Anyone who has lived past youth carries with her a memorable cast of characters. There are parents and older relatives, siblings, friends (and enemies). Teachers. Colleagues, employers. Lovers, spouse(s), children. A person who tried to make a list of those important enough to earn permanence in memory would have a roster to dwarf the list in one of my own overpopulated novels.
For me such a list would include Tish, Roe Avic, Griselda, and many other dog names. I think there's a genetic component here; my parents, my sisters, and now my grown daughters and nieces simply find life incomplete without a canine companion. Cats appear now and then; my father had a time when horses mattered to him. But dogs were constant with all of us, and they live in astonishing variety in my memory.
Or even before my memory. There was a German shepherd named Lady; she was gone before I was old enough to notice, but there were pictures and a family legend of her beauty and intelligence. Following Lady came two pit bulls: first a male of short but tempestuous life, following him a goofy-faced female named Betsy. Betsy was amiable, given to rolling in carrion, and inclined to forget where she lived. She'd simply stroll off unnoticed one day, and when we came upon her a week or two later, elsewhere in the neighborhood, she'd greet us with surprise and pleasure and happily come home—until the next time.
Next came a cross-breed puppy, Gordon Setter and Fox Terrier. Tish was with us for about fifteen years, medium sized, black-and-tan, cheerful about everything except being left alone. Her speciality in her younger years was coming to the grade school some six blocks from our house in search of me or my sisters. Later she perfected the art of being the cat's friend in the house, the cat's pursuer in the yard.
Others followed in my parents' house. Petey for Petra was an underbred German Shepherd who was beautiful and loving but very timid, a bad quality in an animal weighing close to a hundred pounds because it played out as aggressiveness. Then there was the Hungarian shepherd, or Puli, Icon O'Clast, who herded everything and everyone and one day found and herded home a small part-Basenji, Bambi, who stayed. Icon thought she was his dog.
Meanwhile I had grown up and gone off to college, where I embarked upon another family pattern, a grown-up (more or less) version of the he-followed-me-home syndrome. On the campus of the University of Arizona I found, or was found by, a woebegone red-and-white English setter. After sharing my room in the frosh dormitory for a week, we were betrayed by non-dog persons, and so Roe Avic went home to my parents. She was a beautiful, mannerly dog, and loved me with the fervor of one who had been lost and is found. Her only failing was the deep need to run and hunt, which led her to disappear from the big backyard every month or so, to return 24 hours later with worn and bleeding pads and, once, what might have been a bullet-rake across a shoulder.
Teaching high school English some years later, with Roe long gone to her final reward, I fell prey to dog-lust once again and bought an enchanting Gordon Setter puppy with the thought that I could keep her in my small Berkeley apartment. As beautiful as Roe but less adaptable, Leal soon found her way to that parental backyard, where she was much happier.
That lesson learned, I remained sensibly if sadly dogless until I had a husband, a house, and a bit of free time. As soon as my small daughters were old enough—say, two and four years old—we were blessed with Griselda, a standard poodle/Labrador cross who lived up fully to her name. She was patient, loving, obedient, tolerant, and had to my memory no flaws except the usual sad canine failing of a too-short lifespan. She was followed by Nicky, a wild and crazy black standard poodle whose adventuresome spirit took her early to disaster, and then by Natasha, a calmer black poodle who loved to camp but refused to swim. I have a picture in my mind of my husband in the lake, Natasha with her stiff poodle arms around his neck.
And then, one day, my older daughter came home and said, "Mom, I'm moving to New York City and I don't think I can take Emmitt." Emmitt Smith, her yellow Labrador, was then less than a year old. My response to her was "Fine. You can have him back within a year. Longer than that, he's ours for good." He is with us still, beautiful and brilliant by dog standards, with a repel-all-boarders bark, no nerves to speak of, a sense of humor, and the belief that there's no reason a seventy-pound dog should not lap-sit. Beyond a bit of arthritis and some hearing loss, the only shadow in his life at the moment is the presence of his "baby sister," three months old and in his view unnecessary. To us, she's protection against the misery of that sole, inevitable canine flaw.
Baby Dulcie, another yellow Lab, is almost unbearably cute and very much an example of her wonderful breed. She is curious, fearless, demanding of companionship, calculating of eye and disposition, and clearly born to carry stuff around. She promises to be another of our memorable friends, if only we can survive her puppyhood.
Postscript, a year later
The dogs (and their owners) are older now. Emmitt still gets around, but it's clear that his feet hurt and his legs and back are stiff; he occasionally stumbles when he tries to bound up the stairs. The expression on his face—Labrador retrievers have very expressive faces—might be that of a 75-year-old man with the same problems; the rude but accurate term for it is pissed-off. It's sad, but instructive, to watch him: we're all going there eventually.
Dulcie is late teen-age in dog-time, manageable 95 percent of the time but likely to explode once a day in what another Lab owner describes as "discharge" mode. This involves a mad, furniture-and-wall-banging dash up and down and around that lasts two or three minutes and then clicks off, poof. With that out of the way, she's the best-adjusted dog I've ever had, sure about what she wants but not inclined to push too hard, quick to retreat to a quiet corner when she senses trouble in the air. Corrected, she gives a white-edged roll of her eyes: Oops, sorry. Ignored, she doesn't whine or lean, but flops down flat with a loud sigh: Oh, well, never mind me. Cheerful, affectionate, willing to offer a paw or roll over on command although she clearly thinks these actions are silly, she's a joy and a hoot.
© Janet LaPierre.