The very first Dusty

My mother couldn’t get the asparagus right, try as she might.

She tried cooking it oh so many ways. She steamed it. She boiled it. She baked it. She blanched it. Back then, circa 1958, microwave ovens were still a decade away from kitchen countertop, and my mother hadn’t a clue what stir-fry was, or she would have tried stir-frying it, too. She even plumped the knobby stalks into the depths of creamy casseroles, but all I could see were reminders of the green, slimy alligators lurking in the murky creeks around our home in Colleton County, South Carolina. No one ever ate the asparagus, not me, not my brother William, not my dad, not my mom. Still, there it appeared on the table, in various formats, three times a week. Eating asparagus was, for some mysterious reason, supposed to be a household rule, though it turned out to be the exception that proved the rules of suppertime engagement: The family dined together, we talked in turns, we listened to our father declaim against some aspect of popular culture, a discourse with which we would all pretend to agree, and we ate the portions mom tidied on our plates. Except for the asparagus. That, everyone shoved aside, and it went into the garbage. Then we could adjourn to watch TV with a small wooden bowl of potato chips or, if we were lucky, a “Co-Cola” float.

An asparagus is a terrible thing to waste. But we weren’t the only ones who hated it. So did our friends, family, and neighbors. Their truth being told, though the Southern species thinks highly of most produce — except for my father, who detested their looks and likened the smell of cooked vegetables to dirty clothes boiled in Clorox — asparagus simply wasn’t on many local menus, at least not where I came from. After all, why have asparagus when you can enjoy poke sallet? It’s the same thing with turnips — why eat turnips when you can savor collard greens? As might be expected, because no one liked asparagus, it was hard to give away from the garden, and so it made its way inside, to the refrigerator, to the countertop, to the casserole or steamer, to the table, and to the garbage.

Until, that is, the very first Dusty came along. Our dogs always ate people food. My father was funny like that. He refused to ever take the family to dinner at my aunt’s and uncle’s house because they served the children hamburgers while the adults gorged themselves with steak. That offended his sensibility. “My children are going to eat exactly what I eat,” he would say. “Exactly what I eat. And, by God, so is the dog.” Which probably explains Dusty’s love of ham and Irish potatoes, of cane-syrup soaked biscuits and steak-put-back-in-the-gravy and French fries. The asparagus? Not so much. Not that mom didn’t try, try she did. She made it a sport to coax and then to attempt to trick the dog into eating the god-forbidden greens. Nothing worked. At first she simply plopped the stalks across a marsh of wet dog food, but Dusty would sling the spears sharply to the floor. Mom would roll them like logs in a river of beef stew to make them tasty and tender, and there Dusty would leave them, limp and soggy. She chopped them into tiny pieces and scattered them in chicken-and-rice perlow, but all that was left at the end of Dusty’s meal were the dismembered morsels of what had once been a promising, completely whole vegetable. It came down to the strawberry pie. Mom placed the asparagus dead center in Dusty’s dish and painted the stalks with the pie’s thick sweet syrup, three coats so Dusty couldn’t resist, and then called the dog to come and get her dessert. She folded her arms and waited for her triumph, smiling.

“I’m going to let out a holler, finally,” my mother said.

Minutes later it was my brother who let out the holler. William delighted in the sight of Dusty devouring everything else and, to get all she could, zestfully licking the stalks without biting into one, even accidentally. She licked the spears so hard the pie pan bounced its way from one side of the kitchen to the other, navigating the swells of aging linoleum with the rhythmic intensity of a tin drum. “Even the dog won’t eat it, mama,” William howled. I shrieked with laughter, too. “Even Dusty won’t eat it, mama,” I mimicked William. Dusty appeared unfazed by the commotion but looked up briefly, just in case more syrup might be coming.

“Come on, puppy, now eat your vegetables,” Mom said.

She sounded pleasant enough, but we could see she was gritting her teeth. Dusty was sitting now and looking up, eager. She vaulted forward suddenly, as if launched from a spring, turned her back on the jilted asparagus and began to sniff up toward the counter where the rest of the strawberry pie was.

“That’s it,” my mother said, her patience as wilted as much as the asparagus was jilted. “Go lie down!” she yelled at the poor dog. Then she marched to the corner, grabbed the pan and flung the asparagus into the yard. “The squirrels can have it if you don’t want it,” she said to no one in particular and to everyone in general.

“Betcha they won’t touch it,” William squealed.

“Betcha they won’t,” I said.

“They’d be coconuts if they did,” William said, and made a squirrelly face.

“Coconuts,” I said. “They’d be coconuts.”

With that moment Dusty sealed forever the fate of asparagus in our household and in my mind. Asparagus equaled coconut, and I have never liked coconut, either. That, too, Dusty harbored a distaste for. She and I, we shared an affinity for so many of the same foods. Not to mention the same things in life, but what impressed me most was her fervor for good eating. Dusty was a connoisseur. It took me many years, but eventually I realized all dogs are connoisseurs, even when they are bolting down cat shit. Think about it. There must be a reason Dusty would eat cat shit but not asparagus (my apologies to the asparagus industry). It also took me a long time to appreciate the bonds between a dog and her human. Dogs have one real passion and one real dread in life, I read somewhere: They love to eat, and they fear being alone. That is why they are enthusiastic about your menu, unless asparagus is on it, and so eager to please. It is the nature of being a dog. It was the nature of Dusty.

Dusty was my dog. Usually the family’s dogs bonded with my mother. They were her dogs more than ours. Tiny, Taffy, Muffin, and more — chihuahuas all. My mother loved the way they would burrow beneath the blankets and curl up buried at the foot of the bed. She loved the smell when she would lift the covers, “like a rat’s nest,” she would compare it to. Some shared their affections with the rest of us, some yapped and stayed at a distance, but all were devoted to my mom. Dusty was different. She was true to me and me alone. Time has scraped away the pixels of my memory, and I no longer see her with the digital detail I once did, but I recall the puppy plump, her yellowness, her longsome hair — she was a mix of some other breed and a golden retriever, I think — her floppy ears and especially the perfect white diamond on the top of her head. She wore it as a cap of dignity, and she was my nobledog. Dusty was my doctor, too. I suffered awfully from childhood asthma, and her job was to make it better. Dogs cured asthma, everyone knew. In the days before Dusty I would attempt to sleep at night and gasp and try to breathe through my nose but couldn’t. My head lay atop four pillows, lifting me almost upright and laboring mightily to catch a breath. In his final days, my grandfather, dying of heart disease, lay upon a like number of stacked pillows, struggling to breathe, still working to inhale his filterless Camels, and I remembered his final suffering and death, and would lie there, breathless on my bed, afraid I would not live to see the morning sun. Just like my grandfather. Most every night, I anticipated death’s arrival.

Dusty arrived instead. She touched down in our lives as an informal prescription. The doctor had suggested the family get a larger dog as a way to treat my asthma. In those days, our family physician had a habit of resorting to old wives’ tales when the new-fangled medicine didn’t work. It wasn’t working.

Time has long since rasped away many of my Dusty memories, I was so young, but I do remember dinner time and playing with soft toys in the dim hallway by the floor furnace and my Mom trying to dress her in a sweater like she did the chihuahuas. But Dusty — a dog, not a chihuahua — would have nothing of the sweaters and fought her tooth and paw. Most days Mom would resign the project middress, and Dusty would carom from wall to wall, swiping at the offending garment and circling the room catastrophically, head completely engulfed in cotton and polyester, into the La-Z-Boy, into the coffee table, into Mom, like a beheaded chicken that had not quite figured out its head was gone. Once free, though, the sweater became the hunted and ultimately slain beast, Dusty seizing it in her mouth and shaking the life out of it once and for all. At least for that day. Mostly I remember bedtime with Dusty, for at bedtime I could now sleep. Dusty would nestle up beside me, and rest her head on my arm, and I would drift away soon after she did. And I could breathe. Really breathe. For the first time in my life, or for the first time I could remember, I could breathe. The breathing came so naturally and spontaneously, like a child’s first word or a puppy’s first bark, it did not register at first that the suffocation had disappeared. The realization I could breathe, really breathe, all but took my breath away, it was such an enormous burden lifted. It took me by surprise and I yelled, “Hey, mama, I slept all night. I can swear I did.” Such a simple concept, sleeping all night, but for me it was the expression of life itself, the calm eloquence of nonconsciouness. Suddenly the world, the future, was before me, and Dusty was the reason.

They say it was all in my head. In the 1950s many people were convinced chihuahuas cured asthma, and more than a few doctors agreed. The value of larger dogs was debated. Some doctors believed bigger breeds, especially the longer-haired ones, produced more dander and made people allergic. My doctor and my parents, my grandmother and my grandfather (he himself was a great believer in witch doctors) pooh-poohed such fancy science. If a smaller dog might remedy asthma, they reasoned, a larger dog would relieve it even more. In my adulthood, though, the growth of the medical establishment and of pharmaceutical orthodoxy diminished the idea that dogs in general, and chihuahuas in particular, could ameliorate or eliminate respiratory disease. Pets, in fact, especially larger dogs, became the culprit. This is how the Centers for Disease Control put it, along with suggesting we just give Fido, and Dusty, the boot: “Furry pets can trigger an asthma attack. If you think a furry pet may be causing attacks, you may want to find the pet another home.” This burgeoning bias has been accompanied by a proliferation of people who say they are hypersensitive to dogs and cats, and who do their best to ban them from the neighborhood — petism. When I was growing up, when the world was a simpler and seemingly healthier place, we never heard anybody say they were allergic to their domestic companions, except for the occasional aversion to spouses. These days 30 percent of the population is supposedly hacking and sneezing at the mere mention of Spot. In 2000, the National Institutes of Medicine went so far as to blame dogs for ‘asthma exacerbation’ in the nation, and it quicklly became the number one childhood ‘bation’ in the land.

So, Dusty, you really didn’t ward off the asthma, in the way broomsticks in doorways can waylay witches? It was all in my mind? I don’t believe it, never did, and a wise friend once put into the plainest words for me exactly how Dusty did help. As many might guess, my parents branded me a frail child. They etched into me how fragile I was. They shaped me daily into the attenuated particularity they recognized as my natural fate, like chefs molding a doughshape for custom display in a five-star pastry case, working the form until it is ideal, unalterable — the perfectly paralyzed figurine not only in their eyes but in popular perception: perfection they achieved: I never felt much like playing outdoors. I was never to be found among friends after school playing football or pitching horseshoes. I was too sick, or shy, or uninvited, to ride bikes with the gang down Devil’s Gorge. Or to kill Nazis with Bob Pellum. Slithering on their bellies beneath imaginary gunfire, my schoolmates played and laughed together in their camouflaged, cocooned childhoods amid the domed, sandy hills that scattered behind our houses like pitchers’ mounds. Not me. I preferred reading inside or playing with the doll I had clung to since babyhood. I scaled tall mountains all right, always with an acrimonious wind nearly slapping me from the mountainside, and I flew every Saturday morning with Penny and Sky King, liberating yet another trapped hiker, but all the while safe within the den, on the couch, under the blanket.

Not after Dusty came, though, not for a single Saturday morning. I let Penny and Sky King fly alone; Dusty and I took off on paths around the neighborhood, she and I, far away, at least it seemed far away — far from the sandy hills of childhood’s conforming, smothering asylum, far from my mother’s all-too-precisely underdeveloped den, with its dim lollipops of lamplight spaced halo to halo, far from the peaks of my imaginary adventures, far from my wheezing, suffocating nighttimes — down the three-rutted dirt road, sour grass and real grass sprouting along the groove tops, past the patch of lanky pecan trees and beyond what was considered the very last outpost of civilization in Colonial Heights, to a reed-surrounded clearing where our headquarters was. I would smuggle my favorite treat, and there we ate banana-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and daydreamed, Dusty and I, by ourselves. Dusty maneuvered me outside, my friend reminded me. Dusty helped me heal by inducing me to exercise and inhale fresh air. I introduced Dusty to banana sandwiches; and Dusty introduced me to life in the real world, which is to say, to life, where real breathing happens. It made all the difference in the world. It makes sense to me even now.

It makes more sense that that. Recent studies have begun to put down and lay to rest the tufthunting pseudoscience that prevailed through much of my adult life. In the past few years a more legitimate evidential science has been let out of the empirical doghouse, so to speak. By 2012, new research showed that pets, and dogs especially, may well help prevent and control childhood asthma. Specifically, infants who live in homes with dogs are less likely to develop childhood allergies, and dog-associated house dust can play a key role in preventing allergic inflammation.

So Dusty did waylay the asthmatic witches of my childhood asthma. She engulfed our house with a cloud of dog magic and literally sprinkled the microbes of my stomach with her fairy dust. Our old family physician, Dr. Smith, had been right all along. He knew in his gut Dusty would help my gut. Hail Dr. Smith and hail Dusty for all the world to see. She liberated me both on the inside and the outside, a holistic dog if ever there was one.

A story such as this should have a happy ending. I should be able to write about passing through my entire childhood with Dusty. I should be able to tell tales about how we grew up together daydreaming, getting into mischief, shunning asparagus. I should be able to write about the two of us entering old age, me off to the assisted-living confines of a college dormitory, she free of the saddling weight of being loyal to me. I should be able to recount the dignity with which she departed this earth, dog old, dog gray and dog proud. I cannot. This boyhood narrative does not have a fairy-tale conclusion. I wonder now if any really do. Dogs, of course, always hurt you when they die. They give you more in the end than you could ever give them. Still, usually, the brief years together give title to some compensation and satisfaction, memories by which to find comfort in the years without them. I did not get even that. She burst into my life, licked the wounds of my disabled respiration, made me realize that waiting at the end of all overgrown, reedy paths is a clearing where peace and ample breath can be had, if only for a spell. And then she was gone within the year, like a visiting specialist who had cracked the case and moved on to the next diagnostic challenge.

I knew it from the second I stepped foot in the house. Dusty did not come running. I heard it in my mother’s voice, “Richard, son, Dusty is sick. She’s in the bedroom.” My mother never said ‘Richard’ and ‘son’ in the same sentence except when the Earth itself was ending, which was often enough. When she was upset, she would drawl her words out a little longer, and now they hung in the hallway like laundry left too long on the line, stiff and heavy. “She’s just lying there. She won’t move. She won’t eat. It’s like she’s drinking all of Ireland Creek.” I went to see, and my thirsty puppy managed only to glance up from the water dish. I walked to our clearing and back, and attended dinner, a spectator watching a mournful parade of food go by. We were all onlookers. Nobody ate a thing; the food was as cold as a corpse. The evening’s agony stretched on a lot longer than this, but no one ever likes to read about such a night. I went to bed. Dusty lay on a pillow on the floor beside my twin bed. I can remember breathing so easily as my companion gulped for air. She sighed and gazed at me, and I knew she was begging me to help. I could not. Drifting, dozing, I offered my little dog my hand. She licked my knuckles twice and laid her head for a moment there and then lapped up more water. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

I never saw her again.

Dusty had gotten into rat poison somewhere, everybody said later. The vet cut her open and that was the verdict. I don’t recall much more, not denial nor anger nor recovery. I did feel guilt. I remember thinking she had given me my breath and lost her own all within one brief year, and I could not help her as she had me. I even wondered if, in the trade of bonds between us, I had killed her, as surely as if I had smothered her with the pillow upon which she lay. I forgave myself at last, but long ago those feelings made me realize how little in life I could ever control. It instilled in me a certain sadness of understanding that fate is not a decision. But Dusty uplifted me, too. She schooled me in the magic of dogs. She educated me about their sentience and intelligence. She introduced me to the canine world and to the unparalleled relationships dogs have with their humans. She trained me to listen to and observe them, and to fathom and follow the trail to the good things in life. Dogs, they love a good walk. They love to cuddle up, cheek to cheek, and to spoon, they are superior spooners. They love to play. They love to dish up wisdom, in their frenetic hungry way. They love their people and each other and know those things are most important. Dogs love to let tomorrow take care of itself, knowing there’s always a clearing around the next sunrise. And, oh yeah, dogs love to eat dinner. They especially love to eat dinner, unless, of course, it involves asparagus. My mother must have thought the same thing because she never served asparagus again.

It was many years before a dog again graced my house or my bed or napped in my underdeveloped den of life. I have had many close canine relationships in those intervening years, exalted in some of them, spoiled not a few of my friends’ canine companions, but it was years before I let another one lay before my hearth. I could breathe, physically perhaps, but when it came to dogs, paralysis reseized my psychological airways. For a long time the hurt outweighed the magic. The daily companionship Dusty gave me I viewed as having been mere rehearsals for the final betrayal. For what good is an education in the ways of love if the final lesson is that we must surrender love? What wisdom is to be taken from learning love is the most important thing but in the end life takes away those we love? The lesson learned was inevitable sadness and no more dogs to repeat the performance.

In matters of the heart, all dogs are strays, and so are all humans.

Then, when I was in my 40s, married and with a family, I thought I was ready. Life at last had become settled, or as settled as it could be. My long-suppressed cravings for a dog resurfaced from deep within. It was time again for a sweet, adoring, cuddly companion I could take walks with: a gentle laid-back creature. Sure, this dog, too, would age, but I had a head start. I knew more about life, and death, than I did way back when. Most important, I wasn’t a child. I had been a lost puppy with Dusty, with no control over her, or over me — not how we were raised, not how we were trained, not how we were fed. Now, though, I was a sovereign man in control of his life. Surely I could control the territory of a dog’s life, too. It would be pretty simple. My agenda would be her agenda.

What I did not know at this very crucial point in time was that dogs come with their own agendas, and some dogs have little use for yours.

I thought I was ready, but no one on Earth — not the most dedicated or experienced trainer or dog whisperer — could have prepared me for who was to walk — no, burst — through my doors.

Another Dusty was coming to the party, and life would never again be the same. Not even close.