For use: Friday, April 8, 2001

mfinley.com: "Poodle Update"

by Michael Finley
Computer User Columnist

I have gotten some mail the past couple of years, although less than a metric ton, asking why I never write about my dog Beauregard any more. After all, I took a year to write a biography of him when he was only two years old, and his life was still largely ahead of him. Why did I stop?

Well, I thought I had worn out his welcome among you all, writing so much about a dog. Even I got tired of trying to see things through his eyes. Especially when it dawned on me that he was no longer a puppy, and what I saw was all I was going to get. Despite his coat going blue-gray with time, and the wisdom of the years supposedly attaching itself to him, Beau remained Beau. Imperious, impractical, intolerant of any male dog claiming to be his peer, and the passive victim of frequent, violent emotional hijackings.

If you were in the market for a new best friend, those would not be the characteristics you would seek out. Yet we are stuck with one another, like Laurel & Hardy, for the duration.

Beau doesn't really hate Bob the mailman. It's just a sudden whim that overtakes him. But that will be cold comfort to Bob's widow.

His problem is that he is hopelessly dominant with other male dogs. He goes into social situations with an immense chip on his shoulder, that he must make others aware of his natural status above them. There is no chit-chat or affable tail-wagging. He encounters them tail erect and unsmiling. Do you agree to my terms or not? If a dog is too young to sign on the line, he will get growled at, and maybe pinched.

I feel sorry for him. Imagine never feeling free to be a mensch, or whatever the canine equivalent of that is. You can never just say, Hi there. Say, you had soup for lunch, didn’t you? Instead the heavy obligation to impose the proper hierarchy of things, with oneself as top turtle.

Everyone with a nice dog looks at Beau and me as if we were the distilled embodiment of evil, like I require my dog to be an asshole. It was worse back when he had the poodle hairdo. Once, sporting a full pompadour and cuffs, he threw two German shepherds on their backs and lingered with dripping fangs over their throats, their astonished owner asked why my dog did that. "He doesn't know what he looks like," was all I could come up with.

What none of them can know -- you have heard this about everyone who ever went crazy shooting -- is that he remains lovely company when we are alone. Besides scrambling the brains of interlopers, he lives to do but one thing, and that is to follow me from room to room, for as much of my life as he is permitted to live.

When I work, he sleeps on his plaid pillow. He is formidable at this, sleeping 15-17 hours every day. He can travel by car 400 miles without once whimpering to be let out. But he has to be in the caravan. If he sees me loading the car for a weekender, he finds a way to shoehorn himself into that car, even if I have loaded it with broken window glass. And when I start the key, and he knows he is included, he licks me in furious, passionate gratitude.

There is a sense which my marriage to Rachel is a sham. We are both so busy, we sometimes see one another only in passing, kissing at the curb. My real marriage is with Beauregard, who goes everywhere with me. For us to be closer we would have to be Thai twins. Today he is going to the radiology lab for my six-month MRI. When they pull me out of the tube, he will be curled up in the rear of the station wagon. He will never have been anxious about my return. Beau is not just faithful to me, he has deep faith in me. This perfection can be a burden. But I do hate to let him down.

On those rare occasions when I do have to leave him for an hour or two, like a business meeting, the greeting I receive puts the lie to the poodle myth of detached intellect. This is the emotional hijacking. His joy at seeing me is so boundless, Rachel and I fear he will hurl himself through a door and be halved.

This past week, I took Beau down to the airport dog park, so he can work his magic on the other dogs. Lately, I have come up with a somewhat successful solution -- every time he acts beastlily, intimidating other dogs, I clap a leash on him for five full minutes, and hold him close.  It sure beats reading passages from Dale Carnegie to him.

Today, unaccountably, he is sweetness and sunshine with the other dogs. He wags his tail in a stiff, tight arc. He even proffers a little grin from time to time. It is a Beau I would like to see more of. In the space of an hour, I haven’t had to intervene to save another dog from 20 hours on the couch.

Then, suddenly, a young male Rottweiler shows up and ambles over to Beau. The new dog seems unreliable. My antennae are tingling, so I put Beau on the leash as a precaution. To no avail -- the big dog suddenly swings toward Beau and sinks a major crunch through his foreleg. The skin splits and blood starts seeping down Beau's skinny arm. Beau can’t believe it. The other dog's owner -- it's his first visit to the dog park -- denies that it happened.

Maybe Beau's karma has returned to bite him in the arm. The next week will be rotten, as he gets stitched up, unstitched, and learns to walk anew on an unsteady limb. Maybe it will constitute a lesson: Bite not lest ye be bitten.

Who am I kidding. I see him sleeping on his pillow, so vain, so obdurate. He's an impossible dog, and I suffer the dismissive judgments other people make, even when they are unspoken.

But I also know Beauregard is fundamentally innocent. He has no plan in mind except to be with me, as long as he can.

I'll get you through this, old fellow. Stick with me, we'll walk it through together.

 

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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