Meditations on Bringing Home a Dog

<p style=”clear: both”>How is it something can have been missing and you don’t even realize it was missing until it comes into your life and you startle, “So that’s what was missing!”

All of these years I’ve gently (I hope) tolerated other people’s dogs, hopefully not projecting too much forbearance, since I wasn’t a dog person. Raven and I could almost be defined by our not being dog people, particularly since both of our sets of parents were so very much in love with their dogs, and our childless siblings paid such keen and loving attention to animals, even the brother whose professional and traveling life makes keeping a pet impossible. We had our cat who, though she is more or less indifferent to our presence, we like having around; still petting her was awkward for us, uncomfortable for her.

And now there’s this dog. Baldr. And I am surprised at the lift I feel inside of myself every time I glance at him. Like, I just got it. This is what people have been talking about when they speak of their love for their animals. He lights up for me, and trails behind me wherever I go, like my own private canine entourage. Settles on my feet when I stand in front of the sink doing dishes. Curls up on the couch next to my desk when I am writing in the morning so I can just extend my hand and scrunch up the extra skin on the top of his head while murmuring how fantastic an animal he is to him. So it is like kids, the feeling you have is completely different when it’s your own you’re talking about.

The ways it’s like the kids are startling, I admit reluctantly. Before he came home I privately had opinions about people who compared having a dog to having a kid. But here it is after a week and we filter contradictory advice, we struggle to pay attention to anything else when he’s around, as we need to check to make sure he’s not getting in trouble about every thirty seconds, I’m misplacing keys as I haven’t since Rainer was a baby. We are seduced by all the products that exist to make up for our inadequacies as dog owners (Raven is not allowed to go to the giant pet store alone anymore) and I struggle a little with the etiquette of the playgroup-like dynamics at the dogpark because I only just graduated from having to finesse the playground moms. I melt watching my husband with the dog lying on his chest, and find it perfectly sweet that he will spend hours researching questions about dog care on the internet. And I feel like I have been opened up, made vulnerable to the world in a new way, and it’s okay.

So I admit to some doubt I had about myself before the dog, that perhaps I was insensible to these feelings, that there was some defect in me. I remember my sadness reading Nabokov’s description of how music leaves him cold. This sadness isn’t rational. Nabokov is dead. Who knows what compensatory pleasures he had — that maybe the synesthesia enabled him so that visual beauty could trigger for him what I feel listening to Beethoven. Or maybe my pleasure listening to Beethoven is dwarfed by the pleasure Baldr experiences on smelling whatever he smells in that clump of grass when we’re out walking.

Raven was quoting some CDC estimates that one in 110 children in the United States, one in 70 boys, has an autism spectrum disorder. Given the population my kids are running with, our peer group of nerds and geeks and people in computer and internet technology fields it feels endemic. But I keep wondering what such a label would mean to someone a hundred years ago. Sort of like anxiety and depression, how much were they invented and how much were they just labelled better. And I talk carefully about these things because in the individual, anecdotal level these things are very real and clear and indisputable, but I want to think about what they mean at a cultural level. And how it suddenly seems like we are preoccupied with a normative, prescriptive idea of how people should feel, should respond emotionally in a way that is without historical precedent.

And this thing occurs to me that part of this normative idea of how we should feel comes at a time when we are surrounded by intense emotional manipulation in advertising, and, oh, the movies I go to where it feels like these manipulations have been substituted for art, for thoughtful writing, for powerful acting: the juxtaposition of images is a manipulation, and I’m wary of saying it’s definitely something other than capital-A Art (which I would stay away from, on principle) except that I can tell the hollowness by the empty feeling a couple of hours later. So if we build a culture on emotional manipulation, someone who feels DIFFERENTLY is somehow threatening.

But maybe something else. You know the saddest Star Trek episodes are where Data cannot feel the way he observes everyone around him feeling. But isn’t it necessary he have this one weakness when he is so much stronger, faster, smarter and generally immortal than all of his shipmates. This flaw makes him tragic rather than resentable. And to live with the unprecedented possibility of thinking machines makes it so the gulf between mere thinking machines and human feeling becomes more important than ever. Perhaps, even, this is exacerbated by materialism: if one is skeptical of a ‘soul’ then the capacity for feeling becomes extraordinarly important as a way of giving meaning to our brief human lives. So we build up a cultural anxiety, defining our humanity with this normative notion of human feeling. And my puppy is reduced to a Turing test.

Or not. Sometimes it’s me being tested. The patience when I have to clean up after him again, the willingness to set boundaries now so that as he gets bigger and harder to control he will be a polite dog we can live with (even though it’s so cute now when he puts his paws and nose on the dining room table.) The letting go of some of the need for control and order, living with white hair on the couch and some mud on the floor. I think of how animals in the movies sense the bad guy when no one else can, right, and I think I had secretly suspected that our cat’s disdain for me was this Picture of Dorian Gray-like sign of some hidden truth about me that nobody else knew. So the dog’s faith in me feels extraordinary. And I try to feel what I feel as honestly as I can: plenty of times in this last week I’ve been exhausted, overwhelmed, wondered if we were really ready for this. And yet, there is the lift I feel looking at him, the joy of watching him bound ahead of me on the sidewalks, his leash in one of the boys’ hands.