Tasmanian Dog

As I was cleaning out files last week, I came across an essay from a few years ago, a pre-blog world when I was just beginning to write short pieces. This one is about a dog who had an uncanny ability to mess my world up just by being herself. Amazing how such challenges just show up uninvited!

I live with a dog who is “special” (as in “special child”).  My son and daughter-in-law, who are responsible for this, have self-diagnosed her as “autistic”; I just think she’s nuts. She is inappropriately named Sophia. If this is wisdom, count me out. A partial list of Sophia-caused havoc since she arrived a few months ago includes two destroyed screen doors, a demolished back gate, a back yard where grass has been replaced by a shit-covered moonscape, trails of urine following her from room to room when she’s overly excited (which is most of the time). I had to install a hook-and-eye lock on the master bedroom, because she pissed in the middle of our bed twice in one week. She chooses not to eat out of a bowl, preferring instead to head-butt the bowl of food (and therefore the adjacent bowl of water) until sufficient pieces to constitute a meal are scattered on the water-soaked floor. Laying down is a project of baffling complexity. She circles her chosen landing spot with clockwise circles of increasing velocity and decreasing circumference until, either from exhaustion or vertigo, she collapses.

This takes me back in time. For Proust it was a madeleine; for me, it’s an insane boxer. As a child, my favorite character in the pantheon of classic Bugs Bunny characters was the Tasmanian Devil. I lived vicariously through his uncontrolled and destructive energy. Who doesn’t occasionally wish for the opportunity to make a god-awful mess with impunity and without repercussions, just because you can? Mom doesn’t like the way I picked up my room? I’ll show you “picked up”! I whirl into a tornado of destructive frenzy, clothes and bedding flying everywhere, leaving a child-sized hole in the wall as I exit the scene. Dad doesn’t like my attitude?  I’ll show you an attitude, as I leave flying paper and debris in the wake of my Tasmanian exit through your floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Just as the Tasmanian Devil was an infrequent visitor to the Bugs Bunny Show (maybe once every third Saturday), so I wasn’t looking to be destructive on a regular basis. Infrequent and arbitrary scenes of total chaos would have been enough to keep everyone on edge and suitably respectful.

Now I have a Tasmanian Devil living in my house, and it’s no fun. I’ve tried to be patient and cope, looking for her good points, but have not been successful. She’s got the classic boxer look, which means she has a face only a mother or a dedicated owner could love. Her ears both flop over in the same direction (right), giving her had a lopsided appearance. A woman called her “beautiful” once when we were out for a walk, stretching the meaning of the word beyond recognition.

I am a patient man. “Laid back” is how my sons have most frequently described me over the years when they brought friends to the house. My tolerance level is high enough that Sophia is one of the few living things that has ever regularly exceeded it. But I’ve had it. I told my son in strictest confidence the other day that “I really hate that dog.” Interestingly, he responded “so do I.” But he’s been married less than a year, Sophia has been in his wife’s life a good deal longer than he has—I don’t think he’s sure how a “Sophia or me” ultimatum would play out. That’s his problem, though. There are no conjugal issues complicating my relationship with Sophia. I intend to reclaim my house, and she has to go.

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            Now, a few weeks later, my son and daughter-in-law have moved into their own apartment and Sophia has moved on with them. It is faintly amusing how put-out and self-righteous I can get about things that, ultimately, are simply part of life. Sophia, after all, is the one who has mental and behavioral problems, who is blind in one eye, who was uprooted from everything she was familiar with and moved across the country without even being consulted, who has such a difficult time simply coping with the most basic things such as figuring out how to avoid a human being who obviously doesn’t like her. In Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” after Ivan suffers a long and mysterious illness that leads to an extended and excruciatingly painful death, his widow Praskovya says to one of the mourners at his wake: “How I have suffered!” That’s such a sad, yet typically human response to messiness and imperfection—look how inconvenient and burdensome this has been for me. It’s all about me.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad Sophia doesn’t live here any more. Different people have different gifts, and the gift of love and patience for a Tasmanian devil in boxer form is not one of mine. Just today, though, I was reminded of a gift that Sophia left me. This summer has been a season of transitions and change both inner and outer, personal and relational. I am marking these sometimes disconcerting changes, as I often do, by taking close notice of the books that have been my anchors in the midst of uncertainty. Sophia decided that one of these books was her chew toy one day when I was not at home—I returned to find the book on the floor missing both covers, drenched with saliva and sporting numerous teeth marks. I love my books, so let’s just say that I was not amused. As I reviewed some of the places I marked in the book today, however, I see that not a single page of content is missing. Sure, there are still saliva stains and tooth indentations, but the good stuff’s still there. That’s sort of the way I feel these days—somewhat worked over by the Tasmanian storms of life, many of them of my own making, but everything’s still pretty much intact. I don’t know exactly what to make of it, but somehow this book is better for having been worked over by Sophia. Maybe I am too.