A Dog Entered the Story

It happened again last night, this time on Mad Men. I had finally talked my husband Mark, who was initially put off by the program’s depictions of unsavory behavior among our parent’s generation, to try again and we were halfway through season two when the plot took a dreaded turn.

A dog entered the story.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Maybe not,” Mark said.

So we waited. Waited as this one bedded that one, as one drink gave way to five, as the man with the dog struggled with alcoholism and estrangement from his children.

“He loves that dog,” Mark said, as in his loneliness the man petted and protected the Irish Setter named Chauncey. We sat on separate sofas, Mark and I, flanked by two dogs each, four sleeping dogs snoring and whimpering in dreams, four dogs with at least twice that many breeds between them.

“Exactly,” I said. But secretly I hoped. I hoped because this was a good show, damn it, a show built on three-dimensional characters and dialogue that never stayed within the lines. A show that didn’t do the obvious thing, take the well-worn path, surrender to cliché. But I should not have hoped. Because in due time the man, succumbing to despair, walked the impeccably groomed Chauncey to the front door of Sterling Cooper’s Madison Avenue building, detached the leash, and handed him over to the Manhattan night and traffic, to strangers and almost certain death. One bark, then nothing.

In that instant, the writers did what writers nearly always do. We had recognized the odds as soon as Chauncey took his first spritely step onto the screen. Because dogs are never dogs in films or television shows, they are symbols. They are lessons. They are tear-jerking plot devices. They are Chekhov’s gun: Once introduced in Act One, they must pay off in Act Three. Cheap, cheap, cheap shot.

Curious to see what other viewers had said at the time the episode first aired, I went to AMC’s Mad Men blog. A few viewers felt outrage, but there were more who found the scene no big deal: “Someone else will find the dog, take it home and treat it well,” one viewer wrote. Another said, “I am a major animal lover and I thought it was sad/surprising when he let Chauncey go but I was more struck by what it said about Duck. To me, it showed that Chauncey was better off finding a new family than with him…I assume the dog will be fine.” I assume the dog will be fine.

Isn’t it pretty to think so.

That a dog can thrive if turned loose on city streets is a convenient fiction…just as it is a convenient fiction that the dog dumped on the rural interstate will find its way to a bucolic farm with kindly farm folk just waiting for a dog to happen along and live happily ever after, chasing cows and barn cats… just as it is a convenient fiction that the dog surrendered by its owner to the county animal control will be adopted--being, you know, so special and all. We don’t have enough time to do right by this dog is what people say. We love the dog dearly, but now we have a baby on the way is how the emails to rescue groups are worded. We’re moving across the country, they say, no other explanation apparently required. Or, worst of all, we’re going on vacation.

You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe that some people would just as soon dump their dog at animal control to be killed almost immediately because they are going on vacation and figure they’ll get another one upon their return. Oh, but it’s true. It’s the reason that every person involved in dog rescue feels a little crazy, a little despondent, or very, when Fourth of July approaches, say, or Memorial Day.

Let me explain how animal control works, because I need to put it in black and white, need to remind myself that my own parents did this to a stray dog whom I had named and come to love when I was nine or ten. Pepper. For Pepper’s sake, and for the sake of every dog surrendered to every animal control across this dog-loving and dog-hating nation, let me articulate it here.

When dogs are picked up as strays, the county or municipal animal control is supposed to hold the dog a certain number of days to allow the owner to locate it, if, in fact, it has an owner. Some wait six days, some wait four, but those dogs are supposed to be “safe” for that interval, after which they can be put up for adoption or destroyed. However, when an owner walks into animal control and surrenders a dog (or cat), that animal can be euthanized immediately if space is an issue, which it almost always is in certain parts of the country (such as the South, where I live now) or if the officer in charge just feels like keeping things tidy. After all, the one person who is most likely to care for the dog has just washed his hands of it, delegated the problem to municipal functionaries who may or may not give a damn.

Gas chambers, heart sticks, euthanasia performed on a slotted floor that’s hard to stand on, but easy to clean. Is this upsetting? You damn well better believe it is, and I could easily launch into a lecture about the importance of the No Kill movement, but that is not my purpose here. No, my purpose is to say to the writers who so glibly, who so easily turn the abandoned dog, the lost dog, the dead dog into a symbol, simply this: Dogs are not your pawns to move around, your whores to buy and discard after an hour, your jerk off tools, your shorthand for character, your cheap trick. To kill a dog off in a movie or a television show or a story is the most predictable, the most bush league move you can make. And every time you do it, you breathe life into the idea that dogs are expendable, nothing but props, and that human convenience and narrative expediency take precedence.

That’s why, when a dog enters the story, I pull my own dogs a little closer. That’s why I prepare to suffer. Because even Mad Men's writers, even they could not resist.

Palms Up: Sweetie

Yesterday, I drove to exit 121 (Buckhead) off I-20 to meet Sweetie, a purebred Chesapeake Bay Retriever who had been dumped at Cobb County Animal Control, northwest of Atlanta, to be euthanized. She was eight, heartworm positive, with a limp, so was deemed "unadoptable".

Sweetie was lucky. Though the cement floor of the shelter was hard on her joints, she was purebred, her ticket out. It doesn't always work that way, of course. Plenty of purebreds are euthanized, despite the slope of their flanks and the cut of their muzzle. But word travels very quickly when a purebred winds up in Animal Control: "PB Chessie in Cobb County" or "PB MinPin: Contact Spalding AC." Because many rescuers choose to organize themselves around preservation of a particular breed, there are groups and resources to pull, transport, and foster these dogs until an adoptive home can be found.

"How many Chessies do you have?" the woman who was going to foster Sweetie asked when I met her in the church parking lot we had designated for hand-off. I had arrived a little early, and so I walked Sweetie around the grassy area by the entrance to the Prayer Garden. Her leg sometimes slipped, but she pulled with real strength, at one point rolling onto her back and wriggling around in what must have been some yummy smell.

"I'm not really a breed person," I said. "We have four dogs, all mixes."

She told me about her "three permanent Chessies" and how she fostered one or two as the need (and there is always a need) arose. Sweetie was up for a bath and then headed to the vet that very afternoon to see about her limp, which made me feel very grateful to the woman who was giving so much of herself to a dog she'd never met before that very minute.

As I drove off, I wondered about the resistance--even resentment--I feel sometimes toward what I have come to think of as "the breed people". On the one hand, there are so many dogs in danger every minute of every day in every county across the South, there is no way a person can take it all in and act without some boundaries to help focus that action. We do what we can. We do what we are led to do.

On the other hand, why was this dog more deserving of rescue than the big black lab mix puppy or the medium sized brown and white terrier of indeterminate provenance? Why would no one look twice at the young dog with years of life ahead (if we chose to save him), but several organizations scramble to find a slot for the senior Chesapeake Bay Retriever? It made me queasy to think of the frightened dogs left behind in Cobb County AC, the ones who weren't anything special, who didn't measure up, somehow. Not long ago, I had emailed a woman with a local greyhound rescue about a greyhound mix on the "euth list" the next day at a Georgia shelter. I offered to find someone to pull him, I offered to get the dog to her if she could find a spot--

"We don't take mixes," she responded curtly. No offer to help, no sheepishness, just that single stone cold sentence. Breed Nazi I thought, then: No. We do what we can. We do what we are led to do. I tried to believe it.

Later that evening, I received an email from the woman who'd taken Sweetie:

"She has some major issues going on. At the end of her vertebrate there has either been an injury or infection or tumor or something which has majorly damaged it. She also has 5-6 vertebrate down her back that have crippling arthritis and on top of all of that there is an underlying neurological problem. The vet said it is rapidly progressing and she would be paralyzed with in 6 months. So.........we are going to look for a nursing home for her to live out her days and she will not be treated for heartworms. She will just be made comfortable for her remaining days. She is getting showered with lots of love. She has found "her" spot in the house it is under the piano so I put down a blanket for her. She has already gone out to potty and come back in and went straight to her blanket under the piano. She looks very happy to be off the shelter floor on her own bed. It is too bad that she is ill because she is so sweet and beautiful but at least chessie rescue made it possible for her to live out her final days in luxury."

I sat and cried. Until then, I thought I had learned my lesson. But the universe had more to teach me: What hubris to take pride in our compassion! What hubris to think we can even know its effect in this world, that we can determine the outcome. We do what we can, we do what we are led to do with the dog who presents herself, the dog in front of our noses.

We sit, palms up, and whatever comes, comes. Whatever falls from the sky, we take.

To Carry It: Letter from Augusta, Georgia

He no longer knows concrete from carpet, asphalt from grass. When you get close to him, the sour smell washes over you in a wave.

“Okay, old soldier,” my husband says. “Okay.”

Our dog strains at her leash, every muscle taut. But the old soldier doesn’t seem to notice. He wanders into the middle of our busy street, head cocked to listen to something we can’t hear, something other and more compelling than our voices, raised now in alarm, something other than the sound of horns and brakes.

He no longer knows human from machine.

***

They began arriving at our door the evening of the day we moved in, neighbors with covered dishes and baked goods packaged tightly first in a layer of plastic wrap, then aluminum foil. They arrived at our door before we even thought of it as “ours.”

They wanted to welcome us to the neighborhood, they said.

We were exhausted and adrenaline-scorched and we stunk, having packed up what was left of our home 750 miles away two days before, loaded a U-haul trailer all one sleepless night with what the movers couldn’t take; having carried two impossibly heavy televisions and three computer monitors down a curved staircase (dragging them thump-rest-thump-rest, step at a time, when our legs gave out) and four mattresses and many, many boxes; having left one angry teenager behind with her grandparents and loaded our younger daughter (more docile but no less emotional) and one big dog into two very old cars and driven and stopped and driven and stopped when we nodded off, crossed lines, snapped awake, heart pounding, to the other’s lifesaving horn.

Having arrived at 2 and risen at 6 to sign our lives and livelihoods away at 10.

We were exhausted and we stunk. Still, my husband’s eyes met mine with a kind of manic wonder: Welcomed by the neighbors! In our eighteen years and nine moves this had never happened.

So, my Kerry-Edwards sticker hadn’t repelled them. How silly my liberal Yankee defiance, my fears seemed now.

Cornbread and chili, brownies and tuna casserole. I almost wept.

***

We had never had a lawn before, not one of our own. Yet, here we were, a 40-something couple acquiring a lawn at an age when others, kids grown, were divesting themselves of same. Not a yard, you understand, but a lawn. Not only had our ninety-year-old condo in a collar suburb of St. Louis bought us twice as much space here in Georgia, but it had got us this lawn. A lawn among lawns!

What the hell were we thinking?

***

“You should be ashamed,” the man said to my husband, who was bending to pick up our dog Karma’s contribution to the ecosystem. We walk our dog on a leash twice a day, we carry bags and use them, we are careful and respectful. Where we came from, that’s what you do.

“What?” Mark said.

“Letting him do that—you ought to be ashamed!”

“But I’m picking it up,” he said. “We always pick it up.”

We had often admired the Zen aesthetics of the man’s house and lawn, the way everything was balanced, shape and line and color. We had even, in what embarrasses me now, noted with satisfaction that the couple with that beautiful house were black, African-American. Surely here our kids would finally live an integrated life, not like before, where the black children were imported for the day and then promptly returned to their city neighborhoods, but a real life, a true life. One with color.

The man stood there, glaring, hands on his hips. “You ought to be ashamed,” he repeated.

“You know what?” my husband said, as he finished his maneuvers, tied the bag, and pulled Karma away from that lush green carpet. “You know what?—you’re a jerk.”

An isolated case. That’s what we thought.

***
There is a dog, it seems, in every backyard, a dog barking and barking and barking out of boredom and frustration. Dogs behind fences, dogs lying in the driveway waiting, waiting for something, anything, to relieve the tedium of their lives on hot cement, lives that stretch out day after day after day.

They must have electric fences, we said to each other at the beginning (how else could these people leave their dogs out like that?). And then the barking dog would spring to its feet and run to the end of the driveway and follow us, barking, for blocks, cars whipping by at 40 mph, the drivers giving us no margin.

“Go home!” we’d shout, trying with all our might to pull Karma away. “Please go home—“ And then another car would round the blind curve at the top of the hill, slam on the brakes just in time.

“Oh, please, please just go home.”

***

Even the most impeccably groomed lawn in our neighborhood can’t compete with the Augusta National, which is only ten minutes away, though it took us several months to discern its carefully camouflaged entrance, its Old Money boundaries. Not that we’ve been inside, you understand; like the rest of the world, we’ve seen its azaleas and emerald fairways only on television, which does not require an invitation. A few blocks away from “the National” is the Sandhills neighborhood. In Sandhills, there are no white faces. It is where, we’ve been told, “the caddies used to live.”

Here, poverty has a different feel.

In the urban Midwest, the brick buildings—what might, in the East and in another time, be called tenements—are crowded close to the street and are nearly identical in their squat brown squalor, block after block after block, cars parked on either side, snout to ass, like dogs checking ID.
But here, the streets narrow suddenly, are suddenly overgrown. The trees, separated by a broken ribbon of asphalt, nevertheless effect tangled union just above the street or reach out to brush your car, as if wanting in. And the houses. Not houses, but shacks, really, smack dab in the middle of the city. Two miles from our neighbor’s Zen-ish temple there is a shotgun, falling-down grocery store overtaken by Kudzu, the letters on its ancient sign fading away.
Driving through, I can’t escape the feeling of being watched.

***

Walking Karma, I can’t escape the same feeling. We are wrong, somehow, my family, we cross lines, break rules we never knew applied. And we are bewildered.

Occasionally, I run into someone else walking a dog on a leash, and when I do, I find myself talking a mile a minute, as if to keep them from their walk for just a little while. “Yes,” I say, “we’re new here. And you? Have you lived here long?” In this way, I have made several acquaintances: Marie, warm and gregarious walking Beau; Susan, who once had a much loved Golden Retriever she can’t bear to replace; Jane and Fred, an older couple who don’t have a dog, but are unfailingly kind when our morning walks converge; and our next door neighbors, transplants like us, who took in a second dog about to be abandoned when its family moved away.

Mostly, though, the dogs in our neighborhood are left to wander the streets ungoverned and unprotected —like eccentric, slightly mad relatives. Like someone’s slow cousin who just got it into her head one day to mosey on down to the Tastee Freeze in her nighty, and what can you do, she was just born that way.

***

We have been admonished for simply allowing our dog to sniff someone’s grass. We have been lectured for allowing our dog to step onto the curb from the street when cars are coming. On every block there are at least four lawns we don’t dare breach, no matter the traffic, no matter that there are no sidewalks. Private property. What at first seemed an opportunity to get to know our neighbors has turned out to be just that.

Finally confronted, the Old Soldier’s owner says, in his defense, “he don’t have much time left, anyway.”

***
There is a Jesus fish on every other car. There’s a church on every other corner. There is a flag in every other yard (lest we forget what country we live in). There are pickets at Planned Parenthood and so many fetus-fetishizing letters the local paper no doubt can’t print them all (though I’m sure they try). There are vigils and there are protests on behalf of cells and clumps of cells and potential clumps of cells.

Private Property doesn’t seem to apply.

And there is a dog wandering every street—skinny and homeless, with visible bones and demeanor way past stoic (I’ve seen those eyes as I stop to let them pass, their total lack of expectation) or fed but turned out to wander, deluded by the erratic comfort of home. There are dogs unsecured in the beds of pickup trucks going 70 on I-20 and there are dogs dead along that same highway, so many I have learned to keep my eyes trained on the road ahead. There is a shelter where, last year, more than 13,000 animals were “put down,” their bodies carted by truck to the public landfill and dumped in heaps of multi-colored fur and slack muzzles and fixed, clouded eyes.

And there are these neighbors, the ones who now return our waves with scowls, blaming us for the piles of shit our dog didn’t leave.

They don’t seem to know that our job is to pick it up and carry it, to carry it home.

***

We have three dogs now: the second rescued by a local group from the kill shelter, a puppy with the misfortune to be born, one of five, into a family on the brink of a violent divorce; the third, one of ten born to a heartworm-positive mother rescued by another organization.

“Oh, honey,” the sweet young vet tech says to me, putting her hand on my arm when I let it all pour out. “Oh, honey,” she says, shaking her head, “Welcome to the South.”