They Chase Our Joy

“Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.”

— Mary Oliver

His Small Paws Shiver

His small paws shiver

In swift pursuit of dream things

While I watch and smile.

A Dialogue with a Dog

George the Beagador thinks he has arguments with me, but his vocabulary is extremely limited, like Groot’s.

It begins when George stares at me fixedly with his yellow Rosemary’s Baby eyes.

“No,” I reply, “you don’t need to go outside. I just took you outside.”

“Woo woo,” George says, in a distinctly argumentative tone.

“But I just took you out a couple of hours ago. You don’t need to go!”

“Woo woo!!”

“No, George, I am NOT taking you outside again! That is absolutely final!!!”

“Woo woo WOO!!!”

And then I take him outside.

George always wins those arguments we don’t have.

The Demi-Beagle Lays Down the Law

George’s Rules

1) Motor scooters and bicycles are forbidden.

2) Horses are an outrage.

3) How dare squirrels exist.

4) The pillows are mine. I have plans for them.

5) Paul may not sneeze. Others may, but not Paul.

The real George the beagador.

The Pooch and the Past

The dog stops and sniffs,

reading recent visitors

the way you read this.

Looking Up to a Dog

Every day about dawn, a woman walks a large, black-and-white, boxer-type dog past our house into the park. It doesn’t seem to notice that it has no left hind leg.

The dog moves briskly, sniffing plants and hopping along ahead of its companion.

My ambition in life will always be to carry my burdens that lightly.

A Good Book to Chew

Drawing and quote by the late, great New Yorker humorist James Thurber

The Dog of Tomorrow

Here's an Alex Ross painting I absolutely love. For the uninitiated, I'll say that this is Krypto, Superman's dog (don't ask, just go with it). He's been around, on and off, for more than a half-century now. For the record, a dog is one of the few beings I would actually trust with super powers.

Sleeping Dogs Lie

By Lisa Lipham Lemza

Their bodies soft,

Improbably compressed,

Curling into commas,

Apostrophes of beguiling rest—

Paws crossed,

Noses tipped with tail,

Snouts tucked,

A contraction of dog.

It all belies

The obdurate muscle coiled beneath,

Which can spring

In a scalding moment,

In a shock of surging power,

Into an elemental something

A burglar would not wish to meet.

No Gold Medal? Try a Gold Heart

U.S. Olympic freeskier Gus Kenworthy is bringing home from Sochi four stray puppies he saved from that city's disgusting mass canine extermination program.

Even in a disaster, save whom or what you can, when and if you can, and you save our own humanity from being extinguished.

If You Puddle Up a Little, That's Okay

Wonderful.

Under the Protection of Thor

Painting by Sinclair Stratton

After their baby was kidnapped and then accidentally and secretly killed the same night in 1932, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh acquired a powerful, fiercely protective German shepherd.

Lindbergh named him Thor, evoking “thunder, strength and the protection of mankind.” Within a week, Anne wrote, “The devotion of this dog following me everywhere is quite thrilling, like having a new beau.” Thor awakened Anne every morning with his nose on the bed.

Lindbergh trained Thor to open and close doors on command and take the family terriers for a walk on a leash. Thor would reportedly watch his mistress swim in the sea. When he judged she had swum out far enough, he would jump into the water and paddle out to her, pulling her back to shore by his tail.

They knew their later-born children were safe once they gave Thor the whispered command, “Mind the baby.”

Overcome by old age during World War II, Thor struggled to rise and follow whenever Anne passed. Lindbergh noticed that his eyes followed her every moment she remained in sight.

Thor died quietly under a hickory tree on the Lindberghs’ lawn and was buried in a grave Lindbergh dug.

“He had no pain, and I think he died as the old should die, not lingering so long that all joy is gone from the living,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. “I think Thor found something worthwhile in life to the very day he died, and yet I think he was ready and willing to go. But now, for us, there is a great empty, lonely feeling in the places he used to be.”

Lindbergh’s biographer Scott Berg noted that the passage about Thor was more emotional than anything Lindbergh ever wrote about a person.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Room for Another

My Baby and Me

Our Dalmatian Baby. It's nice to remember her this way.

The Sometimes Astonishing Power of Kindness

By Dan Hagen

The 21-year-old Jacob Riis was jobless, homeless and foodless — starving, in fact — on one cold, rainy night in 1870.

Tortured by his lonely poverty and the depression it inspired, he was determined to kill himself. It looked like the only way out.

At the point when his thoughts were darkest that night, an abandoned stray dog snuggled up to him. That physical and emotional warmth, that outstretched paw, offered to him by a creature no one cared about or wanted, was the only thing that saved his life.

Later that night, he had a gold locket stolen while he was sleeping in a police station to warm up, and then the police officers mocked him and kicked him out. That human cruelty steeled his resolve to become one of America’s greatest muckraking crusader journalists. But only canine affection made that crusade possible.

Your Dog

We treat the bounding enthusiasm with which dogs greet us as silly, but at some level we're aware of its underlying existential truth. Every time we part from someone we care about, there's a chance we'll never see that person again. And the day will come when we do not. 
Dogs know that. We pretend not to.