Must Love Dogs: Yes, this post is almost entirely about my dog

This is going to feel a lot like I do not like cats, because if you are a cat person - this is just not going to be the reading selection for you, and I want to be clear, here from the top, that I like cats just fine. They are soft. They make nice noises. When they sit in your lap, it is like heaven has cracked open. But, despite my personal adamance to destroy binaries, the one I fall prey to consistently is that I am, without question, a dog person. 

I adopted my dog Maya less than two months after a break up when I was 23, despite the gentle advice from my co-worker, “Don’t get a dog because you’re sad.” Shawn was wrong, and so I adopted a dog. I borrowed a friend’s car and drove two hours south to meet the foster parent in a high school parking lot. I walked her into the football field, sat in the grass, and this little five month old monster put a paw on my chest like a fucking Pixar character and I was done for. Two weeks later, I moved out of my apartment (that I loved but with a roommate who said no dogs) into a house with three guys from college. A fenced yard. A dog door, for the dog I was about to bring home.

She’s in my lap now as I write this, and last week we had $750 in vet bills. My perfect cretin has a sensitive stomach at times and is known for the occasional grass-filled vomit pile, but last month it went from puking once, twice, then a few times in a week, and then five days in a row in the early morning. I winced looking at my savings account, knowing I love my dog more than the motorcycle I am saving for, and I took this four-legged love of my life to the vet. It got worse after the first vet visit. The next night, New Year’s Eve, she had diarrhea starting at 4pm nearly on the hour until I took her ass to the vet New Year’s Day at 11am. The third or fourth time she woke me up (this polite and very well-trained gremlin was waking me up so I would take her outside the grass of my apartment complex where she’d fold her body in half and (sorry for this description, in advance) blood mucus truly spouted and puttered out of her ass. 

This dog is my goddamn world, so I cried a lot in the last week. Dog owners (maybe pet owners) all must sort of fall into this really sweet spot of contentment where we forget that a furry companions have much shorter life spans than the rest of our friends and families, and as I so thoroughly experienced the last two weeks, it is very hard to watch someone or something be in pain and not know how to fix it. But I’m an alcoholic! And depressed! And a millennial who is starting to really see the flaws of socialism! So of course, I want to be able to fucking fix it. I see a friend crying and I ask if they have drank water today. My friend isn’t sleeping at night so I ask if they have tried sleeping meds. And my friend going through their sixth ghosting of the year - I gently ask if they also want to delete their dating apps. Remembering my dog’s precarious presence and that if I am lucky I’ve got six to ten more years of this particular love.

And it is not as if my dog Maya is the first dog I have loved. It happened early, with my mom’s dog Checkers she got just shortly before I was born. A purebred Yorkshire terrier. Further indoctrination because my grandma had three of these terriers when I was kid (she bred them, whoops, but it was three decades before Adopt Don’t Shop, so give Sheila a little wiggle room), the most notable being the youngest Tad. A three-legged toothless creature who truly weighed maybe six pounds and whose tiny beady eyes looked like buttons off a toy bear. Tad had three legs for most of his life, so he was used to his limping, but every time I watched him run across grass I swear angels cried.

Checkers died when I was nine, hit by a car in the parking lot of the apartment complex we lived in at the time. I have very few memories of seeing my mother cry, but that day is one of them. In the various moves, we ended up living with grandma again, and then one day there were two puppies. Sadie and KC. KC was a gift for my mom, Sadie for my grandma. When we’d move across the state, to the big house in Nine Mile Falls, with mom’s notable on-again boyfriend Jeff, I remember the giant yard we had for KC. She was a purebred Jack Russell terrier with those perfect brown ears. Tiny little tail that stood straight up. She loved fetch more than any other dog I have met. From the second story deck you could throw the ball and she’d scramble down the deck stairs across the massive yard and back again. Once, when KC had been digging in the yard, I watched Jeff throw her off the deck. My mom yelled and screamed. The dog was miraculously fine. 

She would climb trees at the next apartment, stout evergreens you could toss her ball into, where’d she would navigate the limbs, snagged her ball and dutifully back to the patio. Or when we learned she would occupy herself for hours with a ball and a bucket of water. Until she rubbed the fur off her legs, hanging onto the edge of the bucket. On Valentine’s Day, my freshman year of college, I got the call from my mom about KC getting put down. Cancer in her mouth. I haven’t really liked Valentine’s Day since. 

My mom made it maybe a month before she adopted another dog, Lucy. Lucille. Another Jack Russell, but definitely a mutt with a shorter longer wiener dog body and a comically disportionately long tail. She is still around, and truly has the most annoying bark and softest fur. Maybe six years ago, I got a call from my mom who was in Las Vegas, that Lucy was missing. My grandma drove me forty-five minutes to North Idaho, and there my mom’s boyfriend (the man who presumably lost the dog) and I wandered the woods near the house shouting ourselves hoarse. Lucy got picked up by a neighboring family and dropped off at the vet around the corner. She slept with me at my apartment that night, burrowed under the blankets and in between my ankles. 

Maya has not lacked her own excitement and tribulations or close encounters with death. The first morning after bringing her home, I took her into the backyard, a tennis ball in my hand, my Jack Russell to play fetch with now. Maybe a dozen throws in, I accidentally launched the ball over the fence. And with some Tom Cruise action movie scientology slow motion magic, I watched as Maya spotted a (previously undiscovered to me) hole in the fence. And she was gone. I launched my body off the deck, across the grass and to the six foot slat fence. I peeked through the hole to see gravel and nothing else. Barefoot, in shorts and a t-shirt, I fumbled my body over the fence. Maya sat primly, the ball in her mouth, waiting for me. Probably confused why I took so long.

I couldn’t throw the ball back over the fence, I couldn’t throw her over the fence, I sure couldn’t climb the fence holding her, so I scooped her up and walked around the block to the front of the house. There, I discovered our front door was locked. None of the roommates were home, and even the gate to the yard was locked. I sat on the front porch and cried. I eventually stood at the curb, Maya tucked under one arm, and started manically waving at cars. I hoped someone would pull over for the barefoot woman holding a dog, quite possibly a very-normal-sight-to-see in my methamphetamine saturated hometown. Ten or so cars later, a truck pulled over and a man in his late forties rolled the window down.

“What seems to be the problem, miss?”
Yes, I am fictionalizing this man into a warm-hearted country drawl walking, just stick with me.
“My dog and I are locked out of my house after she got out of the yard.”
“Huh. Well I’m not working today but I’ll call for some help. What’s the address here?”

I mumbled my address and he drove off and then, several minutes later a fire truck pulled up in front of my house. Thankfully, no sirens. My soul evaporated only briefly and sure enough I am retelling this story to three firemen standing on my lawn, all very amused I’m sure with my predicament. Standing at the gate to the yard, one quickly and without struggling hopped the fence. “There’s a carabiner locking the gate!” And then the gate was open and my dog was starting to make my arms sweaty and I had just been crying woe-is-me fifteen minutes ago, so when this same Fence Savior Fire Man tried to pat my dog on the head and she snarled at him, I just replied, “We’ve had a rough morning so far.”

Not even a month later, I took her to the lake for the first time. Mid-July, an incredibly hot day, maybe low 90’s, all my co-worker Mary and I have talked about for days is swimming in the cold lake. We bring a cooler full of drinks, a couple of beach chairs, and my puppy who I am very determined to teach to swim. Mary and I settled our things in, but I knew I wanted to get my feet wet so with Maya on a leash still I went down to the water’s edge. Just as soon the water is splashing my toes, Maya let out a yelp. I bent down, just some rocks, but now she was holding up her paw, so I figured maybe she stepped on a sharp edge. I scooped her up, went back to the chair, and sat with her in my lap. On this sweltering day. She started panting. I offered her water. She drank it all. Then, truly without much warning, the poor thing vomited in my lap and shit down my leg. By the time Mary is googling a vet and she has packed up the car, I am near hysterics. Maya’s breathing slowing, and on the ten minute drive to the closest vet, I had my finger shoved in her mouth because her tongue was swelling and I was worried she wouldn’t be able to breathe. Wearing a bikini, with remnants of vomit and shit on my legs, I walked us into the vet, holding her like the Mother Mary with Jesus in her arms, a vet technician whisked her away.

Turns out, she is highly allergic to bees, and some bee or wasps stung in her between the pads of her paw. With that vet trauma under my belt early, my dog literally beginning to die in my arms six weeks after I first brought her home, you can understand why I was anxious to return to the vet last week. No bee sting, just lots of bile and bloody shit, even now after blood work and fluids and antibiotics, without a known cause.

I know this perfect idiot won’t live forever. I know that she is the first in what will be a long line of dogs I love so fully. But for now, I love this dog more than I love nearly anything else. Letting her lick yogurt off my spoon. Teaching her to wait while I balance one of her stuffed animals on top of her head, trying to not embarrass her while I snicker the entire time. The patience of this dog is bar none, once my ex put her inside a rucksack, so she would be safe while he vacuumed. She has patiently sat at the foot of the bed while I fucked far more people than was necessary. She even preemptively gets down off the bed when I turn on my vibrator, I’m sure out of annoyance rather than being polite. She doesn’t chew my socks or shoes and has never made me picture the movie Marley and Me. When I am depressed and still in bed at eleven, she sits on my chest until I get out of bed to feed her breakfast. When I am crying in the bathtub, she waits on the bath mat, to lick the soap off my legs. When I toured the country, all of my belongings were shoved into a tiny VW, and on top of my pillow she’d sit, inching forward so her chin would be on my shoulder as I drove. She loves people, and is tentative with other dogs. She barks at the door if the neighbor’s are so much as breathing on the landing and she only licks the faces of anyone-but-me. Her favorite snack is tangerines. If I yell at the TV, she barks along too. When my ex died, I took her back to the home we owned. She ran around looking for him and my heart has broken a thousand times since remembering this. She pees with one back foot off the ground, like a drunk girl in an alley with her nice Steve Maddens. She growls while she eats and while she sleeps and if she lives into old age she is definitely going to be an absolute impossible cunt. She likes windows and the beach and the snow. She does not like when I try to hold her while dancing. And she is, without question, a very good dog.

All love is prolific love if you pay close enough attention. All dogs are good dogs, if loved and given enough attention. Adopt, don’t shop. Take the walk on the nice day, and on the rainy one. Pick up your dog’s shit, or else karma is going to bring your shoe into the ugliest pile of still steaming diarrhea on your next worst-no-fucking-way day. (Except church lawns. Maya and I leave those.) All advice that you, a dog lover, who has made it this far already know.

As a very much single person, very much in the middle of this pandemic, I am wondering what my next two-legged love will think of this critter I croon to. If they will be able to love her the way I do. Maybe we even meet a dog park, both bending over, a bag covered hand, and karma winking from over our shoulders. Cue credits, one singular bark. Looks like good shit can happen too.