There is no mystery like a slightly used dog.
We brought home a new guy the weekend before last. He’s a 3-year-old Lab mix who had been surrendered by his human family to a shelter in southern Pennsylvania. Apparently they didn’t have time for him anymore; my theory is that a 10-year-old kid who begged for a dog and promised to take care of it is now a 13-year-old who has other things to do, and mom and dad can’t or don’t want to pick up the slack.
We’ll never know.
They called him Odie, after the idiot dog in the “Garfield” comic. We changed that to Bodhi, hoping he wouldn’t notice the plosive consonant. It’s Sanskrit for “enlightenment;” more importantly, it’s the name of Patrick Swayze’s surfer-dude bank robber in the 1991 bonehead classic “Point Break.”
Advertisement
Bodhi’s a really good dog.
People can tell you where they’ve been in their lives. Animals can only show you. My wife and I have adopted shaggy mid-size mutts three times now over the past three decades, and each one has presented his own particular puzzle. What have they been through? Who trained them, and how? To paraphrase Bo Diddley, who did they love?
To rescue a dog is to bring into your home a being who has already been imprinted by experience, wired to behave for better and for worse, on purpose or by accident. They reveal that wiring when you least expect it. Bodhi knew how to sit and shake a paw; when we got him to lie down, a casual flip of a wrist sent him into an eager-to-please rollover. OK, he knows that.
He was a bit of a jumper, and we worried that this was going to be an issue until an acquaintance came in and held his hand calmly at waist level, which Bodhi obeyed as if it were a commandment from Moses. OK, he knows that.
Advertisement
You lean on the metaphors of the times in which you live, so I find myself reaching for computational images when describing what’s going on here. Bodhi was programmed by life with his first owners and now we’re reverse-engineering that programming to find out what makes him tick. He’s a sentient, autonomous being, sure, but one who was generally shaped by his early environment and specifically shaped by his training, or lack thereof. We’re overlaying a new life atop that first imprinting and finding out where they do and don’t sync up.
So, on our first walk around Bodhi’s new neighborhood, he picked up the newspaper from in front of the house next door, carrying it in his mouth the way he’d obviously been taught — another clue. We were told at the shelter that his first family would put him in the basement rec room to get him out of the way; as soon as we opened our basement door to do the laundry, down he scooted without prompting. I bathed him at the local dog wash without incident, but a trip to a nearby Petco made him so nervous he peed in the aisle. Was he over-aggressively groomed at an identical Petco in his old hometown? What memories and traumas were locked away in that furry head?
Most of all, I noticed Bodhi searching the faces of each person we passed, presumably for signs of the only family he still knew. Certain human types excited him: a teenage girl, tall young men. He immediately took to my wife but was leery of me until I started reinforcing his training with the help of a bag of diced-up rotisserie chicken, a.k.a. Crack for Dogs. Now I’m his best friend, which I’m fairly sure the last alpha male in his life was not.
Advertisement
Animals live at our disposal and our mercy. They bend their lives to ours unless we make an effort to meet them halfway. I’m wondering now if humans are all that different. Where else do we come into contact with sentient beingswhose past experiences are often radically different than our own? Oh, right, in love and marriage — in the great holy joke of two people who are fundamentally alien to each other yet who choose to share their lives. Every true romance is a science fiction movie called When Worlds Collide.
We each carry around a hidden version of ourselves, programmed by our earliest pasts. It’s the self forged in childhood and adolescence, where we were shaped by our parents or primary caretakers — our “first owners,” if you will — and by our environments. We’re usually present at the arrival of our children, too, and responsible for much if not all of their wiring. As the poet Philip Larkin put it in his deathless “This Be the Verse,” “They [expletive] you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to but they do.”
Advertisement
And when we try to solve the puzzle of another person by waking up next to him or her every damn day for the rest of our lives, we bend ourselves to their reality and they to ours. We learn each other’s respective backstories, and then we learn how those stories work in the present, minute by minute, by trial and error. Every time two strangers decide to move in together, two houses have to be rewired into one. There’s going to be a lot of compromises and the building’s definitely not going to be up to code, but with any luck you’ll have light everywhere you look.
Or, to return to where we started, we retrain ourselves (and each other) for a newer existence where the old assumptions and hopes find fresh shape and meaning. If it takes rotisserie chicken, all the better.
This is how we escape the lockbox of self; this is how we merge our imprinting into a being greater than the sum of its parts. For lack of a better word, we call this family. My own now has a dog curled up asleep at the foot of the bed, starting to fit his life into ours.
Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.