61. fur burger

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m thinking about the love stories in my life - especially the wet, sloppy, hairy, stinky ones. In some ways, the love stories with my canine companions might be the sweetest of all. 

I’ll give my mom credit for opening the tap to my sappy, softie heart. The boys love dog movies, and Grandma said she knew a really good one about a dog who comes back, life after life, to care for and protect its human. So we watched this film last night (A Dog’s Purpose) and when the credits started rolling, all of us - me, Tanner, River, Brent, and my mom, all crowded around Barney where he lay in lazy ball of fluff on the couch and cooed and gooed over him, whispering sweet nothings in his little piqued ear; the magic words all dogs are meant to hear: “You’re SUCH a good dog.”

Barney is getting older now, he’s gotta be around ten. We don’t know for sure, because he was a rescue, but when we adopted him they said he was around a year and a half, maybe two at the oldest. He was a puppy then, and we’d driven two hours to find him after I saw his picture on the internet. 

You know, sometimes you see someone and you just know they’re gonna be your person - or in this case, dog-person. I remember seeing Barney’s ad on Petfinders, his little white and brown terrier face staring at me through the screen, and that was it - I had to go to him. When we pulled up to the parking lot where the adoption fair was held, and made our way to the booth with the folks fostering Barney to ask about him, they said we were too late - that another woman was getting set up to take him home. 

I was crestfallen. We’d driven two hours with a nine month old baby in the car (which is sometimes a breeze, but it wasn’t that day) and I wasn’t there for any other dog. I knew Barney (he was called Winston then, a stupid name if you ask me) had chosen us. I told the woman we’d wait and see, that we really wanted this dog and would be such a good home for him. We lived at the beach, were both home throughout the day, had one kid (and would at some point have another) and we were ready for a family dog. He’d get to run and play. We’d be good to him. 

The woman hesitated, said something again about him already being claimed, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. From the other side of the parking lot came a yell. We all looked over, and there was Winston-Barney, being dragged on a leash and yelled at by some angry woman who it appeared was not the one Barney wanted to go home with. The foster dog lady looked back at us, sheepish and embarrassed. “Maybe I’ll just let her think about it for a minute,” she said, “and you can just meet him.” 

I’m laying here with Barney snoring softly at my feet, his little fur-burger body nestled between Brent and I in our marriage bed - it’s the same position he’s taken every night since he came home with us that day in April 2017. 

If you haven’t seen A Dog’s Purpose, the idea is that the same dog reincarnates time and time again to be with their people. I started thinking about all the dogs who have loved me, and the way they’ve gently guided, taught, shaped and molded me into more of the woman I am today. 

My first dog was Eli, but I don’t remember him much. He died when I was really young, maybe three. He choked on a chicken bone. I don’t have a lot of visual memory of him, but I do have the felt sense - I remember what it was like laying my head on his body and rubbing my hands in his long golden fur. If I learned anything from him, it’s that dogs are a safe place to land. 

When I was about five, we got Poppy. She was half black lab, half beagle, and she was a troublemaker. I was glad for it as a kid, because when Poppy was getting in trouble - for chewing up a soccer ball, ripping apart the family dictionary, or digging up the yard - it meant I was in the clear. Poppy was a helpful third wheel for my sister and I; sometimes, when all three of us were acting up, my mom would get confused in her admonishments: “POPPY! I mean Mandy! No, Mela! Whoever you are, knock it off!” At the time I thought she was so silly for not being able to keep us straight, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called Tanner “Barney.” 

Poppy was a good dog. She loved to play, but she didn’t get enough of it. We overfed her, and didn’t take her for enough walks, and when she started to get older (I think she had arthritis), she got grumpy. One day, Poppy bit someone and she had to go live with my aunt in the country. I was probably about ten or eleven, and I was devastated. Looking back, Poppy left our family just a few years before our family fell apart. In some ways, maybe her departure was a harbinger of things to come. 

I didn’t have a dog through high school - but I loved someone who did. After things went haywire in our household, and I turned to rebellion as a coping tool, I dated a boy who had a big, beautiful, goofy pit bull named Buddy. Buddy was the sweetest, bestest boy, and the first love of my first love - but both of them were a mess, too. Some years after we broke up, I learned that Buddy had been killed in a fight with a dog that was half-wolf. I guess he stepped up to the wrong fight. Twenty years after that, I learned that his dog-dad, who held my heart in the years after my parents divorce, had taken his own life out near the creek where we used to walk Buddy. I guess in some ways, he stepped up to the wrong fight too - or maybe the right ones, with his own demons - but he lost. 

The dog who saved me was Mindy Lou, my girl, my road dog. She came to me when I was twenty, four years deep in a toxic relationship and carrying some major trust issues (for good reason). Mindy Lou was a little mirror for my soul, a tiny, angry, defensive, aggressive, bitchy little girl - a kiloton of fury in a fifteen pound body. She was half Jack Russell and half rat terrier. When she came to live with us, she growled when anyone came near her, showed her distaste for people by peeing on the floor if they got too close, and seemed to have packed an insurmountable amount of trauma into her teeny tiny body. Looking back, she and I weren’t all that different. 

It was because of Mindy Lou that I stayed alive in the years after I left that relationship, when I was drinking and drugging and carousing in ways that should have gotten me killed. I can’t tell you the number of nights that I wouldn’t have come home, if it wasn’t for Mindy. Drunk and disastrously irresponsible, I’d think of Mindy, crouching by the front door, shaking because she needed to pee, and I’d miraculously make my Irish exit, only to stumble in through the front door and be greeted by her unfailing love. 

When I met Brent, and fell madly in BIG love in a way I never had, Mindy Lou was jealous - or maybe just protective. On our first overnight date, she made a clear point by pooping on Brent’s living room floor, right underneath his ping pong table. She’d been abused, and wasn’t really fond of men, so I suspect she thought he’d get angry and yell, and we’d get out of there… but he didn’t. I mean, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but took it with a bemused meets amused attitude, and we carried on. 

I remember a few years before Mindy died - we were living on the sailboat, and had gone up to camp for a few nights at Churches - a surf spot on Camp Pendleton just north of San Diego. It was just me, Brent, and Mindy Lou, sitting around a bonfire, well past midnight. We were engaged by then, I think, and I remember watching Mindy turn circles on Brent’s lap before snuggling down to sleep. He was the first man in her life that she’d ever felt truly safe with -  my soul dog, my mirror. 

Mindy Lou left her body just days after our honeymoon. When we came back from Mexico and went to pick her up from my mom’s house, she didn’t run to greet us at the door, and my stomach sank. I found her curled up under the covers of my mom’s bed, so tired and weak that she could barely thump her tail to say she loved me and was glad we were home. 

We took her to the vet and they said she had leukemia. She’d need a blood transfusion every two weeks to stay alive, along with high doses of pain medication, and even then, wouldn’t live very long. We couldn’t afford even the first transfusion, much less the recurring expense, and the docs said that it might be more compassionate to let her go. My heart was shattered. She was my best friend, the one who loved me through my darkest hours, the one who never gave up on me, the one who believed in me and looked at me like I was a hero when I felt like the lowest scum of the Earth. 

We took her home for the night, and gave her all the love we could give. When it was time to let her go, Brent held her and stroked her fur. Anyone who has loved a dog and had to say goodbye knows that there is a moment when the soul leaves the body, and you can feel it. Suddenly, they are heavier - and lighter at the same time. 

I didn’t want to get another dog after Mindy. It was too painful letting her go. But after we had our first child, something in me said it was time to bring a fur-love into our lives again, and then came Barney. 

In many ways, Barney arrived right on time. The first week we brought him home, after he realized we weren’t going to abandon him, he dropped the angel-dog act and started to reveal his strange, stubborn, alien-dog nature. One night I let him out to pee and he wouldn’t come back in when I called. I went out back to try to find him, and he was just standing kitty-corner from me in the yard, staring at me with his big black eyes… staring right into my soul. This dog wasn’t gonna obey, and he wanted me to know it. This was a relationship of equals. 

I’d like to say that Barney came around and now heeds my commands, but that would be a lie. Barney does what Barney wants to do, and his Rage Against the Machine vibe (fuck you I won’t do what you tell me) is probably just the tenderizer I needed to become a boy mom - to soften my controlling tendencies into something more useful for parenting - the ability to realize when I’m in a losing battle, throw my hands up, give an exasperated sigh, and just let it go. 

He’s getting older now, and the boys are too. He doesn’t push back so much anymore, and I don’t push him around either. Together, along with Brent, we herd the kids as best we can, and protect them, and love them. We made Barney a promise when we got him - the same promise I made Mindy Lou, and the same promise I make to my kids: 

You don’t have to worry. We’re family, and we belong together. If we leave, we’ll always come back. We’re never going to abandon you or forsake you. This is, and always will be, your forever home.