A human's journey courtesy of a dog
Rona Maynard's memoir got me thinking: why dogs, and when?
Before we begin…
What role do animals, perhaps one special animal in particular, play in your life? What is your favorite “dog book” whether it is a memoir or novel?
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A stiff heart begins to expand
Rona Maynard, in her sixties, newly sprung from a career she’d spent most of her adult life cultivating, did not want a dog. Her husband, however, did. He pressed gently and, as two people who have made a marriage work over decades, she allowed herself to consider the possibility.
The dynamic was familiar to me – one person suggests a new idea, the other person immediately points out all the reasons NOT to do it, patience is practiced, minds are opened, and the next thing you know the reluctant party is leading the charge. Then a four-legged stranger plops himself down in what had been an empty nest. A horizon of possibility that stretched wide, unobstructed by jobs or children now shrinks around the needs of a dog who is oblivious to its impact.
In her memoir, Starter Dog: My Path to Belonging and Loving This World, Rona Maynard recounts how adopting Casey, a mutt containing multitudes of breeds that may or may not include beagle, peeled back the image of herself she’d built over years of a successful career as leader of the top women's magazine in Canada. Guided by Casey’s curiosity on their walks or his clear preferences in the face of attempts to train him, she began to suffer growing pains and the joys of unexpected connection with the world around her.
“It was like that stage in a yoga practice where a stiff joint begins to move for the first time in memory—a sensation that a teacher of mine called “joy pain.” A great deal of quivering precedes the letting go. The downside of a shoulder that fulfills its purpose at last is wondering how you ever managed without one. I had somehow spent a lifetime in a stiff heart that was finally beginning to expand.” - Rona Maynard, Starter Dog: My Path to Belonging and Loving This World
I read this book because I had read Rona’s memoir My Mother’s Daughter . These days, I read her essays in her Substack, Amazement Seeker. In this most recent memoir, I found the same elements that draw me to her writing: clear thinking and elegant prose along with the flash of recognition over a shared experience, or the excitement of encountering someone who wanted to explore the same ideas and questions that regularly keep me awake at night.
As I read Starter Dog, I relived my own journey as a dog person. The decision. The honeymoon. The discoveries. The way the world unexpectedly expanded. The unexplainable love that grows inside a human for an animal who arrives with a mysterious past. And now, twenty something years in, to the question I have never really answered for myself: why do I choose to live with dogs when living without them would make so much more sense?
Why do I choose to live with dogs when living without them would make so much more sense?
In our case, I was the one who had first wanted dogs. My husband was not exactly reluctant but decidedly more cautious. He agreed in principle but felt no hurry to close the deal. I, on the other hand, was driven by an urge that I couldn’t explain, a feeling of readiness rooted so deep in me I wondered if there was some similarity between it and the biological clock described to me by friends who had actually planned their lives as younger women.
My urge to get a dog could have stemmed from something as obvious as empty-nest syndrome or a case of self-sabotage. The daily responsibilities of motherhood had started and ended early for me. At forty-six, I knew I did not want another child but I wasn’t done with that part of my life. I had all those impulses and nowhere to put them.
At the same time, the horizon was opening up for me. We had left behind the jobs that had filled every minute of our days; everything was new to us when we moved to San Diego back in 2002. I wanted to write and now was my chance. I was thrilled. I was also terrified. I had no experience in putting my work first, especially work that offered no immediate rewards except the pleasure or pain of actually doing it. I had, however, experienced the rewards that come from loving the stranger who had entered my life as an infant and left it as a mostly-grown teenager. I had grown up in a household that throbbed with the lives of multiple humans and animals.
Well, who knows? Here’s what I do know: on Labor Day 2002, my husband and I took ourselves to the San Diego County Animal Shelter and came home with two dogs: Kato, a one-year old Cairn terrier who loved chasing a ball more than life itself and Chloe, another Cairn, who won my heart for her total lack of ball sense and athleticism. They were a package deal, a canine odd couple who could not live without each other. My husband was the one who, in the end, could not leave the shelter without them that day. I’d told him we could go home and sleep on it. He would not leave them behind.
In the twenty-two years since then, we have shared our lives and our home with six dogs, a number that gives me pause now as I consider it. Only one of the four who have died reached old age; the other three died way too early: to cancer, to seizures, the last one to a heart attack when she was only three years old.
Each one took a piece of us and our story with them. I planned to share some of those stories here, today, but now I can’t. There are too many. I am overwhelmed just thinking about them. I fear falling into sentimentality which I occasionally enjoy as a reader but loathe as a writer. So, at least for now, I will not focus on the individual dogs I have loved. I will share a few of the answers that rise up in me when I ask myself why, in the face of all that is rational and in the face of inevitable loss, I keep bringing dogs into my life.
On days when I might want to retreat from the world, give up on writing, or just drop out of life, the dogs get me out of bed. Things always look better after a blast of fresh morning air, a good poop, and a nice breakfast.
Dogs can learn lots of words but they show me every day that verbal communication is overrated. Dogs show how to pay attention to what isn’t said, to the cues conveyed by body and tone. This is why they will cock their heads if I mention the word “walk” but scramble to their feet and follow me when I put on my Hokas and hat. It is also why, each time I have cried over the death of my brother, my dog, Frida, has run to me and pressed against me until the tears stopped.
Dogs are not children although I get why it’s confusing. They are cute. They are dependent and, often, vulnerable. They are subject to the whims of the powerful. They call upon our patience. I have caught myself on more than one occasion, painting my dogs with my expectations just as I sometimes smothered my son with them when he was small. You have to show up for them until they can take care of themselves – and that is where you understand that dogs are not children. They will never take care of themselves. They – and I – are in it for the long haul. There is comfort in that– burden, too, but mostly comfort.
I learned more about the nature of love. I do not understand what my dogs feel for me. I don’t buy into the idea of the “unconditional love” that so many dog people sense in their animals. I do buy into a bond of trust that grows when two beings come to understand what the other needs and how to provide it with respect and care. I believe in the relationship that unfolds between species without necessarily understanding how my dog experiences it. As Maynard puts in in Starter Dog:
“I couldn’t let go of the conviction that a failure of understanding is a failure of love. Sometimes it’s more like a miracle. You don’t and can’t understand, but here you are. Loving.” - Starter Dog: My Path to Belonging and Loving This World,
Postscript on Starter Dog
It’s been a while since Starter Dog was published and recently, Rona posted that Casey has been diagnosed with cancer. In a comment on Notes she recently wrote:
“I didn’t know when I wrote it how much I would need this record of our joys, which are not over yet. What you don’t write down, you lose forever. There are many more reasons to write than to publish and market a book.” - Rona Maynard
Writing with dogs
Are dogs impediments or inspiration to writers and artists?
Over the past 22 years that I’ve had dogs, I’ve published one novel and am closing in on finishing the second. Would I have written more without dogs in my life? I don’t know. I do now I’m not the only writer with a dog. Here’s a blast from the past in which we explored the role of the canine in a writer’s life.
Writing about dogs
The closest I have come to writing about my dogs is this piece about Chloe for Cynthia Newberry Martin’s “How We Spend Our Days” and this obituary I wrote in the wake of losing Rina, our puppy, suddenly during the pandemic. Here is what I learned: it’s not a great idea to write something so soon after losing a dog. I could not summon the necessary discipline or distance. I wish I’d waited until I could have done better by both dogs.
Amid the many thousands of books and pieces written about dogs, here are some links to essays or books about dogs that I have loved.
In "The Youth in Asia," David Sedaris explores the mismatch of an older man and a younger dog.
With, The Eyes and the Impossible and its predecessor, a short story called “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned,” Dave Eggers writes from the perspective of dogs on a journey without a shred of sentimentality and lots of joy.
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Betsy, thank you so much for featuring STARTER DOG and weaving it gracefully into your own rich life with dogs. You had me expecting a mention. I am honored and touched by your words.
favorite dog book: "The Art of Racing in the Rain"