more thoughts on dog love

Lately I've been really hung up on something I ended up calling, by need of a blanket name to cover all its possible manifestations and ramifications, "dog love." It started in an email to my professor friend, who is caught in a tangled father-figure relationship with one of his students. The student bites him, and he took this as a betrayal of his loyalty. Somehow, as all questions centering on love and loyalty do, my answer spiraled its way back to my friend Rachel. My mom said the other day that sometimes I seem more concerned with her than with my own family, and I told her the truth: I don't differentiate between Rachel and family. My professor friend wrote me of an inner circle that he lets very few people enter, and Rach and I opened those lines more than half our lives ago. My own sister, on the other hand, is almost eight years older than me. She has Always Been There, and I blithely and unfairly take for granted that that cannot change. But I remember life before my best friend, and taking her out of the equation is an unfathomable horror--I imagine it would be something like the way it felt the day I found my bedroom at my parents' house emptied, the floor covered in butcher paper, walls already half-painted the decades of scribbled phone numbers and chalk drawings away. I had a first love once who died; it was terrible and I was twenty and lapsed appropriately into madness for months. I backed myself into a corner, snarling. My family sniffed, stung at the rejection, I'd imagine, then stood back and kept watch from a safe distance. Rachel was, for some reason, not a threat to me, and thus she spent months at my side, baring her teeth as needed, following on my dangerous, thoughtless jaunts into the street only to watch for oncoming traffic. In short, it was some pretty heavy shit for a nineteen year old girl to commit herself to, but she did so unflinchingly. Once, in trying to describe her philosophy on people, which may have seemed cold to a stranger, she said something like, "I know who I love, and I love who I love." She punctuated the statement with a shrug that seemed to say and everyone else be damned, for all I care.
She and my sister don't much like each other, I don't think. They're as different as a Kandinsky and a mathematical algorythm, and I am their only common ground. That's okay. Now that we're supposed grown-ups, each chooses words carefully regarding the other, and the low growl waiting in my throat never comes to fruition. My mother, being Alpha in most things, speaks her mind freely on all matters, and is continually shocked when her daughters snarl. That's okay, too, though I wish she wouldn't take these things personally. I'm not very good at staying with a pack, probably haven't been since I was very young, evicted from many in classrooms and schoolyards. So in a world that seems to respect things I don't really understand, like professionalism and degrees, I look for the smart people who understand loyalty at its most fundamental level.
When I first met my boyfriend's dad, I thought him unbearably cold and reserved, and resented the uneasy old-school male inability of he and his son to speak their love for one another. Then he needed surgeries, and I saw my boyfriend's snarling cease and turn to dutiful daily hospital visits, where they had next to nothing to talk about unless I came along armed with what sadly remains (for the large part) the feminine gift of chatting. I saw then that this man I'd written off as hard and cold was sitting impatiently in a hospital robe that didn't conceal the rarely-seen tattoos from his other life as a Marine at Khe-Sanh, waiting for nothing more than to get home to Flane, the old devoted collie mutt he'd rescued years before (and kept his odd moniker to avoid confusion).
This past Christmas, my pack howled when I insisted I was spending Christmas morning with this pack and not my own. As the only woman in the household on a holiday, the men stepped back and let me arrange the scene to my specifications. There was a bit of grumbling when at the last minute I realized we didn't have a camera, and insisted that Ryan and I go to the gas station and buy a disposable one. Ryan's dad, by this time, had come back healthier than he'd been in years, but none of us knew that it would be Flane's last Christmas, that in fact, he wouldn't see the new year. It was a good day for both of the old boys, and Flane and his dad figured prominently, their unflappable love caught in action, my favorite a shot of Flane leaping almost to his dad's full height to reach the amazing candy-cane shaped rawhide in his hand. The cat even got involved that day, delighting in attacking the packages I'd spent hours wrapping and decorating.
Flane went fast after that, and I suppose had any of us known, our neighbor Harley, the sweet neglected Shepherd, would have found a new home here instead of in the garden of St. Francis (call it the Rainbow Bridge, if you prefer), and I would have continued in my role as Wendy in a house of Lost Boys. But Flane's death was terrible, and though he was old, shockingly painful. Ryan spent a night sleeping on the living room floor with him, and on his last night, though Flane and I never shared the deep love he had with Ryan or his dad, I stayed up all night watching him, trying to coax and coo him into calm, the way my mother taught me when, in fourth grade, my pet pigeon went into a terrible panic over a thunderstorm and I watched as "that bird" was brought into the house and my mother put aside her allergies and distaste until her cooing was in sync with the bird's. My family, aside from my sister, is not a deeply religious one, but I think that we must fall under the protection of my beloved St. Francis, for if my parents have little else in common, they share and have passed on to their children a responsibility to any animal in need. Strange dogs, when lost, come to their door--one is particularly remembered for climbing into the dog recliner and crying when my mom opened the door to see what he'd come for. My dad had a squirrel, much to the outrage of the great Mopsy and Hank, the two dogs who left permanent holes in my heart when they died. The squirrel sat on his knee and ate from his hand. She sat on the railing by the door and leapt when someone came out. In her finest hour of insane dog love for my dad, she hooked all her claws into the screen door and waited for him, looking like a Christian desperate to be martyred.
Dog love can be learned, I realized this morning when Maggie, Ryan's new 11-month old rescued sister climbed onto my lap, oblivious to the fact that she's fast approaching my size. In this neighborhood and in my parents', both mine in a sense, I suppose, the biggest problem is not the occaisional broken car window. Doors can stay unlocked all day without much concern. The problem is a faction of humans who lack dog love. I have no use for these people, and I wonder if the day will come when their own children feel the same way about them, about everyone. Harley died because of a lack of it, and I suspect that monsters rather than stewards of the earth, as St. Ben called it, are being created in the house where he lived.
Today is a vacation day for me, and as much as I'd like to see my mom or my sister, or even my pre-teen niece, they've made it clear I'm unwelcome to come into their lairs and pick up strep germs. So that leaves me and Maggie. She's sulking because Ryan and her dad are at work; I'm sulking because I can't see any of my family, and Rachel had a baby yesterday and she's a thousand miles away.
There is a woman in this neighborhood Ryan's dad bristles at, because by all appearances, she returns and exchanges dogs like they were an impulse buy from Nordstrom's. Maggie was a Serious Decision: Jud Parker, for all his quirks, understands dog love as well as anyone I've ever met, and he looked for her for weeks, visiting shelter after shelter, before he finally met the girl they were calling "Beulah" at the Anti-Cruelty Society one Saturday in February. She didn't come home that day--in fact, that Sunday I saw Father Ted (appropriately and "coincidentally" a professor of life science) outside my building at work and chased him down to ask that he say a prayer to St. Francis for the two of them to find each other. Maggie came home that night.
So she woke me today with the same delight and wonder as she always does, though I am, at best, her tertiary person. And I was filled with wonder at another day, though last night it didn't seem like much to me. Then, for the first time, I thought about Maggie, as Maggie might think. She was adopted out and returned twice before the steadfast man came to bring her Home, permanently. Ryan was getting ready for work as I held her on my lap working at managing the excitement-biting, and it came to me suddenly that she might be wondering how long she'd get to stay here before she went back to the shelter. "Do you think she ever thinks..." I asked Ryan.
He isn't prone to dramatic exclamations, but I heard something like horror in his voice when he said, "Dear God, I hope not."
Rachel adopted Ava, a young boxer not long ago--her first rescued dog, and commented to me how appreciated she made her feel, in a way that other dogs brought home as wide-eyed puppies hadn't. Ava, I'm sure, is confused by the one-day old human who came home with Rachel today, but I feel certain that she'll come to understand: I love who I love, and he is one of ours.
Ryan wrote me a song when we'd known each other only a few months, a sort of traditional Irish bar piece called "The Girl Who Brings Home Stray Dogs." I laughed at it, not because it wasn't good, but maybe because its truth was too raw to face. Ryan and I are not having fun right now; we're both preoccupied and tired of everything: we're both waiting for spring in both the literal and figurative senses. That's okay. No one is leaving. Maybe my dog love over time has called up in him that part of his father that he was so wary of giving to me. Just as Maggie will learn a little more each day with the consistent love of her dad, that she is home for good. That not all people believe in returns and exchanges, even when things get rough.