DOGS AND CULTURE WARS IN PARADISE

DOGS AND CULTURE WARS IN PARADISE

This photo of two cocker spaniels makes me think of an old saying: "Let sleeping dogs lie." It also makes me think of my years as a snowbird.

My wife Barbara, our dog Chelsea and I used to spend the winter months in Naples, Florida, known to the locals as "paradise." The rest of the year we lived in a suburb north of Detroit. As lifetime liberals, we came to realize just how sheltered our lives were in Michigan. All our friends and family were pretty much in agreement on most things.

In Naples, though, we lived on a golf course, and although our neighbors were cordial, they were almost all of them chest-thumping conservatives. Whenever politics came up, they took it for granted we shared their views. As new kids on the block, and greatly outnumbered, we bit our tongues and kept our opinions to ourselves.

What was so weird was how these same defenders of gun rights, and government small enough to drown in a bathtub were as doting and mushy toward their dogs as we were toward ours.

My neighbor across the street was a likable retiree. As he sat on his driveway, his favorite thing in the world was Debbie, the overweight cocker spaniel roaming and rooting around under the coconut palms in his yard. “How’s Debbie today? How’s my sweetykins? That’s a good doggy, you get those geckos!”

He'd settle again in his lawn chair, head back, eyes closed. Having washed his beautiful Mercedes convertible, he was now catching some rays and listening to the radio. The voice coming from his  open garage was that of a local Talk Radio host, barking out contempt for anything or anyone not to the political right of Louis XIV.

That was my problem: How could I square my neighbor’s unconditional love for his overfed cocker spaniel with his politics?

But seeing him like that--sunning himself and listening, now and then cooing sweet nothings to Debbie--always reminded me of a simple truth: without a shared allegiance to our dogs, things would have been much chillier in paradise.

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Photo credit: <a href="https://visualhunt.co/a1/d33a1ee5">Funky Chickens</a> on <a href="https://visualhunt.com/re3/ac80076f">VisualHunt</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/"> CC BY-NC-ND</a>

WHAT TO GIVE THE DOG WHO HAS EVERYTHING

WHAT TO GIVE THE DOG WHO HAS EVERYTHING

The following numbers are dated (taken from the 2007 U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook), but I'm too lazy to look up more recent stats: Even so, these are revealing:

In that year, the top pet was the dog. 37.2 percent of pet-owning households had at least one.
Something in excess of forty-five million people in the United States owned dogs.
Thirty-two million bought Christmas gifts for their pets.
Ten million celebrated their dogs' birthdays.

We can assume the numbers are much larger now. To me, the last two stats are especially significant: thirty-two million + Americans gave Christmas gifts to their pets. Along with children and grandchildren, wives, parents, lovers, etc., thirty-two million people also remembered to shop for Ariadne or Goth or Bucky. They drove somewhere, or walked, or took a bus, or went online to check out appropriate dog-oriented presents. They pondered alternatives, made decisions, and finally bought what they decided would make their dogs “happy.”

Because owners want it so. Just as with buying gifts for others, buying for a dog is both generous and selfish. You are giving something, but getting something, too. Actually, you are getting a number of things: the pleasure of choosing for someone you know, and the expectation of seeing the reaction. With dogs, this expectation leads to the moment when everyone else is shredding paper and feigning surprise and delight at receiving a new tie selected by a teenage grandchild, featuring the unmistakable likeness of Lady Gaga.

Not so the dog. He or she has entered the spirit of the season with unalloyed gusto. Shredding, whimpering, working his head off, he lets nothing stand between him and the task at paw. And it won’t much matter what’s inside. He will snatch it up and prance around the room, parading his new kong or rawhide chew for all to see.

He or she will almost certainly be happy, nothing feigned about it. Grateful, too, and never disappointed, or bored with waiting for it all to be over, so he can get back to texting Sophia, or to playing Grand Theft Auto.

It’s the purity of your dog’s response to life that’s the real reward, the actual gift a dog gives you on holidays and birthdays. Actually, on every day. It’s the lack of ambiguity in a dog’s response--to a raised leash, even to hard eyes staring down following a perfectly innocent encounter with your new slippers.

When all around us is complex and often ambiguous, when so much is gray, we are grateful for someone in our lives who is none of these things. Or we should be.
HERE'S THE BOOK

JUST BILL: INTRODUCING A DOG-MAN COLLABORATION

                                       INTRODUCING A DOG-MAN COLLABORATION

My name is Bill, and I’m a four-year-old Lab mix. Of course I can’t talk or type, but I’m on good terms with my mister. He’s decided to speak for us both.

Why doesn’t he just speak for himself? No idea. After all, I’m a dog. But maybe speaking for both of us frees him in some way. Maybe imagining that I understand him helps him to think and type what’s on his mind.

Is he exploiting me? If it makes him happy, fine with me. He’s done a lot for me. I was born a mistake, at a puppy mill. I wasn’t supposed to even be, let alone grow up, but here I am. The breeder didn’t drown me with my littermates. He let me grow up, out of curiosity. Then, when I was nine months old, I escaped into the pine forest.

That’s when my mister came along. I was in the woods I don’t know how long, but one day I came out on the road, and followed the man who’s typing all this down. You could call it my leap-of-faith day, an act of intuition. I was sick with parasites, couldn’t keep food down. I’d lost a lot of weight and would be dead soon.

But I didn’t die, and I was right to choose that moment to come out on the road. This man—no
other--decided to stop on his morning walk, turn around, and wait for me. He put out his hand, I touched it with my nose. Years, later, here we are.

Maybe thinking of his dog as a co-writer has to do with how disgusted he is these days with humans. He talks about it mornings while reading the paper, evenings when he checks the TV. He never watches long, just checks. Sure enough, the same dough-colored, yammering heads are still at it. Especially he talks about the dough heads if he has an extra rob roy before dinner.

“Dough heads” and “yammering” don’t sound much like a dog, do they? Chalk it up to life with the mister. He’s always coming up with stuff like that.

Clicking up there at the table, he stops to think, reaches down and scratches my head. As we look at each other, he speaks a word. I know the sound if not the meaning, but it doesn’t matter. His voice is soft and his eyes are friendly, the way they are when we walk in the woods. Collaborate is the word. My mister really does believe we’re doing something together. He’s convinced by the way I return his gaze, knowing I’m ready at any time to go anywhere with him. That’s what makes me his partner. His collaborator.

Other times, he says words I do know. Old Bill, old timer, good dog, fetch, walk, down, here buddy, no, come, attaboy. Mostly, I understand what he means from his voice and eyes, how his smell changes when he's happy or mad. Or drinking rob roys.

The way I trust him--to feed me and not forget to fill my water bowl, to crack the van windows when we go shopping--that's how you should trust him. You won’t be sorry, I’m sure of it. Because my mister knows me almost as well as I know him.
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TURKEY DAY IN THE HOOD

  

TURKEY DAY IN THE HOOD

Nostalgia figures big with me on holidays, and this season is no exception. I don’t remember what year it was, only that our border collie Chelsea was still with us. I can hear her nails ticking behind me as I enter the kitchen on Thanksgiving morning.

I think the stage had been set the day before. Driving somewhere with my dog next to me in the passenger seat, I had listened to the first two or three minutes of a Funk-laden version of The Messiah. It depressed me, the way it would to learn of a Zombie Apocalypse version of Bambi, or a Quentin Tarantino remake of The Wizard of Oz. It just put me off my white-boy, suburbanite feed.

I was glad my dog was deaf, because I knew the same influence would soon figure with Christmas carols.  Here in Detroit--Motown—we are always treated during the Yule season to a competition of sorts. R&B artists deliver up aural flights, risking serious voice-box medical complications in their efforts to stamp Jingle Bells or Oh Holy Night with filigreed excess.

Anyway, Thanksgiving morning I enter the kitchen for more coffee.  On the counter is a small TV. I am pouring from the carafe, half watching and listening as our Local 4 anchors provide color for the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade working its way down Woodward Avenue.  I turn to go, but hear the unmistakable voice of Karen Newman. 

She’s singing “It’s the Best Time of the Year,” and I turn to watch.  Karen, you see, is a local, small-pond version of Vanna White.  Both women have made lengthy careers out of a single, highly specialized gesture.  Whereas Vanna has done well on prime time by revealing letters of the alphabet and then congratulating herself by clapping, Karen Newman has prospered as a result of having made The Star Spangled Banner her own at Detroit Red Wings hockey games.

That’s it, the National Anthem.  For years, over and over at Joe Louis Arena, glittering and blond under intense lighting at center ice, Karen has belted out the Anthem for the thousands assembled in their Red Wings paraphernalia.  When she finishes, they explode.  By once again nailing the Anthem with every grace note and cadenza she’s fixed to it over the years, Karen again reasserts the power of memory and tribal consciousness for her fans.  With the last ringing high note and roar from the stands, the players can now put in their mouthpieces, and skate out for the first face-off.

But this is something different--Karen in the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Always well turned out at hockey games, today she is presenting herself in a seasonally adjusted costume: black tights, and a Santa sweater designed to suggest a micro dress.  Even though she’s athwart a motorized float--or because of it—the effect hints at the arresting possibility that her panties lie just north of the sweater’s hemline.

But Karen’s tireless commitment to excellence in singing the National Anthem is here being brought to an arpeggio-laden rendering of “It’s the Best Time of the Year.”  This song is the last and only reason left in the world to remember Andy Williams.  But listening, I think Karen has decided to make Andy a forgotten collectible, stored down in the basement with his vinyl recordings. 

Her powerful, stadium-trained voice is drawing on the many sonic influences afforded to her by life in Motown.  Fascinated, I watch.  Her slender legs in black tights are now spread wide against the Woodward potholes under her float, in preparation for the song’s conclusion.  She’s almost there, straining up in every pop singer’s fellatio-inspired signature move with the mic. 

And Karen delivers!  It’s something I don’t think had ever been seen by her fans at the Joe. With “best time of the yeeeeeeear,” a stake is driven through the heart of Andy Williams. And in that moment, Karen, in apotheosis, delivers a rapid-fire series of pelvic thrusts into her skimpy hemline.

You had to see it. I remember looking down at my deaf border collie, thinking how it had all come together for me in that moment. The holidays were at last upon us. 

Happy Thanksgiving!