A Pause for Paws

The end of summer seems like a perfect time to take a breath from hurricanes and heat and fears that the world as we know it is falling apart—and pay homage to the four-legged-beings with whom we live and by whom we are reminded of always-here-always-now love. In that spirit, here is a piece I wrote when we first brought our dog Izzy home.

We adopted a puppy last week and it hasn’t been pretty around here. Well, really, it hasn’t been pretty in here. My mind, that is. Izzy the puppy, however, is pretty. She looks like a stuffed toy. Big brown eyes and a nose like a plump olive. Red fur that is soft and a bit curly. My friend Catherine says she looks like a person impersonating Lucille Ball. From the outside, you’d think that our house was the picture of adorableness. Cute little puppy running around with her black “Pawda” stuffed purse. Then you might take a look at my face and see that all isn’t so fine in paradise.

Izzy was a sort of rescue dog. “Sort of” because she wasn’t supposed to be a rescue; my husband and I aren’t that virtuous. I know, I know, it’s terrible and if I had a tail, it would be between my legs. Good-hearted people, people who care about the earth and about dogs being thrown over bridges in Puerto Rico do not buy dogs. I, however, am not one of those people. Don’t get me wrong. I give money every year to Save-a-Sato (the people who hand-rescue, one by one, those Puerto Rican dogs), the Marin Humane Society, and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. I believe that the people who save those dogs and the people who adopt those dogs are angels.

I, it must now be apparent, am not an angel. Plus, everyone I know who has adopted rescue dogs—okay, two people—(none of my other friends are silly enough to even get a dog, and I understand their feelings much more this week than last week) told us that it’s taken two years for their dogs to stop submission-peeing and fear-biting. I don’t want to wait two years. I don’t want to spend the time I have left, not even two years of it, with a submissively-peeing dog.

So, we looked at a litter of nine that a friend of a friend knew about, all of which were like those irresistible puppies you see on YouTube. All, that is, except for one, who was cowering in the corner. She was shaking and frightened and couldn’t get away from the bully who kept attacking her. She wouldn’t walk over to us. She wouldn’t make eye contact with us. And in a moment of weakness, a moment of remembering what it felt like to be the chubby, gap-toothed kid who never got picked for soccer but who did get picked on by Marlon Bernstein, the class bully, my heart melted. And so, when Matt said, “If we don’t take her, I don’t think anyone else will,” I agreed.

Until last week I would have told you that I like animals more than people. “I am an animal person,” I say, when people start talking about babies and puppies. Then for the shock effect, I add that if I saw a crying baby and a whimpering puppy in a grocery store, I’d walk over to the puppy first. After it rains, I spend hours saving salamanders and frogs from getting run over. The hummingbirds in my backyard land on my fingers. And I, who abhors being wet or cold, have been known to jump into icy bodies of water to save drowning baby birds. I fancy myself like Clarissa Estes, in Women Who Run with the Wolves, would be wild enough to run with (very nice) wolves, or least capable of loping with a poodle. (Izzy, by the way, is a standard poodle.) But today I am not an animal person. Today I don’t like anything on four legs, especially the one who looks like Lucille Ball.

I blame my husband. He, Matt, is the one who wanted a dog. And not just any dog: He wanted a girl dog. A big red non-shedding dog—and this is the important part—who was related (through a complicated series of blood lines) to Celeste, our dog who died a year ago. Me? I was enjoying not having a pet for the first time in eighteen years. Enjoying being able to walk out the door and not see those big eyes staring at me through the window, silently accusing me of abandonment. But Matt also has big doggy eyes and when he looked at me ever so sweetly and said, I really want a dog now, I caved in. I’m usually not a push-over, but, and I’ve written about this before, and I say this in the kindest possible way, Matt is very dog-like. Every morning he greets me like he hasn’t seen me for ten years. “Hi sweetheart,” he says brightly. Big smile. Crinkly eyes, like the sun is just now rising and using his face as its stage. Sometimes I am glum, introverted, and rather dramatic—sort of like Isadora Duncan (was her nickname Izzy?) who strangled to death on her own scarf. So as Matt walked around shaking off sparks of light while telling me how much he wanted a puppy, I thought, well, it doesn’t seem right to deprive him and anyway, why not get a dog? I am, after all, an animal person.

But now I am convinced we made a huge mistake. Izzy walks around (when she bothers to come out from under the bed) with her tail down, afraid of everything. Doorways, stuffed toys, food, water, friends, Matt, me. Last week, a woman who started a sanctuary for abused and abandoned dogs came over to help bring Izzy out of her shell. After three hours, she said, “Your dog is as bad as any feral dog I’ve met. I’ve never seen anything like it.” This from a person who rescues dogs thrown over bridges in Mexico City. This from the woman who drives around with ten feral dogs in her car, most of whom look like large rats.

If I was going to get a dog, I tell my husband, and apparently the “if” part of that sentence is now moot, I wanted a dog that was happy. I wanted a dog that could remind me that day-to-day joy is possible. I tell him about my friend Nina’s nephew who spent a year searching for a puppy, adopted him, and within a week, decided he wasn’t cut out to be a puppy father. I tell him the story of the writer Joyce Maynard who adopted two girls from Ethiopia, soon realized it was a mistake and gave them back (i.e., found them a home with two stable parents). If people can give back their children, I tell Matt, I can give back a puppy. Can we please just FedEx Izzy back to where she came from?

For the longest time, I clung to the conviction that scary thoughts are created by scary situations: losing someone you love; being fired; having your house burn down; being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Hell, it seemed to me, was a situation created by other people or events. I couldn’t tell the difference between my stories of a situation and the situation itself. Now I am beginning to understand that stories are the extra I place on top of the present moment. Without them there is a simplicity and an elegance to life as it is unfolding in this very moment.

So, although having a dog whose nervous system reminds me of my own wouldn’t have been my first choice, there is something about this dog that I feel as if I already knew. Almost, but not exactly, as if I’d been waiting for her—and there she was, but not in the dog costume I was expecting.

Thus, with uncharacteristic maturity, I have made a promise to stop myself whenever I notice I am listening to the stories my mind prattles on about. Since I could switch the Izzy story with many similar tales I’ve told myself that were not true—I married the wrong person, I wrote the wrong book, I have the wrong life—it has once again become quite clear to me that the mind is mad. When I remind myself of that, I don’t take the thoughts that I need a different dog/life/husband personally.

The truth is that along with its multiple and exhilarating pleasures, there is something so deeply uncomfortable about being human. About loving for the sake of it, even when you know that everything and everyone you love is going to get lost, get broken or die—particularly four-legged beings, who almost always die before you. (There are exceptions, of course. Leona Helmsley died before her dog, Trouble, and left twelve million dollars and a private jet to care for her. Seriously.) And yet, we persist. We endure. We remember what wants to be remembered, which, in this case, is that the pain of loss of a loved one is worse than the pain of withholding the love.

As the weeks have rolled along, the situation with Izzy has changed, as situations always do. She’s kissing us now, puts her wet-truffle nose in the crook of my neck every morning to be nuzzled. Despite my reluctance, I find myself laughing at her prance-prance-leap before she picks up a toy and the crossing of her paws when she lays down as if awaiting high tea and scones. The way she lives in the world, as any animal person knows, is a portal to what the Zen masters call Beginner’s Mind.

Everything is new to her, even the scent of the redwood tree she’s passed a few hundred times; despite her hyper-vigilant nervous system, she is a constant reminder that although I’ve seen the tree in our driveway, the succulents in our garden, the helicopter-flight of the hummingbirds a hundred thousand times, I haven’t seen them today. And according to Zen masters and dogs, there is no other day. No one has ever touched or experienced the future, because when it arrives, it is still, only today—which makes it a perfect day to revel in the spectacle of being above ground, and throwing a pink elephant toy across the room dozens of [first] times.

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