February 1, 1998 |dream dog
My husband and I are waiting for a dog. That is, we are waiting to adopt what we hope will be a dog, not a puppy, from a shelter or some other problematic situation.
     We have been waiting for months, and I have been waiting for longer than that. I first became aware that I wanted a dog in 1980, when I was single, living in Maryland, and working as a newspaper reporter. There were three deadlines, and about a hundred phone calls, to make every day. The calls were to police departments and other agencies that handled crime, like the Harbor Police in Baltimore. I covered stabbings, shootings, railway accidents, drownings, and so on. I would get off at either 4 p.m. or 1 a.m., depending on my shift. I was very lonely and working very hard. I was also between men, and maybe this gave me a space to think about someone who would be there not simply to sleep with me, laugh at my jokes, or support me financially. Well, all right, maybe laugh at my jokes. But by and large the dog would be there just to be. At the time, I wasn't very good at being. I'm still not. I was, and am, better at doing. I think at some level I sensed that dogs are in large part about being, unless they're working dogs, and my dog wouldn't have any dead ducks to retrieve or any sheep to herd. This was going to be about being—being per se, and being with me. So I have this memory of writing in a letter to a friend that what I really wanted out of life was a dog.
     Time went on, and I never got a dog. But the dog got bigger anyway, at least psychically. Although my circumstances never seemed to allow me to have a dog, either because I was working in somebody else's office all day (lonesome for a dog) or because I was in one of my periodic go-home-to-my-parents-and-sort-out-my-life phases, my thoughts about dogs became more complex. At a certain point, I began having recurring dreams that included a dog. Usually, the dog was a guide. It did not speak or bark or lick my hand. But it gazed at me and led me through Jungian forests representing, no doubt, my psyche and life journey. This guide dog was, of course, a German Shepherd Dog. Except gray, like a wolf.
     Later I got married, and eventually my husband and I found ourselves living a stress-filled, two-career-couple suburban life, and realized we were miserable. We moved to the West Coast after an extraordinary series of events that convinced me that what we see is, in fact, not all that is Going On. My husband's mother died, in another series of events that showed us that we had been right to move because life is very, very short. We bought a sailboat to assuage a longing that my husband had developed over the course of the preceding twenty years despite (or perhaps because of) being raised in New York City. And I began to want a dog as much as he had wanted a boat.
     Finally, I asked my hairdresser for help. This is not because I believe hairdressers hold the key to life, although some of them undoubtedly do. It was because she already had a dog: Aries, a brindled Great Dane who would occasionally come over and lean his large, warm solidness against me or some other customer. Every time he did it to me, I felt an ache. By this time I had amassed a significant dog library; I had been, after all, in my research phase. I wanted to move beyond research, and by this time both my husband and I were working at home, so we weren't going to turn a dog into a miserable, day-abandoned barker. My hairdresser gave me the name of her dog person, a trainer named Gail who also helped people find dogs that would be right for them.
     Gail came over. She had abandoned accounting to become a dog person, so we liked her immediately. During a long talk, my husband and I admitted that, as first-time dog-owners, we didn't know much about what we were doing, and we didn't want to end up giving back a dog because we had made the wrong decision. She gave us the best piece of advice we'd heard: Don't get a dog that you think will change the way you live, she said. The change won't happen. Get a dog that will fit the way you already live. This has to work for both of you, not just the dog.
     We made a list of criteria. The dog had to be small enough to fit on the boat, which is a tight one. We're both writers, so the dog had to not need large amounts of exercise. That unfortunately leaves out Siberian Huskies, which my husband adores on aesthetic grounds and because Siberians love everybody. However, Siberians also run away and would probably kill our cats. We're realistic enough to know it would be a bad experience for all concerned. And we agreed with Gail that we're not equipped to deal with a puppy. Beyond those criteria, we said we didn't care much about breeds. Mutts are often great dogs, and we didn't want to be too restrictive.
     Now we're waiting to hear from Gail, who is very plugged in to the dog world in our area and gets to a lot of shelters in the course of her work. And we wonder: Will it be a boy or a girl? Will it be russet-colored or black? Short-haired or long?
     Does it sound as if we're waiting to hear from an adoption agency? That's how we feel. I'm trying not to get impatient; life has taught me that things happen pretty much when they're supposed to. But there's something I'm looking for, and I want it badly. All the fiction I write is, I believe, about this something. It's a sense of connection—not like the connection with a baby, who starts out seeming "other" but gradually becomes, really, much like us, in the sense that people are similar in many ways. What I'm after is that feeling of connection with someone who really isn't us and can't be us—someone who always has been and always will be Other. And I hope it comes soon.

Next time: dog meat