Where We Begin

Today was all brooding clouds, freshly sharpened air, and small-but-mighty snowflakes. My kind of moody winter day. I’ve been on the couch for an obscene number of hours, watching movies while ghostwriting a book and writing thought-leadership articles. Thought leadership. A newfangled marketing term that means people like me get paid well to write articles that will get little to no play unless the SEO monster is placated. SEO is the enemy of good writing, so I'm grateful when clients don't expect me to write like a robot, even though it's not good for their end of the deal. 

Between alternating bouts of inspiration and bottlenecks, I clicked around my social media accounts for a distraction or twenty. On my most recent scroll, my mood went south as a friend shared photos of a senior dog in bad shape. My friend runs the shelter where the dog had originally been adopted. The owners had passed the four-page application with flying colors, she said — and now they're about to be charged with animal cruelty. 

For me, animals are historically linked to happiness. I grew up around lots of them. My family had a beagle, Cujo, his name courtesy of my big brother. For a very hot minute, we also had a pup that my brother named Coda after a Led Zeppelin album, but our parents made us give him back to whoever was passing out puppies near my grandma’s. Or maybe we found him a new home. I don't remember little Coda's exact fate, but I know he had a cool name for at least one afternoon of his life. 

At Grandma's, where I spent a big chunk of my idyllic childhood, there were multiple dogs over the years — also horses, cows, and chickens that tended to occupy the field's "main stage" where delighted children would gather to adore them, or run from them if their name started with R and rhymed with "booster." Pigs lived at the far end of the field in a pen reinforced with corrugated steel. Ducks convened in the puddle that formed between the small red barn and the spot where the field began to form a rolling hillside. A few stray cats. Once a billy goat. They say representation is everything, and Grandma’s just-outside-city-limits farm provided a fine array of God’s creatures.  

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe it’s crucial to have a means of communing with Creation. Not being an outdoorsy person, I don’t accept Nature’s invitation to explore her body of work, which is home to Things That Poison and Bite, including homicidal snakes. I like looking at snakes, but not the sneaky kind. I like my snakes carrying signs like they’re waiting for me to deplane at the airport. My version of communing with Creation is not under the forest canopy but at the seaside or in the company of animals that occupy farms and homes. 

This evening, as Pvt. Joker and I ended our micro-walk, which is all his 13-year-old arthritic legs can handle, he stopped short at the top of the cement steps that lead down to my house. Entitlement is part of his old-dude schtick nowadays. He stops, looks up at me with his glaucoma eyes, and stares until I respond. In fact, that's his usual way of telling me what he needs. It's a shot of lovesweetlove straight to my persnickety heart. 

At the end of each walk, I get in the proper stance so I don't end up in a Bridget Jones-esque disaster involving a nasty fall, a nearby pile of dog crap, and a lumbar injury: Squatting, not bending at the waist, I prepare for lift off and pick up nearly half my body weight, steadily carrying him down eight steps, down the sidewalk, and onto the front porch. All things considered, my 46-year-old bod might not be as ripped as she once was, but she's still doing me a solid. 

Asked no one ever: Danielle, why do you love dogs so much? 

Me: Because I've experienced coexisting with an animal, or a few, during difficult phases of my adult life. They have never let me down. I have a list of everyone else who has. 

That list happens to include me. Luckily, since I have to live with me, I've opted not to give myself the No. 1 spot. Instead, I’m at the bottom. If you’re down with Jesus, it’s called giving grace. If you’re a guru, it’s called self-care. Near the top of that list are some fine disappointers, like the goofy coward that I thought I'd properly vetted as safe for human dating or the "best friend" who pretended she didn't see me at a bar when she was with another friend who had decided to hate me. I don't know what I'd done to offend her, but the options are fewer than the dollars in my bank account back in those days. Very few. She could’ve given me some grace, but my guess is she didn't have enough to go around. I recognized her tough-girl facade early on. After all, I think it was obvious that my biggest “offense” was being a wanderer in search of community (albeit sometimes in the wrong places). Maybe it looked differently to her from the outside in. Maybe she didn’t care regardless, because self-preservation is a wily beast. 

Each time I’ve disembarked from disappointment in this untamed life of mine, I’ve arrived back at my safe place: me and my dogs. 

When I encounter an act of animal cruelty, I’m tempted to wonder why anyone would get a dog if they don’t love dogs. I already know the answer: Humans are a mess. There’s a seemingly uncountable number of people who’ll get a pet without actually caring about what happens to it. It's more like an accessory that looks cute today but will lose its appeal and end up discarded. And because I have exposure to rescue through my own volunteer work and a big handful of friends who do the real work — at shelters and in the trenches — I take animal welfare seriously. 

There’s no perfect pet owner. Sometimes I forget to fill my dogs’ water bowl. I don’t walk them enough. They have tartar buildup. I don’t even practice affirmations with them or ask them about their feelings. What I do is provide a baseline of humane care with a sprinkle of conscientiousness, a dash of training, and a shitload of affection. If we could just get more people to do the first on that list, we’d spare a lot of grief for God’s creatures and the people tasked with rescuing them.

I don’t have all the answers for making a more humane world, but I have a feeling self-preservation isn't one of them. Internal grace is where we begin.