Some Dogs I've Known

My wife and Wally and I went for a walk in the woods this morning. On a couple of long stretches of incline, my wife told us to go on ahead, she'd catch up. When we would get fairly far ahead, I was struck by how Wally would stop and turn back to wait for "Mama." I marveled, as I had many times before, at Wally's conscious presence.

Wally, happy on New Year's Day 2005

I was reminded of that profound observation by someone long ago: dog spelled backwards is god. And if I thought of God as, say, the sum total of consciousness, I could believe in that, something manifestly existing not only in humans, but also in dogs...in all such living creatures and maybe even in those rooted to the ground, for who was I to say that God as a tree was not experiencing the wind, the rain, the sun, squirrels, frogs, owls? I reminded myself to consult Rilke when we got home. From the ninth of his Duino Elegies:

Sind wir vielleicht h i e r, um zu sagen: Haus,
Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster,—
höchstens: Säule, Turm . . . aber zu s a g e n, verstehs,
oh zu sagen s o, wie selber die Dinge niemals
innig meinten zu sein....

[Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Olive tree, Window,—
possibly: Pillar, Tower? . . . but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be....
          J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender translation]

And waiting for Mama there with Wally, I remembered other dogs, other presences of God.

The first dog I can remember was Poncho, a collie mixture my parents had when we lived on a Petaluma chicken ranch around 1950. I remember once, when I was desperately sad—why specifically I can't recall, but it could have been after a fight between my parents, or after I'd run away home from school because my feelings had been hurt—sitting on the porch steps weeping and holding Poncho for comfort. Sometime later, my dad had to kill Poncho (a .22 shot to the head) because he bit my niece Stormy on the face and neck after she reached for his food bowl. And thus for the billion billionth time was God experiencing violent killing and being killed, as though God hadn't experienced it enough times already in the constant uproar of the food chain.

Twenty-five years later, my wife and I bought a springer spaniel for our children. I can't remember whether they named him Dale, or he was already named that, but "Dale" he was, a nervous dog who shed copious amounts of long, silky hair. He was permitted in the house, but he mainly lived outside. We had a plastic "sky kennel" for him, situated in the narrow space between our house and the redwood fence separating our seventh-of-an-acre tract lot from our neighbor's, there in San Jose.

When we migrated from California to North Carolina in 1983, Dale rode in the sky kennel in our airplane's luggage hold. Spiritually, Dale was mostly our son's dog. Our daughter didn't seem that attached to him. But of course my wife and I did most of the chores of caring for him, and we did all of them after August 1984, when our son, who had been playing the cello since fourth grade, went away to complete high school and take his bachelor's degree in music at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Dale seemed very unhappy living outside. We didn't have a fence, so he was continually hooked to a long lead attached to a line stretched between two oak trees. He wasn't welcome inside for long because he shed so much.

One of the very worst things I have ever done in my life was taking Dale to "be put down," with the concurrence of my wife and daughter, but without having consulted our son. When he came home and found out, he immediately took off for a long walk and wouldn't say anything about it afterwards. Nor has he ever been willing to talk about it, even on the several occasions when I have brought it up, hoping each time to be forgiven. But even more than that, I remember the vet asking me just before he injected Dale, "Did he bite someone?" And I said, as I held Dale in my arms, probably to comfort myself more than him, "No, Dale never bit anybody." During that moment I wanted to call the whole thing off, doubting that I could decide for Dale that it was better for him to die than to go on living unhappily. God experiencing both innocent death and remorse at once.

Ten years later, my wife wanted a dog and chose another long-haired shedder, a ten-year-old golden retriever named Ruffy.

Ruffy, August 1995

But by this time she'd ceased to care whether a dog shed or not, so Ruffy lived inside and was welcome to spend part of each night on our bed. Ruffy was the dog I was taking out for a walk on that blizzardy evening of January 10, 1996 when my feet flew out from under me on a frozen step and I landed so hard on my butt that the brain tumor I didn't know I had started to bleed. When I was in rehab after surgery, my wife brought Ruffy to see me. I came to regard Ruffy as "my angel in disguise" for occasioning the tumor's discovery. He and I were photographed for a newspaper article about it.

My wife wanted another dog, a young one who she hoped would learn from Ruffy's calm, gentle ways. She'd learned about poodles' not shedding and we bought a pup from a neighbor who bred poodles. We chose "Little Blue Spot," the one marked to distinguish him from his cream colored twin. That of course was our Sir Walter Raleigh, or "Wally."

Wally almost still Little Blue Spot

Wally at about 3-4 months old

He was of no mind to learn from Ruffy, however, bossing his appointed "mentor" around from the very first day.

Ruffy, always patient with his "mentee"

Ruffy suffering Wally's rough-housing

I wonder how much Wally missed Ruffy after he died. Not so much, I think, as my wife and I did.

And, besides Wally and God, another dog I'm still getting to know:

I did liken myself to a dog, after all, in a comment to Tom Sheepandgoats the other day:

Most of my posts since I started blogging back in the spring seem to have been motivated by a dog's desire to pee on a post, the post being George W. Bush. Me saying, "I've not been taken in by the man. And I'm here again to say so."

I had already written (in my "Youie" journals of 1989, I think) that when a dog marks a spot he's saying "I AM" (as the burning bush characterized Yahweh to Moses).