A fine specimen

You know that point in a relationship where you’re loved so intensely and hungrily, with such clear and undiluted need, that you start to think, wait a minute?

I mean, it’s not that you’re unappealing. You scrub up just fine, when you can be bothered. Yet to them you’re the most delicious, heady mixture of every texture, taste and smell. There’s not enough of you to ever fulfil them; you’re the definition of scarcity economics. They treat you as though you were ambergris, musk or Bulgarian rose, when the evidence would probably show you’re vanilla.

You’ve never had anyone literally pant at your approach before, or so obviously lose the will to live when you leave a room, and so part of you basks in this full beam of warm attention. But the other part thinks It’s been six months, and you need to stop following me into the bathroom.

I’ve definitely entered this stage of my relationship. With the dog.

His devotion exhausts me. It’s been just over a year since we brought him home from the Air New Zealand freight counter, eight-weeks-old and so tiny he could fit his head inside a coffee mug.

He smelt of warm hay and seemed thrilled with everything. He assigned nobody more value than anybody else. He nipped everyone’s sleeves; he would widdle on anyone.

I mean, look at him!

I think we all knew that eventually he’d imprint himself on me, simply because the summer ended and I was the only one left: feeding him, maintaining his schedule of round-the-suburb walks, playing tug with socks, combing him, slipping him the odd knob of sausage and talking to him about my problems, as if he were a bartender.

But, not having owned a poodle mix before, I didn’t know I would be permanently shadowed, pursued from room to room, waited for while I take a phone call, sat on if I stop for a cup of tea, and mooned at while I brush my teeth or perform other unspeakable, intimate tasks. If I leave the house, he takes up position in the window. If I go upstairs, he whimpers to come too.

There isn’t a minute in the time we spend together where he doesn’t have his gaze locked on me. It’s like being surveilled round-the-clock by the doggy Stasi.

“He’s bred from two lap dogs,” another dog-walker told me only this morning. “He exists to please you.” She said her Cavoodle was the same. I asked how old he was, and she said, “Fifteen". This inspired a range of emotions.

Apparently Cavoodles are a relatively recent crossbreed, and so these are the early generations. Nobody really knows how it’s going to turn out. If I were keeping notes for animal science, I’d record Cavoodles seem to have a problem with hoodies and hats, vomit at a moment’s notice, and prefer to excrete uphill. Sample size of one, but mine enjoys backing carefully against low brick walls or potted flowers and leaving his deposits to hang.

He may also have a death-wish. Not long ago I found the crinkled remains of a chocolate bar inside my spilled handbag, along with mouthfuls of foil on the floor. I rang the vet clinic, knowing chocolate is toxic to dogs. She asked how much he’d eaten, and I didn’t know. “Bring him in,” she said, briskly. “We’ll make him throw it up.”

When I arrived, they lifted him out of my arms and told me to kill half an hour at the nearby shops (easier said than done when it’s Karori Mall). They’d give him an emetic. I paced around the village. It was awful; I worried my sweet tooth had killed our dog. But when I came back the vet told me they’d found a negligible quantity of chocolate in his vomit.

“We did, however, find this,” he said, and held up a clear specimen bag. Inside was a fist-sized knot of my daughter’s elastic hair ties, twisted together and floating in bile.

If they’d passed from his stomach into his intestine, it could have been curtains. I went faint and asked to sit down; I felt like a failure as a dog owner and parent (who even knew those hair ties were missing?). “Don’t worry about it,” the vet nurse said to me. “You wouldn’t believe what we find inside Labradors.” Lego pieces and pen lids. One had gutsed a whole sock. Later, in the dog park, a reasonable-looking woman told me she’d heard about a Lab somewhere in Wellington who’d swallowed an umbrella. “The handle and everything,” she said.

Aside from the worries, the vet bills and the disgusting feeling of carrying a bag of warm poop around the block, there are manifold pleasures in having a dog. One, for me, is the social reward. A dog is the perfect conversation-opener. I’ve now talked to dozens of people I’d have otherwise passed wordlessly on the street, and the pleasure I take from these three-minute snatches of other people’s lives is almost indecent. In return, I say things I have no business saying. It’s bloody fantastic.

One woman I never met again described in detail how her dog humped the furniture. Another said he’d walked his in the cemetery, had taken mushrooms and started talking to ghosts. Another told me his mother-in-law was in a secure dementia unit and had just found herself an admirer. “They rang us and asked how we felt if she began an intimate relationship,” he said, with a nervous yelp. “I mean, it’s not a conversation you expect you’ll ever have.”

“It sounds like she’s having a better time than the rest of us,” I said.

I no longer believe that dogs resemble their owners, because if that were true, everybody in Karori would look like a Labradoodle. But there’s no question your chosen breed reflects the person you must be. Greyhound-owners are fundamentally kind. Pitbull people are optimists. Suburban folk with working breeds probably dream of the country, and pug owners love being in town. The elegant woman with the Italian truffle dog was always going to get an Italian truffle dog. And it makes sense that my dog is needy, with a difficult centre-parting.

I can’t pretend I’m clocking the miles, criss-crossing the dog parks and running him in the pines above Karori Park in the hope we’ll be left alone, speaking to nobody. When your life is largely routine, these encounters offer a gentle sort of adventure. It makes me feel warmer towards other people, for the most part - their odd beliefs, turns of phrase, their news and views. I even like the ones who say the wrong thing.

“Run him along the beach,” an older man told me, when I mentioned my dog was a kilo too heavy. “He’ll lose weight in no time, and so will you.”

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I hope you’re surviving the school holidays. I wrote this with two children and the dog in my face and our cat stuck above me on a curtain rail. There are roofers replacing our sheet iron and scaffolding across every window. If this newsletter makes any sense, it’s miraculous.