I dreamt about my mom the other night. In the dream we were looking for her lost dog. She was very upset, but I asked her why she cared since she didn’t even like dogs. In the dream she explained her feelings in detail and a psychological depth that which I have only recently come to understand is the real reason we never had dogs after a certain point in my childhood.
Next to my bed is a framed picture of a dog. It was done by my mom about six years ago. It’s a pencil drawing of her dog, Prince, that she owned when she was a young girl living in Hawaii. The story of Prince is one that I remember my mom telling me when I was small. My mom and her family were in Hawaii because my grandfather, Popeye, was stationed there for the Korean War. One day my mom saw an ad on television: “Win This Puppy.” All she had to do was draw the puppy and send in the picture to the TV station. Like her mother before her and myself later, my mother was natural at drawing, the class artist. She won First Prize in the competition and won little Prince.
She loved her puppy, and he grew into a handsome young dog that would run beside her when she rode her bike around the neighborhood; a young hellion with a pageboy haircut and baggy jeans, and her happy-go-lucky bounding mutt. One unlucky day when they were on their ride, Prince was hit by a car. The driver was horrified, and a decent human being and they put my mom in the backseat of the car with her injured dog, rushing her to the vet, but Prince died in my mom’s arms. She was eleven years old. It made me want to cry when I heard the story, and it still makes me want to cry now.
Her father, Popeye, tried to fix it. He went to the pound and brought home a scrappy rescue named Buster. Of course, it was a disaster. You can’t replace a Prince with a Buster and expect it to work out. Mom hated the new neurotic dog with the bad attitude, and it was mutual. Naturally, Buster lived an awfully long time, devoted only to Popeye.
When I was seven or eight, we got a puppy too — a beautiful Irish Setter we named Cinnabar. She was an affectionate dog with a silky red coat and big floppy ears I loved to pull (gently). She was barely past the puppy stage (like Prince) when we moved to a rental house in Great Falls, Montana. We had the upstairs apartment. Downstairs lived a woman and her yappy dog. I don’t remember either of their names, but what happened next guaranteed I thought of her as a wicked witch and hated little dogs for years to come.
One bitter night in the middle of a severe Montana winter storm, she left the gate open to the shared yard and Cinnabar bounded free and into the dark and swirling snow. She didn’t know any better. We all assumed the neighbor lady did it on purpose because there had been words and acrimony for some time around our dumb but loving untrained puppy. Mom and daddy went looking for Cinnabar. She was found frozen to death in a snowbank after having been hit by a car. It was a bad night for all of us.
There was another dog, briefly, in my childhood, after that, but only a temporary stray that mom named Pie Face. Gradually mom went from happy memories of her beloved Prince to “I hate dogs, dogs are awful, dogs slobber, dogs shed hair.” When my sister was little, she begged so hard for a dog that I got her one. My mom sent it back to the shelter immediately and replaced it with a goose. More on that in another story. When my sister was old enough to make decisions for herself, she got a shih tzu that bit my son in the face. Dogs were just not a lucky thing in my family. I carried it forward. I didn’t get my son a dog though he begged every year he was a child. Dogs are slobbery. Dogs are trouble. Dogs bite or fawn. Cats are where it is at.
Seven years ago, I decided to get a dog, Dilly Bean. I got a little dog even though I hated little yappy dogs. Thankfully, my dog has proved me wrong in every conceivable way, and the family luck changed. I adore her. She opened both my eyes and my memories, and perhaps she did that for my mom too, because I think my mom drew the picture of Prince shortly after I got my dog. Even though mom was clueless with Dilly, Dilly loved her and accepted her as one of the family. No matter how long it had been since Dilly had last seen my mom, she was pure in her pleasure at greeting her again. Who would not melt at such devotion and acceptance? My mom beamed with girlish joy each time, exclaiming “I think she remembers me!”
As my mom explained to me in my dream the other night, it wasn’t that she hated dogs. She loved dogs. But she’d had her heart broken not once but twice. She’d put up a wall around that fragile heart of hers to make sure she never had it broken by a dog again.
Instead, mom broke my dog’s heart. When she didn’t come back from the hospital the night after her heart attack, my dog slept on her pillow for weeks, curled up with her tail tucked in. Dilly knew.
