Why Do I Have Dogs?

My dad was a dentist in a small Minnesotan town. Back in those days, slightly after the glaciers had receded, leaving Minnesota with 10,000 lovely lakes, not everyone whose teeth wanted fixing had the cash in hand.

Our Polish cleaning lady, Zelda Grabnowski, worked off her dentures spending two days a week at our house, leaning on a broom, drinking coffee, and yammering in heavily accented English to my bewildered mother.

I can’t imagine how many hours my dad poked around the mouth of a penurious Duluth dowager in exchange for her player piano and two dozen crumbling yellowed piano rolls that still tickled the ivories in a magic way. That player piano — a baby grand player piano at that —was my family’s claim to fame.

Some guy from Hermantown swapped a pair of cocker spaniel puppies for half-a-dozen fillings. For years, my sister and I, like all idiot children, had clamored, “Can we get a dog? Can we get a dog?” Now, thank God, we each had our own pup. My sister (aka the Feral Child) and I were unable to share as much as a Barbie Dream House without burning it to the ground.

The puppies, Chip and Brownie, arrived at Christmas and proceeded to pee and poop everywhere in the house, including the Christmas tree, the French provincial furniture, and the Autumn Gold shag carpet. My mother, the Elsie de Wolfe of Duluth, was not pleased.

Chip and Brownie were exiled to the basement playroom, where they remained, unhousebroken. My fantasy dog did not need to be walked several times a day in 13 below zero temperatures. My fantasy dog did not stink. My fantasy dog did not yank the leash out of my iced-over mitten and hightail it towards Canada. I guess what I really wanted was a pull toy.

When the Feral Child and I did remember to walk the dogs, we had to pick our way through the canine waste covering the checkered linoleum to wrangle the smelly dogs, who grew less cute by the day. The times between walks got longer and longer until my sister and I were locked in the basement with two mops and a pail of Mr. Clean.

At some point, Chip and Brownie went to a farm in the country.

A slow learner, my father excavated a root canal in exchange for two hunting dogs and an immense wire kennel that was installed behind our kitchen, where the dogs paced and howled ceaselessly. The dogs made it through duck, pheasant, and deer season, and then my father ducked out of our lives, taking his guns but leaving wife, kids, house, and hunting dogs behind. The hunting dogs joined Chip and Brownie at the farm.

A few years later, one of my mother’s bridge partners was leaving Duluth for a Chicago apartment that had a strict no pets policy. She asked if Mom would be so kind as to adopt her apricot miniature poodle. You betcha. It was love at first sight when dog and Mom met; Ah Sweet Mystery of Life, at Last I’ve Found Thee played as they gazed at each other. Pichez Pierre, aka Shay-Shay, was not a bad dog. He did bite the postman, and after that we had to pick up our mail at the P.O. downtown.

Two years in, Shay-Shay’s birth mom returned unannounced for her dog. “I slammed the door in her face,” Mom said when I asked why the little mullion window was shattered. “I wanted to punch her. The very idea I would give up my dog.” What I would give, even in that pre-TikTok era, to have filmed that encounter.

Shay-Shay stayed with mom longer than her third husband, before going to doggy heaven. (I’m an atheist and I firmly believe such a place exists.)

“I couldn’t feel worse if one of you girls died,” mom wailed, providing fodder for dozens of therapy sessions.

Then I was 22, dumber than a potted plant and facing a grisly end of the affair (my 42-year-old lover was semi-catatonic after a shellacking in the stock market). When I saw the pink eviction notice tacked to our apartment door, I thought “I need a dog” and headed to the closest animal shelter.

This was a mistake. The shelter was more of a jailhouse, a cacophony of desperate barks, too-small cages stacked like boxes at Costco, and eye-watering stenches, one dog more pitiful than the next.

I had almost settled on a three-legged dog when I spotted a Yorkshire terrier the size of a New York City rat. This dog had no hair (mange), no teeth (malnutrition), and cloudy eyes (cataracts). I named him Groucho, and he was a good dog.

Groucho and I moved out before we were thrown out; the zombie boyfriend not even glancing up from the woeful crawl of Dow Jones quotes on the TV. I got a new boyfriend, a divorced dad. During one of the dreaded visitation weekends, boyfriend’s kid left the front door open, and Groucho vanished into the mean streets of Chicago.

For several decades after that I went dogless. Then I moved to Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, a drinking town with a fishing problem. It is also canine-crazy; I believe there’s a one-dog minimum to live there.

My first Puerto dog, Bitey, was born without a personality and maybe without a brain. It didn’t help that she was only four weeks old when she was passed onto me by my neighbor, who already had five rambunctious and noisy kids and now had five constantly mewling puppies in the mix.

“This dog is too young to be away from its mother,” scolded the vet. I guess I could have flung the pup back over the fence to my neighbor but I feared that might be the end of Bitey. Once I had named her, she was mine, for better or for worse. Mostly worse.

Faithful as a dog? Not Bitey. When Bitey turned three, she moved next door to Kale, an Aussie surfer. Bitey showed up for breakfast and dinner and then headed back to Kale’s house. At an outdoor concert, I thought “Isn’t that Bitey?” It was. She was Kale’s plus one.

Kale moved back to Oz, and Bitey reluctantly came home where I killed her. She had always been listless and dull, a milquetoast among dogs. I didn’t notice that she had become duller and even more listless until she was practically comatose from tick fever and had to be put down. I always knew a true friend was someone who would help you bury a body.

Gyyrdwl, a long hair brindle mutt, adopted me and showed me what a dog was supposed to be. She is delirious with gratitude for every meal, and cannot get enough love; stop petting and you’ll get a paw poke to keep going.

Then came McCloud, a goofy rescue mutt who had been found on the side of the road, looking like an abandoned dirty sock and requiring leg splints, special dog food, bottled water, and double hip surgery. He’s fine now and enjoys chasing his own tail, a cartoon of a dog.

Gyyrdwl, McCloud, and I moved back from Costa Rica to a Manhattan matchbox. We had been in New York for three days, and on one of our 34 daily walks, McCloud leapt into a sidewalk tree bed and came out with a rat in his teeth. “Holy shit!” I screamed. “Drop it! Drop it!”

McCloud shook the rat like a Polaroid and I heard the rat’s neck snap. People were screaming, I was screaming, and McCloud looked like I imagine St. George did after slaying the dragon, grinning with pomp and pride.

McCloud and Gyyrdwl devised a hunting strategy overnight: she flushes the rats out and McCloud kills them. The count stands at 225 230 235. I think NYC owes us something.

Unlike my real children, Gyyrdwl and McCloud are early risers. At 5:30 I am wakened by dog breath, damp noses, and pathetic whimpers. A brush of teeth and a cup of coffee (for me) and we head to the park, where dogs can be off the leash before nine. We greet the day with gratitude and try to stay out of the way of the 324,000 joggers and the insane posses of bicyclists who believe they are competing in the Tour de France. For two hours, Gyyrdwl and McCloud search for discarded pizza crusts, sniff a lot of dog butts, investigate likely-smelling holes, and chase squirrels but never catch them, the dogification of hope over experience.

This year, we moved into a slightly smaller matchbox nine blocks north and far enough west that we switched dawn patrol from Central to Riverside Park. We had been in our new place about six weeks when daylight saving time arrived. An idiot, I released the hounds believing the sun would rise any second. Five minutes into the pitch-dark park, McCloud and Gyyrdwl take off like greyhounds, baying like coonhounds, and I know they smell not a rat, but a racoon.

If you see me running, something very bad has happened. At speed, I chased the howls up Riverside Park, until the noise drifted away. The park lights shed a romantic but not helpful glow. Screaming “GYYRDWL! MCCLOUD!” did nothing but make me look like a madwoman. I kept running north from 96th Street, headed for the 105th Street dog run (where my dogs never ran or played, just begged other owners for treats) thinking that might be a place in their little doggie heads.

No joy. Now it was getting light, and dog walkers were showing up. I asked “Did you see two idiot dogs?” No, no, no, until a woman said, “Yes! They’re down at 96th Street.” I ran back from 105th to 96th, and out of the bushes crawled Gyyrdwl, panting like a steam engine.

“Where’s McCloud?” Gyyrdwl had no idea, she was exhausted and wanted her breakfast and dog bed. I got her on a leash, saw another dog walker, and asked “Did you see a yellow dog?”

“Yes, he ran out into the street.” I dash out of the park. No McCloud. A man said, “Are you looking for a dog? It ran up to West End Avenue.”

On the corner of West End and 96th I asked a woman, “Have you seen a yellow dog?”

“That’s your dog? I thought it belonged to the woman who was chasing it.”

I galloped north, dragging Gyyrdwl behind me. My phone rang — my number is on McCloud’s tag. I fumbled to unlock my phone, slid accept with a sweaty finger, and screamed “Do you have my dog?”

It was the doorman at my new building. “Your dog is in the elevator.”

McCloud, whose expression is of permanent confusion, crossed six New York City streets and two busy avenues to find his way to a place he had only lived for a month-and-a-half. He walked in the front door and into the elevator. He could not reach the sixth floor button.

These knucklehead dogs came into my life by pure accident. I could drop dead and my grown-ass sons would shed a tear and then go back to their jobs and girlfriends. But I can’t die because I have these two creatures, who may or may not have a soul. They definitely have hearts, hearts as big as the world. Gyyrdwl, who is eleven, or twelve, or please God not thirteen, has eyes misting over with age. Her muzzle is greying, and it takes her a minute to get up. My greys are hidden under blonde bleach, and every time I stand my knees want to know what the hell is going on. We are two crabby old ladies.

I love our little triumvirate. With my dogs, like my kids, I have one job: make sure they’re alive at the end of the day. I dislike the mom/kid terminology for dogs: they are not my children, they are not people. If a trolley were speeding along and I had to throw my dogs in front of it to save human lives, I would do it (I hope so). But the universe has sent them into my care, their little doggie bodies that get fleas and ticks and weird bone and skin things, and their little doggie hearts, which know only love and devotion.

My dogs are not my kids, yet we are a family, a family of different species, living and loving. And killing rats.