Reading · Unfamiliar Comforts

I am looking at my dog. The window to my left shakes itself as the storm outside dances across the dunes. I can hear the rustle of long grass brushing against each other in the gaps between the wind and occasional cars that pass by my bedroom. A sun is setting somewhere for people outside the edges of my small world. And here I am, sunken into my mattress like a newly watered sapling in fresh soil, looking at my dog. This dog that turned eleven. This dog who holds a life in his hazel eyes. Eleven years of endless memories buried deep in the valley of his chest. This dog who is asleep, but blissfully alive.

‘Happy Birthday Buddy’ as I pour myself out of the bed to greet him and let him out into the garden while making a coffee. He moves around the suburbs of our lawn, smelling the same patches and weeds like every morning then returns to me at the back door to press his nose against my thigh and tilts his long snout upwards to see me. One look and he cracks the whole world open. The air is fast and swirls around us, sending ripples through clothes and fur as we tether ourselves in this strange but essential familiarity we have nurtured. I lean to the side and reach my arm down to scratch the place between his jaw and the back of his ear, the place he loves to be scratched.

Sid, standing over me as I lay on the grass. Summer

We have moved through eleven years so carefully, not wanting to disturb each other and the peace we built for ourselves. This world we live in, rich, unique, private, felt only in our corners and edges. I am looking at this dog, my dog. This dog who knows all of my secrets, the sound of my cry, the clothes left unfolded in the corner of the room, the people I have let in and let go. He has been there for it all, and I keep him there, needing him like nothing else I’ve known. I am looking at him and wondering why there will ever be a day where he wont be there to look at, how ridiculous that is, and how naive I was to forget.

2 weeks ago, whilst I was at work, I was faced with the scary reality that Sid is actually mortal. My naivety has held him like a god above my head for far too long, calling him endless. I had a phone call from my neighbour to say I needed to come home, that things weren’t right and they thought he’d had a stroke. I spent the whole trip home frantic, dizzy and sick. I was selfish. As I sat there rushing my way back home my sight would slip into a complete blur and all I could think about was myself, what would I do without him, and how would I do without him. There was no sense in any of it. I just kept shaking my head at how ridiculous it was, because we are always together. There’s no landscape where we aren’t. How could it ever be a reality. It wasn’t, not yet at least. Thankfully. He is back to dreaming as I continue to write this, safe and home and seen. Asleep but blissfully alive. There will come a day though where my hands won’t find him. Where we no longer see each other spinning around our precious life. A day where the light is gone, in every room, making any attempt to search for him impossible. But that day isn’t today, and hopefully not tomorrow. This house is well lit.

Thinking, like looking, is effective in its render of what these eleven years have been like. And when I am not looking at this dog, I am thinking about him. Thinking about eleven years together and all the crops we have sowed. A blizzard of memories cut through the noise and I am faced with a landscape rich in pasture. A crop of irresistible love, there for grazing.

I am thinking of Sid and all the times in which he looks at me. How he jumps on to my bed in the morning to find me, like a wren to the feed. How he comes to the rug when I get home from work, sits to see me coming back, always coming back and how he looks to my hands as they reach down to find him there, always there. “He put his cheeks against mine … Tell me you love me, he says. Tell me again.” wrote Mary Oliver in Dog Songs.

Dogs are far better at looking than humans and as such, owning one has made me far better at it. I experience much more now than I ever did. I am prompted to pay more attention, to seek, to learn and to love more of what is around me.

Alexandra Horowitz describes this in her book Inside of A Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know, where she says;

“Minor clashes between my dog’s preferences as to where and how a walk should proceed and my own indicated that I was experiencing almost an entirely different block than my dog…What I saw and attended to was exactly what I expected to see; what my dog showed me was that my attention invited along attention’s companion: inattention to everything else.”

And so Sid has taught me more than the everyday favourable things us humans experience. He has so far given me 11 years of adventures, tiring trips into a vast sea of ‘more’, sailed in this lifeboat with me, steered us in directions that often involve parks or grass to roll around on. He has turned corners I would have otherwise ignored. Having this dog has meant that life has involved a myriad of directions, we have darted ourselves across countless landscapes and terrain, like neuron’s firing themselves throughout the brain, telling the body what to do and how to be and where to move.

“Together, we became investigators of the ordinary, considering the block — the street and everything on it—as a living being that could be observed. In this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new” Horwitz later wrote.

Sid is particularly good at looking. Not least because he is a sighthound, born for the hunt, built for the chase, alert and impulsive to act. But because he has learnt me so well. He knows what to look for when days look like good ones and which ones are bad, he knows how to look for the exit when perhaps I just need a moment, it is only ever a moment, any longer and I become the hound, chasing him, hunting him down. He knows how to look for the comfiest parts of all the places he ends up in, where is safety, his eyes scanning frantically for that sacred place, knowing that if he just sits by my leg he is safe. He knows how to look for the Sugar Kelp, foraging along the shore in the pursuit of additional snacks. Where to look for squirrels. He looks at hedgehogs in curiosity, not knowing it but willing to. He looks at things all the time, trying to know them or attempting to say something. And looking is often his only way to communicate. He looks at me more than I look at myself and it is in his looking or seeing me that I find a sense of self acceptance. When I am with this dog, those questions I had in the room without him are gone. Later in Dog Songs, Mary Oliver writes “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.”

The joyful thing about looking at dogs is that often when you do you will find that they are looking back at you, already there, beating you to it. Their eagerness not just to be seen but to see you, to know you, to love you. And they love you for not what they see of you but simply that they can. You are there and that is always enough. That, for me, has always been the divide between dogs and humans. How something can be so real, so this, so here and honest and living, ready to rush into any future. “This state of being-in-the-moment is what’s so compelling about dogs. It’s hard for a human to get to it. Even in the most difficult times, dogs are cheerful and ready for experience. A dog can’t figure out that it’s being measured for its grave” wrote the late John Homans in What’s a Dog For?

Sighthounds have appeared and been referenced throughout history, perhaps more than any other dog. They have long been known as a loyal companion, devoted, and at times regarded as the archetype of nobility. They were buried with the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt, a status often reserved for sacred and noble beings, suggesting an early spiritual companionship. The Vertragus, mentioned in Roman Literature by the likes of Arrian and Martial, who praised them for their speed and effectiveness. And through Medieval to Renaissance Europe with laws that forbade anyone but aristocrats owning them. They appear in tomb paintings and carvings, heraldry, tapestries and literature. In renaissance art, painters such as Titian, Pisanello, and Velázquez depicted hounds at the feet of nobles, a symbol of loyalty and refinement. And by Picasso in 1962 in his Femme au Chien works. And then in my own small world, Sid, who features heavily in the pictures I have made. All are attempts to revere these humble hounds as the ultimate, the all loving and giving.

**John Frederick Lewis RA,** *A greyhound in profile.*

There are times, like now when he sleeps as I write, where I have the privilege of getting to look at him alone, and to see him not seeing me. And every time I am found in this place the thing I see most is his restfulness at the knowledge I am there. And in those parts, just knowing is enough. He has always been enough, I have never needed him to be a different dog or a different kind of dog. All that I ask or want is that he is my dog, and for 11 wonderful years he has been, and I hope that he continues to be for many more.

Just as he is 11 he is 1, there again climbing onto the tip my skull as we slept on the floor of the living room, curling himself to sleep, unsure of where we’d go next. He is there at 2, sprinting through Greenwich Park with a gold sun suspended in the air above him. He is there at 3, on the underground being spoken to and loved by strangers in fleeting moments. He is there at 4 and 5, in a house with 2 people that loved him to the ends of their world not knowing that soon it would all change, that the future would just be me and him, left to find our way together. He is there at 6, by my side in the corner of the room as I cried into my phone looking at a past we both now begged to forget. He is there at 7, dizzy on the beach, dressed in sand and bathed in salt water. He is there at 8, climbing mountains with new good people who had no choice but to love him, for how easy it is to do. He is there at 9, happy and warm in the cottage, sleeping by the aga and tired from the joy. He is there at 10, next to me as I finally unbox certain pasts and trawl through printed pictures, carefully saving the ones of just us together. He is there at 11, now, asleep but blissfully alive, unchanged, the same dog i’ve known his whole life, being seen and loved.

And in years beyond these, in spaces without him, I will always go to the wall to pin his picture. Careful to place the drawing pin in a space not occupied by him or me as to not puncture us. And when there is no dog there to look at I will still be looking at him, the shape of his absence - long and deep chested. I will be looking at him in unoccupied places, how cold and lifeless they will be. I will be looking at fresh cut lawn and see the memories of him wriggling his way across it. I will be looking at the vast open world I’m in and wonder why I ever felt lonely when he was there, nudging my arm to tuck himself under. When I can no longer look at him, I will look for him. Plowing through the days and years we spent together, gathering the harvest of everything we did and had and loved.

I will walk the memories of these precious days to the end of my life, unleash them and sit at the bench to watch them zoom around the field, dizzy and joyful and lively. My eyes will begin to blur, then close, until I become the memories and join them in the field, spinning through the crops we sowed together. I need another lifetime, because to know him in just one is not enough.

To Sid, my dog,
in every lifetime.

Looking At Dogs

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