Intro to Be the Dog: Some of my favorite people are dogs, Part One
(in which you meet the dogs of my childhood).
What the heck is Be the Dog, anyway?
It’s my new year-long project to become a better person. I’ll post (more or less) once a week, about a trait that I see in my dogs and that I wish I could emulate. I’ll attempt to be the dog in that very sense for one week. Then, I’ll report back about how it went.
Before I get started, though, I thought it would be helpful to understand why I’m so dog-obsessed. So, before we get started, a little intro. . . to the dogs in my life.
* * * * *
One summer day when I was four, the kids on my street were playing on the driveway of a friend’s house when we spotted a cat with a new litter of kittens under the porch. Like virologists at the microscope, we examined the thrumming melee of paws, fur, teeth and whiskers, enthralled by the tiny noses, the incessant mewling and occasional hiss escaping from the lair under the stairs.
Immediately, we each ran to our respective homes to ask if we could have one.
“Absolutely not,” my father said, emphasizing the point by shaking his index finger in my face.
I stomped back to the group of children still huddled around the clowder and declared, “He said it’s okay!”
Snatching a kitten, I ran back to the house and let it loose in my parents’ front hall.
Never mind that the terrified creature made a beeline into the living room and promptly shat under our couch. Never mind that that was the first (and only) time that my father spanked me.
This image of my dad will be forever emblazoned on my memory: on his knees in front of the sofa, broomstick in hand as he waved it back and forth on the carpet like a crazed windshield wiper in a thunderstorm while attempting to flush out the kitten.
Who knows? Maybe that was the moment my distaste for cats emerged—and simultaneously, my lifelong love of dogs.
As the Universe would have it, I was born in the Year of the Dog. I have what my husband calls “dog-like qualities” (viz, sensitive ears, extreme loyalty to those I love, always ready to eat, yadda yadda) and I often feel an ineffable kinship with the canines I meet.
I’ve always loved dogs and wanted to have them as family members. Before the Dreaded Cat Incident (DCI), our family had a dog, a boxer named Princess, for a short while.
Princess used to sleep in bed with me, which, more often than not, resulted in the pooch sprawled across the bed like a starfish in the sun come morning, while four-year-old Ricki lay curled up on the floor at the foot of the bed. I never remembered being ousted; I just woke up every day on the floor.
When my younger sister was born a year later, my parents were spooked by the thought of a churlish breed next to their delicate infant and gave the dog away to our milkman (in those days, we still had milkmen who delivered dairy milk to people’s doors. He drove a big, boxy van that looked like a giant toy truck, filled with racks and racks of glass bottles of milk. And no, alternative milks didn’t even exist back then).
Our next dog arrived when I was about 12 years old. I remember driving out with my dad and my younger sister across town. The home at which we arrived belonged to a customer of my father’s (she bought meat at his local butcher shop) with a Polish name I couldn’t pronounce—let’s call her Kowalski. Mrs. Kowalski had a basement full of puppies for sale.
My sisters and I had begged for a cocker spaniel, with their soulful, saucer eyes and droopy, silken ears, and we were there to pick up our own pup. He didn’t disappoint, either; from the throng, Mrs. Kowalski bent down and swooped up a little caramel-colored pup, the sweetest looking thing I’d ever seen.
“This one is called Sweeney,” she told us, “which means ‘sweetheart’ in Polish.” Turns out—and we didn’t learn this until he was almost ten years old—“Sweeny” actually means “pig” in Polish.
Maybe that was Mrs. Kowalski’s little joke on her customers, knowing they’d regularly be calling, “Here, Pig! Come get your dinner, Pig! Go do your business, Pig!” for the following ten to 15 years.
It also turned out that Mrs. Kowalski named all of her dogs “Sweeny,” as my father discovered from another of his customers when he arrived with a delivery one day and heard the woman calling for their own dog.
Driving home from Mrs. Kowlaski’s place with the terrified puppy on my lap, I was tasked with keeping him still in the back seat of the car. As he cowered against my belly, whining and squirming to escape his new environment, I attempted to soothe him, cooing and caressing his silken head. After a few minutes, I implored my father to turn around so we could take him back.
“He doesn’t like us and he doesn’t want to be with us,” I pleaded. “He’s so sad! We have to take him back.” I still had far too little experience living with dogs and couldn’t imagine the unbreakable bond that would form over time.
Poor, put-upon Sweeney, though. He embarked on life as a free spirit, very quickly adjusting to the indulgent and spoiled lifestyle conferred upon the dog of a butcher. Like almost all dogs, Sweeney loved food. And he got plenty of it.
When my mother trimmed stew beef for our dinner, guess who got all the scraps that were too fatty for the humans? Sweeney benefitted enormously from the fact that my mother couldn’t tolerate eating meat with even the slightest bit of visible fat or marbling. So, when she trimmed the beef cubes that my dad brought home enveloped in waxy red butcher paper, she’d do so very liberally, being sure to leave a safety margin around any piece of fat. In the end, Sweeney often ate almost as much beef for dinner as the rest of us combined.
He did have a bit of a temper, however, and was very protective of his property (which included his five humans). He had no idea that the people supposedly ran the show.
One day when I was in high school, my friend Jackie made the mistake of visiting unannounced, precisely at the same time the newspaper was normally delivered (by a different young man).
Because he’d been to my house dozens of times before, and because the door was ajar with just a thin screen between the house and the outside, Jackie rang the bell and flung the door open without thinking. He was greeted by a snarling, snapping Sweeney, who bounded down the hall and jettisoned himself across the tiles, directly into a chunk of Jackie’s leg.
Looking back, poor Sweeney actually endured a lot of hardship for a dog. As insouciant kids, we’d attempt to lure him out from under the couch using my mother’s ice tongs, which we snapped against his muzzle to “encourage” him.
No wonder he was so ornery.
As a pup and young dog, he was permitted to wander the neighborhood freely, making his own friends and establishing his position in the canine hierarchy. In those halcyon days before public leash laws, we’d simply open the door after breakfast, let him out and watch him race down the street until we could no longer see him. Around 4:30 or 5:00, he’d arrive back at the front door, scratching the metal below the screen to alert us that he was home for dinner.
Then, when Sweeney was around five or six, the laws changed. Suddenly and without warning, a dog who’d enjoyed ultimate freedom outdoors was forced to walk on a six-foot piece of nylon ribbon, whining and hauling against the injustice of it all (not to mention my poor sister and mother, who were left to deal with his outrage while I took myself out of province to university).
Luckily, there were still summers up north, where my parents rented a cottage for July and August. During those months, Sweeney was once again a free agent dashing between forest and lake, into the valley where we kids often played, and even on occasion sneaking over to the family’s Bar-B-Q so he could abscond with an uncooked hot dog or two.
Sadly, we lost Sweeney when he was 13, one day after he escaped through the back door after a neighbor’s cat. By then elderly and obese (remember all those beef trimmings?), he’d been locked indoors or on a leash so long that when he saw his chance for escape, he snatched it. Unaware not only that he was a senior, but also an obese senior, he ran after that cat in a blur, like watercolor streaking across a canvass.
When he finally did return about 30 minutes later, he was huffing and puffing, panting uncontrollably. Before long, the panting turned to high-pitched whining and, eventually, wailing as he lay immobile on the kitchen floor, gasping his final breaths.
I hope that when he finally lost consciousness, it was with a vision of that cat in closeup, knowing he’d won that one final, triumphant race.
Next up: dogs from my adulthood, all leading to a description of the Be the Dog project.