Dog Day

But first, Dogs.

Yesterday I went to pick up my friend Sarah for a lunch date. She was ready to go when I arrived, but there were dogs there. Dottie, named for black spots on her white paws as a puppy, and Frank, named for his eerie blue eyes. “Let’s go get some fish and chips,” Sarah called out happily, but I was perched on a footstool, reaching for the short glossy fur of dogs. Prancing dogs, one with a rope and a ball clenched tightly in her jaws to let me know how happy she was to have me there. She is sleek and black and elegant, with catlike grace, and if she were mine I would call her Isis, after the Egyptian queen of the underworld. The other dog I’d call Jack, because to me that seems to be his name, with his cattle dog brindle coloring and uncanny white snout, wide as a Bull Terrier’s, and those strange blue eyes, always watching me to make sure of what, I don’t know. A hundred pounds of young, muscular dogs, romping and wrestling in play and nipping each other in competitive jealousy to be the one that sat at my feet, to gaze into my eyes with that singular canine devotion, to be carefully petted and caressed and talked to as if this particular set of eyes was the only set in the world. How can they both be the very best dogs, I wonder, though that is what I told each one in turn. And after a long interval of attention, each took a minute to lean a rump against my legs, extending an invitation that I declined, as I don’t require the information available at the back end of a dog.

And then I washed my hands, and then we went to lunch.