Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Finley
Of course, I did go through all that emotion, and more, years later when Rachel and I, now married and semi-propertied, had our first child. Now I was 34, and presumably adult enough for the rigors of fatherhood.
Parents hate hearing this, but if your only point of reference is pets, children seem an awful lot like them. Both kids and dogs have developmental passages they go through, with corresponding emotional nuances.
Daniele was born in our apartment in Milwaukee, and the moment she tumbled out into my waiting hands, and she looked at me with already open eyes, and let out a mighty, sage sigh - "Ahhhh" - I have been crazy for her. Daniele was the bestest puppy ever.
I worked the first year of Daniele's life, but I would come home at five o'clock and fling the door open, expecting, and getting, the same high levels of hysterical glee that I used to get from my fat old pointer. We lived those early months on a blanket laid square on our living room floor, surrounded by the toys we bought for her - some of which, like her squeaky cheeseburger, were really dog and cat toys.
Daniele was a bodhisattva baby. She had the round face you associate with all-knowingness. She had poise, and readiness, and humor. She was spectacular, and just like me, she loved animals. Her first word was guh!, which she applied to her stuffed mallard - you will recognize guh as an accepted variant of duck. By the time she was ten months old, she had mastered a long repertoire of animal sounds. If, out driving, I called out "duck," she replied from the backseat, quack-quack! If I said, "laughing snake," she'd answer with "Ssss! Sss! Sss!" God, I adored her.
Daniele grew into a stellar toddler, astonishing elders we presented her to. When we moved back to Minnesota, and I started working at home (freelance writer), I took her out almost every day to the zoo, to a playground, for an adventure in the big wild world. I have a series of four pictures of us, taken in one of those seventy-five cent arcade photo machines, where we are both mugging shamelessly. We seem so happy on the picture strip, so high on one another.
But then, at about the time she began attending preschool, something happened. Though powerful in the company of adults, she was powerless in the company of peers. She spent hours hiding from the other children under tables, crying when things did not go her way. By kindergarten she had begun balking at competitive activities like school Olympics.
Rachel and I were slow to see something was the matter. We considered it a mood, or a developmental pothole. But it was more than that. She began exhibiting phobic behavior, shrieking when she would see a cat or dog, even when the animal was a block away. It hardly made sense, because this was a child who adored animals.
She became the pariah of her Brownie troop, because the den mother had a tiny dog - a West Highland White - who bothered no one but terrified Daniele. The other children began excluding her from activities and parties. In a few months she had gone from a confident kid to a sad, unsure one. At times she seemed helpless to act on her own behalf.
Friends, this went on for four years - what should have been the brightest years of her life became a very sorry period. By the time she was a fifth grader, she was silent, guilty, anxious, depressed, unable to pay attention, unable to initiate tasks, and foreclosing on every opportunity. "I can't talk to that person." "They would never want to be my friend." Other kids, except her best friend Betsy, excluded her. In her unhappiness Daniele was slipping into minor compulsive behaviors, counting the panels on the car dashboard, counting the tick marks on the clock face, counting everything.
And do you know the strangest thing - when I would ask her, in her misery, what would make her happy again, she answered without hesitating:
"A dog."
First, I could not get her a dog so long as she was afraid of dogs. I would have to intervene somehow and get her beyond her phobic feelings. And I didn't know how to go about that. She was also phobic about being in deep water, and I had tried everything to get her to dunk her head under, even offering her $20 to hold her nose, stoop down, touch the floor of the swimming pool, and stand up again. She couldn't do it.
Second, I had my own reasons for not wanting a dog. Some were superficial. They're a lot of work. The kids would undoubtedly shirk their part and make me the primary caretaker. Taking care of the animal would eat into my worktime. I'd start popping deadlines, and pretty soon we'd all be out in the cold, thanks to some dog we hadn't even met yet.
But the deeper reason was that I was afraid of the emotional burden of getting another dog. When Casi died I felt not only grief, but guilt. By giving her freedom that was so dangerous, and that she never asked for, I was responsible for her death.
And I was afraid it would happen all over again. I would be hornswoggled by the next dog just as I was hornswoggled by the last. It would quickly become a relationship all out of kilter. And I was a grown man this time, with wife and children and priorities beyond a dog's happiness.
This time around, did I have what it took to put on the emotional brakes, be a superstern owner, and keep the puppy from making a doggie bed out of my heart?
I doubted it.
It occurred to me that what we had here was a case of father-daughter cowardice. That what each of us was really afraid of was our feelings. We were both hyperemotional people. I was like a kid who wanted to adopt every sad-eyed creature I saw. And Daniele really was a kid, and confronting an animal for her was like standing under a waterfall of her own confusion and excitement. She loved going to the zoo, where steel bars provided some emotional distance, a shield from the experience. But meeting dogs up close, the emotional shield was gone. The experience was so intense, she froze up in fear.
I hit on a plan. Instead of immersing her in a pit of dogs, what if I created an environment in which she experienced dogs, but I equipped her with a shield to hide behind while she experienced them?
And so we both became volunteer dog-walkers at the Ramsey County Humane Society.
The shelter is located on the edge of Como Park, a pretty city park that includes a conservatory, a kiddie amusement park (closed in the winter), some playing fields and picnic tables, a tiny patch of woods, and a small zoo.
Every Tuesday in the winter of 1992, from November through April, Daniele and I showed up at the shelter, signed in, found our identity badges in a file cabinet, walked through the cages and pens in back, and selected the three dogs that looked like they most needed a walk that day.
We generally spent an hour to ninety minutes walking one dog at a time. When weather permitted, we brought the dogs all the way to the zoo perimeter, and let them glimpse and call to the two wolves that were kept in a large open pen. There is no genetic difference between wolves and dogs, and no matter what breed of dog we had with us - from bulldog to bichon frise - they hailed their feral brothers with cries of recognition, and vice versa.
At first Daniele stood back from the process, walking behind me and the dog by ten steps or so. Our first dog was Fred, a 4-year-old basset hound. His ears were like big drips tumbling from a spigot. Once outside, he became a pulling machine, dragging me through the muddy snow, barely aware of us, pulling on his leash, nearly inhaling every tree trunk he came to, smelling every smell he could smell, like a condemned man's last act of gluttony.
Which it might have been. Fred was intense, but dear. He was the perfect dog for our first encounter. His soul was completely domesticated - he would gnaw off a leg before biting a human being. But that sorrowful face must surely have warded adopters with young children away. I pictured Fred in a home of his own, making slow circles before lying down to nap, shutting his bloodshot eyes.
Daniele followed from a distance, but I could tell she, too, was lulled into feelings of security by this comfortable old dog. The next dog, she walked a bit closer, and each time she followed with greater interest. By the second week she was walking right behind me. Then beside me. Before the month was up, she was heeling big, ungainly dogs on her own leash.
It was a glorious victory for her, because she loved dogs even when she was terrified of them. She not only overcame her fear, but she learned at an early age that specific fears could be overcome. That's a powerful lesson for someone so young.
Her favorite dog was one we encountered early in our tour of service. He had belonged to an older woman who died, and now he was trying to start all over again. His name was Ricki, a kind of longhaired a Pekinese football, very spirited and proud despite bouncing up and down when he walked like a car fitted with square wheels.
Ricki was the first dog Daniele took on her own. Where Fred dragged you through the snow, Ricki was an instinctive stepper, never falling behind, never allowing the leash to tighten up. He was so happy, even trotting in the rain, his feet moving invisibly under his shaggy coat, water cascading off him when he sneezed. He was like a robot dog, with a face that looked flattened by a rolling pin.
At home, Daniele drew pictures of Ricki. He was the kind of dog she would have wanted at that age, toylike and funny. You could picture him blissful to be a member of your household, skittering up and down a staircase, excited that his master, a little girl of nine, was home from school.
But we didn't adopt Ricki. Indeed, the third week we showed up, Ricki was gone. We had been told that only one of eight dogs put up for adoption are actually adopted. So when a dog vanished from the kennel, death was a more likely reason than a new life. We tried not to get too involved, but the dogs were so brave, and so grateful for the moments we gave them, it was hard not to take them into your heart.
Another dog that got to us was Rusty, a mix of Irish setter and Lab. Rusty was one of the most beautiful dogs I ever saw. His coat was short, the color of his name, and his legs seemed longer than they needed to be, wonderful for running but somewhat awkward for just getting turned around. In his cage he seemed defeated, but out in the woods he came alive, and his face shone with a sad gratitude. He would stand and hold his chin up in a cold breeze, and you could see he was luxuriating in the air brushing his face. I don't know what his story was, but for such a gorgeous, well-behaved dog to hit such a patch of bad luck seemed very wrong.
That winter we must have walked 75 dogs. There was a big Saint Bernard puppy, solemnly and determined not to be too big. There were Labs of every hue, and setters, and terriers, and the occasional lapdog, who seemed heartbroken and a little deranged, like Blanche Dubois, to have fallen from a high station to this.
Several times we did the unthinkable - we took a dog that did not belong to us, and that we were responsible for, off the leash, and let it run free for just a minute or so. We chose these dogs carefully. Not many prisoners, losing their chains, will voluntarily let them be put on again. But these creatures did, like Christs being led off on leather tethers to Herod. We never lost a dog.
By the end Daniele was walking the dogs all by herself, and I was walking one step behind. There was a spring in her step, and a cheekiness in her voice, a feeling of confidence from doing something that used to scare her. She could make the most ebullient dog heel. Even the German shepherds and Dobermans, the big dogs that seemed to have little sense of humor, didn't scare her. She proved she could handle a dog of her own.
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.
I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did
it for free. If you'd like to contribute to this site, however,
to keep it up and humming, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor
Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click the CLICK TO
PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike
Total tips, year
to date: $9.70
Did you tip your writer?
