I wrote this piece at New Year’s in 2015. I’ve just reread it for the first time since then and I still like it. Probably because I love most dogs very much and all these years later, I still miss Becky. She was Her Own Legend.
Let the reader beware; we do not have a dog now. Owning and being owned by a dog (or two) is indeed among the very finest gifts in our lives - but also they are a lot of work. And look, I am a retired person yet this week has been so full of things I wanted and needed to do, that here I am digging up something I wrote ten years ago.
Anyways, let me be the first to wish you Happy New Year.
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“I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?” Alexander Pope
If there is one thing that is always true of a healthy, loved, and loving dog – it’s this. They are READY!
Ready for what? Oh, who knows and who cares?
If you are going to get up and walk into another room, they are ready for that to mean:
“Ok, now I’m going to go lay on the floor in the room where the TV is, because my person is there and I love to lay on the floor right next to her sofa, so that maybe she will scratch my ears and I can smell her, which makes me comfortable.”
Or, “Wow! He’s going to the kitchen and the lady isn’t home, which means he might be making a snack that has CHEESE and SARDINES and MORE CHEESE. Oh Man, this is my favorite thing! He always drops stuff on the floor and I help him get it all tidied up before she comes home.”
Or, “A walk? Cool! Let’s do it! Let’s go outside and sniff the heck out of everything! Is it a blizzard? Oh man, I LOVE blizzards. It means, oh I don’t know what it means. I’m a dog. But we’ll walk and I’ll get ice on my muzzle and that’s always interesting.”
A dog is always ready. It’s one of the traits of dogs that flips the love-switch in our hearts. This lack of skepticism, this enthusiasm for the dumbest little thing, this eternal light in a dog’s soul that says no matter what normal, ordinary, trite, little thing happens next, as long as a dog can do it with her people, this is a really good thing.
In dog terms, are you ready? I know this is the time when a lot of people take on resolutions - which is cool. We are not humans just so that we can keep on making the same mistakes and dumb choices over and over again.
The whole point is to make NEW mistakes - which dogs are so good at!
Such as the day when I made three loaves of bread and then left them on the counter to cool while I ran an errand. When I got back home later, there was one mangled loaf of bread on the floor in the living room and a dog on the rug in a back bedroom looking up at me with so much sorrow and regret in her eyes. Yes, that was a powerful mistake on my part. Who leaves warm bread two inches from the edge of a counter in a house where the dog is tall and strong? And a powerful mistake for her. She couldn’t even eat her kibble that night.
Or when Len left the new box of Milk Bones on a chair. That’s when we learned that in a long quiet day at home, Becky can eat all of the milk bones in a box of them, except for one. We wondered what she felt like when she left that last one. I’ve done that with various snacks and am not proud of it.
Becky made mistakes, yes. But they were mistakes of enthusiasm.
Even for those of us who are rather old dogs in both dog and people years, I’m going to suggest we launch into this year like dogs.
Let’s get ready for love, walks, snacks, and adventures.
LOVE - First of all, how does a dog approach love? Trust first, don’t bother being wary and anxious unless this person has hurt you before. Also, don’t get all bendy about finding a “right” person to love. You can just love the little girl walking down the street. Look at her with happiness in your eyes and heart and if she looks back at you, wag your tail and be happy. Love doesn’t have to be with movie stars and heroes; it’s pretty easy to like anyone who has a vaguely human air about them.
In dog terms, prepare to love people you haven’t met yet. Knowing there are folks out there now whom you might adore by the end of this year, is this not a wonderful thought?
WALKS – There is not a dog on earth that walks with a pedometer. Dogs walk because that’s the way to get from here to anything that’s not here. Mosey, trot, run like the very wind, amble in circles perusing the scene – this is a dog walk. Are you ready to go outside and see what’s there? Or go to a mall and walk in there because it feels so good to stretch your legs in the middle of a cold winter day? Can you scramble over a snow drift, up a hill, around your house (when is the last time you looked at the side of your garage?). Instead of vowing to exercise, how about vowing to explore the way a dog does - with unending interest in what might be different today from yesterday?
SNACKS! – There is that Doug Barry line about how dogs eat. “Eat it now; you can always throw it up later.” Which, if you have lived with a dog, is so dearly and darkly true. Most of Becky’s worst mistakes happened in regard to food, which is foolishness many of us can relate to.
Dogs are generally not great at a 1.) discriminating palate, 2.) savoring each bite, or 3.) ignoring the cookie in front of them because dinner is going to be served in an hour.
What they are good at is enthusiasm and happiness. If one is going to eat it, one may as well wag their tail, chomp with gusto, drink so much water at the end of the snack that one’s chin gets wet and then take a quick snooze. Don’t overthink it. Life is tasty.
ADVENTURES – Dogs don’t require intercontinental travel arrangements or Hawaiian tours or The Latest Movie. They live by their sniffer nose, fair-to middling’ eyesight, urge to snack, and a wild whole-hearted love for their people. If they get to get in the car and go to Madison to take a two hour walk around the city with Several of the People They Love Best, that is very cool and they will snore in the back seat on the way home. But if the family goes to Italy and one is the family dog who can’t go with, well, that means two weeks at Franc and Michael’s with all their little dogs, plus the neighbor kids there, plus bird seed that falls from the parrot and a host of other wonders.
Dogs don’t shut down if they don’t get exactly what they want. They keep on going because that is the nature of life.
Open your eyes and heart, look for breakfast, walk, nuzzle the ones you love best, and look expectantly at the rest of them.
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