How The Dog Park Healed My Soul
It wasn’t that I wanted a dog. That sounds careless, but here was the situation I was in 18 years ago: I was miserable. Several times a week, I would be driving in my car and have to pull over suddenly, wracked with hard crying. I had been struggling with infertility for some years, and the list of things I could withstand had grown smaller. Things I didn’t do: Lunch with girlfriends who were mothers. Parties. Walking down the street and looking anywhere but the ground, in case the woman walking past me was pregnant.
What I needed, I figured, was some joy. Because I couldn’t produce it myself, I needed a happiness boost from some external force. If I could have summoned Jerry Seinfeld to move into my house and perform stand-up comedy every time I snapped my fingers, I would have. Failing that, I decided I needed a creature whose very face would make me laugh. An astoundingly delightful animal that looked silly enough to crack me up immediately. Was there ever any doubt that I would get a pug?
Pugs are sweet, hapless bouncy balls, and I use the term “ball” deliberately, because when they are not on the hunt for their owner’s armpit or lap, or any other place they can use to pretend they’re an extra appendage, they are desperate for food. They seem very un-doglike, as if they missed out on the rule book that normal dogs like border collies and terriers are given. They might chase a ball but they might also, inexplicably, eat the ball, break the ball, be suddenly terrified of the ball and/or forget about the ball. They have their whims.
When Ali (she was named after Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical character Ali G) arrived, a fawn pug puppy, she did exactly as ordered. She’d look up at me with her squashed face, tongue sticking out as if in a perennial smile, and fully demand my attention. Was she my surrogate baby? Let’s just say that the outfits in her wardrobe included a birthday hat, a cowboy hat and some kind of fabulous Liberty print jacket. I didn’t forget about being infertile, but I was distracted enough to handle it. And soon there were other bonuses: restorative walks taken twice daily, strangers greeting me on the street and the best icing on the cake: meeting the dog park people.
You can spend hours with a fellow dog park person just talking about their pet. You usually do. For hours and days and weeks, you stand side by side and you compare notes: what your dog likes to do, which park is the best, which dog owner will give you stink eye and is best avoided, et cetera. Eventually you form a friendship. It might be months before you know what that person does for a living, what their marital status is or whether they have children. But you know what they’re like as a human, because you judge them pretty quickly: are they kind? Do they have seven different nicknames for their dog? Are they dressed appropriately for the dog park? (Trust me, you don’t want to befriend anyone who wears Gucci sneakers to the dog run.) It’s as good a yardstick as any.
Through Ali, I met friends who are still in my life two decades later, and they are friends who I might not have encountered otherwise. They are jazz singers and leaders of the LGBTQI+ community and chefs and interior decorators and retired police officers, and I just don’t know how our paths would have crossed. But dog people are the best kind of people, so when you meet them and you hit it off, you never look back. (Take it easy, cat people: you’re fine, too.)
Ali herself survived until she was 14 years old, eventually offering herself as a playmate to my two children. When my son was born, she’d tuck herself into my arm as I’d breastfeed, her head pressing against my son’s as a cushion. It was either cute or disgusting, depending on whether you’re a dog person or not. You already know where I sit.
Ali literally rescued me, and I know for a fact I didn’t come close to returning the favour. She taught us all about living with laughter, about grace through illness (when she was later diagnosed with cancer), about really, really enjoying the plate of food that’s in front of you, about living life without judgment, because she herself would scurry up as quickly to a Rottweiler or Doberman in the park as she would a fluffy oodle. That was her way. But I try not to be too maudlin about these things, so when I think back on Ali, I prefer to remember one scene.
We were once invited to a pug’s christening (you heard me right, pug people are crazy), where the owner had splurged on French champagne for the gathering and a pug-godfather read out a little speech. At the allotted time, butterflies were released in the air and the champagne was popped. But the pugs? They went straight for the butterflies, swatting them with their paws and felling a whole bunch of them. I still remember the guests’ horrified faces. And that makes me smile.
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Photo_ UnSplash