Day 83: The Watched Watchdog and her Person: A Day in the Life

Chapter One: The Writing Life

Monday morning I bring Zoe into my writing studio, even though she prefers a good nap after her morning walk back in the house.  I move my laptop out of my corner so that it faces her doggy daybed.  I watch her intently, and she watches me watching her.

This goes on for a while.

I am looking for signs that she's having  trouble tolerating the drug we started her on today, and she is looking for signs that everything is okay with me, which means that everything is okay in her world.  My job is to take care of her.  Her job is to take care of me.  And for her to feel safe, and to do her job, watching the house and watching me, she needs to know I'm okay. 

So now we are in one of those feedback loops.  Can I look for signs of distress, without distressing her? 

I've never been a good actor, never been good at playing it cool.

How do parents handle this?  Gentle readers: please report.  My experience with raising children started as a stepmother when the boys were a tween and a teen, and they almost always knew what I knew when there was trouble afoot. There must have been times when I had to exude calm and ease when I felt fraught, but I've forgotten those moments entirely.  What I remember most are those instances when the trouble I sniffed out was about the mischief they were getting up to (i.e., their party when we were out of town, where someone ran over the fire hydrant and created a gushing fountain, and the police came to the house, and a certain boy had to go to court).  Showing my concern right on my face was a way to show them love, which is to say, to show them I was watching, and that they couldn't fool us again, which was a way to show them love.   Another feedback loop, I suppose. 

To prevent myself from driving my dog and myself crazy I do what I'm supposed to do on a sabbatical.  I sit and type, and try to take myself to the landscape of my novel.  Although it’s mostly set in France, the narrator is remembering a Thanksgiving trip home with her college roommate in Amherst, Massachusetts.  (See Day 77: The Friction of Cooking up Fiction.)

There’s turkey in the oven there.  The smells of pies baking.  But today, under the influence of my dog-watching mission, I find myself adding something cloying and a little sickening to the pie ingredients.  The smell of cloves, and mince.  This was not something I had planned.

A sign of nausea in a dog is excessive licking of the lips.  She has been licking her lips on and off since she came home from her walk this morning.  I watch her tongue and her mouth as  I render a scene of people licking their lips waiting for the feast to come to the table.

I watch the dog, and the dog watches me.

I write about people in distant places and try to embody and inhabit them via the the world of the senses, especially smell and taste. 

Reading and writing literature are both ways to escape and ways to move closer to urgent matters at hand.

So here I am, giving my character the nausea I don't want my dog to have.  I'm displacing it onto a fictional human being.  While we're at it, she might even come down with the flu.  It would be very awkward to be a visitor in someone's home for the first time and find oneself puking in the guest bathroom after a beautiful meal had been served, would it not? 

This makes me wonder not about the big ticket autobiographical events from author's lives like divorce, death and bereavement, marriage, and birth that have influenced all the novels I've read and been transported by, but the authors' daily lives, the quotidian: the morning drives to work, the dog walks, the lunches made for the kids, dentists visited, pies eaten at Thanksgiving.   The real lives "measured out in coffeespoons" going on day after day as page after page is written.

Now I know something I never knew before.  Sometimes you have to give your character a belly ache because it's the best way to channel your anxiety and have something to show for the day.

And it's better than hovering too close to the dog and making her wonder what she did wrong to make her person start acting so strange.

Chapter Two: After That

I go out for a two-hour lunch with my dear friend Liz and her parents, who are visiting from California.  We talk about our shared love of France, dogs, literature, and teaching.  We talk about Derrida, who did the dishes at one of their Thanksgiving dinners, and about the paperwork you need to fill out to get a dog into France (which no one looks at, but if you didn't have it, someone official would demand it of you), and of their trips to Burgundy and Paris, and about Montaigne (and how he is not taught so much now in French classes, as he once was, but is now required reading in any essay class), and somehow, by the time I get home, I have stopped being The Sick Dog's Over-Protective Headcase of a Person, at least for now.

Zoe runs to greet me when I get home and begs to go outside.  She wags her tail when she sees the treat pouch go into the pocket.  We will leave soon to walk with Milo, the Cavalier King Charles who Thinks he's a Greyhound, and his person, a dear friend.

It was raining for a while, but the sun is out now.  Zoe sits in the snow waiting for me to finish this post so we can go.  When I look out the window, she is sniffing the air for something tasty.

Sometimes it's really a good idea to get out of the house.

Day 49: What the Dog Sees in Him

Last March I was shopping for lunch at the market in Cassis, and I met a lovely dog.  She was black and white like a big saddle shoe, with soft fur and big eyes.  She looked like a springer spaniel but reminded me of a border collie in the way she watched over her domain with such vigilance.  I longed to pet her. 

I bought fruit and cheese and bread for a picnic, but I kept checking back.  Who is this dog's person?  I tried to get her attention, but she only had eyes for her companion, whom I knew could not be very far away.

After a few moments passed, and the dog inched closer to the crowds, I couldn't contain my curiosity. Who was this dog's person?  I had to know.

That woman, there?  A Korean woman in her early twenties walked past carrying a bunch of yellow jonquils.

No.

What about him?

A middle-aged man with a white goatee and a beige raincoat approached with a newspaper tucked in his elbow.  He sat on a bench to read, but the dog did not acknowledge his presence.

Definitely not him.

The dog now could clearly see her person.  She pulled herself further out from under the bench.

This is exactly the intensely focused look Zoe has perfected over the years.  It's a herding dog look, I think, although other dogs seem to have mastered it.  The world revolves on its axis inside the pupils of this dog, and that world is one human being.  I have seen Zoe assume this same position: she lies down with her head and neck straight down on the earth and stretches forward as far as she can go.

A tall blond woman in skinny jeans and knee-high boots walked past.

No.  Not her either.

Finally the dog began wagging her tail in joy.  A tall man appeared in a tan, ragged coat.  Some of his teeth were tan as well.  He had the blurry, unfocused eyes of a hard drinker.  In France, a street person like this is called a clochard.  He had bought a small amount of cheese and meat for himself and the dog.  Then he took a sip from something in a paper bag.

The dog was calm now.  The man sat on the bench and dog climbed underneath, order restored to her world.

I was on the opposite bench.  I resisted taking a picture of him, so you only see his legs here.  I said, "La chienne est contente maintenant," the dog is content now.  But he didn't seem to understand me.  It could have been my accent.  It could have been that he wasn't used to having people speak to him.  Or maybe he was already a little drunk.

I wanted to respect their privacy, but if you look closely, you can see the man's legs and the dog.

I don't know if I have ever missed Zoe more than I did as I watched those two be reunited after an endless separation of maybe ten minutes.

Yesterday I met a woman who told me about her father's decline into dementia, and how he no longer remembers her name.  She is just, "sweetie," which works for her.  He knows he has a son named Richard, but he doesn't recognize Richard when he sees him.

Nine years ago, Richard adopted a dog from the humane society.  Every day for eight years, he left the dog at his parents' house when he went to work.  The dog's name is Rusty.  Rusty loved spending her days with Richard's parents.  What she would do when she came in the house was kiss both of them, and then sit on the father's feet.  The man would read the newspaper, or watch TV, and there Rusty would be.

Last January the man's wife died and he began to lose his bearings.  Now he lives in a nursing home.

The dog visits often, and does what she always has.  She licks his face, then sits on his feet.  "Hi, Rusty," he says.  And sometimes, "Rusty, next time you come, you should bring Richard."  Richard will be standing there when his father says this.

I asked the woman if the dog treats her father any differently now than she ever did.

"She's a little distracted by all the people coming and going in the nursing home, and all the new sights and smells," she said.  "But no, when it comes to being with my dad, she sees him the same way.  She loves him the same way.  And the two of them, Dad and Rusty, are the same way together as they've always been."

I thought about this for a while.  I imagined how this man's two adult children have been forced to say and do different things in his presence now that his reality is so irrevocably altered.  He doesn't reliably know them.  He believes his dead wife visits every day.  He doesn't always know where he is.  But the dog still knows him.  The dog knows the "real" him that is still there and has always been there.  And he knows the dog.

When he is with Rusty, then, he is still himself.  He is still the man who loves Rusty, his companion for eight years.  He is still a man with a dog at his feet.

I couldn't wait to get home and see Zoe.

Sometimes when Zoe has been in the yard and doesn't want to come inside, I use my husband as enticement.  "Let's go see your daddy!" I will say, and she comes running up from the river and into the house.

What does the dog see in him?  What does Rusty see in the man in the nursing home who is losing his memory and doesn't always know his own son?  What did the French dog see as she tugged at the lead to get as close to her person as possible while he shopped at the market?

Love.  Home.  Or whatever those words are and mean in a dog's world, in a dog's bottomless eyes.

photo by Francois Bernier