Doggy ruminations

Lileks spends some time on his dog today. Thinking thoughts that at the same time are ones you never want to think and remind you about all the reasons you love your animals to begin with:

Unless you’re single or childless, you don’t give a lot of time to thinking about how you’ll miss your dog. I would guess there are millions of American men like me – got the dog before the kid, treated him as an ersatz offspring until the real thing came along and made you feel foolish for dressing him up in a bomber jacket for Halloween. You get busy with your child, and the dog recedes, gets old, becomes ambulatory furniture with weird warts hanging off his snout, that tired annoyed expression and a hitch in the step when he tries to get up the bed. He’s the only family member whose end you will arrange on purpose. You’ll make the call. You’ll take him to the same place you took him every year to get his shots. Two go in, one comes out. But you don’t think about that; why should you?

Maybe I'm a bad owner, but I must confess that there are times I already anticipate the sad day that "our first" must go and all the tears that will be associated with it. Makes me enjoy even more when she lays down next to me on the floor and rests her head on my crossed-legs.

Just as Lacy is a needy people-pleasing dog, Cassie is independent, reserved and much-less needy. But she will be missed just as much for the living-contrast she offers as for her sweet disposition and personality. Bottom-line, once they're part of the life you don't want them to go; ever. Even if it comes after a dozen wonderful years.

Some dogs become rugs; some dogs become indistinguishable from the sofa pillows on which they sit. That’s not Jasper. How he talks! The range of his vocalizations are so wide and varied you wish you could give him the Gift of Consonants and hear what he really has to say. But I know: MORE PIZZA THROW THE HEDGEHOG NOW THROW IT AGAIN.

Do people who have cats ever put their faces in the creatures just to smell them? Smell that good cat smell? Is there such a thing?

Gnat will remember him, I think. But there is something poignant about the sight of a four-year old kid hugging a ten-year old dog – a moment that meant everything to everyone, and will be remembered by neither in the end. But if “the end” is what counts above all, why bother with anything.

What counts, of course, is the simple present you’re granted anew as the day rolls on, the moment when you see the dog on the floor staring up at the crumbs from her Pop Tart, knowing he cannot eat them because I am watching. I can leave the room, and he won’t eat them. He awaits permission. As noted on this page long ago, the relationship between man and dog is a dim reflection of the relationship between man and God, inasmuch as we don’t know what we don’t know, but intuit there is a Rule, an Order that hovers above us. The difference is that God never leans over from the kitchen table and grants permission to eat the Pop-Tart. In so many words, anyway.

Ultimately that is what it's about with your pets. Lacy has no long-term memory; she no more recalls riding in a box in the car with my wife from Prescott down to Phoenix than she does of her very first trip to the dog park. She only knows she loves the dog-park (and mommy too!).

It's about today. So what are we going to do today? THROW THE HEDGEHOG NOW THROW IT AGAIN.