Canis

I’m a big believer that every boy should have a dog.  It’s our first step toward true friendship, you see, and a guy can learn a lot from a best friend with four legs.

Dogs only want to please.  They’re just happy that you’ve come home after a long day.  Doesn’t matter what kind of day you’ve had at all, they’re happy to see you.  The tail wagging, the barking, the spinning in circles … it’s all part and parcel of the dog experience.

I was, for many years, a “cat person.”  My logic was simple: I wanted companionship but not all the time.  I wanted to have another living thing in the house, but one that was reasonably mature and could take of itself.  I wanted a pet that was quiet and low-maintenance.  All of these are the exact antithesis of a dog, so I went with cats.  All you have to do is feed them occasionally (so they’re not wont to eat your face off in the middle of the night), do an every-other-day scooping of the cat box, and you’re set.  Cat comes to you when it wants affection or food; otherwise, he just wants to be left the f*** alone and nap.

It wasn’t until I met Tom that I seriously considered dog ownership again.  Growing up in the deep South as I did, everybody has dogs – but they’re outside, smelly, howl-at-the-moon, tried-and-true mutt bloodhounds.  And they travel in packs.  It’s the rural curse, I guess.  If you can’t feed your kids or get your truck running, adopt every puppy you can find!  And we did (although my siblings and I were reasonably well-fed and we didn’t own a truck).  At any given time in our house on the bay, we had four dogs; and it was loud, messy, smelly and not really at all family friendly.

I missed it, though.  I miss the companionship a dog needs, the desire just to please and to be acknowledged with a belly scratch or a pat on the head.  And although Tom and I had cats (we still have three, and I honestly cannot wait for them to die at this point), the idea of adding to our brood with a dog just didn’t seem sensible.

Until our house was broken into.  While we were home.  After returning from a week’s vacation in Toronto.

Can you believe it?  Lights blazing, 10.00 p.m., I’m upstairs half-asleep while Tom is in the basement watching some TV trying to get wound down.  I hear a strange noise that I assume is the cats, so I ignore it.  Then I realize that the cats are with me on the bed, so I get up, go downstairs, and hear this scratching noise coming from our curtained bay window in front of the house.  Flip the curtain back.

There’s a guy crouched on my porch who’s already managed to bust through the outer pane.  My screech of “What the f***?!?” is coupled with him turning tail.  So what do I do?  I open the front door and start yelling down the street after him, every epithet I could think of (and I’ll admit, a lot of them were vulgar and aren’t repeatable).  I grabbed a walking stick from the umbrella stand and started after him, ran a few houses down, still yelling, and then realized I’m next to stark naked, at night, in Pontiac, wearing a gauze caftan.  Neighbors are opening their doors regarding the noise, asking for details.  Tom comes upstairs concerned; after hearing all the noise, his concern was that I had fallen and hurt myself.

I was like an animal for three hours.  I was pacing back and forth, calling the police, shaking uncontrollably (after all, what I had been thinking, chasing a burglar who could have had a knife or a gun down the street), and telling Tom things like, “We’re getting an alarm.  We’re getting a dog.  We’re getting a gun.”

Three calls to the Pontiac police department later (and this is when I learned that Pontiac, a city of almost seventy thousand people, has six officers on duty on a Saturday night), Tom and I manage to give a statement about what happened to a young rookie who didn’t know how to write cursive, much less drive a car.  (There was an unintended good side effect of the whole affair.  As the cop was leaving, a neighbor from across the street emerged from his house shirtless with his lady friend of the evening.  This particular neighbor was from Greece, spoke highly-inflected English, and was popular up-and-down the street for mowing his lawn without a shirt on.  Ah, Lorenzo … whatever happened to you?)

As it happened, my nagging got the better of Tom, and two weeks later we attended the Meet Your Best Friend at the Zoo event at The Detroit Zoo.  It’s a semi-annual event where animal shelters from all over the state bring their adoptable dogs and cats to the Zoo for a walk-through exposition, and they usually adopt out 700-800 pets per event.  It’s very popular and very motivating … and Tom and I found our current black Labrador.

Anybody who knows anything about dogs in general knows that Labradors absolutely suck when it comes to being guard dogs.  They’re alarm-barkers, sure, but if somebody actually breaks into the house, a Lab is more likely to lead them to the silver as long as they detour to the goodie jar on the way.  However, I was thinking more about size than temperament, and I was vindicated in this department – he’s 80 pounds and he does have an urgent bark.  So, if someone tries to come in through my front window again (although we no longer live in Pontiac), he’ll be face to face with 80 pounds of loud, drooling Labrador.  I know that the dog won’t rip Mr. Thief’s leg off, but does Mr. Thief know that?  Don’t think so.

The other really good point to dogs is that they’re patient and understand you’re the Alpha Male in your house.  Dogs and men have a lot in common – they’re constantly self-pleasuring (admit it), they come to food at the sound of a pin dropping, and they don’t care what they look like (running around the house dressed in nothing but a pair of undershorts, wearing the Cone of Shame to stop biting at sutures).  And seriously, if most men could do half the things dogs can when it comes to contortionism … well, let’s just say we wouldn’t necessarily need companionship.

Tom and I have taken great pains to socialize our dog in as many situations as possible, and with as many people.  He gets chained in the front yard so he can guard his portion of sidewalk, he races with the neighbor dogs along the fence, he goes to the park and the football games with regularity (and there’s a lady Labrador who also visits the games, but as I tell him every time his ears perk, “She’s out of your league,”), and he gets to sleep in bed with Tom and I, although there is always some active negotiation about where: he likes my pillow and my side of the bed, and will growl when we try to make him move.

We even have various scarves (I know, how gay), a tank top that says, “I have two daddies,” for Pride visits, and I have even put him in a pair of boxer shorts (inverted, of course, so his tail had somewhere to go).  It’ll be a sad day when he’s no longer with us, and it’s a shame that dogs of his breed and caliber can’t live longer and age so quickly – three years of puppyhood, a year or two of adolescence, and then they slow down due to knees and hips and the like.  But he’s a good dog, popular with passers-by and people on the street who have dogs of their own.

And you’ve got to hand it to dogs … don’t you wish we could say “Hi,” to a new friend with a crotch sniff?