Dogsitting

Non-ficition

Sometimes we don’t realize how badly we want something until we can no longer have it.

Take Sandra and me, for example. We both love dogs and would have liked having one. The timing’s wrong now, though, since we realize that at this point in our lives we are much too selfish to surrender our needs to those of a pet.

But we do love the critters and welcome taking care of them for limited periods. At dinner parties, if there is a dog in the house, I almost always find myself paying lots of attention to it. “If you ever need a dogsitter…” I hear myself saying. And I mean it. We like being the aunt and uncle you spent your vacation with, before going back to the people who have to pay your medical bills and drive you to your play dates at the dog park.

Millly, a 30-pound long-haired Dachshund, stays with us from time to time. The first time, she came with Felix, who by then had fully entered his geezerhood. He’d been with us off and on and was an excellent house guest. When he needed to go out to do his duty, he’d jump down from wherever he’d perched, look up at me, sneeze, trot in a little circle, and then stare up at me again. Clearly, he had business to attend to. I’d have to have been pretty thick to miss the point. On the leash, he walked briskly forward, stopping to check out the markings of other dogs and to leave his own message. At night, he found a spot at the end of the bed and settled in with no fuss whatsoever.

Milly was not so easy. She is a rescue with a sad history. She’d had motherhood foisted on her repeatedly in a puppy mill and had spent all her life sitting pregnant in a wire cage. She often trembled even sitting in a quiet room, always jumped at loud noises, and was apt to have accidents. Not only had she never learned how to communicate her needs, but she had never even learned to play. I have still never heard her bark or make anything more than a reluctant muffling noise in her throat. To prevent her famous accidents, I had to take her out nearly every hour.

She didn’t make it easy for me to do that, either. If this drama started in the bedroom, where she preferred to post herself on my pillow, I had to gently pick her up and carry her down two flights of stairs. At the bottom, huffing and puffing, I had to sit on the last step and, with one arm, put on my outside shoes while holding onto her wriggling body with the other. If I didn’t, she’d dash back up the stairs to take refuge on my pillow again. Then she’d fight me while I tried to attach the leash to her collar and magically turn her little body into a ship’s anchor when I tried to lead her to the door.

And she didn’t walk on a leash like any dog I’d ever known. As we walked, for whatever reason, she went in circles. Now she was next to me, now in front, now on the other side, now behind me, and on like that as I switched the lease from right to left hand, side, back, side, front, and repeat. In tango dancing, that’s called a molinete. We proceeded in a straight line of circles, drawing a stretched out slinky map on the pavement. Once we fell into the rhythm, it worked fine until she managed to tangle herself in the leash. Invariably, as I tried to free her, she wrapped the leash around my feet and looked up at me as if to say, “What exactly are we doing out here, anyway?” She always seemed befuddled.

Your heart had to go out to her, though. She seemed sad. Never wagged her tail. Didn’t bother sniffing anything on our walks. Even the trash cans in the alley didn’t arouse her curiosity. A squirrel scampering out in front of us? Nothing. No reaction.

But at bedtime she snuggled in next to me under the covers. When I sat up reading, she joined me with her head on my lap. Despite the difficulty and inconvenience of having her around and sucking our attention away from the much more easygoing Felix, we thought ,”Poor thing. She’s truly been denied a normal dog’s life,” so when our friend needed a dogsitter again, we were happy to take her in. Felix had died by then, so it would only be us and Milly. I prepared myself for lugging her down the stairs again.

The afternoon she arrived, I was up in the bedroom reading and didn’t run downstairs in time for the actual handoff. As I finally came down the stairs, she shot past me headed for the bed. I turned around and retraced my steps, knowing I’d find her sitting on my pillow. “Well,” I told her, “welcome back.” I saw that she’d already begun shedding hair onto my side of the bed. She looked straight back at me. No cute doggie head tilting. No puppy eyes. Just an unreadable stare. I walked over and ran my hand down her back a few times, adding to the accumulation of dog hair already on the pillowcase, and then sat down next to her. She inched over and leaned into me. “I’m not going to carry you down the stairs this time,” I told her. “I’m not getting any younger, you know.”

Then I had an idea. I went and got the leash and dropped it within arm’s length on the bed and sat down with her again. We sat together like that for a time as I leafed through a magazine, then casually I hooked the leash into her collar and went back to my magazine. A little later, I stood up and said, “Okay. Let’s take a walk,” and started walking away as the leash stretched out between us. She gave me a startled look, leaned back against the taunt leash, but nonetheless got to her feet. “Come on,” I said. “No dillydallying today.” I think she was too surprised to do her ship’s anchor routine because she jumped off the bed and followed me down the stairs, and we were outside walking down the driveway within three minutes.

Not so many circles this time. She did tend to walk behind me, but not always, and she didn’t force me to change hands with the leash so often. She kept up a brisk pace, stopping now and then to stare off into the distance. Maybe she heard a noise. Maybe she smelled the trash cans, though I don’t think so. Her nose never twitched. Maybe she just wanted to catch her breath. On the whole, I got the impression that she enjoyed the walk.

The next four days went by smoothly. We sat on the couch together, she burrowed in under the covers at bedtime, clung to me during a thunderstorm, ate treats out of my hand, and then it was time for her to leave. She had been my focus those four days. I’d kind of fallen in love, so I felt a surprising emptiness as we gathered up her things. I actually felt jealous to see her wildly wagging tail when our friend, her person, arrived to take her home. I had never seen her so animated.

“Dogsitting,” I had told a neighbor facetiously one day that week, “is the best way to have a dog. You get ALL the bennies without the headaches.” I saw now that that’s not true. I would have given plenty to have that tail wagging for me. But, like I said, we missed our chance.