dogs.
I said just that to Steve on Friday evening as we sat outside after dinner, with country music playing softly from a boom box on the stairs to the house. The fenced yard was one reason I’d bought the place. By suburban standards, the yard would’ve been small, but for Cambridge, it was decent-sized. Running parallel to the house on the long side of the yard was the brick wall of the peculiar little building that occupied the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue, the “spite building,” as it was called, presumably because it was the legacy of some forgotten dispute. Wooden fences at the front and back made the area secure for the dogs. Ivy grew all over the brick wall, and shrubs and perennials testified to my vision of horticultural possibility if not to my acceptance of the reality of Alaskan malamutes. I’d no sooner cured Rowdy of digging when Kimi the Excavator arrived in our lives. Now, just as I was starting to feel hopeful about persuading Kimi that by “horticultural possibility” I meant the hidden gardens of Beacon Hill rather than the battlefield of Verdun, here was Sammy, who had been sired by Rowdy out of Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, but by miracle rather than biology had inherited Kimi’s self-destructive zeal for tunneling directly to China, where “dog love” refers strictly to an unholy food preference that I’m unable to see as culturally relative. It’s not for me to judge harshly if cultural relativism dictates that it’s dandy for brothers and sisters to marry each other or that nonagenarians should be set adrift on icebergs to meet life’s end, but wrong is wrong, damn it! Torture is wrong. Child abuse is wrong. So is dining on dogs.
Where was I? Oh, so Sammy the Bulldozer, otherwise known as Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, was at this moment using his big front paws to fling dirt in Lady the pointer’s bewildered face and was thus distracting me from telling Steve that my book was selling better than the renowned Judith Esterhazys. I broke off. “Steve, please make Sammy stop. I’m going to build a digging box for all three malamutes, but in the meantime, I really don’t want him killing that peony.”
Steve refilled his wineglass, took a sip, and said with maddening deliberation, “It’s unrealistic to expect a dog yard to look like a flower garden.”
We were sitting on the wooden park bench that I’d bought with precisely that expectation. It was about ten o’clock and still stinking hot, but neither of us had wanted to endure another breath of inside air. Hank Williams was singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The light mounted on the side of the house and the ambient city light let us keep our eyes on our dogs. All five were loose in the yard. When I was alone with them, I let them loose only in carefully selected combinations because I didn’t want to risk a dogfight. Steve trusted his ability to stop trouble before it led to bloodshed. Also, if the dogs tore one another to pieces, he’d be able to stitch them back together, whereas my profession left me with nothing more helpful to do than write about what had happened.
“Couples who merge two sets of children have it easy,” I said.
“Kids are just as likely to wreck yards and go for one another’s throats,” Steve pointed out.
I got up and was heading toward the house when Steve read my intention of startling Sammy with a blast of cold water. “Sammy, leave it,” he said quietly.
Sammy quit digging. If you live with golden retrievers, you may fail to grasp the astonishment I felt. If you live with malamutes, you will be stunned.
“You should teach at Hogwart’s,” I said.
“What?”
“The school for wizards in Harry Potter. A teenage malamute just obeyed you. You’re magic with animals.”
“You’re just magic.” Steve clinked his wineglass against mine.
Before the potentially romantic interlude could develop, the heavily Boston-accented voice of Kevin Dennehy sounded at the
I said just that to Steve on Friday evening as we sat outside after dinner, with country music playing softly from a boom box on the stairs to the house. The fenced yard was one reason I’d bought the place. By suburban standards, the yard would’ve been small, but for Cambridge, it was decent-sized. Running parallel to the house on the long side of the yard was the brick wall of the peculiar little building that occupied the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue, the “spite building,” as it was called, presumably because it was the legacy of some forgotten dispute. Wooden fences at the front and back made the area secure for the dogs. Ivy grew all over the brick wall, and shrubs and perennials testified to my vision of horticultural possibility if not to my acceptance of the reality of Alaskan malamutes. I’d no sooner cured Rowdy of digging when Kimi the Excavator arrived in our lives. Now, just as I was starting to feel hopeful about persuading Kimi that by “horticultural possibility” I meant the hidden gardens of Beacon Hill rather than the battlefield of Verdun, here was Sammy, who had been sired by Rowdy out of Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, but by miracle rather than biology had inherited Kimi’s self-destructive zeal for tunneling directly to China, where “dog love” refers strictly to an unholy food preference that I’m unable to see as culturally relative. It’s not for me to judge harshly if cultural relativism dictates that it’s dandy for brothers and sisters to marry each other or that nonagenarians should be set adrift on icebergs to meet life’s end, but wrong is wrong, damn it! Torture is wrong. Child abuse is wrong. So is dining on dogs.
Where was I? Oh, so Sammy the Bulldozer, otherwise known as Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, was at this moment using his big front paws to fling dirt in Lady the pointer’s bewildered face and was thus distracting me from telling Steve that my book was selling better than the renowned Judith Esterhazys. I broke off. “Steve, please make Sammy stop. I’m going to build a digging box for all three malamutes, but in the meantime, I really don’t want him killing that peony.”
Steve refilled his wineglass, took a sip, and said with maddening deliberation, “It’s unrealistic to expect a dog yard to look like a flower garden.”
We were sitting on the wooden park bench that I’d bought with precisely that expectation. It was about ten o’clock and still stinking hot, but neither of us had wanted to endure another breath of inside air. Hank Williams was singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The light mounted on the side of the house and the ambient city light let us keep our eyes on our dogs. All five were loose in the yard. When I was alone with them, I let them loose only in carefully selected combinations because I didn’t want to risk a dogfight. Steve trusted his ability to stop trouble before it led to bloodshed. Also, if the dogs tore one another to pieces, he’d be able to stitch them back together, whereas my profession left me with nothing more helpful to do than write about what had happened.
“Couples who merge two sets of children have it easy,” I said.
“Kids are just as likely to wreck yards and go for one another’s throats,” Steve pointed out.
I got up and was heading toward the house when Steve read my intention of startling Sammy with a blast of cold water. “Sammy, leave it,” he said quietly.
Sammy quit digging. If you live with golden retrievers, you may fail to grasp the astonishment I felt. If you live with malamutes, you will be stunned.
“You should teach at Hogwart’s,” I said.
“What?”
“The school for wizards in Harry Potter. A teenage malamute just obeyed you. You’re magic with animals.”
“You’re just magic.” Steve clinked his wineglass against mine.
Before the potentially romantic interlude could develop, the heavily Boston-accented voice of Kevin Dennehy sounded at the
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