[Stuart Cohen brings the “cur” to “curmudgeon.” This part 2 of our four part series. Enter the cur. SB SM]
Chapter 5
A necessary note about cats. I don’t mind cats. Their personality is acceptable and they don’t need to be walked. They don’t leave shit piles around. If you go out overnight the cat will survive just fine without you. They scratch but they don’t slobber. They bring you dead mice as gifts, but only occasionally. Unless you’ve got an especially whiny cat or a female in heat, their voices are bearable and their commentary generally infrequent.
I had a kitten once (back in college) and it was just fine. The problem was, it grew up. Cats make my eyes itch. Long haired cats, especially males, have been known to reduce me to a sniveling, wheezing mess in under an hour. Even begging children give up quickly when they see how an animal makes dad so ill. I used to be allergic to dogs as well when I was young, but unfortunately this allergy failed to sustain itself when I most needed it.
Chapter 6
Fearing the perils of puppyhood, I could still stand resolute when Daughter #1 and Daughter #2 came home pleading for a puppy after a visit to the pet store in the mall. They were children. I knew they’d soon move on and put their attention elsewhere. Unexpectedly, I was undone by my neighbor.
He had a son, mid 20’s, who used to visit his father next door with his black dog in tow. The dog was well trained. It would sit in an open jeep and wait patiently, even if the wait were as long as an hour or two. There is nothing wrong with someone else’s well-behaved dog, and this one seemed perfectly adequate, as dogs go. The girls looked forward to visits of the son and dog, mostly for the sake of the dog.
It was a good deal for me. They got to bond with an animal. They’d pet and play with a dog without it even coming onto our property. Relations with dog were entirely over there, next door. Until the son decided to go back to school.
Chapter 7
One dark day in summer, Daughter #1 came running home in a state of alarm, “They’re going to have to kill Amory’s dog.” It turned out that the son was going away to a program where he could not keep his pet. My neighbor already had two dogs and was not interested in another. Whether or not they could have found another owner was outside the scope of my daughter’s imagination. “Can we keep her?” she begged. This was a pivotal moment in my life. I said I’d think about it, but I knew the ball had dropped.
Children profess that they will walk and feed dogs, love them and take care of them, but this is nonsense. They’ll do what they feel like doing, as usual. Parents who allow a dog into the home with the expectation that children will actually do what they vow to do are kidding themselves.
The problem was Wife. She wanted the dog. She happily agreed to take full responsibility, thereby freeing the children of even a hint of obligation. Wife considered dogs inside a home to be not only not despicable but desirable. I knew better, but my half-hearted pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Children should have a dog. It teaches them responsibility,” she lectured me. This is patently false. Our girls were 7 and 9. The prospect of children that age ever voluntarily picking up dogshit from the yard is nil. “Eeeww!” They can accept the wagging tail but not the business department underneath it. They don’t like dogshit, and no amount of threatening could make them clean it up on any kind of a regular basis.
“Daughter #1 is a sensitive child,” Wife told me. “There is going to come a time when she feels like she doesn’t have a friend in the world. At times like that she’s going to need a dog.” That turned out to be false also. Her “sensitive” moments generally turned to outbursts of rage that included slamming the door against two-leggeds and the four-legged alike.
It was three against one. I looked into the future and did the math. These dogs typically live to be twelve or thirteen. It was already four. That would mean that about the time Daughter #1 finished high school, we’d be done with dog ownership forever. By the time we wanted the flexibility to go away for a few days, dog care would be a non-issue. Like my brothers, I could say we tried it for a while and be done with it.
I could not have imagined how wrong I would be.
Chapter 8
The critical conversation was with Wife. She guaranteed she would take on 100% responsibility for dog. She would feed it, walk it, buy it stuff, clean up the dogshit, come home in time to tend to its needs when she might rather stay out somewhere, everything. I asked one last time if there were anything else we could do to avoid having a dog. She shook her head and firmly said, “No.”
Then came the speech everyone in my position hears: “Once you have the dog for a while, you will come to love her. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without her.” Wife spoke with compassion about how sad it was that I had grown up without the benefit of a dog. She told me stories of others like me who had entered dog ownership with trepidation and gone on to fall madly in love with their new pets.
Her attempt to reassure only scared me. Besides the burden of the presence of a walking, shedding, shitting, barking animal inside our house, I was expected to go all squishy too? I did not have to make an argument to refute her prediction. I knew I would hate having a dog.
The dog arrived one day in late summer, welcomed by three charmed females. Wife bought a bowl and some dog food. The daughters quickly realized that Mom (Wife) was prepared to do all those maintenance tasks they had promised to participate in. Their sense of duty evaporated instantly and has only rarely returned.
Chapter 9
What to call it? The dog came with a name, of course. Having been owned by young males, the dog was named Remy, after the cognac. Young girls with a dog named for an expensive alcoholic drink? They didn’t care, and the name stuck, at least for them.
I couldn’t bring myself to be that personal. I referred to the dog as “it.” When Wife scolded me and said I should call it “her” I declined. “She” is a term for a woman. I like women. Just because the dog had a gender doesn’t mean it deserved recognition at that level. People anthropomorphize boats in this way too, something that’s always struck me as odd. I guess that’s because they have a quasi-personal relationship with them. My personal relationship with the dog was based on my objection to its presence. “It” would do.
Over the years I came up with other names: “the black thing,” “the barking machine,” even “the dark presence,” which I particularly liked. These were all unpopular in our house. I’ve called it “the dog-faced dog,” which met with less resistance.
Chapter 10
At four years old, it was still a young dog. It was in fact well trained and did not shit up the house or chew precious household items. This breed of dog, I was told, has a prodigious appetite. We were to discover that that it would indeed eat just about anything that wouldn’t eat it first.
The former owner told us that one cup of dry dog food twice a day was the right amount. In our house it quickly became one brimming cup at a time, about a cup and a half. Then there were the cookie bones the children delighted in using as incentive to try to teach it tricks it would never learn. Extra bulk appeared on the dog’s flanks.
The appetite turned out to be as predicted. It developed a taste for household trash. We’d come home to find the trash barrel yanked from under the kitchen sink and on its side in the next room with contents strewn about.
Dog lovers accept that sort of violation as just one of those things that becomes part of your family, like changing diapers on infants. Having the trash dumped appalled me. Food scraps strewn about also meant permanent stains in the living room carpet. When bits of chocolate were left out, the dog would find them and eat them leaving nasty chocolate stains that permanently discolored the rug. Wife got highly agitated, not because of the mess but because, she claimed, chocolate is poison to dogs and could make this one sick or even die. The dog survived all encounters with chocolate handily. We still have bits of brown stains on the carpet.
When Wife claimed embarrassment before guests about the sullied rug, the solution seemed obvious to me—get rid of the perpetrator—but I stopped mentioning it after a few times.
Dumping the trash became a continuing problem. I care about aesthetics and I like the house to look attractive. The trash mess really bothered me. Wife’s solution was to place the barrel on the kitchen counter instead of leaving it where it could be attacked. A permanent feature of our kitchen became a big ugly barrel up on our food preparation area. I told people it was the latest trend in kitchen design.
Morning and evening the dog inhaled its food in seconds. Between meals, it took to running away to scavenge. Dog would be put out to do its business. If nobody retrieved it in a short time, and forgetting was frequent, the dog headed down the street to someone’s compost pile where it would immerse itself in foul smelling refuse. We got calls on a regular basis about it. I tried to say that it’s not my dog, but the neighbor did not understand. The dog eventually arrived back from slumming, reeking of garbage and evidently happier for it.
Only once in the twenty plus years in our house have we seen a skunk in the back yard. Of course, that was one evening just after Wife had put the dog out. She panicked and yelled for it to come back in, but there was no chance. A direct hit. It was a bad night for dog ownership even for other members of the family besides me.
Living for Nearly Damn Ever with the #%@&*! Dog
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Stuart Cohen. All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9833077-1-6
Cover photo of dog courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
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Contact the author/publisher via email: sc@aya.yale.edu
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About the Author
Semi-curmudgeon Stuart Cohen has been accused of taking himself too seriously. But not
lately. After graduating from Yale in the chaotic spring of 1970 he went skiing. The next year he
enrolled in trade school to learn the craft of photography. He spent 25 years as a commercial and editorial photographer and actually made a living at it. Along the way he took up writing and wrote three consumer books on photography for major publishers. He also wrote extensively in the photography trade press on industry trends and ethical issues.
Since leaving photography he has been the head of a symphony orchestra, synagogue president, non-profit board member of various organizations and basketball coach to 12 –14 year olds.
His more recent and most important books include The Seventh System: The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Human Emotional System. https://www.seventhsystem.net/ , and a Positive Psychology book, Happier Tomorrow, Happier Today, Happier Right Now, 24 Proven Keys to a More Satisfying Life https//HappierX3.com You should check them out.
He is divorced, and remarried to a woman to a woman who hates cats. He now lives in Santa Fe and enjoys hiking and snowshoeing in the mountains.