Dog Adjusts Cautiously To Change
His name is Cody, in memory of Wild Bill. He is golden with a muzzle that’s just beginning to turn a bristly white. His eyes are wide-open dog brown, capable of changing from sad to glad within five seconds. For nearly seven years, he has been my mother’s best friend. Now, because she can no longer keep him, I do.
He has lived all of his life as the companion of one person. His territory has been a small yard that looked out over the asphalt that’s a bank’s parking lot. His job, a self-created position, was to greet each of the bank’s employees and all of its customers every day, every visitor, for nearly seven years.
His co-workers (charter members of the Permanently Disgruntled) were two enormous cats, loosely owned by my mother’s neighbor. They reliably snarled their general disdain for the comings and goings of mere mortals. Cody wagged back his perennial good cheer.
This was Cody’s window to the world: asphalt, surly felines and the love of one human being. Now, that picture is gone.
The new picture is acres of yard and river, a sloppily devoted pup-protege and a revolving door of humans all marching to their respective drummers. And yes, a surly, impeccably groomed feline. (Well, at least some things never change.)
Like a tiger raised in a zoo only to be freed in middle age to roam the jungle, this new world is too big for Cody. Accustomed to boundaries, he pulls back looking for the edge of things he can no longer touch. Frightened, he doesn’t know where he ends and the world begins.
Gus, my lanky, dreamy-eyed retriever welcomes Cody with unreined joy. Gus has been longing for the company of dogs since the death of his German shepherd this spring.
After some brief posturing, the ego-less Gus relinquishes all his territory to Cody. My kingdom, Gus seems to say, in exchange for the comfort of your wet nose on mine. Intoxicated by the smell of Cody’s ears, Gus falls into spontaneous, blissful sleep around the older dog. Cody is decidedly less sure of all of this.
He circles around the younger dog’s affection with the same wariness he circles his new life. He misses the familiar, small space of his former home; he misses the asphalt and the bankers. He misses my mother. Cody, it seems, is a love dog.
In his poem “Love Dogs,” the Sufi poet Rumi tells the story of a man who daily prays, devotedly and lovingly. One day a cynic asks the man if he has ever had a response. The man cannot answer and soon after stops praying entirely.
Then one night, in a dream, a spirit asks the man why he has stopped praying.
“Because there was no answer to my longing,” says the man.
“Your longing is the answer,” replies the spirit. “Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.
“Listen to the moan of a dog for its master,” the spirit continues. “That crying is the connection. There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.”
When he wakens from his dream, the man resumes his prayers with a renewed devotion, like the love dog longing for its master. Like Cody, as he searches this new house for his old friend. In his searching, he discovers something else.
In the beginning, the discoveries are small and close to home a breezy spot on the deck to sleep, a sprinkler head that serves as personal water cooler but over time, as Cody’s sense of comfort grows, so does his world.
I, his stand-in master, hold the keys to this world for a time. He turns and waits at the door for my signal that it’s safe to go outside. He waits for my permission to be a dog. I give it willingly.
He swims in the little river, rolls in the tall grass, stares transfixed at deer, nudges up against the new, kindred comfort of the smell and feel of a creature like himself.
The irony, if that is what it can be called, of all of this is not lost on me. I can give my elderly mother’s dog the home, the freedom I cannot give my mother. The boundaries of our own human circumstances the ones we chose and the ones that chose us makes that impossible. And yet, in loving her love dog, I can comfort a small part of my mother’s longing.
This morning I open the back door to let the dogs out. Gus, as usual, stampedes through, not wanting to miss the wonderful something he is always sure will happen outside. Cody licks my hand then bounds down the steps. He doesn’t look back.
The breeze off the river is charged with the smells of life. Cody lifts his wet, black nose to take it all in. Free, he doesn’t know where he ends and the world begins.