My Accidental Accessories
By Kent Doyle
I never really was a dog guy. Sure, there were family dogs throughout much of my childhood, and I enjoyed playing with them as any little boy would. But none of those animals was my personal pet – a dog being with whom I saw fit to really bond. In fact, it never occurred to me to seek canine companionship for the first 20 years of my adult life. On the contrary, I often looked disdainfully at grown men and women who stared vacuously into traffic as they waited, pooper-scooper in hand, for their furry friends to expedite the business at hand.
Then I got married. Have I mentioned feeling … surprised, by more than a few aspects of this ten-year partnership? One of them was finding myself the owner of a little white Maltese dog, and then two little white Maltese dogs. Bolstered by multiple past successes manipulating me into submission, my wife engineered the situation. She dragged me to the mall, ostensibly for women’s shoes. But knowing that maze of consumer madness better than I knew my own closet enabled her to steer me straight to the pet store. There she fell in love with two pounds of eight-week-old fluff, rolling around in a heap of newspaper strips.
I put up a decent fight. It was three hundred bucks a pound for the dog, and another two-fifty for all the accoutrements. The same money, I argued, could get us a better per-pound value on a manly dog like a boxer or a labrador retriever. I suggested that owning a little white fluff ball might raise doubts about my masculinity. Besides, nobody with any brains buys a puppy at a mall. You get online, research breeders, place yourself on a waiting list, and use the interim as a “cooling off period.”
About halfway through my verbal brief, the little bastard fell asleep at my wife’s breast. It was either cave or be labeled a monster. I caved. Besides, the little guy was pretty cute, and my wife swore she’d be the sole caregiver.
I am aware that some people successfully train their dogs. After all, some dogs lead blind people around while others sniff out bombs or pot in airport luggage. Wasn’t Lassie always finding Timmy in the well and leading a rescue party to him?
Dog training didn’t work out quite so well for me.
I bought a big crate (read, cage) at ruinous expense and studied every dog-training book I could get my hands on. I then endured countless nights of piteous whining from Mr. Hudson (we lived on the river) with no noticeable effect. Fortunately, it took less than a year for him to arrive at his own sensible conclusion that it was more fun to pee and poop outdoors than in my house. The guy who got trained was me. I think of it as fecal terrorism. Mr. Hudson only had to look like he was considering an indoor indiscretion, and I’d drop whatever I was doing to run for his leash.
Another thing that happened within the first year of this dog’s life was that I became the primary caregiver. So much for promises and maternal instinct. I walked Mr. Hudson, and most of the time I fed him. And when I got to feeling wracked with guilt about leaving him alone while Debbie and I worked, I bought him a little white companion dog and named her Lucy. In truth, I bought myself another little white dog because Lucy hardly registered on Mr. Hudson. Endlessly aggressive, he was too busy trying to attack every bull mastiff, pit bull, and St. Bernard we passed to even acknowledge his little sidekick. Little-man’s syndrome, I guess. He’d strain against his leash to get at them, as I saved his life two or three times a walk by holding him back.
Part of my training informed me that the walk ends when the dog goes. If you have two dogs, as I did, the walk ends when both dogs go. Only owners of multiple dogs can appreciate the joy of a “double.” So imagine the sublime exaltation associated with a “simultaneous double.”
Another thing I learned as a dog owner is that the original $600 is chump change. When I feel ill I don’t run off to the doctor because doctors cost money. But when my fluffy friend who can’t tell me: “Oh, it’s just a little indigestion from some goose poop I ate in the park” looks a tad off his game, I rush him to the vet for a $150 examination. Needless to say, there’s no such thing as dog health insurance. So when Mr. Hudson had a stroke, I was lucky to find a dog neurological clinic that was only 500 miles away, and charged a mere three grand for a cat scan in a machine just the right size. Three thousand dollars! For a dog cat scan in a dog neurological clinic that looked inside and out as swanky as any plastic-surgery center you’d see on Rodeo Drive.
But here’s the thing: When Mr. Hudson was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I would have paid thirty grand to make it go away. It wouldn’t have been enough. Hudson died in my arms. And as tears rolled out of my eyes into his curly white locks, I realized that I loved the little bastard. Lucy, too. So what that they growled at toddlers, begged food at the dinner table, and were as dumb as fence posts. They had become … family.
After an appropriate amount of time passed, we bypassed the mall and went straight to a breeder for another little white companion dog – this time for Lucy. We named him Mr. Hudson II, and called him Mr. Hudson for short. A year or two later, when my wife and I split for good, I prepared for a fierce custody battle. But when I unloaded her at her new apartment building and the superintendent greeted us at the door with a waggling finger accompanied by three words – “No Dogs Allowed” – my wife responded without hesitation: “No problem.” She did keep Mr. Hudson and Lucy’s ninja turtle and bumblebee Halloween costumes, though, seeming content to leave me with two fluffy accessories as I embarked on my new life as a stud.
It occurred to me that I should thank her. Surely the dogs would lead to new female companionship. Both fluffballs sucked up shamelessly to every cute girl we passed. And the girls responded by oohing and ahhing and touching them all over. Why couldn’t I get the point across that we were a package deal, that touching them could lead to touching me, that being licked by them could lead to …?
Unless, of course, the affable passerby was a guy in a muscle shirt and skin-tight jeans.
Best, I thought, to keep my sights set on the next simultaneous double.
