Slow News Week

I'm not a cat person. I don't have the self-esteem deficit required to tolerate the indifference. I merit reciprocation, thank you very much. Nor am I such a disengaged, brutal pragmatist that I'm able accept the purely functional relationship between canned food provider and canned food consumer. I am a dog person. Not just in the absence of cat-ness, but in the positive, space-filling sense: I am a narcissist, as all dog people must be. The ferocity of canine co-dependence is such that it nullifies ab initio the possibility of the myriad levels of practicality that are possible in cat/person relationships.* As a narcissist, I have to believe that the frenzied attention my dog shows me upon my return (after minutes or months, with no discernible difference in commitment) is affection and that that affection, on even that abject and unconditional a scale, I deserve.

It requires a deliberate, however subtle, mental and emotional move on my part to deny the Darwinian explanations of pack behavior, resource competition and the uncounted generations of man/dog mutual domestication.** But dog people are also romantics. That's right, romantic narcissists. What other kind of person would think it's OK to talk to a dog in that cutesy-poo dog voice in front of other adult human beings? Someone able to both suspend indefinitely the eminently reasonable idea that a dog doesn't know what you're saying no matter what tone it's said in AND pro-actively uninterested in the way one's actions are embarrassing to everyone else in the room/vet's office/city street/great blue spinning world.

All the soppiness and solipsism, though, make for some rough patches, especially if you've had to experience putting your old dog friend(s) down. It's been an interesting couple of weeks as we've met and passed the anniversary of just such an awful contingency here. It's been twelve months and I'm still wrangling with the idea that a) my dog loved me and I loved her back and b) the only reason she is now dead is because of a decision made by me and me alone.

For the last four years of her life, my dog had arthritis. It was pretty nasty, in her hips and back, her feet and even her tail. That whole time she was on medication to manage it, but we had to cut it back because it was slowly destroying her liver. I'd always talked the big talk about people letting their pets linger on too long and how that was never going to be me, that I'd rather have them go too soon than too late, wasting and suffering to fit my time table of when I was ready to let them go. The day came that, despite the medication and the easy, lazy days, she spent a whole morning howling and screaming, unable to get all the way up OR lay down completely. It sounds awful because it was, but I called the ex-wife and the kids over and we sat with her for a bit before we decided.

Then the old girl*** jumped into the back of the car when I opened the door, all on her own. And in the vet's office, she wagged and sat and even wandered a little. The vet checked her out and yes, there were limits to how she could move and she stayed off her back right leg almost entirely and her face was haggard and tired from what in retrospect was a long night of (literally) crippling discomfort. So, to my great surprise, I did what I'd always so absently and undeservedly claimed I'd do: too early rather than too late.

Now, a year on, I'm fighting the war we all fight with loss, Memory vs. Remembrance: the things that actually were stacked up against a tonal pastiche of muted pastel feeling. She is where she is now because I sent her there. That's the palette I'm stuck drawing from, making abstract Rorschach shapes inside the celluloid frames that should be showing me facts and events. The choice was never avoidable, not forever of course. But as I think about and think about how much longer we could have had or what else we might have tried, I'm beginning to understand the appeal of cats. Sometimes they just wander away...





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*I hope I don't need to say that I do not mean relationships with half-cat/half-person hybrid creatures.

**That came out a little more Rick Santorum than I wanted. Sorry.

***The dog, not the ex-wife.