New Life, No Instructions

by Gail Caldwell

  I still had every reason to believe I was up to the job. I had hints, but only hints, of a physical decline I believed was slow-moving, normal, and inevitable. My leg had always been prone to injury, though I’d counteracted some of that frailty with decades of swimming and rowing and dogwalking. As Clementine had aged, she preferred a leisurely amble to a two-hour romp, and I had set my pace in response to hers. Now I would need to amp it up again. I thought I remembered the demands a young dog would place on me, and I wanted to get her through her wild years as soon as I could. Then, or so I envisioned, we could slow down together.

  The obvious question here, at least to me, is this: Why would a woman in her late fifties with a bum leg decide to get another sled dog, bred to pull a thousand pounds? I asked this of myself almost daily for Tula’s first few years. Though the tenor of the question varied from wry to dismayed, my answers were consistent. Because I loved the breed and couldn’t imagine the pallor of life without a Samoyed. Because I wasn’t ready to give up: give up the notion that we can freeze time, give up the self-image of a strong, competent woman who could handle a big dog. Because I was convinced that I could make up in brainpower and devotion what I lacked in physical stamina. Or maybe I was just foolish and headstrong and chasing a dream past its expiration date. Maybe I was just the middle-aged guy going after the Porsche. But now I was doing laps in a hotel pool by moonlight in some little town in Pennsylvania, waiting to meet my newly arranged destiny.

  5.

  I drove the twenty miles to Janice’s place, nervous and already happy. She lived on a winding, wooded road, and I turned in to a driveway marked by a small wooden sign with SANORKA etched upon it. At the end of the drive I saw a gorgeous young Samoyed in full extension behind a fence, springing like a top with enthusiasm. And I shook my head and started grinning and said out loud, “Oh, my God, I am so done.”

  Janice came outside to meet me in the driveway. She was a quiet, pleasant woman who had managed to have beds of flowering begonias within the vicinity of her dogs, as well as an elaborate system of inside and outside runs and kennels. I had come prepared to do temperament testing, to separate the girls and boys and see who approached me and who seemed shy or exuberant. I had squeaky toys and ribbons in my pocket, lures and props to ascertain sociability and prey drive and all the other traits I wanted to believe I could judge from a five- or six-week-old litter. I had a little notepad and pen. And then I got inside the run with the puppies, and everything in my arsenal of preparedness became irrelevant. I stopped trying to impress Janice with my knowledge. I just sat down on the wooden floor of the outside run and let the dogs sniff and whimper and bite my shoelaces and climb all over me, and then I looked up at her and said, “Well, there’s not a dud in the bunch, is there?”

  Janice’s co-breeder, a woman named Carol, who owned the dam and lived a few miles away, came over to meet me, and patiently posed with every squirming puppy while I took pictures with my cell phone. Puppies are typically color-coded in a litter, like baby lambs, with a strip of red or pink or green on their ears. I watched them hopping around for a mesmerizing hour, trying to get a take on the quiet one, the talky one, the independent one. I had retained almost no information at the end of this, probably because my heart eclipsed whatever rational determinations my brain was attempting. I knew the sire was calm and beautiful and the dam was loath to leave Carol’s side; these were good signs. Unwisely, I had taken to a quiet girl who whimpered, and when I picked her up, reinforcing the behavior, Carol rolled her eyes and said, “Well, that was the wrong thing to do.” I liked Carol immediately; she was tough and straightforward. She had bred Pembroke Welsh corgis for years, then fallen for the deviltry and beauty of Samoyeds and never looked back. “She’s soft,” she declared that day about the quiet girl. “She’ll need to be socialized.”

  Janice was making her selection for pick of the litter when the pups were seven weeks old; I would find out after that who was available to me. “Don’t fall in love with anyone,” she warned me, flicking a tail and examining a chin every time she touched a pup. “In two days, they’ll be entirely different dogs.”

  “I’m thirteen years older than I was last time around,” I told her. “I want a female who is calm and attached.”

  She shrugged and said, “Well, that’s the breed.” I hugged her and Carol good-bye and headed back home to await my fate.

  I spent the next several days mooning over Quiet Girl, my version of falling for a photograph on Match.com. Then I got the crucial email from Janice, her decision revealed in typical no-nonsense fashion. Quiet Girl was not even mentioned; the one person ahead of me had clearly fallen for her sleepyhead charms. “The pups available to you are Orange, Purple and Blue,” Janice wrote. “Blue will never fit into the crate you have. I don’t think Purple will be able to be contained in a crate that long. I think Orange might do the best in this situation. We had a dog club party at my house on Saturday and everyone fell for Orange and Red. I am keeping Red, so you will be getting second pick. Is this OK or do you want to chance taking one of the others and maybe not getting her on the plane?”

  My heart started fluttering. I wrote back a long, torturous message about who Orange Girl was—I couldn’t even remember her, just one of a movable mass of white cotton balls—and about who Janice believed she would turn out to be. I’m surprised she bothered to finish reading what I wrote. She wrote back: “Hi, All I can say is that I wish I could keep the orange girl as well as the red girl. She is very pretty and moves like a dream. All pups grow differently and she could turn out to be the largest. I only hope you don’t have a problem getting her on the plane. They are not small. You will love her. Janice.”

  Somehow, that last sentence became not just an appraisal but a declaration. Yes, I would love her. Yes, there was something beyond tears and loss. There were endless fields and rises between death and here, and I was determined to take the trip again.

  Two weeks later, I flew back to Baltimore on a Saturday morning, carrying only a shoulder bag and an empty soft Sherpa airline-approved puppy crate. Orange Girl had weighed eleven pounds at last report; I had purchased two tickets on AirTran—one human, one animal—so she could ride in the cabin with me. Janice and Carol were driving the seventy miles to the Baltimore airport to meet me, and when I came into the main terminal, I saw them pushing a cart with a crate on top. I was twenty yards and a few seconds away from the baby talk that must be hardwired into the goo of maternal instinct. “Oh, muffin, you’ve gotten so big,” I said to the puppy inside the crate, forgetting even to say hello to the humans accompanying her. They were smiling; these were people who were used to being ignored for their dogs. Janice opened the door to the crate and must have seen me hesitate: For a split second, I saw this: brown eyes years of commitment terror white fur need love mine responsibility. Janice said, with quiet certainty, “Take her.” I gathered her into my arms, and at that moment Orange Girl became Tula, and we were on our way.

  I had a two-hour delay before my flight back to Boston, and I spent it eating cheeseburgers with three Samoyed breeders, eavesdropping on show-dog talk. Janice and Carol and a fellow breeder were going to the Samoyed National in a couple of months, and they spoke in the impassioned code of conformation, structure and movement, championship points. Janice had convinced the air-terminal restaurant manager to seat us with a crate labeled LIVE ANIMAL, and so Tula sat just behind my shoulder, placid as a little monk.

  Once we got to security, where we would separate, Janice’s tough façade softened. She was giving up a pup she loved, and she pulled not one but five toys from her bag to ease the flight. I laughed at one alarming-looking bone she gave me and said, “I don’t know if they’ll let me on the plane with this.” Ever the literalist, Janice shrugged and said, “Just tell them it’s a knee.” I hugged everyone, went through security with Tula in my arms. A security guy hollered down the line, “Hold up, there! Got to see the puppy.” When I got to the waiting area for my flight, I
found a couple of empty seats and sat down and unzipped the netted duffel bag, and a black nose emerged. I put my hand under the small, warm chin inside and talked to her, getting a lick and a nuzzle in return. Then I called the friend who was meeting my flight to tell her we were on time. “Kathy?” I said, and she heard the emotion there and said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, and my voice caught. Finally I said, “I feel like someone just put a poultice on my heart.” We made plans to meet at the airport, said good-bye.

  Then it was just us. No longer just me.

  6.

  Why do we love what we love? Is it an overlap of past and present, as Freud insisted, where the heart reaches for what is already gone? Or time and space colliding: We find nearby the object of our desire, whether the stray who shows up at the door or the stranger on a train. Biology may dictate most dramas of want, and age has plenty to do with it: Those goslings, loyal forever, reached out to Konrad Lorenz, the pioneer ethologist, because his was the first face and scent and touch they encountered. But did the need they displayed ensure his tenderness in return?

  There’s an old story, documented more than a decade ago, about a barren lioness in Kenya who adopted a series of oryx, or antelope, calves. The locals named the lioness Kamunyak, or “Blessed One.” At first she toyed with the calf, unsure whether to protect it or make it her dinner. Then nurturance won out over predation, and the lioness mothered and defended the calf for months, until a male lion overpowered her and made off with the calf. Eventually Kamunyak began the same dance again, for weeks circling her territory alone, until she found another orphaned calf to bring into her fold.

  I know this lioness; we all do. We are all a bit of her, blundering through life and finding purchase wherever the heart lands. It is a drama reenacted the world over and throughout time: hope against reality, carving out a few moments of magic and mutual comfort between the pure beginning and the equally certain end. We fix on attachment because we need it, as much as we need water and light and counting on tomorrow.

  That lioness’s supposed altruism was primal and selfish: If biology instructs that we care for our young as part of reproduction’s dictates, we are also hardwired for nurturance. The payoff is in all those endorphins, oxytocin cascading through us from the moment we pick up an infant or a puppy or hear a baby coo. If we are lucky, we love what we love in part because the object is worth the effort. But sometimes the love itself—the elixir of desire—is enough to bestow the object with the transformative glitter it requires.

  Being loved, I think, is another matter entirely, a neighboring city on the same train route, connected but by no means destiny. If and when the bond takes both ways, you have a third entity, which is the thing the lover and the loved create together. This is called history, or experience, and the stronger it is, the more power it has to muck about with the sense of self.

  A lot of my adult life has been spent within shouting distance of others but in my own tent. Never married, no children, myriad levels of deep connection with men and women both. And animals: In my four decades of adult life, in three different cities, the longest time I ever spent without an animal was a little over a year. That was during my late twenties, when I was drinking too much; I had left an unhappy relationship, and left with it an extraordinary Persian cat named Rima. She heeled like a dog on walks around the park in Austin, Texas, killed a guinea hen once that was bigger than she, and selected my lap as a safe place to have a litter of kittens one night at 3 A.M. She had circled the room for hours until settling down in bed with me, then locked her eyes with mine during each yowling contraction. Every time Rima cried out, my own uterus heaved in reply, until she had four perfect kittens and then collapsed in sleep, inside the nest of me.

  I had to get out of Texas, and I knew Rima was better off where she was, but for a long time I carried guilt and sorrow at having gone without her. I spent a year being drunk and scared on the East Coast before I found my way to another animal. Hoping to replicate history or maybe atone for my sin of abandonment, I got another silver Persian, this one a male, and brought him home to the attic garret in Boston where I had landed. He had huge, velvet-painting eyes and was afraid of everything except me, and for reasons I cannot fathom I named him Dashiell Hammett, maybe to give him courage or to add a sense of whisky-tinged bravado to the jam I was in. Dashiell lay on the pillows of my bed at night while I sat nearby, killing myself slowly with tumblers of Scotch. I loved him especially for this sentry duty, because he gave witness to my plight and kept me a few inches away from the cliff of being an existential washout. Whether I was drunk or hungover or caught in the limbo of craving, Dashiell was still and patient, my compass of responsibility; his litter box was always fresh and his pantry full, even when mine had more liquor bottles in it than anything else. I sometimes contended that I didn’t love him much—he was timid and aloof and as petulant as Job—but when I had to put him down at the age of fifteen, I wailed as though someone had reached a fist into my chest.

  But when Dashiell died, I had Clementine, who was by then a sassy young three-year-old, and I had Caroline, too, a singular best friend who shared with me our new, vast love for our dogs and for the soul-mate connection we shared. We counted on crossing the finish line together. For years when we talked about the future, we blanched at the idea of losing our dogs—a notion so grim that humor was our only defense. “Just think,” Caroline liked to say. “When you’re in your seventies, I’ll be in my sixties, and we’ll be staggering around Fresh Pond together. Lucille and Clementine will both be thirty-three.”

  We couldn’t know that Caroline would be gone in just a few years, felled by cancer at forty-two. My world was so shaken by her death that I sometimes felt I had to invent a whole new cast and script and stage direction. For the next six years Clementine flanked and protected me and gave me a reason to keep going. I had her until she was thirteen, and together we survived pit-bull attacks and human losses and the usual potholes and pathos of life, until she had to leave and I had to let her, and I suppose there are some things you never get over, don’t even wish to.

  One of the things you miss after someone dies is the shared fact of you. The we of me, I used to think of it, after Caroline was gone, and then Clemmie, too. The routine joys. The physical and emotional anchor: “This quiet dust / Was gentlemen and ladies.…”

  We need to remember, I think, that dying isn’t the worst thing. That getting to love someone on the way out is a great honor, easy to forget in the wake of so much sorrow.

  For several years I went to Truro, on Cape Cod, in the summer and stayed in an eighteenth-century house that bordered a riding stable. When I woke in the morning it was to the sound of horses whinnying and chuffing. A little goat named Blossom lived in the stable, too, to keep the horses company, though Blossom’s temperament did not match her name. It was the horses whose sweetness enveloped the air like fresh grass.

  One summer, I saw two teenage girls bury a horse they loved. The horse was old, and they had grown up riding him and had their first love affair with him, the way girls can do, horses being both safer and more dangerous than boys. It took a backhoe to bury the horse. A man brought in the backhoe and dug the hole, and then the large-animal veterinarian and the girls walked the horse down the hill, and the vet put him down there next to the giant hole. The girls cried as they braided flowers into his mane and placed pictures of them riding him in his grave. And two packages of potato chips, which he had loved.

  Chris, Calliope, Kachina, Amoreena, Boofer, Eli, Rima, Lucky, Cory, Rex, Dashiell, Annie, Barley, Lucille, Cleo. Clementine. Shiloh. Tula. Those are some of the animals that have made my heart wider and wilder. All of them a one-way street to mercy, the totems through which we reach ourselves.

  7.

  Tula slept throughout the flight from Baltimore to Boston, her nose emerging only once to take a sip of water. I was so anxious, or so flooded with oxytocin, that I could barely stand to leave her in the
airline’s seat to walk to the bathroom five rows back—as though someone might try to steal her in a cabin at twenty thousand feet. When Kathy offered to hold her in the front seat of the car after she and her husband, Leo, had picked me up, I refused to relinquish her—and then worried, all the way home, that Leo was driving too fast. We drove up to my house just before dusk, and halfway down the block I realized there was a welcome sign out front: My twelve-year-old neighbor Sophie had hung a giant banner on my front porch that read WELCOME TO CAMBRIDGE, TULA!!!! I laughed in delight when I saw it, and then said to Kathy and Leo, “Oh, God—now everyone on the block will think I’ve adopted a little girl.”

  Kathy rolled her eyes. “Um, no,” she said. “With you, they’ll pretty much know it’s a dog.”

  There’s a school of thought that, upon losing a beloved animal, you should take care not to replace her too soon: In the midst of grief, no puppy can live up to the memories of the old dog, who had a lifetime to perfect her devotion. By these accounts, I probably came home with Tula too soon—three months after Clemmie died—but it seemed at the time the only tolerable and most pragmatic course of action.