I certainly did not need a dog. Dogs require care and feeding. They can’t even groom themselves. Dogs need to be walked, played with and picked up after (yes, that kind of picking up after). Absolutely not, I thought. No dogs, not for me. I am not a “dog person,” and I wasn’t going to become one. It was settled: Bruno doesn’t do dogs. One executive decision from my wife later, and there we were with a small, quivering, squealing black pug with a face only a mother could love. We named her Gertie. Suddenly, I was an unwitting dog owner.
Gertie is the type of dog that has to grow on you. She’s not the type of high-fallutin’ princess you see prancing on the end of a leash around the winner’s circle at Westminster. She’s not much to look at but, then again, neither am I. She comes when called at least one time per month. She is bow-legged, her left paw often curls inward when she stands, her tongue is almost always hanging out and she is about as dumb as dirt when she wants to be. Although she doesn’t chew furniture or shoes, she’ll slobber over a pair of socks purloined from the laundry basket until they are soaked through.
Since the decision to own a dog was made for me, I laid some firm ground rules. I was convinced that if we were to have a dog, said dog would be impeccably trained, crated at all times when not eating or going out to relieve herself and would never, but never, sleep in our bed. Needless to say, this didn’t quite go as planned. At 15 weeks old, she nearly flunked out of the PetSmart training school. Her crate became a place to stack the newspapers that she rarely peed on while housetraining. She spent every night snuggled under the covers—in our bed—snoring so loudly that I rarely got a complete night’s sleep from that point forward.
Then, about six months after she arrived, I felt the first stirrings of a deep transformation. Something at the cellular level was taking place, and I was powerless to control it. My behavior began to change. I began to smile at people when passing them in a hallway. I returned waves from neighbors. I started calling my kids and, wonder of wonders, they started calling me. I even made an effort to speak to my grandchildren over the phone once. I go nearly catatonic listening to my granddaughter chatter on about how fabulous Green Day is or listening to unintelligible gurgles and giggles from a 6-month-old, but I at least tried. The point is, the curmudgeon was losing his edge.
My wife and I have come to the conclusion that these changes in my personality have to be due to what we call the Gertie Effect. I found myself spending every minute of nearly every day with a constantly shedding, snoring, tongue-wagging, black slobber machine who looked at me with those molten dark bug eyes that said: “I don’t care what you look like or your political leanings or even that you still smoke when even I know that is stupid and I’m a dog! I love you, and we’re together and that is all that matters.” Thus, the Gertie Effect began to take its inexorable toll on me.
I’m now convinced that dogs, especially pugs, just might possibly be on to something. Since 400 years B.C. or so, all they have ever been bred to do is to love their owners, sit beside them and look goofy. They don’t dive into icy rivers to retrieve game, they don’t save stranded explorers from avalanches. They don’t herd, they don’t point and they surely don’t listen well, but they do love well. Everything beside being hungry or having to pee on wet grass is pretty much all right by them. All of their days are to be relished in that they love nearly everything about nearly everybody. If we could get Gertie to teach a seminar or somehow transmit her life skills to the world, perhaps the need for wars, racial tension and religious strife would soon be forgotten. Remember, I don’t make friends, so if a pug can change me, changing the rest of the world should be a snap.
Gertie is now nearly two years old and almost fully grown. Like most pugs, she sleeps about 20 out of 24 hours a day, and the rest of her time is spent running after a toy or chewing a bone, begging to go out for a potty break or eating her kibble. She spends half her day on the couch in my office, waking up to occasionally lick the UPS guy or to meander through the office asking someone, anyone, to pet her under her chin(s) while her eyes close and she falls asleep sitting up. So since she came to live with Cathy, she spends, basically, 24 hours a day with the person who never wanted her. But she is my wife’s dog. At least, that is what I keep telling myself.
Iocona and Gertie live in Forked River, N.J.
