For the love of a dog

Did you see the movie Coal Miner‘s Daughter? Do you remember the part when Sissy Spacek tells her audience that her husband admonished her about saying something? “But I can tell you,” she says, meaning her audience.

I have a sweetheart who says he loves dogs, but he doesn’t love them enough, in my opinion. Altogether too much time is spent complaining about them: the walks they need, the way they shed, the rivers of water Austin creates when he gets a drink. For me, it just doesn’t matter that much because I get so much back from them. ( I can just hear all you dog lovers saying, “Duh!”) I want to talk about how much my Dog Gabby means to me, and I think I can tell you.

I first saw Gabby, my golden/springer spaniel mix, on an online rescue site as an eight-week-old puppy. She had a small, star-shaped spot of white at the top of her head, and she had white-tipped paws, as though she’d dipped them into a bucket of paint. In her eyes was a soulful sweetness I found irresistible.

I picked her up at a foster home, and when she came walking toward me in a jaunty stride that included her kind of swinging her hips, I started laughing and said, “Well! Don’t you think you’re all that!”

She was all that, adorable and confident and full of love for everything she saw. And gentle; I have met plenty of gentle dogs in my time, but Gabby takes the cake. You can trust her with a baby, you can trust her with an injured bird, you can trust her to take a small treat from you without ever touching your fingers. When she needs to go out in the morning, she comes to stand silently beside my bed— far be it from her to do something so gross as to bark.

She is a lovely dog, one who solicits admiring remarks wherever she goes. When I walk her through the schoolyard at recess and the little kids come running over, shouting, “Can I pet your dog?“, she stands statue- still, enjoying the touch of all those little hands. The teachers who usually admonish people for walking their dogs on the playground look the other way when Gabby comes. They know she’s Ghandi in disguise.