I did not grow up with dogs. My family had a dog for a few years when I was in grade school, a terrier mix named something I cannot remember now, who lived mostly outside and who I did not have a relationship with in any meaningful sense. Dogs were a thing some families had. We had one briefly and then we did not.
I got Biscuit when I was fifty-four years old, which is a strange age to get your first real dog, though I did not know it was strange at the time. I got her because I wanted company, because I had a house with a yard, because the timing seemed right. I did not have particular expectations beyond that.
Here is what I did not know.
The food situation, specifically
I did not know that a yellow Labrador has a relationship with food that is not like any other animal I have encountered. I knew dogs liked food. I did not know that a Lab’s entire psychology is organized around it, that she would spend nine years in a state of low-grade readiness for the moment something became available, that the kitchen counter would be monitored for nearly a decade with the focus of a professional. I now know this. I know it specifically and in detail and I am still not fully prepared for it on any given Tuesday.
I did not know that Labs want to be near you in a way that is different from just being in the same room. Biscuit does not need to be on top of me. She needs to be close. There is a radius, and as long as she is inside it she is settled, and when she is outside it, when I am in one part of the house and she is in another, there is a low-level restlessness to her that resolves the moment she relocates. I did not know a dog could care about proximity like that. It took me a few years to notice and then I could not stop noticing.
Then I got Rusty
I did not know that beagles are a different problem entirely. When I got Rusty I thought I understood dogs. I had trained Biscuit reasonably well, I knew the method, I felt prepared. Rusty dismantled that confidence over about six weeks. He is not difficult, he is exactly what he is supposed to be, which is a dog built to follow a scent independently without needing permission, and that breeding does not turn off because you are standing in a kitchen in Pittsburgh holding a piece of chicken. Rusty taught me that what you know about one dog is not what you know about dogs. It is what you know about that dog.
The thing I really did not see coming
I did not know that dogs give you a structure that you do not notice until it is the thing holding your day together. Morning walk, breakfast, afternoon walk, dinner, evening on the couch, door check at night. I did not choose this routine. It developed because two animals needed things at regular intervals and I adjusted around them, and somewhere in there the routine became mine as much as theirs. On the days I do not have anything particular to do, I still have the walks. That is not a small thing.
I did not know that I would come to depend on it in the specific way that I have. I said when I got Biscuit that I wanted company, and that was true, but what I meant and what I got were not exactly the same thing. What I got was not company in the way you have company when a person is there. It is something else, something that requires your presence without demanding your attention, something that is there when the house is quiet and does not make the quiet heavier. I did not have a word for that when I got her. I am not sure I have a better one now. It is just what it is and I am glad to have it.
The specific moment with Biscuit I keep coming back to is a Tuesday morning about two years ago. We were on the morning walk, nothing notable happening, and she stopped at the corner the way she always stops, and I stopped with her, and we both just stood there for a minute not doing anything in particular. The street was quiet. She was looking at something I could not see. I was not thinking about anything much. And I had this thought, standing on a corner in a Pittsburgh suburb at seven in the morning with a yellow Labrador, that this was a very good morning and I was lucky to be having it.
The specific moment with Rusty I keep coming back to is when he came on the first call, just recently. Came straight to me, no detour, no negotiation. I gave him a piece of chicken and he took it and went directly back to whatever he had been doing. But he came. Seven years and he came on the first call. I am aware that this is not a high bar. I do not care. It was a good moment.
I did not know I needed either of them. I know it now.
Biscuit is at the back door, doing the thing where she stands there until I redd up whatever I am doing and get the leash. That means it is time for the afternoon walk regardless of what I have going on, because it is always time for the afternoon walk when Biscuit is at the back door, and that is, when I think about it, exactly as it should be.
A thought that arrived somewhere in the middle of writing this:
What I did not expect, and what I think would have been impossible to explain to me at fifty-four, was how much it would matter that they need me specifically. Not a dog owner in general, me, at this address, at these hours, with this particular schedule. Biscuit does not know my name. She knows my footsteps, my schedule, the specific way I move around the kitchen in the morning, the sound of my car in the driveway. Rusty knows when I am heading toward the leash before I have touched it. Neither of them has any idea who I am in the larger sense. They know everything about me in the practical sense that matters. That turned out to be enough. More than enough, if I am being straight about it.
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Hey, thanks for stopping by. This is just a place where I write about everything I’ve tried lately: old watches, the dogs, movies, interesting sports games, and any new app or website that catches my eye. Just one guy’s take, nothing more
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