His Dogness

This column first appeared in the May 2014 issue of Forsyth Family magazine:

Since Joy came into our lives, I keep saying to people, “I never saw myself as the owner of a 5-pound dog.”

When Garnet is around, she likes to say, “She’s not 5 pounds. She’s 4½ pounds.”

It’s true.

Because we adopted Joy from a dog rescue organization, we know little of her history. We do know that, three weeks before she came to us, she was in West Virginia. When I told Joy that I lived in West Virginia when I was a kid, she was unimpressed. I’m sure that, had I accompanied that information with a piece of cheese, her response would have been more animated.

Garnet thinks Joy is a Papillon/Pomeranian mix. It’s funny how your perspective can change. We live across the street from a dog named Ozzie. I know that Ozzie is a shih tzu only because I asked Doobins and he told me. Before we adopted Joy, we all thought of Ozzie as small. Next to Joy, Ozzie looks immense. Now, even when we see Ozzie on his own, he looks bigger than he used to. A similar process happened with our cat Blitz. Now he looks like a mountain lion.

Joy has brought other animals into my everyday mental world. Joy is black, and, when the lighting and position of her pointy ears is just right, she looks like a bat. I like bats quite a bit but, before Joy came along, I didn’t think about them much day-to-day. Nor was I likely to think about show horses. Now I do every day because Joy has a distinctive walk that looks as if it was honed to score points with judges at a horse show.

Joy came into our lives because we lost our dog Faye after an illness that was both harsh and unexpected. Faye was young and had always been in good health, so, when she stopped eating and drinking water one day, we weren’t mentally prepared for what was to come. Later, when it seemed that the time had come to find another dog, we met Joy.

Seeing a 5-pound dog prance around as if she was a 1,000-pound Tennessee Walker was just one of the entertaining things that she did right off, and, for the first time in a while, I saw Garnet smile. Sparkle Girl and Doobins were laughing, too. It was when they asked what I thought that I first pulled out the line about never having thought of myself as the owner of a 5-pound dog. I quickly added that she had my vote as well as theirs. As a bringer of delight, Joy seemed to be a good name to give her.

She has proven to be wildly entertaining. Give her a treat, and she might spend two minutes finding just the right spot between the pillows to bury it. Dangle a knotted handkerchief and she will go wild trying to take it from you. Particularly endearing is her utter unwillingness to acknowledge in any fashion that she weighs not much more than a half-gallon of milk. I once read that, to understand dogs, you need to know that, no matter what their size, every dog thinks it’s a wolf. I was reminded of that when, in no uncertain terms, Joy told off a German shepherd that walked down the sidewalk in front of our house without first asking Joy for permission to enter her realm.

Although Joy has, in many ways, helped relieve our sense of loss, at times, she can highlight it. As she hops onto the bed, I might be reminded of Faye hopping onto the bed. She doesn’t know that, of course, and just gets on with the business of making us laugh by being herself .