Tough Day for the Army: Stories

My Dog and Me

19 My Dog and Me I’ve been experiencing dissatisfaction with my dog. As a dog, he’s not bad—sleeps at appropriate times, fetches with moderate to high enthusiasm , never messes in the apartment except that one time I temporarily lost track of where we lived and hadn’t been home for maybe thirty-six hours. When I walked in and smelled the mess and saw the stain on the carpet, and that one of the couch cushions had been disassembled , he was the one who looked pissed. I couldn’t blame him. I’d dropped the ball. That was my bad. But as a source of artistic inspiration, a muse, if you will, he’s substandard . I go to the bookstore a lot, and right near the front, where you can’t miss it, there’s a whole section of books about dogs. Some of these books are even narrated or apparently written by the dogs themselves. I pretend to be catching up with my tabloids in the magazine aisle while I watch people approach this section with the dog books, and their faces do something really interesting, like their skin is melting off their bones, which sounds gross, but what I mean to say is that they look relaxed, peaceful. See, if my dog were more inspirational, I wouldn’t grab these wrong-sounding metaphors and make people enjoying a private moment of reverie look like ghouls. In these books the dogs are very busy saving people. Sometimes it’s a family, other times a whole town. The titles are all like [Unusual Dog Name], the Story of a Dog That Saved [Thing That Needed Saving]. It’s a formula, but it must work because just look at all these books. 20 My dog does have a good name for a book title. His name is “Oscar.” But Oscar, the Story of a Dog That Does Just About What You’d Expect a Dog Would Do Most of the Time doesn’t have much of a hook. He does bark whenever he hears the pchoo-pchoo-pchoo sound that accompanies someone choosing a Daily Double square. Oscar and I watch Jeopardy together every single day, me shouting the answers at the television, him barking at the Daily Double sound. It’s something of a highlight for both of us. The most popular dog-centric books involve this Labrador named Marley who has inspired multiple titles, and even written several on his own for children, all this despite having been dead for quite a few years. Now that’s a real trick. Apparently, Marley is famous for teaching a young attractive couple how to love unconditionally so they could be good parents and even better people. In the first Marley book, Marley’s owner says, “Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart.” But I read that book and watched about eighteen minutes of the movie inspired by it, and mostly what I think Marley teaches us is that, as long as you’re a dog, you can get away with being a total raging asshole. You can say a lot of things about my dog, but he’s no asshole. One of the books is about a dog who rescued people from the Twin Towers. Out of patriotic duty I brought that one home, but I don’t really want to read it. I have a hunch I’m not alone on that front. My dog never rescued anybody. Au contraire, I rescued him, and from his perspective it was a real lottery moment, given the odds, you know, the sheer number of his canine brethren lined up in cages stacked from floor to ceiling at the shelter he called home at the time. I went down a row, peering into each cage at the candidate inside. Some barked viciously, others barked friendishly. Some pressed their noses or paws to the bars. The dark concrete floor had a drain in it, and I knew what that was for. A woman who volunteered at the shelter was following me, offering a kind of color commentary about each of the 21 dogs: “This one likes his belly scratched.” “She just loves to cuddle.” “He’s great with children.” I wondered how she knew all this stuff about these dogs. Maybe she took them home for...