Lucy than I did.
They may have bonded because Deedie took a long walk with Lucy each morning, as the sun rose through the pines. But it might also be because of the words that John P the Dog Man had spoken. In Deedie the dog saw someone who respected herself, a woman who Knew Who She Was.
Which is more than we could say about some people.
The dog had one unique talent, which was the uncanny ability to catch flies with her mouth, as if she were a dragonfly or some breed of exotic long-tongued frog. To Lucy they were not flies; they were Sky Raisins.
When strangers asked us what kind of dog Lucy was, we’d say, She’s a Kennebec Valley Flycatcher. Sometimes people would respond by saying, Really? I’ve never heard of that breed of dog.
To which we could only reply, Yeah, well. We hadn’t heard about it either.
I took Lucy down to my mother’s house in Pennsylvania one summer trip. There, around a dinner table, my mother told the story of how I’d bought the dog from a pig farmer, some character who’d charged me $500 for what was supposed to be a golden retriever but was actually a chow chow. She laughed heartily, as my mother liked to do, at the idea of my obliviousness.
Later, I told my mother it was $50, not $500.
My mother held my shoulder and smiled. “I know, honey,” she said. “But it’s a better story this way. That’s the important thing, the story!”
Maybe you wonder how I wound up this way? This is how.
* * *
Each of my dogs had provided me with a kind of moral instruction—from the consequences of unrequited love (Sausage) to the delights of unrestrained desire (Matt); from the virtue of loyalty (Alex) to the tragedy of obsession (Brown). Lucy was the first dog that was mine, whom I had chosen as an adult, and I’d imagined that I’d be able to take everything I’d learned from all the dogs that had come before her and use this knowledge to create a better kind of relationship.
But it wasn’t long before I realized that, once again, my dog had a very different idea of what that relationship might be. Lucy, as it turned out, would measure everything by the hog-farm standard—and no matter what I did, no matter how many hours I spent working with her, training her, giving her all my love, it was clear in the end that our little house on Castle Island Road was never going to be as satisfying as the Bacon Farm.
Was it that Ruben Flood and his enormous wife had set the bar incredibly high—perhaps feeding their not-exactly-golden-retriever pups the same exotic slops they’d given to their hogs? Maybe there was something about the smell of the sty, the warmth of straw, the gurgling of warm mud, that filled Lucy’s heart in a way that could never be filled by us.
But I suspect that it’s not that the love of Ruben Flood was so much better than the love Lucy received from Deedie and me. More likely it’s just that a hog farm was what she loved first, and there’s something about first loves that we carry the rest of our days.
Maybe that’s what Ruben Flood whispered in Lucy’s ear that day I picked her up at the farm. You can nevah love anotha.
Even now, at age sixty, I can find myself waking from a dream about Shannon, that girl I crushed out on so deeply in high school. It’s sad, really. We look all around us, at the miracles made possible by the lives we have created. We fight so hard to achieve the success we dreamed of. And even surrounded by the world that this love has made possible, sometimes we look wistfully through the rain-streaked window and think, I still wish I had what I had when I was young.
Oh, if only tomorrow I could wake up in warm straw, surrounded by pigs.
* * *
“Down,” said Deedie, issuing a Word of Command. Lucy bounced up and down at the other end of the leash. We were standing on the threshold of the house of her childhood friend Chelsea, in Cleveland Heights, Washington, D.C. As Lucy hit the ground, some menstrual dog blood dripped out her back end and fell in an astonishing red drop on the flagstone.
“Uh-oh,” I said. We’d just rung the doorbell, and from inside we heard the sound of approaching footsteps.
“You don’t know Chelsea,” said Deedie, which