She is not having a bad day because of the rain outside, she is not evaluating her day.
She is a dog, and does not know about thinking, or self or identity or ego,
but she does get her feelings hurt.
When Lacey was new and I was a novice dog owner,
Susanne Robicsek said and I quote,
“Lacey is a perfect dog.”
…thank you I said ignorantly …completely missing the lack of hyperbole.
…from a dog person with deep pedigree and who does know what she is talking about (thank you very much) this was neither a compliment nor a layman’s opinion.
No she repeated.
She is a perfect dog – she obeys, she is eager but not too much, she doesn’t crowd the bowl at mealtime, she gets along with other dogs and people, doesn’t bark… and still my listening was yeah yeah yeah it’s really neat that you like our new dog.
She was an expert; I was a neophyte, a pretender.
She said Lacey had that look because she loved me, and I said I don’t know if they know about love, again revealing the depths of my ignorance.
Susanne said, “Oh, they know about love, they just don’t know about time.”
Six years on, I can appreciate it all, how right she was and is.
Lacey most certainly knows about love, but she doesn’t know how long she has been on the couch waiting for the garage door to open again and make her day.
And I have seen the other neurotic barkers and high-anxiety hounds, enough to see how.
Perfect is my girl
so she inspires haiku at the drop of a hat:
Slide into the morning
pitter-pat of her paws on pavement
eager for the same old place
The satisfaction of trotting along the same road with me by her side, it is the endless road, the river going by, the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, without going out of my door I can see the halls of heaven, it is the same tree, the same road, the same walk, the walk of life, our hearts beating as one animal, feet hitting the ground in rhythm, the rhythm of the earth.
Sipping coffee in the place where coffee-house-sitting was invented, Vienna, the ghosts of Freud and Mozart lurking and making us stop to consider their genius. And then there is the unconsidered genius of what it takes to live in the slums of Mumbai or Calcutta.
Dogs are not thinking about how much salary to pay the young man who could be the future of our company, not about how to maintain million-dollar sales year over year, or about the breakdowns in organizational life that make it so difficult for executives to stay at one company for over ten years anymore.
But they do know about love. I need to remember that.