Two Short Essays

I know no less than eight--no, nine--different people, all of them still Harvard students, who have recently got a dog.

Of those nine, three of them are married, five of them are just living with their girl (boy) friends, and one of them just broke up with the guy she was living with. These are the only people I know this side of the parental generation that have dogs in their households. They all got their dogs at the exact same time in their respective love affairs (just after their relationships got settled down).

There can be no doubt, not any, absolutely none at all that these people each got their dog to be a baby substitute.

The Pill Generation, one that finds its art by turning on a knob and adjusting the antenna, and found its spiritual transcendence through a chemical catalyst, has come up with a way to get around its own act of pro-creation.

Not that one would wish children of their own on these dogged people. But they should know what they are doing, say to themselves over and over as they fondle the fur of their bouncey little puppy: "What I have here is (and I know it) a baby substitute."

The sin of these college-age dog owners is their original impetuous purchase. To a couple, they each got their dogs at a time of heady emotion, without considering how impossible it would be to fit the dog into their already cramped lives and crowded apartments.

Perhaps this new wave of dogs would mean little to me if one of those aforementioned dog buyers weren't my roomie himself, who bought his dogie ten minutes after passing it in the Mass Ave window of the Pangloss Bookstore. An ill-pondered indulgence.

I (in addition to making a good cup of coffee) once had an English teacher who hated dogs very much, and who used to talk about how awful they were for several minutes of every class, and who used to shoot at dogs when they came onto his property in Cohasset, Massachusetts, where I lived as a youngster. And futhermore, since I was born, we've had a total of thirteen dogs in our family each one of which has, in turn, been run over by a car, and only a few of which I can remember the names of, including one called Josephine, who was as big as I was, one that my father ran over by mistake while going down the driveway (we had back in New York a big house with a long driveway), and one most recently that was run over by a school bus full of children.

Besides, I'm an existentialist (gulp!). Each morning I roll out and open the bedroom door and find a big yellow puddle in between me and the bathroom. It is this--not the fondling, not the playing of tricks, not the 'stand up; roll over, boy"--that most frequently causes the vectors of your life and the dog's to intersect. That is to say, that in terms of existential moments you get to know the dog by what it leaves behind.

I've brought each new unfolding chapter of this problem up before my section on Existential Psychology. The section agreed that the problem was that one had to relate himself to the dog's full existence. For example in the paper training of the dog, they said that it wasn't enough to expect the dog to be behaviorized by the "usual" pattern of threats and rewards. We should make ourselves aware of the dog's entire situation, and then set it up so that his doing it on the paper is consonant with his existence as he knew it.

All of which is fine; but to be thusly true to the dog requires more of us college people than we can give no matter how settled our emotional condition.

My roomie took off for vacation on his father's private airplane for Florida. The dog, it goes without saying, couldn't be expected to discontinue its existence for ten days. So, through the series of accidents we've come to know as Fate, the dog fell into my hands.

I, my English teacher's student, do hate dogs. But I hate them because I know. I am more at one with their (the dogs') existence than most dog buyers I've run into. If they truly knew what they were doing, they would never have gotten the dog for many reasons similar to those because of which they presumably passed up actual children.

After a week's coordinate living with the dog, I've learned how important it is to the dog to be free to expand its own awareness, to extend the boundaries of its own experience as far as it wants to. We keep it inside all the time except when it is "taken for a walk." We feed it when we remember to or when we get back home. We tell it to shut up and stop running around whenever it's around us.

The dog tears the newspaper to shreads all over the floor. He gobbles my socks. It drives me nuts. It reminds me how much he wants to go out and run around in the street. He'd be killed if he did. Dogs should be allowed to grow up on big farms, and run around over the fields, and know all kinds of dog things about the land that we could never know.

Every time I go to New York City I see men in those big flat overcoats that prove you're successful walking their dogs. It always made me feel to be in a world other than theirs when I saw them shuffle back and forth staring at the streetlights while the dog on the other end of their leash let go on a fire hydrant. What are the metaphysics of a dog walker's reality? They couldn't be of Nature as we know it to be natural.

The nine new dog owners mentioned earlier aren't in for much futurewise.

The girl who just broke up with her boyfriend had been incredibly settled and in love at the time they got the dog. She wanted it, so he got it for her. Shortly thereafter, they split up with him moving out of the apartment. That left her holding the dog. She's really miserable now anyway. But the dog is enough to turn pain into agony.

One of the couples who are married weren't so when they got the dog. Then they got married and, in the first year, had a kid. As soon after the child was born as they had time to reflect on it, they decided they liked the dog better.

The others find that they don't go to the movies hardly at all anymore. They are a little too barked at to read. And generally they do what is least effected by interruption--watching television, the mediocre shows.