Dramatis Canes

While I don’t want to overstate the size or devotion of this blog’s readership, I will say that more than a few (okay, technically four) people have asked me when I was going to write about my dogs. Since, coincidentally, I have four of these living with me now, and since visitors to the house must run a gamut of barking and writhing creatures before they are offered a piece of cake or a glass of wine, the question makes sense. While I don’t know why I have waited so long, I know why I want to write about them now. My blog posts about Darwin and the observation experiments of the last post made me realize that I wanted to turn my gaze to my dogs. I am always, of course, looking at them. That act of looking can be diagnostic: why is Sydney scratching her ears and shaking her head? Why won’t Djinn come out from behind the couch? It can be temporal: do they look like they are ready for breakfast, for a walk? It can include a looking for in various modes: Where is Zuko? Where is that damn dog? Oh, God, did someone steal him from the front yard? Looking can be, often is, a form of pleasure: one or more of the dogs might be looking particularly cute, cuddly, interested, alert. In that last instance, gaze meets gaze: dogs have been bred to look back at humans.

But, as the word “observation” implies, the kind of looking I am trying to do would be different, more distanced, scientific even. It would serve as a limit case of one of my favorite activities: making the familiar unfamiliar. It would be a chance to test my deeply held and even more deeply felt assumptions about individual dogs and the dogs as a group against something like reality. Because the dogs, as I discuss briefly in of Packs and Paradox, are very much part of that salient thing called a household, observing them as Darwin did his weeds and Piaget his children would be part of a more extended opportunity to think about home and household in a new way. Because these creatures, with their routines, their predilections, and their surprises, are the most current manifestations of centuries of domestication, it would allow me to think about the idea of the domestic so central to this blog and to what I have been exploring for the last year and a half. Because these creatures, with their perhaps oddly human names, are part of a species developed (most intensely of course by Victorians) to be human companions, looking closely at what in the middle ages might be called “familiars” would allow me to think more than I usually do about the human/ non-human divide.

Somehow it makes sense to begin by introducing the dogs, by their (of course human-chosen) names. Introductions often take place at the threshold of one’s home: this one is Sydney, this is Kendrick, this Djinn, this Zuko. I think of the first Bridget Jones movie, in which the socially awkward heroine practices a form of cocktail party introduction that depends on short descriptive phrases, on appositives. To translate into canine terms:  “This is Sydney, a miniature goldendoodle whose interests are rubber bones, chasing squirrels, and establishing household dominance ”

Of course, in a piece of writing, introductions of characters have a special place and purpose. I am thinking here of the list of characters that precede the text of a play, the Dramatis Personae. Traditionally less focused on attributes than on relations, these lists spell out how individual characters fit into a network: “Sydney 9-year-old mini-goldendoodle, friend to Kendrick and occasional love interest to Zuko.” Although “Persona” in this case means not only person, but “mask” or “character,” I think it is right to change the phrase while keeping the Latin structure of the plural genitive, which would make it “Dramatis Canes.” 

Introductions are, of necessity, superficial, depending as they do, especially in a Dramatis Personae, on a set of easily identifiable and memorable characteristics. In a play, these capsule summaries often belie the complexity the characters (almost always human, of course) display over the course of drama. Take a Victorian version of Hamlet, edited and directed by Charles Kean:

 Claudius (King of Denmark)

Hamlet (son to the former and nephew to the present King)

While no one could call Hamlet’s identities as son and nephew irrelevant to the unfolding of the play or to the protagonist’s role in it, the appositive phrase offered by the Dramatis Personae says nothing about Hamlet’s indecisiveness, his anger, or even, in this patriarchal genre, his crucial relationship to his mother. Of course, Dramatis Personae are not merely meant to introduce the character, but also the actor. “Mr. Ryder” plays Claudius in Kean’s production of the play, and Kean himself (of course) plays the Prince of Denmark. My version of the Dramatis Personae/Dramatis Canes has all characters playing themselves. Djinn, a parti-colored mini goldendoodle is playing (very convincingly) a parti-colored mini goldendoodle.

My introductions of the dogs here, although slightly longer than those found in a traditional list of characters, are summaries before my more sustained observation/experiment, before, if you like, the unfolding of the play. These are the things I knew about my dogs by living with them, napping with them, feeding and caring for them, over many years. One thing I both know and strategically forget is that these dogs—at least some of them—are not really “mine” at all. Questions of whether one can own an animal aside, the other human remembers of the household have their own stories of identification and ownership: Paul chose Sydney; Kendrick was a Christmas gift for Paul; Djinn is Ross’s dog who lived in Austin with him until Ross returned to Houston during the pandemic. Zuko is Djinn’s dog—and Paul frequently refers to him as “my son.” On the other side of the doggie coin, these dogs are not mine when they get into trouble. I have been known, under duress to yell “Look what your dog just did!” or “get your dog off the table!” one minute and to snuggle with “my” now suitably abject dog the next.

The Introductions:

Sydney. First dog. This term, taught to me by my friend Thad, avoids entanglement in questions about alpha-ness—and in Sydney’s case whether a female dog can indeed be alpha. Sydney came to us first and remains first in all kinds of ways. Sydney just turned 9 years old, which in the simplest version of the ever-evolving calculation of dog years and longevity, means that she is 63 and that we are almost exactly the same age. This completes my--already complete--identification with this mini-goldendoodle who came into our lives during the dark time of my older son, Ross’s, cancer treatment. She was a replacement for our beloved giant labradoodle, Max, who died of cancer at this same horrible month, October 2012. Sydney represented a severe downgrade in size from Max’s 100 pounds to about 20 (when she is feeling slim), as well as an upgrade in intelligence—Max, although loveable, was not, finally, trainable. I couldn’t, as the phrase goes, take him anywhere. For years, when it was only Sydney, and then just Sydney and Kendrick, I took her everywhere. She accompanied me to places dogs were allowed and some places they were not. She especially delighted in the Rice campus with its wide green fields and cave-like spaces under my various desks. She was my writing dog. Sydney’s own vocation is not writing but swimming. Sydney is, to her very bones, a swimmer, and to her very bones a diver after rubber ones. As a distributor (think point guard) in our endless games of pool boneball, Sydney makes playing possible, retrieving the bones—red, blue, and green—from the other dogs and returning them to the humans so they can be thrown again. If Sydney’s life of college lawns, swimming pools, and Gulf beaches seems, well, golden, it has also been punctuated by illness. At two, she developed life-threatening pancreatitis, and has been on a strict no-fat diet for eight years. Apparently, she still remembers happier days when our companionship extended to sharing small amounts of cheese; always, hopeful, she is always at my side when I open the cheese drawer in the fridge. She has turned her daily medicine sessions into rituals of firstness; no other dog is allowed on her “pill chair,” where she swallows, without tricks or liquids, the blue pancreas supplements that may or may not be effective, but that we are terrified to discontinue.

Kendrick. Nicknamed the “fourth responder,” Kendrick is often the last to join the pack in any given activity. He is the only one who is not a mini-goldendoodle, although that name is embodied in several colors, sizes and shapes by his packmates. Kendrick is—I am ashamed to say—our only rescue dog; he appeared on my friend Thad’s neighborhood chat in the winter of 2013. Knowing we were looking to add a friend for Sydney and a dog for our younger son, Paul, Thad sent his winsome picture along: peering in a dark car at the screen on on my phone I saw a stumpy black and white creature with spotted legs and liquid brown eyes and fell in love. Kendrick had been picked up off the median of North Boulevard in an affluent part of Houston where, it is rumored, owners who care a little bit come to abandon their dogs, knowing that the chances of adoption are good. Although he had obviously experienced some trauma or abuse—to this day he cowers when he sees a stick, a bat, a broom, or even an eight-pound white fluffy pup on the beach—Kendrick fit seamlessly into the family, becoming Sydney’s shadow. His age, his provenance and his genetics remain a mystery, even though we have had his DNA tested. The results—that he was a  mix of chihuahua and poodle with a little bit of spaniel, makes no sense for a dog with border collie magic waterproof fur, a squat solid body, and a spectacular plume of a tail. We think that the DNA company actually reversed engineered the results from Facebook pictures of Sydney; when we looked for examples of the combination the firm had suggested, we saw an enervated, Sunset Boulevard  version of Sydney, with a bow in her hair. Like our border collie from many years ago, Kendrick has no interest in games or toys: bones of any color hold no magic for him. It is difficult for at least this human not to read in Kendrick’s spaniel eyes, so different from his packmates’ a profound and dignified sadness. When the occasion is just right, however,when it is neither too hot nor too cold, when he has the right stretch of grass in front of him, he show us, even in middle age, that he has (again a basketball metaphor) the hops the other dogs lack. On those few golden days, he gambols like a lamb.

Djinn. The most extroverted of all the Michie-Derricks, human or canine, Djinn will walk up to any human and befriend them in an instant. He is parti-colored, splotched with black and white, and something, indeed, of a party animal. In public spaces humans flock to take selfies with him. He lacks the competitiveness of the other doodles, but participates in their fun and games with an analytical eye, often bending the rules to his benefit. Djinn is Ross’s dog, whom he purchased from a family breeder in East Texas. When the puppy he had seen in a blurry photo online crawled out of the box he shared with his siblings and walked towards my son, I caught my breath. For me at secondhand —and as I found later for Ross— this puppy perfectly embodied a vision Ross had shared with me: during his year of cancer treatment, Ross  had, in a state between sleeping and waking, imagined a healing figure—a black and white chicken, almost perfectly spherical. Djinn was that chicken in canine form. Our family has always argued vigorously and not always pleasantly over names for our pets (for example “Windshield” was briefly but officially the name of one of our cats).  I deeply regret persuading Ross not to honor this apparition with the name “Chicken.” “Djinn” is a great name, and a suitablymagical one, but there is a way in which he will always be chicken—and in which I was always too chicken to let it be. Djinn’s name, with its somewhat confusing silent “D” refers of course to the genie of middle-eastern narratives[ his rarely used middle name, “Hopkins” is my contribution—an homage to Gerald Manley Hopkins, the author of the poem “Pied Beauty,” in which he celebrates the magnificence of “dappled things.” Like Sydney’s, Djinn’s seeming insouciance masks something of a troubled past: Djinn survived, with Ross’s help, two violent attacks by the same much larger dog. It is a gift that Djinn remains open to meeting other dogs, although we have to calibrate the height of his expressive tail to see when he is feeling threatened.

Zuko. The youngest of our dogs, the perpetual little brother (and literally Djinn’s half-sibling), owned, fittingly, by my younger son, Paul. A deep black, Zuko resists the (racialized) photographic powers of the cell phone; he can disappear into picture of couches and beds, his eyes inaccessible to the camera. Larger and more athletic than his packmates, he is also the one who comes closest to speech. Zuko’s range of vocalizations is startling and evolving: he makes noises for which we have no names, and sounds, like an occasional deep growl, that seem out of sync with his long, gentle paws, and his need to touch and be touched. Zuko has had in some ways a less stable life than out other dogs, accompanying Paul to college as a registered comfort animal, and moving back with and without him according to the exigencies of the pandemic. Perhaps it is this history that makes him so attentive to place. He initiates contact and restless movements from inside to outside the house, insisting on declaring threshold dominance over his brother and Sydney. One memorable moment he broke free on a walk and appeared within minutes on our front porch a good mile and a half away. His eyes hidden by fur, his communications difficult to decipher, this last dog who is often first on walks and in playtime is perhaps our most mysterious. We cannot predict on a given day whether he will eat all his food and everyone else’s or whether he will turn politely but firmly away from his bowl.

I have made my introductions, written my Dramatis Personae. My observational experiment, which I ended a few days ago, has been, perhaps unsurprisingly, filled with small surprises, details that erode, usually without exploding, assumptions about hierarchy, place, gender, and home. I am smitten, as you might have noticed, with the idea of this experiment as both science and theater but my commitment is to the unfolding of character, mask, persona—in their canine forms. The play begins (and ends) next week, in the next post.