Howl Read Free Page B

dog likes to loiter while the younger one is forever lunging wildly on, nearly asphyxiating himself on his collar. Solution: By knotting their leashes together—by yoking the puller to the lollygagger—I can leverage the equal and opposite forces of motion and inertia, thereby creating a perfect equilibrium in which one hound counterbalances the other for the duration of our pleasant stroll.
             
    In the end, there’s nothing in the list of life’s rewards that compares with the deep, abiding, unconditional love that is unique to dogs. Besides, if it’s true that people who own dogs live longer, your second dog will push you that much closer to immortality’s door.

I Done Them Wrong: How I Wrecked My Daughter’s Self-Esteem and My Dog’s Sex Life
    [Cathy Crimmins]
    M Y DAUGHTER, AN only child, has been deprived of sibling rivalry, so she does what comes naturally: She takes it out on The Dog.
    “You love him more than me,” she’ll pout, and of course most times I protest that it isn’t possible.
    But who could blame her for suspecting differently? When she was nine, Kelly even caught me singing her “special” song to the dog. That was a bad moment. I never confessed that her anthem was once her father’s particular song in our halcyon childless days, and I had just adapted it for her. Kelly also went to pieces whenever I called the dog by her affectionate nickname, “Tootsie,” and I admit that I sometimes did it intentionally—what fun is being a mom if you can’t glory in a bit of passive aggression?
    Interspecies relationships are hopelessly muddled in any household, especially since a family usually gets a dog
for
a kid. That’s a big mistake, because young kids don’t really like to take care of a dog and tend to tire of them the way they lose interest in the newest PlayStation game. I ignorantly passed down the kid/puppy tradition from my own family: I had received a puppy as a gift when I was eight, so I promised my kid one at the same age.
    At the time, I forgot that I’d never once taken care of my dog, even though my family lived in a rambling exurban community where dogs didn’t even have to be walked. Filling her water dish was my only responsibility, but I still couldn’t hack it—at one point, after paying rapt attention in fourth-grade science class, I tried to convince my mother that my dog’s water dish was empty because of evaporation, not neglect. And so it went with my kid, who foisted off the dog care on me on his second day with us.
    Sitting every day with me in the home office, the little dog became inordinately attached to me, as creatures are wont to do when you walk and feed them. But I felt swamped with duties, and it was a terrible recipe for family friction, going on for years as I struggled to do my work, stay interested in my marriage, prepare meals, help my kid with her homework,
and
walk and clean up after the dog. The puppy, a pudgy, short-legged Jack Russell Terrier named Silver, became the most pleasurable part of the domestic equation, providing endless hours of writerly procrastination. But when it came to my other duties, I was frequently seething in that way only moms can seethe—in a deep Vesuvian mode where the steam coming from one’s head is always present, threatening imminent eruption.
    I don’t mean to suggest that the dog was perfect, but he was certainly the least demanding member of the household, and, being smart, he caught on to the family dynamic right away. Silver the Dog knew that the kid was important, and he had to pretend to like the young hairless pup, even though she moved quickly and unpredictably and mostly tortured him. As a canine actor, Silver rivaled Brando or De Niro—he was positively Stanislavskian—and any visitor to our house would think he adored the kid. He would let her pick up and fondle him while he fell limp in her arms and traveled to his Canine Happy Place, wherever that was. Maybe it was a mountain