I have a new dog. Her name is Rosie – well, I call her Rosie anyway, her name when I adopted her was Rosa. I first met her a month and a half ago online, pet adoption basically now mimicking dating conventions, but me being me, I avoided looking online as long as possible because my heart was open and it didn’t matter on some level who I met online, just as long as the spark was there and it was, Rosa was perfect, and while I also met Dwight at the same shelter, my heart went towards Rosa and then I had my mom, who’s going to be doing a lot of the surrogate help with her, meet her, and Rosa was the one. No question. She’s perfect.
She also is terrified of change, as almost all of us are, and she’s now embarking on massive change. So she pees on the floor more than the “housetrained – check” indicator on the shelter website indicated, and she sometimes bolts out of the yard because she doesn’t know that it’s all okay, and she’s not like Gordy, she doesn’t have ten years of trust and treats and foie gras under her belt.
She also has to deal with my son, a seven year old, and Gordy didn’t have to deal with that when he and I bonded eleven years ago. Gordy had to deal with the odd energy – lots of love, but also lots of confusion and pain, that marked my marriage at the time – but he didn’t have to deal with the utter chaos of a seven year old boy. My son is lovely on every level but he possesses that explosive energy of boyhood – and having Rosie interact with other children I do realize that it is a Y-chomosome issue – and that makes it more confusing. Also Rosie is female, and Gordy was male. Gordy was a bit aloof with my son, but that made sense, or at least, now it makes sense, now that I can see a female dog interact with a young boy.
As I write this, though, I realize I’m generalizing about gender and age and specie, and all of it is wrong. Rosie is a rescue – she was picked up at the side of the road in the rural bits of Birmingham, Alabama, estimated age of two when she was picked up in January, a botched spaying operation made more tragic by a kind of weird white supremacist tattoo by the site of the operation, a cropped tail which is never something you do to a puppy you actually love – and all of her story is unknown except for that data on the page. Gordy, on the other hand, was apparently tied up with several other dogs on an abandoned puppy mill in eastern Washington. Gordy’s emotional scars revealed themselves in a terror of other dogs except for the biggest breeds, Great Danes and Bernese mountain dogs, who I assume were the ones who protected him in bad times; he didn’t like other people, was fiercely protective of me, of my ex-wife, of my son, of the ex-girlfriend. He also never left my side, except when tempted by chipmunks, and then he felt guilty about it. Rosie wants to like other people, but needs to explore. She’s roamed across the neighborhood several times, and tonight, she chased out of my range across a state highway. She just wants to explore, although she always comes back.
I’ve spoken of recursion often on this site, and I do think recursion – the capacity for infinitely applying the logic of our own observations to ourselves – is what separates sentient beings from non-sentient beings. Dogs apply the logic of their own experience to the experience they have now, but in my experience, it’s a one-step thing; although I’m sure some can go one step further, most don’t. Gordy, I think, went one step further; Rosie, I think, doesn’t, although it’s premature for me to assess that. In any event, human beings aren’t that different. We observe the world and learn lessons, and then go through one or more – or maybe just one – level of recursion to assess how those lessons will apply at a second level, at the second derivative, as it were. We can apply those lessons we learn by observing others to ourselves, but mostly we don’t. Rosie doesn’t, or at least she didn’t this evening – hence I had to walk across three neighbors’ lawns, across a highway, and pick her up and bring her back to my house. But also, I had to give my son a time out because, despite a set of questions about “are you sure you want to color that picture with a glass of lemonade in front of you”, he colored a picture with a glass of lemonade in front of him and inevitably it spilled over the picture, his clothes, and the couch he was sitting on.
My son will (hopefully) learn to apply questions recursively against the lived experience he has; my new dog will (hopefully) start to see roads, highways, and lawn boundaries as varying steps of safety. All of us, though, are joined by a leap of faith which (hopefully) we won’t have need to question: we opened our hearts of love, we opened ourselves to joy and hope, and we became companions on this earth. We will (hopefully) apply our ability – limited in some sense, unbounded in others – to think recursively about love, and we will see the perfection of being open to love from those who are also, simultaneously, open to love. I ask nothing of Rosie. I ask nothing of Alan. Well, not wholly true – I need them to be safe. But if they aren’t, if he tries difficult things with electricity or she ventures across Route 9 at rush hour, I still love them – in fact, I love them so much I overreact and demand that they understand how much I love them and how much their danger hurts me. And honestly, I don’t feel they ask anything of me. I give them food and shelter, and they want encouragement and affection from me, but really, what I sense from both of them is that they just want me. Me all of me, me with flaws, me with my inability to be there all the time, me with my doubts and fears. And I want them as they are.
Companions are not possessions. And companions have to be voluntary, on both sides. Pets are hard because we provide so much – but you have to listen to them and make sure you are being accepted. If you aren’t, then you’re just an owner. You still have tremendous power, but oddly, you have that over your children too. But we accept the power we have over pets, while we deny the power we have over children, because they will (generally) outlive us, they’ll at least become bigger than us. But the moment either of them come into our presence, we need to welcome them as companions on our shared journey. And we need to ask them to welcome us. We need to be worthy of their company. I have no right to get a dog; I have no right to have a son. But I can ask permission of each of them – my son, my new dog – to be part of their life. I hope they find me worthy of their companionship. I have to accept the idea that I might not be. But I’ll do my best.