Your Dog and Your Social Life

Up until now, I have never been much of a neighbor. I have lived in places for years and not known my next-door neighbor's name.

But Beau has changed all that. From the first walks I took with Beau, I have been meeting people, and telling them my name., and pointing to the house where I live. Children three and four years old see Beau and me ambling down the walk and cry out "Poodoo, poodoo!"

When adult neighbors see my dog peering through the cyclone fence at their dog, they come out of their houses and we introduce ourselves and chat about our dogs' habits. Because we both have dogs, we are at the very least fellow suffererers. While they apologize to neighbors without dogs when their dog barks at the moon, with me they don't have to apologize. We have a common baseline of experience. We know each other as soon as we meet, because of the dogs.

Beau and I were walking through the alley during the great winter of 1997. Snow was so high that the fence keeping the dogs in was no longer doing its job. Kobe and Sonja stood looking down from the fence, Kobe barking as only a herding dog can bark, and Sonja taking her cue from Kobe.

When next we passed through the alley, the sun was shining and we were greeted by Noelle Jaquet-Morrison, their owner. She invited us to enter, and while the dogs played she made the stunning offer: any time Beau wanted to play, he was welcome to come into the yard. To Beau this was a passport to paradise.

Not only did we take Noelle up on her offer, but she and I, and her family and my family, became good friends over the months that followed. The humans would go inside the house and make coffee, Noelle telling me stories about growing up at the base of the Pyrenees in France, and in Mauretania in Africa where her father was a diplomat, and the dogs would remain in the yard, chasing one another around the bushes. By summer's arrival we were going on family camping trips together, dogs included. Our kids have worn a path from our house to theirs.

One time, I was out with Beau on his long 21 foot leash, and Beau, as is his wont, strolled up onto every house's porch to sniff around. No one has ever complained of this habit, which I believe to be a postal fixation on my dog's part. But one day, a man on Dayton Avenue began banging on his window from inside his house.

"Get your damn dog off my yard!" he yelled at Beau, who was marking the lilac bushes at the corner of his lot.

"Too late," I said. "It's his now."

Dogs not only let you make friends, they can usher in romance, or in my case, the momentary fantasy of one.

If I went for a walk through the neighborhood in the old days, few people said hello to me. Women, the people most often home during the day in our neighborhood, are especially leery of stay-at-home men. But since we got Beau, people feel they know something about me. I'm not only safe, but a little bit -- dare I say it? -- desirable.

I read somewhere that one thing women in singles bars look for is if a guy owns a dog. A guy who owns a dog can only be so psychotic, the reasoning goes. Because he has to take care of something, which sets him aside from lots of guys right there. It may mean he knows what affection is, beyond plain sex. A man like that will think twice about stalking you or bullying you into spending the night with him. Because if he doesn't get home in a reasonable time, his dog eat his couch.

But back to me. Everywhere I go, people recognize Beau as the woolly big poodle with the jaunty step. He is a classy-looking, reasonably well-behaved dog who seldom barks. He strikes people who encounter him on the street as uncommonly civilized, for a dog.

Different kinds of people see different values in him. Kids like him because he is an animal and thus not an adult. Yuppies see him as a trophy hound. Dogpeople are always interested in unusual breeds, and in Minnesota, poodles are not common.

I can't tell you what young women see in him. But evidently he moves them in some powerful, instinctual way. If you think about it, a poodle, if he were a man, would be the kind of man other men dread -- dashing, good-looking, charming-and-he-knows-it.

Women cannot resist that kind. They stoop down, they tousle his ears, and they say the darnedest things:

"What handsome man you are! Aren't you my handsome little man. Oh, I just want to eat you up!"

I am never sure, when this happens, whether to be jealous of my dog, or to be grateful for the traffic he attracts.

Sometimes, being with Beau has had the opposite effect. While by day he radiates a spirit of harmlessness, by night he takes on a different aura. His coat is black, and his teeth are ivory white, and his customary silence can be unnerving.

I have several recollections of night walks with him that turned creepy. Our nightly walk is a wind-down from the day -- a chance for him to expel some energy, and anything else he feels the need to expel, before bedding down for the big sleep. Typically I take him out on the retractable leash at night, and he stretches it out to its full 26-foot length as he patrols the yards and alleys of Merriam Park.

His curiosity is what makes him creepy. He has always been hypnotized by red brake lights on cars, and one time, he stared a car into its garage. When the driver emerged, all she could make out in the dark was a dark dog and a dark-clad stranger, both standing stock still and looking directly at her. All I was doing was waiting for Beau top snap out of his trance. But I could tell from the look on her face that she thought we were really bad news, as she scurried to her house, keys in hand.

I should preface this by saying I am a very happy married man. But when I go to this place I sometimes see a woman who emanates, for me at least, the most wonderful vibes. Can it be a tribute to Rachel that this woman reminds me of her? She is pretty, but more than that, she seems kind of wonderful. And far from being allergic to dogs, she has built her life around them. She actually moved to the neighborhood adjacent to Poodlevania so she could walk her dog. A few times I have sort of walked alongside her, while her dog and my dog played and sniffed one another out, and she and I did much the same thing.

I overheard someone call her Evangeline. Evangeline!

One time I saw her walking with three gawky men. They were very obviously single, and they wore their loneliness on their parka sleeves. How exciting it must be for them to walk alongside her and imagine being part of her aura.

Today I made the calculated decision to go to the river not once but twice, at 8 am and noon. I just wanted to be there, I told myself -- it's a beautiful winter here. But I was also thinking of Evangeline, and sure enough our cars -- two old bronze Chevy celebrity station wagons -- arrived simultaneously. You could sense the gods moving us around like Tonka toys.

All we did was walk along, very respectfully. I talked, using the dogs as a conversation starter. Evangeline said she was a poet and an artist, raised by missionary parents in Madagascar, and like Daniele a sufferer of depression. When she told me she was a vegan, because it was her way of honoring animals, I relaxed. The exoticism of vegetarianism put her outside the realm of reality for me. But then she lured me back in, by telling me that, while she doesn't eat meat, she fries up giant steaks and chops for her German shepherd to eat.

And so we walked and talked, while the dogs danced circles around us. I was schoolboy happy. My father once told me this about himself: "All I have ever wanted from life was for beautiful women to laugh at my jokes." I knew exactly what he meant.

When I mentioned my walk on the wild side to Mari-Lou, a friend, she was alarmed. "Tell your wife!" she told me. "Without delay!"

It hadn't occurred to me that I had done anything wrong, just that I allowed myself to have the giddy feeling. But that night I did tell Rachel about the walk, although I downplayed her golden hair and sky-blue eyes. And you know, Rachel didn't care. She wished it was OK to have friends of the opposite sex. She knew exactly the feeling I had had, and thought it was OK.

Rachel and I are like eagles, mated for life.

The next day, going down to the river again with Beau, no one was there. We walked for miles on the crunchy snow. By the river's edge I came to Evangeline's snow sculpture, which I had only glimpsed from afar before, and which I had assumed was a crude sort of snowman.

But it wasn't. It was the head and shoulders of a snow queen. You could tell the head had come off, but someone had set it back on its shoulders. Though some snow had melted, you could make out the indentations of her cheekbones and eyes, and her head was turned in a silent, sad way, like one of those odd collages of de Chirico, as if something ancient and important were drifting by in the cold Mississippi water.

There is a pleasant easiness when you are with dogpeople. The example of the dogs is always there in all its muzzy genuineness. They are funny, athletic, obnoxious, curious. They are like comical dumb people, a Punch and Judy show of wagging tails and flashing teeth. Having them nearby drains your pretensions away.

Evangeline is a dogperson. She moved from downtown Minneapolis to the area near the Veterans Hospital, so that she could walk her dog at Poodlevania.

Noelle believes so much in the happiness of her dogs Kobe and Sonja that she allows Beauregard into the yard to play chase with them any time he likes, with all the damage that implies to her garden and landscaping. She loves flowers, but she shrugs. "It's only grass," she says.

I myself, when I had my pointer many years ago, and I took a part time job as night watchman so I would not have to leave her all day long, became a dogperson. Twenty-five years, I denied my nature. Now I feel it coming back.

Mere dog owners freak out when their dogs do things that are horrible in human terms, like fight, or bully one another, or simply sniff one another out. Dogpeople watch the proceedings with a calm and happy demeanor. They will tell you, if you are alarmed, that they have seen a thousand fights, and no ever died in them. Scrapping is what dogs do, so let them do it.

And when true dogpeople, who have sorted out the wild issues of territoriality, protectiveness, and even dominance, gather together, they have an easiness among them that is like the comfortable society of dogs. They don't show off. They don't push ourselves on one another. Nor do they shy away. It feels nice, even to dogpeople like me, who still roam the corridors of dog hell, trying to sort out their pets' behaviors. Dogpeople won't hold your dog's peculiarities against it, or against you. I felt I had finally located the tribe I were born into.

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.