What Is a Dog?
I’M LYING ON THE FLOOR of our kitchen, resting my head on Booker’s huge, hairy chest. It’s late. The house is quiet. He smells like cinnamon rolls baking in a barn. I smell like dog.
I come to visit here often now, at the side of Booker’s bed, because at 15 years old—and as a big, big dog at that—he has trouble walking, trouble even getting up. We use a harness to lift him, an act that at times takes on acrobatic grace, and at other times reminds me of the shame my elderly grandparents showed when they started needing similar help. The harness is always on him so that at any moment, up, up we go! It’s about time to wash it again, I’m thinking, and, What do you know about death, Dog? It’s a glossy, bleak place to have arrived, but here we are every day now, trying to figure out if he’s ready to die, and if we’re ready to let him.
WHAT IS A DOG? At some cloudy, pink point in my life, I didn’t know the answer to that question, same as I didn’t know the answer to, What is blue? What is a tablespoon? What is fear? I imagine eventually my mother or father pointed to our old Afghan hound, Ytse, and said, “Dog.” Okay, I must have thought. I see the dog, but what is it? I see its eyes, its nose, its tail trailing fur like tentacles. But what is a tentacle? What is a dog?
I was around four years old when Ytse collapsed in the kitchen. My mother took her to the animal hospital in lower Manhattan, and I never saw her again. Cancer had invisibly, wickedly filled her up.
So a dog must be nothing. A dog is a dream I once had. A dog is a disappearance, a dog-shaped hole in an otherwise identical house.
When I was six, my parents gave me Agatha, a sweet slip of a Scottish terrier puppy. My dad bought her from a pet store; back then, we didn’t know better. I think we have only one picture of her because she immediately came down with parvovirus, my mom took her to the animal hospital, and I never saw her again. It was the first time I remember seeing my mother cry, her face stiff and contorted like a house several days after a fire. I laughed. That was the first thing I did. Then I cried, because I realized I knew what a dog is. A dog is death. A dog is abandonment. A dog is sorrow.
As soon as the period of parvo contamination in our house had passed, my parents got another Scottie character,” he said. So we went with character. She was the runt of the litter, and until we took her home as Agatha, she’d been called Ida Red.
