My Life with Dogs, Part 2

My wife and I have owned cats. Cats work for a couple where both have to be at work nine to five. We started with her cat Bailey, an apple-head Siamese. He was calm, not terribly talkative, and only moderately affectionate. He was an outdoor cat. Next to our place for much of the time he was with us was a vacant lot full of brambles and that's where he liked to hide out. He did pretty well, though one psycho neighbor cat (both the neighbor and the cat) ripped him up pretty good one weekend. He recovered. After my Grey Tuxedo bugged out we talked for a bit about another to "keep Bailey company" and decided on an Abyssinian. Annie was much more fun than Bailey and very affectionate and alas, though she appeared to have short hair, was a real shedder. They got along okay and everything was copacetic. Later, after Bailey died, we got another cat, a male Tonkinese we named Timmy. The idea of dog was pretty much out of mind.

Then my wife had a long break from work that she decided to take fishing and reading by a river in Montana. Coincident with that, friends were going to be away traveling and my wife offered to take their rather large puppyish dog with her to Montana. So she ended up having a dog for a couple of months.

Meanwhile at home one Saturday I went to get the paper at the front door and was greeted by the cutest little dog, who went into a sit when I opened the door and just looked at me. Some kind of spaniel. She had no collar and tags, so I let her into the garage and set out some paper and water and just a little bit of dry cat food. I didn't think it would be a good idea to have her in the house with the two cats. Then I called Animal Control. It took them four hours to get to us. Each time I would check on the dog while I waited, she would go into a sit and look at me. She never made a sound.

When Animal Control finally arrived I told them that "If no one wants this dog, I want her." He said that he thought someone would be looking for her. "She's a Cavalier." Turned out she had been micro-chipped so they could find the owner; but for me it was the beginning of an investigation.

Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are a very interesting breed that is in some ways old and some very new. They are the dogs in the paintings of the Restoration period, hence the name for King Charles II. The characteristics seen in the pictures were bred out of the King Charles Spaniels over the years leading to the standard for the English Toy with its pushed in face. In the 1920s a man started looking for "Blenheims of the type" in the pictures from the Restoration, found some rejects from the King Charles Spaniel breeders and began to rebuild the breed. They almost didn't survive WW II in England--people could hardly feed themselves let alone pets--with only six at the end of the war from which all the current Cavalier King Charles Spaniels descend. They weren't recognized by the AKC until 1997, and have now become very popular, which may be unfortunate.

A few years later in the fall of 2003 I was laid off. My wife may have waited a somewhat respectable 24 hours or so before she cheerily said, "Good. Now we can get a dog."

We found Sunny that fall. Regis Olivia Sunlight Rose was the runt of a litter of six that a hobby breeder about an hour south had whelped. My wife had found an ad in the paper. It was pretty much love at first sight. She was a cutie. She wasn't perfect. She had an overbite that required having her baby lower canines pulled and her adult ones ground down, but it actually made her prettier with a slightly longer nose. She's been with us since.

We found a home for Annie the Abyssinian because we knew she would be a bit freaky about the dog, but Timmy stayed. We have some very cute pictures of the 13 week old puppy dancing around Timmy and the cat just staring at her. They have become great buddies and they often end up sharing the same blanket or corner of the couch. Timmy gets pretty bitched off when we take Sunny with us fishing or on vacation, and lets us know very loudly for a couple of days after we come back.

Sunny is very shy and very quiet. She can be not very great on a walk to a strange place, freezing up from time to time, but she loves people and seems to enjoy greeting other dogs of all sizes a lot. Interestingly, she seems to recognize her breed mates and other Cavalier owners have said their dogs do as well.

She's nine now and the life span of Cavaliers tends to be on the short side of nine to fifteen years. They have a propensity for heart problems and no matter how much breeders work to test that out of the lines, most will die from mitral valve disease. Knowing this we had talked about getting another but not too seriously until recently. But now I'm semi-retired and what work I do is from home, it began to make sense. We had a serious Europe trip to get done with first, so when we came back we started looking around for local breeders. One link led us to a fairly hard sell operation that despite its local name turned out to be national and they asserted that we could have "the puppy of our dreams" shipped to us in days. Gave me the creeps. Puppy mills are the most heartless of operations. they don't charge any less than reputable breeders but you have no idea what you are getting.

We found two breeders locally who had just had litters, so we went to visit. Both had very nice looking dogs and were especially interested in seeing if we were the kind of "parents" they were willing to have adopt a puppy. We passed muster at the first but explained to them that we had made another appointment with another breeder and would wait to decide. Turns out they knew the other breeder and were friends.

At the second breeder we were greeted by a literal cavalcade of Cavaliers. She had three generations in the house. Not counting the litter of four puppies there were around a dozen. They wandered around the living room, scrupulously clean by the way, greeting us and occasionally checking out a lap. We met the charming sire of many of the clan, Rodney, and the mom and pups; and then our hostess let in a couple more from outside. One of them, a young male headed straight for me, jumped up in my lap and lay on his back looking up at me dirty paws and all.

Then we find out that he was available, too. At nine months she was still looking for the right home for "KC." I was smitten, of course. KC jumped down and checked my wife out, but then he was right back in my lap after his owner mom had washed his dirty paws. We didn't decide in the moment but asked some questions and then promised to let her know. By the time we had finished the 30 minute drive home we had decided that we wanted him.

"Casey," which is what we will name him, has the kennel name Kid Curry or "KC," but we like spelling it out. We are really curious about how he will fit with Sunny and Timmy. He's quite sweet but clearly has a bit more energy than Sunny. At one point when we were visiting he was rolling around on the floor grappling with his cousin, Dallas. Dallas is being kept for show and has much more of an attitude than Casey, but he was staying right with her, mouth to mouth nipping and rolling, clearly in play. He comes home with us on Monday. Even though Sunny has been with us for nine years, it feels like my life with dogs is just beginning again.

My Life with Dogs, Part 1

The first dog in my life was a Lab-English Setter mix. I don't actually remember Bingo, but there were stories about him and I am told I cried when we got word that he had died. I was maybe four or five. Bingo had been the runt of a litter of 16 pups and was apparently the well-behaved exception to my father's usual choice in dogs. One story was told that on a night when they hadn't heard his usual one scratch at the door, my parents found him the next morning under a blanket of snow.

The next one, I remember. Lady was a Collie, the Lassie type not the working dog type. The old man had wanted to have the popular dog breed and the big long-haired Collies were the number one. And then old man went off to work and left his wife with two small children to care for the animal, which of course did not get enough exercise. She must have been a puppy mill type dog, but we got her when she was no longer a pup. She was high strung and eventually was put down after biting a couple of kids in the neighborhood.

A couple years later when I was eight or nine I remember a lengthy weekend drive in the family car when we ended up at some farm in the rural part of Long Island to pick up a jet black dog that turned out to be part Chow. He was built like a tank and had the black tongue. We got him home and I was told I'd be responsible to walk him. So dutifully I put him on leash, walked out the front door, and proceeded to be dragged face down along the sidewalk. My father was "going to put in a dog run," -- a cable between garage and house to clip the dog's lead to so he could move about the yard -- but for now he screwed an eyebolt into the corner beam of the garage and fastened a long chain. The dog went to the end of it and pulled and then went back to the garage and took a run. When he hit the end of the chain, choke collar and all, the heavy screw ripped out of the garage with a three inch thick chunk of wood. My father returned the dog the next day.

Then came a Beagle, when Beagles were all the rage. I don't even remember her name. She lasted about six months. She was an unspayed female who was a runner. She'd disappear and be found miles away. I suspect my mother put her foot down. This was just shortly before the divorce.

No more dogs for a while.

When I went to live with him again the summer I turned seventeen he was friends with a woman, actually a couple of women, who bred Dachshunds. I was going to be given a dog for my birthday. Great, just what I wanted. My father out of work, living on the income of his male "friend" with a seventeen year old son who didn't want to be there in a two room city apartment, and we were going to get a dog that I would "take care of." There you have the old man in a nutshell. Someone else was going to take care of the dog even if that someone else had a one hour bus commute to school.

A year and a half later Hermione (that was her name) started having weird skin problems with her skin scabbing up and sloughing off. I was instructed to "just take her to Angell Memorial," which was a free pet hospital. Repeated trips and various treatments later I came home to be told that he had taken her to be put down. Supposedly "my dog" and he makes this decision all by himself. Thanks, Dad.

No more dogs for a while.

When I met my first wife to be, her family had a Springer who was hefty and getting on--Portia--but she was the sweetest most well dispositioned thing. My father-in-law liked to take her for long walks in the woods and later I was allowed to take her pheasant hunting. Portia was a natural in the field. She would work a field thoroughly and aggressively. In tall cover she would leap in the air every once and a while to see where you were and would take hand directions. When she put up a bird, if you didn't get it, she would let you know her disappointment. Lovely dog. She would lead to my first screw up like the old man.

We had cats. Mostly Siamese but then some litters that were not intended. Learned that lesson. Then at some point I was doing a second part-time job in a mall and there was a pet store and they had Springer puppies. Puppy mill dogs for sure, but I brought one home for "the kids," and proceeded to waltz away from the responsibility like the old man. The dog, unfixed, got knocked up and had the pups in our powder room, where they stayed until they were old enough to be adopted out. Fortunately whatever the mix was it was cute enough and we were able to place them; but cleaning up that bathroom was a nightmare. I did do that at least. Then we had the dog fixed and found a home for her.

Divorced, there were no more dogs for me. I had a couple of cats when I met my current wife. She had two as well, so we each agreed to give one up. Her gentle old Siamese, Bailey, freaked out my Grey Tuxedo, which then decided to leave us. He adopted a family down the street who were happy to have him. We talked about having a dog but we were both working. It didn't make sense.

During one trip to the shore on a gray rainy Saturday we were greeted in the parking lot by a black Lab female, who proceeded to walk with us on the beach. She did all the good things that "your dog" would do with you on a walk. It was almost like she had adopted us. I was enchanted. When we got back to the car, she gave me a nuzzle and then just trotted off. I think we were probably a long line of temporary owners that she made use of when her own were too busy for her.

I like dogs. I love their unrestrained affection, how they love to be rubbed, their incredible attentiveness. I probably would have had one a long time ago if my life with them hadn't been part and parcel of a life I really needed to get away from. But there's more to the story.

Being a Man

I was at one point researching and writing about the construction of masculine identity. A couple of the more ardent feminists of my acquaintance had a bit of a bird about that, but I think it was because I was early on in my investigations and not able to articulate what I was doing. They took it to be an anti-feminist inquiry. This is natural in our world where we seem to run to adversarial stances when trying to deal with the issues we struggle with. It is kind of ingrained.

It's ingrained enough that in one acting class I took the instructor made a point that we introduce our comments during discussions of our observations with the word "and" rather than "but" so that we would be adding our contributions rather than offering alternative views. And that's not a bad idea when we are investigating matters of the human spirit.

My study was based on some threads in contemporary research about how identity, who we are, is actually constructed in a narrative that we tell about ourselves, and that in the case of men, that it evolves over a lifetime. I'm sure the same thing happens with women, but as much as I would like to I don't know women's experience from the inside. I know my own and I happen to be a man, perhaps a bit atypical, but a heterosexual white male of a certain age.

There's a lot of injunctive stuff about "being a man." We have the "stand up guy" phrase. We have the macho images from popular culture. We have layer upon layer of role expectations much of which we as men impose on ourselves as much as anything. We have the reactions that my feminist acquaintances were expecting to be part my inquiry, the unwillingness to appreciate the lot of women that was much of the male response to second wave feminism. And of course we have the jokes. Men don't come off well in the cartoons or in sitcoms.

Then, of course, we have the demonstrated stupidity of men in the behavior of prominent figures who have their sexual peccadilloes exposed for all to see. Funny how that doesn't seem to happen with women. The women who get negatively exposed are exposed for bitchiness, like Leona Helmsley.

I think part of this has to do with the injunctions. Be in control. Be strong. Be brave. Be smart. Be capable. Be rich. Take care of your woman, your family. Impregnate. Don't back down. Be tough. Do I need to go on? The result is the cartoonish character of a "Rambo," all muscle and craftiness, inarticulate, bent on payback and getting even.

In parts of our city this year "being a man" has been about having a gun and being willing to use it to settle disputes regardless of who happens to be in the line of fire. For those who know who the shooters are, it is about not ratting out someone. For our cops it appears to be "kicking the Mexican piss" out of someone down on the sidewalk who, it turns out, was an innocent bystander; and then stonewalling the Department of Justice investigation into whether the local police force exhibits racist behaviors.

I am coming to believe that all those testosterone ridden, macho stereotypes of "manliness" are in fact not "manly" at all. They are the straight line extension of the bullying ethos of male adolescence into adulthood. It is playground bullshit, if you'll pardon the phrase.

What has driven this conclusion to the front of my consciousness--it has always been there, but in the background--is what has happened recently and over the last several years to a special friend, someone I have considered to be one of my two best lifetime friends.

A number of years ago, six or seven, my friend had an aneurism that paralyzed him and almost killed him. He was in his fifties but arguably in his late prime years. He made a commitment that he was going to run again and ski again and set about the hard work of rehabilitating himself. I hadn't been in a lot of contact with him. The call where I found out about his stroke was over a year after the event, but we started talking about once every month or so after that.

What was so about him was that he never wavered in his commitment to heal, and never seemed to me at least to get down on himself about it or to claim any kind of victimhood; and he remained the kind of friend who would listen to what was going on with you and offered support and clarity in the conversation.

For the last few weeks I had called and left messages for him on a few occasions and not gotten a response. I was beginning to worry and I had no other way to get in touch. He's single and lives alone. On the off chance I sent an email last night.

Today I got a call from a friend of his. She let me know that he had had a series of difficult medical events--a spinal bleed that required reducing blood thinners, then another stroke--but that he was alive but in a round the clock nursing care facility. His leg is paralyzed again but he can move his arm and is able to speak. He has lost so much core strength that he cannot move himself and requires assistance and a hoist to get out of bed for physical therapy. He is extremely unlikely to ever live independently again, which is my worst nightmare.

What she said next is what prompted me to write this. First she said that he told her to find my name in his rolodex and to call me. She was about to do that when she saw my email. Then she was at pains to make clear that despite everything he was in good spirits, and I could almost see his shock of red hair and a smile on his face as she described him and how alert and present he was.

I thought to myself and said to her that "he has always seemed to me to know how to be a man even in the most difficult of circumstances."