A PUPPY – OR PROZAC?
I didn’t have the patience for a puppy – I was tempted but I knew better. While they’re cute for a few months, pretty soon everything you own has been chewed into confetti or dotted with yellow rings. No, what I wanted was a grown dog, healthy, lively, trained and housebroken, like a well-behaved teenager somebody else had raised.
When I found Tory she was six; once the top breed dog at a nearby kennel, she’d recently been replaced by a younger bitch, a situation that immediately earned my empathy. That wasn’t what sealed the deal, though – it was the way she took my measure when we first met, sizing me up with startlingly blue eyes that gleamed with intelligence and then inclining her head slightly, as if to say, We’re beyond all that pet and monster nonsense, aren’t we? before bounding into my lap with a single graceful leap.
As I soon realized, a dog is the perfect relationship for a single woman: It loves you unconditionally even when you haven’t brushed your teeth yet, it doesn’t hog the remote or ask you for money, and it gets you off your behind and out of the house at least three times a day. And dogs have no boundaries, unlike cats, which give their affection sparingly and on their own terms; dogs snuggle up and lick your face when you want them to, not just when they feel like it.
I used to pity people who told me their dog was their best friend – how sad, I thought. That was before I acquired Tory, who spent the next decade never very far from my side. We walked three miles a day and I never had to join a gym to exercise; she went with me everywhere, and slept in my bed unless I had other company there, which she permitted occasionally but never really liked. I lived part of each year in New York, and she came with me until the end, when she was too old, lame and incontinent for the cross-country flight.
Afflicted by the onset of doggy Alzheimer’s, Tory’s decline in her last few months happened to coincide with an otherwise rough patch in my own life, not physically but emotionally. She wasn’t in pain, the vet assured me, but even as I put a doggy diaper on her and lifted her onto the (rubber-sheeted) bed, I knew I was keeping her alive for my sake, not her own.
Eventually I began to feel better – whether it was the Prozac or the passage of time, I don’t know, but it wasn’t until I did that I could let go of her. Hard as it was to do, I felt lighter when I left the vet’s office for the last time; I had loved and been loved by her for a long time, but now that part of my life was over.
A few months later I decamped for Manhattan again, but it was a different city without Tory, colder, somehow, less inviting and welcoming. Even in the elevator in the building where I live when I’m there, people didn’t smile and nod hello or stop to exchange a few words the way they had when she accompanied me, And there was no tail thumping happily in greeting when I came back to the apartment.
I took to hanging around the doggie park like a woman who yearns to be pregnant stares in the window of Baby Gap. The idea of getting one of my own teased me day and night until I finally stopped denying it and e-mailed all the kennels in the tri-state area where I might find another grown (or nearly) Portuguese water dog, or someone who knew someone who had one.
Jacqui and I didn’t take to each other immediately, the way I had with her predecessor. While she was advertised as housebroken, she wasn’t – at least, she wouldn’t go on city streets or sidewalks, even when I walked her for hours in New York’s coldest, snowiest winter in years. As soon as we got back to the warm apartment, she headed for the only rug in the whole place and immediately made her deposit and continued to do so no matter what I did. She was shy around other people and frightened of other dogs – at the doggie park she wouldn’t leave my side, and she moved more slowly at three than Tory had at 16. The breeder had described her as mellow and laid back; a family pet, not a show dog, she explained, Jacqui lacked that ineffable “spirit” required of ring champions, which were the kennel’s claim to fame.
“She just needs time to adjust,” friends counseled, and once we were back in Seattle, where there was plenty of grass and very little noise and traffic, Jacqui mostly stopped soiling indoors. But her spirits didn’t seem to improve, and she continued to move exceedingly slowly and avoid other dogs and people.
I was beginning to think seriously about finding her a new home with a more patient human when a routine check-up at the vet’s revealed that she had a thyroid problem which accounted for her lack of energy and “mellowness.” Two weeks after starting thyroid medication, Jackie was a different dog – not a puppy, but a lively, curious, smart, playful, well behaved but not too docile young adult.
She’s still not Tory, but I’ve stopped expecting her to be. Between her thyroid medication and my Prozac, we manage just fine. And if we’re both lucky, she’ll be the last dog who owns me, and vice versa..
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Welcome,
A skilled coach and life boundaries consultant whose expertise, advice and assistance can improve your relationships with your grown children, parents and other family members, friends and colleagues and help you balance your needs with those of others and your personal and professional obligations and commitments… Jane Adams has spent over two decades researching and reporting on how Americans live, work, and love, and especially how they respond to social change. A frequent media commentator, she has appeared on every major radio and television program. The author of eight nonfiction books and three novels, she is a talented communicator, and an expert in managing personal, professional and family boundaries, dealing with grown children, coping with change, and balancing life and work. A graduate of Smith College, Jane Adams holds a Ph.D. in social psychology and has studied at Seattle Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Washington, D.C. Psychoanalytic Foundation. She has been an award-winning journalist, a founding editor of the Seattle Weekly, and an adjunct professor at the University of Washington. She is the recipient of the Family Advocate of the Year award from “Changes,” an organization devoted to improving relationships between parents and adolescent children. |
I’m a cat person myself; not that I have anything against dogs, but I measure my life in cats – Archie (Archie Andrews, I think), Roo (son of Kanga) Narouz (Justine’s – in Alexandria Quartet – wild aqnd crazy brother in law), Olmo (another wild and crazy guy, in Bertolucci’s “1900″) Heathcliffe (my main man throughout my romantic youth) and then the cats for whom my kids were their “person” – Sassy and Phyberoptic. The mention of any of those names and I am back where I was with them.
Recently my 23-yesr-old daughter, who is living in Buenos Aires, picked up a stray. His name is Tito (short for “gatito” – little cat) and I smile at the prospect of her beginning to measure her life in cats.