Born to Bark (32 page)

To help Joan relax, I offered to open a bottle of wine and I put on some music. I had recently been given a lovely album of Strauss waltzes and Joan loves ballroom dancing. While the music played, I went into the kitchen, I opened the wine, and poured some into two pretty glasses. When I walked back into the room, Joannie was bent over and holding Flint’s front paws as he stood on his hind legs. They were waltzing.

I quietly backed out and grabbed a camera that just happened to be on the counter, and took a candid photo of the event, since I might not live to see another performance. I then went back for the wineglasses and by the time I reentered the room, the waltz was ending. I did not tell Joan that I had seen her performance, since I didn’t want to chance marring the moment.

Joan and Flint were waltzing
.

Joan and I sat, sipping wine and just talking. Later, when Joan got up to leave the room for a moment. I leaned over to pat Flint, who was lying with his head on my foot and said, “You really are a brave and gallant warrior.”

“And a good dancer, too!”
he replied.

Things were getting a bit tense in my home once again. At first I thought that this was simply a continuation of Flint and Joan’s on-again, off-again personality clash. Joan needed order, quiet, and predictability, but neither Flint nor I was orderly and predictable, which was hard on her. But since she loved me, and since everyone expects university professors to be a bit absentminded and inattentive to conditions around them, she pardoned my behavior. Flint’s lapses were less excusable.

Flint was once again proving that he had a mind of his own, and his likes and dislikes violated Joan’s sense of order and decorum. Joannie would shoo Flint off a chair only to see him immediately jump up on the sofa. She would push him off one side of the bed only to have him jump back up on the other. She would scold him for barking at the door only to have him begin barking at the window.

One day, she had some friends over for afternoon coffee. Flint hung around the group, nosing at the visitors to test the possibility that one of them might scratch his ear or accidentally drop something edible. Concerned that he might be annoying her guests, Joan waved him away.

“Flint, stop bothering these people! Go find something interesting to do.”

For once, Flint seemed eager to follow her instruction and dashed out of the room with a great sense of purpose. A few minutes later, he reappeared carrying one of Joan’s undergarments, which he dropped in the middle of the floor and played pounce-and-kill games with. Evading capture, he flagrantly snapped it from side to side with great joy, causing great amusement for her company but a great deal of dismay and embarrassment for Joan.

A few minutes later, he reappeared carrying one of Joan’s undergarments and dropped it in the middle of the floor
.

Flint’s favorite toys for playing fetch were all made of hard material. When he wanted to play fetch, he would bring a nylon bone-shaped toy, a hard rubber ball, or a rubber Kong and drop it on the floor in front of me. I would toss it and he would chase
after it, sometimes retrieving it and sometimes simply grabbing it and running around for a while. He preferred the hard toys because they clattered loudly when I tossed them on the bare wooden floors in our house.

Often Flint would decide that he wanted me to toss one of his toys when I was sitting on the sofa reading or watching television. He would then scamper around the house until he found an appropriate toy for me to throw and bring it over to me. Since he was neither neat nor particularly organized, however, the toys were sprinkled around in various locations, and he occasionally seemed distressed when he couldn’t find one quickly enough.

One day Flint came up with an innovative solution to the problem of having an appropriate hard toy at hand. It involved burying them around the cushions of the sofa. He shoved a number of them into the spaces beside, behind, and occasionally under the cushion at the end of the sofa where Joan habitually sat next to me. His plan appeared to be that, when I was sitting on the sofa and Joan was not, he could unearth a toy, drop it in my lap, and then jump off and wait for me to throw it. I thought that he was very clever to reason that, since I would be sitting on one side of the sofa
, the toys must be buried in another place, hence on Joan’s side.

Of course, I was thinking as Flint’s master rather than as Joan’s husband. Within a few hours of his first toy-burying episode, Joan came home, tired from a day in the classroom, and dropped herself heavily onto the sofa. Cruel fate had her landing on a hard rubber ball that Flint had left under the cushion. She fished it out and held it up, “What’s this?”

I didn’t have time to explain before she went on to also uncover a hard nylon bone and a plastic dumbbell.

“Did you leave these here or was it your dog?” she demanded.

“He was just leaving his toys in a convenient place where he could pull them out to play fetch,” I said.

“Convenient for you—uncomfortable for me!” She glared at Flint and then threw the dumbbell-shaped thing at him with the sharp instruction, “Take your dumb toy and find another place for it.”

The toy noisily hit the floor and rolled several feet, and Flint happily scampered after it. He snatched it up in his mouth and marched over to Joan and sat in front of her to offer it back to her. I could hear his voice in my head
“Wow! I didn’t know that you liked to play fetch with me. Let’s do it again!”

Later that night as we undressed for bed, Joan pointed to a dark blue bruise low on her hip. “Your dog did this to me this afternoon! Burying toys in the sofa …” then her eyes filled with tears that she tried to hide by getting into bed and turning her back on me.

Sometimes even well-trained psychologists are slow to recognize the meaning of behavioral changes in their family members or close friends. But at that moment, seeing my wife’s annoyance and distress, I finally recognized the importance of the fact that over the past six months or so, Joan had been undergoing some major emotional turmoil. She was worried about her mother, who was growing frail and would soon have to move to an assisted living residence, as well as her daughter, who was considering some major life changes. Also, at this point in her middle age Joan had to deal
with her own changing moods and energy level. The end result was bound to be a buildup of psychological stress and depression. Anger requires a focus and obviously, because of their previous history, Flint was the natural target for her.

Flint, of course, was not a completely innocent victim of Joan’s irritation. In fact, at the very moment that I had my flash of insight, I was tossing one of my socks into the open clothes hamper in the corner of the bedroom. Thinking that we were returning to our game of fetch, Flint leapt up to catch it, missed, and came down with his front paws on the edge of the straw
clothes hamper, which toppled over, spilling soiled clothes on the floor. This was an interesting new situation for my dog, and he began burrowing through the clothes as though searching for some rodent, flinging dirty shirts, socks, and undergarments across the room. Her face buried in her pillow, Joannie fortunately didn’t see this.

I called Flint over to me and ordered him to lie down and stay in place while I scooped the clothing back into the hamper as quietly as possible. I then took Flint downstairs with me, poured myself a drink, and sat on the sofa to think this whole situation through. Since Joan was not there with me, Flint jumped up on the sofa as well. He checked the cushion to see if any of his toys were there, but when he didn’t find them, he simply lay down with his head facing toward me as though he expected me to tell him something. So I did.

“Well, little gray person, your mom is in a bad sort of psychological state and we need something that will distract her from her current troubles and have her focus on something more positive.”

“Do explain it to me, Dr. Freud,”
came back the answer in a more condescending voice than I usually gave to him. I had no idea where all of this was going but kept on, since conversations with my dogs always seemed more productive than silently ruminating.

“The usual psychological recommendations include finding new interests, engaging in activities that are calming or that fill the mind and keep the person from becoming obsessed with his emotional state. It’s even better if those activities also promote a sense of achievement.”

“You could have her start to think about a new house out at the farm, since the old shack is falling down. Tell her that she has to design it and that she will have to be the contractor.”

“Hmm … That is an idea. Anyway, in addition to those kinds of activities, psychologists recommend that women who have a
caring personality, like Joannie, but who don’t have any of their own children in the house to lavish care and affection on, should find someone to nurture, like a grandchild.”

“Well, you don’t have grandchildren living nearby. She could nurture me!”

“Sorry, Flint, but you are currently part of the problem.”

“Well, then, get her a puppy.”

“Yeah, that would be great. Two Flints—that would guarantee a speedy divorce.”

“No. Get her a Joannie puppy—something soft and cute and loving. Call it a therapy dog.”

At one level this was a ludicrous suggestion. On the other hand, it made a perverse sort of sense. Joannie loves small, helpless things. If I could find a dog that was gentle and needed care and affection, that might help provide my wife with some emotional support. The truth was that I had also been longing for a puppy. I actually believe that the perfect number of dogs in a house is three—an adult dog who keeps you company in the here and now, a puppy for the future, and an old dog for the memories. Although any new dog might be selected to please Joan, I would still end up
as its principal caretaker and trainer.

“Hey, little gray person, I know that you understand how much I would like a pup, but I thought that we were discussing what to do for Joan,” I protested.

“We are. She’ll love a new puppy. Besides, another dog might keep me from getting bored and might keep me out of trouble as well. In addition, I might be able to train him to be my accomplice!”