Two Dog Stories

One day while walking down First Ave. in NY in 1967, I saw a very tiny elderly man stop abruptly on the sidewalk and say in all seriousness to his yapping dog on a leash by his side, “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you shut up? Why can’t you be like other dogs?” That was such a wonderfully absurd thing to hear as I watched them standing as though frozen while the sidewalk traffic flowed around and past them. In memory the scene has become almost cartoon-like---the man looks down at the dog and complains, the dog looks up at the man’s scowling face. But also in memory the poignancy of the scene is amplified: in admonishing his companion, who is further down on the sidewalk and the general scheme of things than is the shrunken little old man himself, the human speaks as though to another human but appeals to the other’s dogginess, such is the nature and need of this lonely relationship.

My other little story is also about a dog on a leash, this time a memory from the late 1980s when I was sitting at a table outside a coffee shop in Boulder. By chance I happened to be watching a dog at a nearby table as it glanced at a pigeon just coming into view, turn completely away, and then snap back and stare pointedly and amazed at the pigeon---in other words, the dog did a textbook-perfect double-take, there was no doubt about it. You could almost hear the dog saying to itself “Yikes!” when it realized, after it had turned away, that a live bird was right there, plump and gray, on the sidewalk all that time.

As I remember, what was so funny to me was how this dog seemed so absolutely human. Now I realize there was also another sort of familiarity and incongruity involved, for all of us are actually used to this kind of human animal behavior---in animated cartoons, of which we’ve seen plenty. So the little visual joke had a further twist: animals that act like humans are common in the cartoon world of dogs and rabbits and cats chasing mice, but here one of them a few feet away was acting out its humanness on this summer sidewalk in Colorado, with real people all over the place---and the theater was sun-filled, not room darkened at all.

And since this blog is becoming more and more a sort of repository for memories, I’ll add a little addendum: I remember when I was about three years old believing for a brief time that dogs were boys and cats were girls. Further, although it’s off the subject I feel that it’s appropriate to tell you that around the same time, I had the idea that God was the man and lovely long-haired Jesus was His wife. I remember asking a black lady making the beds in a deep southern house if that in fact was the case, and how she laughed and laughed at me with such kindness and love in her eyes, and I felt for the time being that boy o boy, everything must be OK.