Animal Love, or How You Know When He's the Right Guy

We were raised to stop the car for lost dogs, people with broken-down cars, and the random, fiery small-plane crash. Okay, so the last was a one-time occurrence, and the second, I suppose, goes on a case-by-case system, but as Disney would tell the world much later in my life, all dogs go to heaven. The Rainbow Bridge is hard science, not a pretty little myth to soothe grieving animal lovers.
In my parents' house, there is a chair referred to as the Dog Recliner. Not only because a succession of three of our own dogs have claimed it as dog turf, but because all dogs seem to know our house is Dog-Centered. One day, my mom opened the front door to find a strange dog (not odd, we just hadn't met him before) standing on the porch. When she opened the screen door, he came in and jumped onto the aforementioned chair and got comfortable. Of course, he was sent or taken home, but being lost, he knew right where to go. Another secret of the universe Disney let out was The Twilight Bark, the news feed among dogs since...well, since there were only 101 Dalmatians. I'm a firm believer.
A friend and I caught and brought home a chihuahua who bit. A vicious little grandma-dog with a plaid collar but no tags--what else was I to do? After he caught on to the two-person trick of one providing distraction while the other waited for just the right moment drop the towel over his head so we could take him outside, my dad switched to thick leather gloves and the towel. Of course, he couldn't be taken by Animal Control on the weekend.
Wasn't it only a year before that my friend Matt and I had met a cop at Animal Control with a big, gray blue-eyed girl we called Wolfy, only to have The Man put her in a holding cell and switch the lights back off, saying someone would be there in the morning? What a terrible betrayal to poor Wolfy; she'd trusted us and we turned her in like Good Nazis.
So my parents and I stuck it out with that little fucker of a chihuahua until Monday. When my mom talked to AC, she made it clear that if the little fucker wasn't claimed, we'd take him. Biting dogs can't be adopted out according to Them. According to my family, you can always wear full-body chain-male suits (you have to adapt your lifestyle a little when you have dogs in the family, right?), but you can't let a biting dog be put to sleep. As evidence of a benevolent God, the little fucker was claimed before two days went by. We all exhaled.
Then we went back to being bitten and snubbed by Mopsy, the family dog who was smarter than us, and to cleaning the carpet twice daily when Hank, my bad-ass, territory-marking, ten-pound poodle left yet another yellow splotch. (I'll never forget the first thing my mom said when I walked up to her with my gentle-souled but somewhat literal piss-ant puppy in my arms and said we were moving in. Her face went ashy and fell, her eyes went flat and hopeless, and she said, "But I just got three thousand dollar carpeting."
It was solid blue for a few weeks, but of course, it soon took on a sort of marled blue and yellow-green look. Hank also had the distinction of being the entire neighborhood's opportunity to please St. Francis: he went out for an unscheduled dash about twice a week. Both dogs got red collars in their Christmas stockings--with their names and phone numbers embroidered on them. Being the most mild-mannered dog in the world, and happily approaching all strangers and pit bulls with jaws afroth, it was no surprise that once my parents heard him barking from the backyard of a couple who had just told them they hadn't seen him. My cousin Mark actually asked one holiday if he could take him home. I think he was as serious as his bank accounts, but Hank and I didn't do well when we were separated for long. I dated a guy who didn't want "the dog" to come with when we went camping. Neither could he get his mind around our hard and fast agreement between a dog and his girl that I would never be gone for over two weeks.
It should have been apparent right then that I'd end up burning black candles and his picture under a waning moon, putting down the hoodoo on him in the end. Come to think of it, that was the same guy who didn't want to stop and help the lost rot puppy who clearly didn't know the street yet.
In retrospect, of course, I shake my head and wonder that I could have been so blind, and if he has gone completely insane yet from having that same dream every night. Mostly, though, I think about Hank. Fondly, now, after a very open-minded woman named Julee has grief-counseled me to this point. My dad clear-coated the last of the acrylic-paint footprints he'd left on my bedroom floor when he blithely walked across my friend Carol's painting-in- progress.
The current neighborhood issue is our new next-door neighbor, the shepherd next door. He's an outside dog. Apparently, this is still legal. My father went to the dog's man and explained that in this neighborhood, dogs live inside. One neighbor fed him; one watered him; AC has been called in, but no one has gotten anywhere with them. My mom, who is home all day, has become obsessed with the dog next door. She has trouble sleeping if the weather isn't cool enough or warm enough, and of course, about his lack of a comfy bed. It's like Tillie Olsen, Jack London, and Charlotte Gilman got together and wrote her into a corner, the poor woman.
Real Men stop traffic for families of baby ducks; they return baby birds to their nests; they dive under their decks and retrieve ground squirrels from the mouth of the damned cat. Even my sister knows this, and we all think there's something missing in the poor girl that she doesn't enjoy doing normal things like, say, watch a couple of squirrels play silly buggers (that's what my boyfriend calls their dating games) for half an hour.
I'm moving out of my parents' house (time #127.3B) pretty soon, with my boyfriend and the head-eater, as we fondly refer to the damned cat since the bunny incident last year. Apparently there was an ear left, but much like one of the fantastic horror movies we so love, no brain. I couldn't look, but then, I'm not even really Catholic and I wholeheartedly genuflect when I see carnage like I did today in the middle of the street--both ears were still standing straight up. How do I know this man is a keeper? To me there's no question about it: a half-grown river cat showed up on his doorstep, so he took him in, rocked him like a baby, named him after the most dismal town he's ever traveled through, petted him while he ate, and settled in to a life of being scratched and bitten, keeping constant vigil against fauna and property destruction, and swearing a lot.
I can't wait 'til we get the puppy; I'm sure that with enough swearing, the damn cat will learn to love the puppy. (Wait--that's a problem; he'll have to be taken aside for that. You can't swear in front of a puppy. Or smoke.) Of course, I'm saving up as many personal and vacation days as possible, because my job's p/maternity leave doesn't cover dogs. It's the one really backward thing about the place, aside from not having the bring-your-dog-to-work policy yet. My supervisor brings her preteen daughter in to work sometimes; Dorothy Parker took her dog everywhere. I can't get my mind around this archaic thinking, so I'll just let it rest.
I think we should adopt a girl. Then she can be the flower girl, and the head-eater can run off with the ring until my love inevitably chases him down before he swallows it.