Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

The single greatest anxiety of owning a dog is the anxiety you and the dog feel when you leave him behind.

It is an anxiety of infinite regression. You are anxious about the dog’s anxiety. The dog may be anxious on the merits, but its anxiety is magnified by your anxiety. And so on. Whose anxiety came first, is a matter for psychiatrists, human and canine, to resolve. And that will be costly.

I have always been anxious about my dogs. I put my career on hold for a couple of years with Casi in my twenties, because I could not bear to leave her alone all day while I adjusted claims or whatever. The claims weren’t worth the pain.

When Beau came into our lives, I wasn’t much better. As a puppy, I felt he was a guest in our home, and it was my job as host to allay his fears. I was also afraid he would hold my house hostage if I left. If I wanted my Roger Maris-autographed baseball back, I better be back soon.

As you can see, I gave him the run of the house too soon. He should not have had that leverage over me. But he did.

I will always be thankful that, deep down, Beau is essentially fairminded. Yes, he hated me to go. But something noble in him prevented him from wreaking revenge on my gathered goods. If I left him with Rachel, he would howl at the door I departed from, for ten minutes or more. But if I left him alone, he just shut up and went to sleep until I returned.

In other words, his histrionics were for our benefit. He had no personal use for them.

 

If leaving him home alone for a four-hour meeting is a big deal, imagine the significance of leaving Beau at someone else’s place for a week, or more.

I began writing this memoir during a weeklong family vacation in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota in August, 1997. I was very concerned because we had left Beau for the first time ever with a third party, Brigitte’s daughter Lorraine, who had actually bred Beau and his siblings.

Lorraine lived just east of Saint Paul’s downtown, in a house in which many of the rooms had been converted to dog apartments. Each room has one breeding male, or two or three females, or a mother and a litter of however many pups. Instead of doors, the rooms have hardware-cloth gates, like chicken coops. All during my vacation, I visualized Beau sitting in this room, staring out the window, and across the prairie and forests of Minnesota, to me, sitting pining in my windswept cabin.

I missed him.

It happened so suddenly. He watched us pack for several hours, and his concern grew as he saw us haul our pet rats and guinea pigs in their aquarium tanks out to the car, and then off to a friend's house for safekeeping. He did not know whether to climb in the station wagon and come along, to experience whatever fate awaited the rodents, or to stay behind, and to experience the awful fate of not being with us.

After dumping the rats off, it was his turn. We grabbed a toy he liked -- a stuffed schnauzer with the bead-eyes chewed off -- a leash, a bag of dog food and a handful of snacks and rawhide chews -- and drove to Lorraine's. Beau's brother and sisters were there, and beau got to see them -- I think. I can't be sure, because Lorraine kept her operations out of sight of visitors. I saw dogs at the window out front, but inside everything was walled off from view.

All week I wrote rapturously about my dog – it all got edited out later – and I planned to end the story with a dramatic reunion at Lorraine’s door. But when the vacation ended and we drove back to Saint Paul, Beau departed from the script. Instead of jumping joyfully into my arms, he got into a fight with another poodle, envious that Beau had spent every night in Lorraine’s bed with her.

Beau was bit. Lorraine was also bit, and bitterly reproached herself for not locking up the poodle in question before discharging Beau. She needed twelve stitches. Beau spent a feverish night, and in the morning he was himself again, and home.