Dog

When we didn’t have a dog, I wondered, “why do people bother?” Dogs can be a nuisance. There are the fleas, the ticks, the dirt tracked into the house, and the responsibility. You can’t leave a dog alone for too long and certainly not overnight. Then there is the expense; dog food, chew toys, vet bills, chewed leather leashes that I pay the Armenian shoe repair man in West Concord four dollars to sew back together. Dogs growl at strangers and dig up the garden.

But each morning when I go to get Calley from her crate, she waits while I unlatch the door. She steps out and stands while I bend to pat her, scruffle her furry neck and talk quietly. Then we go to the door where she sits patiently to be let out. Once free, she bounds up the hill, jubilant at the reality of a new day. On a leash, we walk across the street, pick up our neighbor Adeline’s Boston Globe and walk up the steep driveway to deliver it to her door. Then home for breakfast.

With the first sound of David’s foot on the stairs, her head perks up, her tail wags and she is there, waiting at the gate that marks the no puppy zone of upstairs. She knows she shouldn’t but she jumps up on him and we both say in unison, “OFF!” as the trainer has told us do. Then she sits at attention trying to please. We laugh. She is a house spirit bringing love and impishness and calm that seems to bond us all together.

She is also a thief; searching out the most treasured of our possessions on which to sharpen her teeth. She comes prancing into the kitchen, head held high with a roll of David’s architectural drawings securely in her teeth. Pulled right out of his brief case.
Next it is my cell phone filched from the front hall table. Yesterday it was my car keys, now indented with her teeth marks. I went out to my car to see if the remote still works. It does. I hope she will outgrow this phase soon.

But in a quiet moment, when her amber eyes fix on us, and her blond shaggy ears perk up, we lower ourselves to the ground to scratch her neck and tell her what a good dog she is.