by Michael Finley Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Finley
Beau was nearly a year old now. Fully grown physically, but mentally, still quite young. He was as much a mystery to me as ever, with his shifting moods and personalities, a hostile maniac one moment, a lovable clown the next.
We took the same walk through the neighborhood as ever, but I noticed that there were many changes among the dog and human population.
Do you remember Reggie, the fox terrier? His family decided they could not keep him, that their house was just too0 busy with four kids to do justice to a little dog. So they handed him over to another family, a block away. Freaked out by his transfer, Reggie did poorly in the new household. He chewed the wrong things, he messed in the wrong places, and worst of all, he bit someone. He had had none of these problems at his original home, but they were deemed intolerable by his new family, who had him destroyed.
Barney, the gouty beagle whose owner ushered him away from Beau, disappeared. I never found out what his precise fate was, but I imagine he got sick and died.
Ginger, the funny boxer beau loved to shimmy with, never became the breeding dog her family planned. She became quite broad in the back. She was still cute, but she was no longer handsome. Worse, she developed a malignant tumor on her back, which left a divot of scar when it was removed. She was spayed, and is now just a house dog like Beau.
Some dog stories took a strange turn. Cobi and Sonja, Beau's best friends, cooled toward him after his neutering. Whatever it was that he had before the surgery, he no longer had after it. Sonja became positively hostile to him, preventing him from entering the house. Noelle and I remained friends, but with the dog thing no longer working, we saw less of each other.
Mango, the golden who seemed to share the same spark as Beau, seemed to lose his spark after he was neutered. Neutering seems to take a heavy toll on golden retrievers. Basil, the other golden in our neighborhood, continued to exhibit his customary personality deficit.
I now, belatedly, came to understand why so many dog owners, seeing Beau down the street, hurried their dogs away. It was not because they were party poopers, but because their dogs were like Beau - they were willing to fight to establish dominance. They had been embarrassed too many times, and did not want to be embarrassed again.
But the saddest story involved the two Samoyeds, Sophie and Bear. Both were angels and very childlike, but Bear, age 8, looked quite ferocious. And he was said to be part wolf. One day he got off his rope and chased the neighbor's cat. Both Walter, his owner, and the cat's owner looked on in horror as bear caught the cat and tore it apart and ate it. Walter cried out to stop, until it was too late. Bear never responded to the command, and thereby sealed his fate.
"I couldn't have a dog that would not respond," Walter told me. "Sop I took him down to the hospital, and we sat, and I fed him his favorite food, raw beef, and I stroked him and sang to him as the injection went in, and he lay down and died."
"That must have been so hard," I told him.
He nodded, tearing up again. "I blubbered for days."
A statelier death awaited the noble Sherlock, 13-year-old bloodhound and veteran of a thousand hunts, and constant prowler of Poodlevania. His owner Bob claimed there was not a better nose in the Americas. And I had seen him with my own eyes, and he was truly magnificent, with his long flanks, 300 pounds of defined musculature, and the face of a thousand sorrows. In my life I never saw a more dignified, impressive, lovely-hearted creature.
One day, following a week of 95-degree days, Bob found him in his bed, the mighty heart stilled by the heat.
Poor Bob - he loved that dog like a giant bride. His solemn dutifulness was the perfect counterbalance to Bob's inventiveness and wit. I tried looking up his name in the phone book, to tell Bob how sorry I was, and how great Sherlock was. But I couldn't find a listing.
I was having a beer with the Morrisons. We told jokes, and then I sighed, and said I was worried about Beauregard. I'd taken him for several walks that day, including a nice long one down by the river. I even stopped at the Dairy Queen and shared a medium vanilla cone with him, taking turns licking. But now he still seemed to emit an aura of dissatisfaction, maybe even depression.
"All he did all afternoon was sit on his beanbag chair and roll his eyes," I said. "I hope he's OK. Maybe he's bored."
"Bored?" John said. "That dog gets as much stimulation in a week as I get in my whole life."
"Well, he's a pedigreed animal, John." John concedes the point.
"He's used to a little action. I know he'd like to be out all the time, but I have work I have to do. I suppose he is kind of spoiled."
Both John and Noelle lurched forward, spewing beer and coughing. Noelle clapped John on the back to get him breathing again.
"What? What?" I asked. Married people have these little jokes that outsiders never get.
I could still walk, but I could no longer run, and I especially could no longer do the pivoting, scrimmage game that Beau loved to play. Instead of chasing him with my glove or hat or scarf in his mouth, I could only stand and watch him tease me. We still went on morning walks, but they were limping, desultory affairs. A little of the light in our relationship together grew dimmer.
By Christmas it was apparent the meniscus wouldn't heal by itself, and I would need surgery to correct the tear. The last walks I took with Beau were quite painful - occasionally my knee would lock up, or I would slip on the ice and force the joint to hyperextend, and the pain would be considerable. On these occasions, Beau never paid me any mind at all; he remained on his course of interests, sniffing trees and trotting along.
In the next phase, he was feeling absurdly fine. He would tear around inside the house, scratching our wood floors with his toenails. Outside, everything was a game. He would bound out the door and run across the street to meet passersby, just as he had as a new puppy. He was willing to fetch sticks not the usual one and a half fetches, but for a half hour or longer -- eternity for a dog of Beau's high station. When he saw another dog, his face broke into a giant dog smile, and his tail stood at unmistakable full-mast wag.
It was a second puppyhood, and we found this by turns encouraging (the operation must have been a success) and perplexing (what were we going to do with this giant child?).
Within a month that second puppyhood stage tailed off and Beau began to seem more like his usual aloof self. Fearing another attack, we recused him from the company of all dogs but those he already knew. But of course he would pass strangers on the sidewalk, and occasionally his old self would assert itself and he would growl nastily at these dogs, baring his teeth.
What was happening was that the operation was a success, as these things go. The immediate removal of new testosterone from his system, plus the disorientation of surgery, resulted in his ultra-frisky period. But it did not eliminate the testosterone still in his system. Brigitte had predicted that it would take until three months after the neutering to discover what he would be like. What he was like was a dog only 25% as dominant as he had been -- still capable of asserting himself, and definitely inclined to defend himself, but having other options as well.
As a result he became a playmate again to dogs like Britt, the older female Doberman he had alienated with his earlier hostilities. Once again they were able to paw the air in Britt's back yard. Beau even did the unthinkable: he abased himself in her presence, rolling onto his back in a display of mock submissiveness. And he developed a new addition to his mock-fighting skills -- the butt slap. When Britt would encounter him from the side, Beau would shimmy his hind end against her and thwack her like a croquet ball. It was very supple and very funny to watch.
It was as if he had added submission to his repertoire out of fun, and found it to be a happy addition.
Worse, he discovered rabbits. Now, rabbits are not supposed to be a poodle's passion -- they are bird dogs, to the extent they are still hunters. But Beau's interest in birds begins and ends with the occasional tidbit of chicken we toss him after supper.
Rabbits are another story. Our neighbors the Morrisons, who also have Sonja and Cobi, also had rabbits, having had an older male named Chewbacca for years, and recently adopting a young black female they found in the wild at a picnic, named Agnes. The plan was to keep these creatures apart, but one day Beau, smelling rabbits, leapt through the kitchen door and knocked down a partition separating the two creatures. Amid the 100 seconds of hullabaloo that followed, and before the two rabbits were resequestered, Chewbacca found time to have his way with Agnes. Thus Beau became a kind of bunny's uncle, or dogfather, to the litter that followed shortly thereafter.
After his neutering Beau lost all interest in the dogs -- and they, to be fair, smelled something diminished about him -- and he switched allegiance to the dozen or so baby bunnies squirming in a plastic tub in the Morrisons' basement. He was dying to go down there, and later, when they were placed in the hutch on their back porch, he would camp out there and press his nose against the stiff screen.
Events now piled on to heat Beau's bunny lust to boiling stage. Another neighbor, Fritz Ludwig, decided to grow rabbits for food, behind our alley. At times there were as many as six large Belgian hares crowded in a pen, dropping their mild duds through their chickenwire floor in a steaming, odoriferous stew.
The winds that winter seemed almost always to waft from the rabbit pen directly to Beau's nostrils. Twenty four hours a day, we would walk through the house on the tips of his toes, his eyes bugging out from excitation. If a door opened even a crack, he was out like a shot, racing past the alley to the Ludwigs' rabbits, whom he would eyeball, and occasionally bark at.
Upon entering their gate he would dash onto their back porch and press his face against the hutch, and stare at them mega-intensely until one of them blinked, upon which he would start barking and bellowing.
We often asked ourselves, what would Beau do if he got at a rabbit? A poodle is a retriever, trained to deny himself the gratification of the kill, and to fetch the game back to the hunter. Would he kill it quickly, or slowly, or not at all? Was he thinking about blood and bunny fur splattered everywhere, or the fascination he still feels for his stuffed animal toys back in the house, under the couch, where he has pushed them with his useless hands and now, vexed at the intricacies of life with humans, cannot get them out?
We didn't know. What we did know was that it would not go well with the Morrisons, who have shown Beau every courtesy in his young life, for him to devour their pets, or with the Ludwigs, who have also been forbearing, for him to devour their dinner.
Spring came, and the bunny litter grew, and Daniele conspired with the Morrisons to take two of the bunnies. Every night Daniele, too shy to go to the Morrisons on her own, would beg me to make a social call, so she could tag along and nuzzle the baby bunnies in the kitchen. In her wood class at school, unbeknownst to me, she was crafting something heavy and wonderful, a large rabbit pen for our backyard.
Now he pen was set up, and actual bunnies were living under our own roof. Beau's nerves were stretched to the breaking point. I think he actually lost weight during the first week.
One day, when no one was looking, his excitement became too much, and he pushed his face through the light window screen Daniele had used in constructing the hutch. He broke the door, precipitating a family crisis. Daniele, who was truly devoted to her little bunnies, now regarded the dog, the dog we got for her, and who was behaving pretty much as nature and breeding dictated to him to behave, as hateful and a danger to her charges.
Daniele was twelve when we got Beau, and is 14 now -- no longer a scared child, she is an assertive teenager, and she is angry that the dog has ruined the hutch she made with her hands. It didn't help when her father applied his withered carpentry skills to her artwork and made it worse.
When you want your dog to be one thing, and he persists in being something else, you really have only two options: making him change (and yourself unhappy, because he never will), and accepting that the way he is, is the way he is.
Wise dogpeople eventually opt for the latter course. But many are the tales of people who kept hoping that their dog's protective impulse would kick in, but instead greeted every malefactor on the threshold with kisses and licks.
In my case, as my dog neared adulthood, and his habits appeared as deep-set as ever, I began to surrender to him. He would always be fixed between the child/puppy state and desirous of continuous attention and fun, and the glowering adult/dog state, ever on the lookout for some other dog to set straight. My hope for a dog of a generous spirit, a dog of great soul who would give back to me, in wisdom and inspiration, gradually receded.
I think what happens is that you recognize that the dog you have, for all his shortcomings -- in fact because of them -- is the dog you deserve.
You know how people joke that people choose dogs that look like them. When I got Beau I figured I had avoided that stereotype. He is a glorious sight in his black coat and crimson collar, and I am a dumpy middle-aged man not known for sartorial flair.
But deep down the stereotype is true. Beau knows in his heart he is hot shit, and in my heart, that is pretty much what I think, too. That the world disagrees pointedly and frequently is unimportant.
In little ways I have often walked away from social occasions having accomplished the same task that is his goal in life -- impress and dismiss, impress and dismiss. Beau is just luckier than me -- when I act that way, people let me know about it. He, being a dog, gets away with it.
This is not a shallow intuition. The people who invented the poodle, a thousand or two thousand years ago, whoever they were, were an odd combination of practical, crazy, foolish and wise. Just as they created a regally coated creature who would be undone by the coat within, so was his kind bred to be social yet aloof, doggy yet distant. I identify these traits, and I recognize them. We are a matched set.
Now that I realize how needy he is, and understand that need, maybe I could forgive him, and forgive myself for being the same way?
Beau has grown and matured in his two years among us. If I tell him to stay, he stays. This is valuable trick. A few weeks ago we were by the river and he came upon a big mother snapping turtle laying eggs in a ditch along by the path. Beau, running ahead of me, had never seen anything so curious and trotted toward the reptile to investigate at close hand. Alarmed at the possibility of having a three-legged poodle, I cried out, "Stay!" and Beau looked at me, gauged my seriousness, and froze like a deer in headlights.
He knows I am trying to protect him. He knows the world is dangerous. He does what I say sometimes. He still won't come when I say come.
He no longer charges out the door and into the arms of every unfortunate pedestrian passing by, as he did as a puppy. He no longer, praise God, growls viciously at every dog he meets, as he did as a hormone-wracked teenager.
But he is still capable of doing either, because each day is still a random rotation of his transactional personality parts -- his child/puppy, parent/dog, and adult/friend components. As a puppy he is still capable of playing catch with himself on the living room floor, flinging a rawhide chew across the room with his teeth, and then bounding after it, as if someone else threw it.
And he is still capable of aggressive behavior, as he showed at my birthday picnic on the fourth of July, when he tossed a poor little Binks, the dog no one loves except the little girl who owns him, on his back and bit him, handing me a $105 vet bill as a birthday present.
Excuses: his ears were bothering him that day, and Binks was never a favorite of Beau's. But the biting was unacceptable, and it ruined my day, even before a yellowjacket in my margarita crawled onto my upper lip and sent me pronking about the picnic table in pain.
But he is redeemed from all this by the emergence of his adult self. I think it is not possible for a poodle to be a bodhisattva dog, outright. The breed is ultimately too finicky, and too funny, to be an icon of sunny acceptance. But I get glimpses now of a rich, warm maturity in him, and a deep doggy appreciation of the live he has been allowed to live.
His latest thing is his soul kiss. He comes to me, looks sincerely into my eyes. He places his forearms on my shoulders, dominance-style. And he licks me, tilting his head this way and that to communicate how deep his love is, how perfect his devotion. He is my dog, he is saying to me. Mine only, mine completely.
And since the day of my knee operation, and he sat by me as I slipped into unconsciousness, and he hovered over me, licking my wound like a great gorilla nurse, I have felt I could no longer say he has not given me anything. It was a new role for him, and he performed it well, and it has changed our relationship for the better.
All spring Daniele, now 13 and going on 14, had been pining for a volunteer job at Como Zoo. It was the perfect summer job for her because it involved animals - showing lizards, lagomorphs, turtles, tarantulas, exotic birds and other creatures to zoo visitors and explaining things about their lifestyles in the wild.
But it was a program that many kids coveted, and not every kid got into. We had a long history of Daniele not making the final cut in her applications, not making a drama team, and Rachel and I were careful not to get her hopes up too high. Though she worked hard on this, she did so in her usual uncompromising manner. She refused, for instance, to dress in any way but her usual punky way, with ripped jeans and Crayola-red dye job. We could easily imagine her missing the cut again, this time because se did not seem "appropriate" for a teaching role.
But she wanted it bad. Indeed, she talked about making an academic career of it, going on from the zoo docent job to taking courses at the big zoo in Apple Valley. She read every book she could find on wildlife, ecology, and animal care. She had her whole life mapped out, including a driver's license and car to transport her to the big zoo every day - all based on this first job. She had either prepared herself brilliantly, or set herself up for a catastrophic fall.
My job - what was my job? To protect her from failing, which seemed likely? Or to help her to succeed - which, if she failed, only made the failure more of a failure?
So I dithered, right up to the day she set off to take her docent examination. She would first go to her karate practice with her friend Betsy, and then the two kids would go with Betsy's mom to the zoo and take the test.
After she was gone, I began to panic. I pictured her in the oral examination, blowing it. Instead of showing off her knowledge, she would go into her paranoid, phobic mode, shut down, and glower at the judges, giving cursory, hostile answers to their questions. And she would come home suicidal.
I was tearing my hair out, figuratively. How could I help Daniele present herself to the judges in a winning way?
Then it hit me. I grabbed Beau, we both jumped in the back of the Celebrity, and we raced down to the karate parlor. I peered in the window, and there she was, exchanging kicks and chops with Betsy. I motioned to her to come out.
I was almost in tears. I took her by the shoulders. "Daniele," I told her. "I figured out how you can do well today."
"What is it?" She seemed touched that I had tracked her down, and so much more serene than me.
"When you talk to the judges, let them know how you feel about animals. Let it shine out of you, the fun you have with Beau and your bunnies, the beauty you see in them.
"I swear, Daniele, that's what this is all about. They want someone who can communicate the kind of love I know you feel. Make it plain - let them see it."
By this time, tears were definitely pooling. "Let them see your joy," I croaked. "It's what it's all about." And I hugged her and jumped back in the car.
And you know what, she did great. Betsy, too.
I awoke, hearing two nurses behind me muttering about something unspeakable that they were both aware of. I attempted to rise, in case they were talking about me, but I was unable to, and slipped back into unconsciousness.
I awoke again, in a second room. Rachel was there. When I could sit, I saw my leg was wrapped in an enormous cast of gauze and drainage. I could stand, and because of the drugs I could feel no pain. I could hobble from point to point. But walking was out of the question for the next week.
Riding home, with Rachel at the wheel, I wondered who would walk the dog, and how the dog would manage. More immediately, I wondered how I would keep the dog from mauling me when I staggered in the door.
But it wasn't a problem. We arrived at the front door, turned the key, and Beau, excited at first, apprised himself of my condition, and modulated his routine. Instead of dashing his body against mine a dozen times, he circled in tight spastic rotations, reining his power in, but wagging furiously against my wrapped left leg.
And when Rachel helped me onto the green couch in the living room, I was already losing it. We propped up my leg, and Beau knelt beside me. We were brothers now, both children of the knife. My eyes were shutting against my will. But I patted him, and the last sound I heard before blacking out entirely was the noise of his tongue repeatedly licking the site of his master's wound.
Good dog, I mumbled, spinning away from them both. Good dog.
When Beau approaches a Sheltie in one yard, the little dog yaps and a face appears in the doorway, studying us to see if we pose his little dog a danger or not.
At another yard, I can't even see the dog that whines and wags by the gate. Beau is just another shadow in the darkness, and when I pull on his chain he resists. He wants to experience this dog. I let them get excited at the idea, but there is no possibility, what with the leashes and the gate.
I am feeling morose thinking of the crummy deal dogs have cut for themselves. They ache to play with one another, but countless obstacles impede them from happiness. They can look, they can smell, but they cannot fully engage. We drag them here and there by ropes around the neck, and lop off their sex organs, as if that would resolve the issue of nature.
It can't. The dogs are still aflame with desire and love, but the ropes and gates and missing sex organs make it all so difficult. We drag them from their joy back inside our screen doors, and put them in their places, and they nuzzle our hands, transferring that wild unkillable love to us, who despite the ropes and razors are still beautiful to them.
They are better than us, and deserve better than us, but until such time, they circle on the rug, and close their eyes and sleep, and dream of big yards with open boundaries, and other dogs, and a happy life of tooth and eye.
And I have a microcassette recorder in my pocket, a generic blisterpack Sony. They are great for taking notes when driving, or out for a walk somewhere. Sometimes people see you and think you are schizophrenic, talking to your hand, but that is small price to pay, in my mind, for being able to "write" on the fly.
The morning is gorgeous, with crisp new powder everywhere, and white vapor rising from the river. For just a moment, a four-point deer poked his head into a clearing. Beau, being a bit blind, pays him no mind.
My dog begs me to chase him. It's his favorite game, a role reversal because chasing others is the center of his life otherwise. My knee is still sore, but I pound along for a hundred yards or so, bellowing like a dog-eating bear. He adores that.
We take several switchbacks, going deeper into the trees. When we arrive at the riverbank, I feel in my pocket for the recorder. It's gone.
You know how when something is gone you check every pocket eleven times to make sure it's gone? This was that kind of gone. I figure I either dropped it when I made my last note, or it fell out of my pocket during the little jog. So I begin backtracking. The dog wants me to chase him some more, but my mood is darkening and I decline.
The snow is thick, but there are many deer and rabbit and human footprints. A recorder could easily vanish into any of them. I calculate in my mind the loss of the unit -- maybe $40. Besides, they wear out quickly because you are always dropping them. I look everywhere I walked -- about a two-mile distance -- for the little machine. No luck.
I was nearly reconciled to the loss when I spotted the unit lying on a patch of thin snow. The battery and tape compartments were both sprung open, and the tape and batteries lay splayed out on the snow, as if a squirrel or crow had given some thought to taking them home, and then said, nah.
I popped the machine back together and pushed the play button, still ready for the worst, a dead unit. But instead I heard my own voice. I was talking about Sao Paulo Brazil, which I had visited on business a couple months earlier. On the tape, I was sitting in a bus on a smoggy artery heading out of town, talking to myself about the beggars crouched by the highway signs, and the advertising, with the nearly naked models, and the infinite pastel rows of high-rise apartment buildings.
And now I am standing in a clearing in the forest, 7,000 miles away, hearing my high, sped-up voice. The woods are so quiet that this little machine and its tinny little speaker ring clear through the air. Nearby crows, hearing my recorded chatter and finding it suspicious, take wing and flap away to a safer bough.
If you have ever stood between two mirrors and seen the illusion of infinite regression in them, you have an idea what I was feeling, addressing myself electronically from a place so different and so far away.
And if that was not stunning enough, I flipped the tape over -- I did not want to tape over this interesting travelogue -- and there was my daughter Daniele's voice, talking to a caller on the phone. I reuse my answering machine tapes in my hand recorder, and this tape was perhaps five years old, when my little girl was eight, back before we got Beau. Now her voice sounds so clear, so young and lovely. I had forgotten what she used to sound like. I knew I couldn't tape this over, either.
Beau, meanwhile, was looking at me with that panting grin dogs wear when they are in their element to the hilt. But the look on his face just now is all wonderment and admiration. He "understands" very little that I do, but this latest trick, picking something up in the woods and having it talk to me in my own voice, takes the cake.
Wallace Stevens once wrote a simple poem called "A Jar in Tennessee," about coming upon a human artifact on a wild hillside. Placing anything human in the wilderness changes everything, just like in the time travel stories. The consciousness is contagious. Just as owning a dog is a kind of portage, in which your soul enters the dog forever and vice versa -- a miracle.
That was the look I saw in Beau's eye, the look of a knowing one, a holy of holies at last. It's entirely likely, since he is a French poodle, and Stevens is the poet of that breed. And today is a gorgeous day, with the scent of sand and pine adrift in the air like confetti in the morning breeze.
A free gift awaits visitors to Michael Finley's web site at http://mfinley.com. Mike is co-author of this spring's eagerly waited book Transcompetition.
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