a bouquet of flowers.
If you didn’t look too closely, I might have seemed like a person beginning the days of her manhood. At the time I felt less like a man than someone imitating one—but then, people of transgender experience are hardly the only ones who suffer from this regret.
I’d look around our apartment, with Rachel’s Vermeer painting and the books on the shelves and the big desk upon which I’d placed my very first computer—a Kaypro 2X—and think: I am not nothing. Surely this is the life I was hoping for, back when I was young and tried to imagine what it might be like, someday, to leave my dogs behind?
* * *
Then, one day in 1984, my father called me up and asked me if I’d pick up this new puppy they were getting, a chocolate Lab.
“Wait, what? You’re getting another dog?” Penny and Matthew had both gone to their rewards by now, and it was my understanding that now that their children had flown, my parents were at last going to enjoy some dog-free years. This seemed like something that my mother, in particular, had yearned for, having spent most of the sixties and all of the seventies picking up dog shit with a shovel—or worse, given that Matt the Mutt rarely felt it necessary to bother with some of the formalities of relieving himself outside.
“You bet,” said my father in his gentle, understated, crinkly fashion. He explained that the puppies had been sired by the dog of a business colleague of his and that they needed someone to rent a car, drive out to Montauk, and pick up the puppy and drive it to Pennsylvania.
“I can’t believe you’re getting another dog,” I said, not only stunned that my mother had signed on for more dog ownership but a little bit resentful that my parents thought anyone could ever take the place of Sausage. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
“Why not?” said my father.
* * *
A week later, I was driving toward home with a puppy asleep in my lap, an adorable brown fluff ball that as yet had no name. The car filled with her wonderful puppy smell.
It occurred to me, as I crossed the Delaware River and saw the big sign—NOW ENTERING PENNSYLVANIA, THE KEYSTONE STATE—that I was doing the very thing for which dogs are celebrated: finding my unlikely way home, over a tremendous distance.
There is no shortage of stories of dogs, sundered from their loved ones, finding their way home after traveling hundreds of miles. The all-time record holder appears to be a Lab/boxer mix named Jimpa, who got separated from his master while he was working on a construction job in Western Australia. A year later, Jimpa showed up at his house, somehow having traveled two thousand miles to be with the one he loved.
It’s not entirely clear how dogs do this, although surely their amazing sense of smell has something to do with it—dogs having many, many more olfactory cells than humans. Other research suggests it might also have something to do with sensitivity to magnetic orientation. One study cited in The New York Times shows that dogs will usually defecate in a north–south position, although this preference vanishes if the magnetic field is disturbed.
When my family moved into our haunted house back in 1972, we were surprised, several days after the move, to find a German shepherd lying beneath the apple tree in our backyard. My father, always ready to admit another dog into the house, called out to the shepherd, opening wide the back door to let him in. For the next half hour or so, the dog wandered around the house, as if looking for something he could not quite find.
The object of his search was no mystery: clearly the dog belonged to the Hunts (the house’s previous owners), who’d let him out the door of their new home ten miles away, only to have him make the long trek back to the place where he’d lived before. It wasn’t just the home he was searching for, either: it was the father of the family, who’d died a year earlier and whose loss had set the long process in motion that had ended with the Hunt family moving out and the Boylan family moving in.
We called up the Hunts and told them we had their dog. When one of their sons showed up to claim him, he explained another possible reason for the journey. They’d had