A recent weekend in Richmond, VA playing ball -- endlessly -- with two darling dogs has me thinking about canine love.
It's been a very long time since I have had dogs in my life. Like 25 years. But when having dogs was in my life, it was my LIFE. I worked on a pet food account at my NY ad agency and created the greatest campaign of my brilliant career for a dry dog food. My live-in boyfriend and I had four rescue dogs -- two Newfoundlands, a golden retriever and a mutt. That's a lotta dogs. We loved it. But we had no kids and we lived in an exurb of New York where they could cavort in a large dog run all day, each with their own cozy dog house and galvanized buckets of water. We doted on them and they on us. It was a mobius strip of relationship -- walk, feed, scoop poop, pet, brush, lick, love, nuzzle, play -- in endless repetition, that wouldn't unravel.
I don't miss the dog hair. I don't miss the doggie smell or the muddy feet. I don't miss having to come home and walk them.
But I've never stopped missing the unconditional love of a dog. It's utterly unlike the complex love that came next for me -- the love of children, which someone wiser than me recently called "an exercise in unrequited love." Sometimes loving your kids really does feel that way. A love so deep and dangerous, so hard and irrational, so joyous and wondrous, that it truly makes doggie love feel small. A love that ebbs and flows and is sometimes given and withheld. It's the real deal.
Why then, did the dumb optimism of a dog "get" to me this weekend? Why did that sweet sunny retriever, always ready to play, always soft and smiling, tawny and tender, seem like a proof text for the existence of God, a manifestation of grace. And I really do mean that in the Christian sense of the word.
Brewster came into my room one morning with a stuffed toy held tenderly in his soft retriever mouth. Then he dropped a tennis ball at my feet and cocked his head and gave me that that come hither look. Why did it melt me? Maybe because I'd been in serious conversation with some friends who have and love dogs. These are mainly single people -- terrific people -- but they don't seem to be able to sustain long lasting human relationships. Pets are easy. Along with abundant love, they bring responsibility and structure to your life.
People are hard. They can hurt you. They can leave you. They can speak. Like dogs they also bring abundant love, responsibility and structure to life. They don't come to you with toys in their mouth or drop a tennis ball at your feet inviting you to play. Indeed the teenage human I live with is more often moody and mercurial than sunny and chatty. But I love him with a depth and dimension no dog can ever provide.
Am I going to get a dog again? Sigh. Nuh uh.
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