A bundle of boisterous joy
When the world overwhelms, as it sometimes seems to do in a clump of depressing ways, it often helps to look for subversive signs of hope.
If you’re lucky, you’ll find that hope in something tangible, mischievous, challenging, sweet — and endlessly lively. If you’re lucky, you’ll find it in, say, a puppy.
This is the column I promised almost two years ago, after I wrote about the death of our beautiful yellow Lab, Molly. If we ever got another dog, I told the many readers who contacted me, I’d write about it.
And so we have. And so I am. We have another yellow Lab, a male this time from a wonderful breeder in New York state, and he’s not yet three months old. A mischievous variation on Samuel Johnson’s “triumph of hope over experience,” the little fellow has brought a clatter of chaos and laughter into our previously sedate adult household.
We’ve called him Toby, which works well enough. All the same, I’m constantly reminded of a cartoon I saw not long ago depicting a dog at a party, urbanely introducing himself: “Oh hello. My name is No No Bad Dog. What’s yours?”
Young Toby, a curious mixture of feisty, timid and hell-bent-for-fun, is our defiant response to the complacent and sometimes sterile predictability that can develop in empty nests. He’s also a lot of work, considerably more than we recall from our selective memories of dogs past.
One wag I know — OK, the wag with whom I’ve shared the past 40 years — says we’re suffering from Post-Purchase Depression. He has a point. The chores, icky cleanups, panicked vigilance (“where is he? omigod, what’s he chewing?”), sleep deprivation (when nature calls in the middle of the night, someone has to help the little guy answer it) and general upheaval of comfortable life all contribute to something resembling the wired exhaustion of new parenthood.
You have a whole new layer of anxiety when you add in the destruction, both personal and domestic.
Personal? That would be the bloody lacerations up and down my forearms as he uses his mouth, with its sharp tiny teeth, to flag my attention. I look like a geriatric cutter who can’t get the lines straight. Domestic destruction? That would be the attempted gnawing, much of it successful despite an array of chew-toys, of baseboards, quarter-rounds, doorstops, table legs, chair seats, electrical wires, kitchen cupboards, door frames, even the fronts of stainless-steel appliances. Yes, we’ve sprayed everything liberally with Bitter Yuck and Bitter Apple — both, apparently, taste treats to the young and omnivorous Toby. It might be a Lab thing.
When you compound the lot with the age factor (ours, not his), you have something special. We don’t think we’re old, and we don’t think old. But the undeniable reality? We’re no spring chickens. We lack the resilience we once had, especially the 1980s version that saw us through the exuberant interactive rhythms of three young kids and a bull terrier puppy named Daisy — or even the 1998 version that energized us through the puppyhood of our much-loved Molly, a youngster with mischief in her heart and needle-sharp teeth in her mouth.
Sometimes — say, when the little fellow has just accidentally incised a bloody new line on my forearm or, for the umpteenth time, licked the Bitter Apple off the safety plug we’re using to try to keep him from electrocuting himself — at such moments, we feel fresh out of resilience.
But then he suddenly plunks himself quietly down beside us, head resting on one of our feet, and we can almost read the thought bubble rising gently from his little blond head: “You are my world. And even though I’ve just done 16 bad things, this is where I feel safe. Next to you.”
(We dog lovers anthropomorphize shamelessly, and we don’t care. How else can we frame the bond we know exists?)
Times like this, when our pup sends out uncannily perfect messages at the precise right moment, are when we make a startling discovery: there’s some resilience left in the tank, after all.
On balance, what are a few arm lacerations, or even a mini-trail of chewed devastation, compared to liquid brown eyes filled with trust, flurries of warm puppy kisses, frantic tail-wagging every time you appear — and the lifetime promise of loyal and unconditional love?
Like all new life, Toby is a call to duty and responsibility, one that can be tiring, frustrating, maddening. But he is also a perfect little bundle of — yes — joy. We have no regrets.
We know we’ve done the right thing.
This week, although there’s no rational explanation for it, hugging him has felt like a gentle embrace of the better elements of cosmic chemistry.
Frisky, sweet and chaotic, the most compelling signs of hope sometimes take the unlikeliest shape.