Learning from dogs

My husband says I write a little too much about the dogs, and that may well be so. But I find the dogs to be a great pedagogical resource. For one, and as I've mentioned before, from the dogs I learn the benefits of approaching each and every day as if it were a gift and not drudgery.

Every night, my husband, the dogs and I traverse the very same block of our small city-town and every night the dogs act as if that walk was the very first one they'd ever had through those parts. It's the same trees, the same grass, and probably the very same smells (especially their own) but they don't mind the repetition at all. They never demand that we vary the route and they never show any boredom or ennui.

Their excitement prior to the walk is the same, each and every night, and when we round the corner to come back to the house, they always pick up their pace, knowing that they'll arrive to a warm, cozy place where they'll get rewarded with a biscuit or two just for walking, peeing and pooping. The standards of performance are not very high with these dogs, as you can see.

Last night, watching my bundled-up husband walk ahead of me on the snow-covered street with the two elderly dogs, who were happily wagging their tails and bounding, ecstatic because "daddy" held their leashes, I couldn't help feeling a sense of profound contentment. Except when there are soaking rain storms, we walk those dogs every night and every night the dogs look forward to that same walk and every night I appreciate the novelty with which they approach the endeavor.

I told my husband recently that when I was in high school in Puerto Rico, none in my small group of mostly male friends drank or smoked or did drugs so our most-innocent of past times was to drive up to the casco de San Juan, up to the Old City through Condado and back. La vuelta del pendejo, we used to call it since it usually meant getting caught in interminable tapones of people in their cars doing exactly the same thing at about 11 p.m. every weekend night.

There was no rhyme or reason to the drive. It was just what we did over and over and over again throughout our high school years.

That's sort of the same sense I get when we take the dogs out, that we're doing another vuelta del pendejo. But the dogs sure don't see it that way. For them, they're Ferdinand Magellan and they're getting to circumnavigate the globe, finally. That's about the level of anticipation and glee that they demonstrate each and every night.

A lot of writers have written about what they learn from dogs, and I have to agree. Having dogs is a lot of work, especially if you do it right and pay attention to them and walk them frequently and keep them up-to-date at the vet and get their medications and their special foods and clean up after their accidents inside the house and pick up their poop outside and teach the male dog repeatedly not to even dream of tearing the pain-in-the-ass cat into pieces.

But every night the dogs remind me how worth it all of it is because they teach me that it doesn't matter what my day has brought, good and bad, we have that walk to anticipate. They look forward to it because that's what dogs do, and I look forward to it because I enjoy (and learn from) watching them enjoy themselves so much.