number. The one that would not be like any other on the planet - that would be the right dog for me, since I too am unlike any other. (My would-be doppelgangers are thankful.)
To move full circle all the way to the end, through years upon years of walks, biscuits, vomit on the rug (but such nice vomit . . .), miles in the Thoreauvian woods, miles in the damnable woods playing forced hide-and-seek, squirrels - and children - chased, wet kisses on the cheek, brown eyes boring deep into my own as if the lottery numbers resided there, ice cream cones shared lick for lick, naps on the couch, through all of this, I lived a rich lifetime in 10 years with a certain black mutt. No one had wanted her. Yet I did, and that made all the difference. Not necessarily to her, because she was already complete, notwithstanding the fact that a cage is no place for a dog. But it made all the difference to me, because I did not know how incomplete I was until I got her.
How had I lived without knowing there was another world underneath the one I had skated atop in my previous life? Suddenly, I was twenty thousand leagues beneath the familiar sea, Monsieur Aronnax to a border collie mix’s Captain Nemo. She was my guide to a vast land with its own customs, concerns, language. Every morning we had to go to the dog park -- gone, quiet coffee and newspaper of yore. Now it was fetch and sniffing (including, but not limited to, bushes and rodent mummies and other dogs’ nether parts, in an act I came to recognize as the important exchange of canine business cards). All human discussions were focused on only certain topics: dog treats; dog food; recipes for dog food; the study of comparative religion by way of leashes and tug toys; how others treated their dogs, which we invariably took issue with. We stood around and admired particularly poetic Frisbee catches. We became involved in one another’s interrelations only inasmuch as they occurred in the dog park, to other denizens of the dog park, or to a dog (which was even more interesting).
I had not even noticed the truth: that my social life had realigned, like a moon in a planet’s gravitational field, to include only people who understood that one must never be expected to go anywhere dogs were not welcome too; in any event, we did not want to go to such places ourselves. We had been utterly changed by our dogs. They might have been dogs who were left tied to fences, or were found wandering the side of six-lane highways, or had less than 24 hours to go in this life. But they did their subtle work, and remade us into people who could do nothing less than love them entirely.
Only infrequently did we revisit our former haunts, the locales of humans without dogs, and we found them thin and somehow unappealing, gray and unable to hold our interest, devoid as they were of moving tails and the occasional coup d’etat in the form of one dog deciding he had to mount another.
The world with dogs was richer and more colorful than the place I used to live, and I could never go back. My dog saw to that. Crossing the species barrier made for a newly international outlook that was intellectual, just as it was emotional.
If I can now pretend to any bit of goodness, any kindness, any understanding of reciprocity, responsibility, awareness that this moment defines life and not the past or the future, they are all the gifts of one whirligig puppy given to me by the benevolent gods of chance.
This gift came with a clock. The best gifts do: the gifts that are most like life itself. They wind down, bringing us into the future, and toward the end, that seals their meaning. When my first dog’s time came, she left behind a permanently changed person. My new passport made me a citizen of a country where it was unthinkable to live without a dog. Who else would I use my new language to speak with? I could not just talk to the air. Too lonely to contemplate.
That is why there is a new dog with me now. She is wholly different, and she is the same. I had made a promise to the dog of my heart that, since she rescued me, I would rescue another one in her memory. And another.
The border has been closed to me. The divide is great, and I would be happy to tell the woebegone dogless what they are missing. But I couldn’t. They’ll just have to adopt a dog themselves. And move to a wondrous new country.
