Dogs are good for me

I've been a believer for a long time that pets are good. My family had a couple of dogs when I was a teenager, and I let the kids smuggle cats into the house when they were little because I thought they needed to learn about pets. One of those two cats lived 17 years; the other made almost 20. And while I loved the first one from the beginning and thought frequently about giving the other one a laryngectomy or lobotomy or something to shut him up, I was crushed as each of them died.

I was hurt in other ways when I lost the dog I had gotten the kids after their dad and I split up. I knew her time was coming—she was close to 14 years old and showing signs of glaucoma and maybe arthritis and other things—but I was not at all prepared for something to get over a 4-ft fence in our backyard, attack, and kill her. I had only recently acquired a kitten to replace the last cat who died, and here I was without my loving, smiling, always forgiving dog.

Within a matter of weeks, my daughter came home for Christmas and we hit the animal shelter. The little dog I found there was a ball of black fluff that I somehow hoped would stay small and fluffy; that didn't happen. Her 30-pound size makes her a little larger than I'd have liked, and her fluff straightened out into stiff, straight hair a couple of inches long and thick around her scruff. She's something of a weenie most of the time, but around her "cousin" Sherman who has been living with us lately, she becomes an alpha dog and I sometimes want to pinch her head off. For a long time I was pretty sure she was part hobbit; she could get from the den to my bedroom under a screen that kept Sherman out, and she'd steal all the toys from the den and hide them back in my room.

I specifically picked the runt of her litter because I was hoping for something fairly small; I didn't want a large dog because of the cost of maintenance and the challenges of assuring that it got plenty of exercise in spite of my own less-than-active lifestyle. Then Sherman moved in.

I hadn't intended to have a Sherman dog. Shortly after I adopted my little Parker pup, Second Son decided he needed a dog, too—only he lived with a roommate who had a large dog, and he had determined that large dogs were cool. Since he was out on his own, I had no reason to care, and he had picked out our delightful little Nikki dog.

SS trooped off to the shelter and called me to announce that he had found "his" dog. He had a long list of steps to follow before he'd be eligible to adopt this animal, and he had to wait several days for its previous owners to be sure they wanted to release it, and SS was second in line to adopt it. But SS was confident: the dog he had seen was going to be his.

I dropped by the shelter to see what I thought. SS had told me the animal was a boxer named Duke, and I sorted through the pens until I found a miserable looking beast who was so starved his ribs seemed to be cutting through his skin and whose hound-dog eyes begged for someone to love him. Much as I didn't want a large dog, I could see how easily SS could have fallen in love with him; this beast needed love! But there was still that one more name ahead of my son's on the list.

Sure enough, after more than a week of waiting for others to exercise their options and figuring out the logistics of taking the beast home, SS called me to tell me he was on his way to buy a kennel. The dog was still a puppy at only about 4 months old, but he was clearly not going to be the pocket-sized beast I had had in mind when I set off to find my dog. He also wasn't just boxer; the hound-dog eyes and speckled chest and gentle jaws have to indicate hound or bird-dog or something inside.

And a few months later, the puppy was living with me. SS graduated from college, moved away to start his first job, and needed a place for the puppy to stay. Sometimes I'm just too easy....

By the time the erstwhile Duke, who had now learned to answer to Sherman, moved in with me, he had already gained practical experience at fence jumping, so I was resigned to keeping him on a chain, even inside my fenced back yard. I had tried ropes of various sorts which had always been fine with Nikki; Sherman chewed right through them. I made a daily point of hooking him and Parker on leashes and hoofing through the neighborhood to get some exercise, but I knew I'd never be able to get his heart rate up beyond an occasional thump. At least he enjoyed the outings!

Once SS got settled in to his digs in Houston, he picked up Sherman to take him "home," which was a nice relief for me: I had my house back with just me and my puppy and kitten, who had fallen a bit behind in their bonding; Mandi the cat had been terrified of the much larger, more boisterous Sherman.

For a while, anyway. Within a matter of weeks, SS had decided that the job just wasn't working, and the only option open to him was to move back home, reorganize, and start the job search all over again. Sherman, of course, managed to move "home" several weeks before his master did.

Sherman managed to get out of the yard a couple of times before SS moved back home, and I made the first order of business after the move the establishment of a fence high enough to keep him in. Our old fence was farm fencing that let me look out onto the virgin forest in my backyard, and the cheapest option for a taller fence was another, higher round of the same stuff all around. I spent a few days collecting parts from the lumber yards, and SS and I spent a weekend giving Sherman a place to run.

And run he did. When daughter came home the next Christmas, she was appalled that Sherman had pretty well done in the groundcover that had once made my yard look lush and cool; now it looked like a beach. The aspidistra that mostly hid the fence from view was already badly trampled, and the tree stump that used to be low enough to mow over was sticking about 8 inches out of the ground. But Sherman was healthy and happy, and Parker bounced happily along at his heels.

I had been trying to teach Parker to fetch a ball by tossing it out and giving her treats for bringing it back, and she had seemed to be catching on until Sherman moved in—and he was a whole lot more fun to chase than a silly ball. The logic of "fetch" escaped Sherman completely.

Until he discovered we could play with his stuffed tiger, Romo. He dragged Romo over to my chair one day, I guess to play tug-of-war, but I just picked Romo up and tossed him across the room. Sherman happily brought him back so I could throw him again. Ah—he had the concept, but could he transfer it to a ball?

Since Parker and Sherman are about the same age, they both went through the chewing phase together, and they chewed everything in sight. In my search for toys that would suit them, I stumbled over an old basketball, which took Sherman's big mouth about a day and a half to pop. For some reason, he picked up its carcass and hauled it up to SS one day, and SS flung it back into the yard. Sherman ran after it and schlepped it back, ready for another round. The game of fetch was on.

SS found an old baseball in the house and decided it was too small and too hard for fetch. We found a softball, and that was better until Sherman chewed the cover off. We went to tennis balls and found they got so filthy we couldn't even find them in the yard again. But it didn't much matter what we threw; Sherman would bring it back. One afternoon I came home from work to find SS playing with him in the backyard, flinging the ball into the last of the aspidistra plants where Sherman had to dig around to find it, but he never failed: regardless how lost it seemed to us to be, Sherman always came back with his ball.

Then we discovered that if we didn't just throw it but bounced it on the patio, Parker also would join in the game. With both of them playing now, we were going through cheap tennis balls pretty quickly, so I started looking for alternatives. I found a goofy, weirdly shaped, heavy rubber toy with a noisemaker inside that Sherman enjoyed for a while, but it lost its appeal when the noisemaker died.

Then I found an off-balance ball that bounced high but erratically when we threw it down, and both of the dogs thought that was fun to chase. In somewhat rapid succession, we acquired several rubber balls the same size as the tennis balls but much more resistant to dogs, and a small collection of racquet balls that bounce like crazy. Sherman was in heaven, and even Parker learned that if Sherman was chasing the rounder balls, she could claim the goofy-shaped one as her own.

Before long, I learned that I could throw one of the round balls for Sherman to chase, and Parker would chase and return the goofy-shaped one. I spend a part of my day working from home, and the dogs will beg me to take an occasional break to throw the balls. Sherman is currently working on his ability to catch low pitches, and Parker is loving chasing her ball as far as I can bounce it.

As much as I've enjoyed playing with them when I can catch a break, I didn't realize until today how much they give back to me. Things on my job have been really frustrating lately, and I've grown to resent having to drag myself to the office to endure the latest vexation. Today's class met after usual hours, I discovered some reasonably significant errors in the assignment that was due today, and I don't have an appropriate workspace for the teaching assistants I need to help me with the course. I came home tired, angry, and tense.

I had left the dogs in the backyard when I went to the office, and SS had left them out when he buzzed through from a trip to Houston to scoot to his job, so I figured they'd be eager to come inside and soak up cool (and maybe dry—we might have had a shower today) air.

Not so much—both of them seemed eager to get on with the balls. I grabbed a couple and chunked them across the yard, and the dogs both took off eagerly to round them back up. Sherman has perfected a way of placing his ball gingerly on the step so it doesn't roll away until I have a chance to pick it up, but he's working on catching slow pitches just off the corner of the patio. Parker tends to toss the ball at me so hard it often bounces away and she has to go round it up again for me, but she's getting good at charging out across the yard and coming up right under it when it lands.

Sherman bounced a couple of tosses off his nose and right back into my hands, and Parker grabbed up a couple of big aspidistra leaves along with the ball when she brought it back, and she seemed upset that she hadn't been able to separate them before she gave the ball back to me. Both would stay with their balls until they were sure I had them firmly in hand, then take off for their various starting points to wait for their next pitch. Both of them would wait eagerly, eyes bright and tails wagging, for their next chance to chase the ball.

Fifteen minutes of fetch didn't take my frustrations off my plate, and it didn't help me figure out how I'm going to handle tomorrow. But it made me laugh, and my spine relaxed, and I knew I will figure this all out somehow.

Sherman's too big and Parker's too cranky and I don't have time to exercise them much, but I'm sure in spite of it all that these dogs are good for me.