https://www.angelfire.com/art/letters/index.html
writegirl@altavista.com
I want a dog. I want a dog. I want a dog. I WANT A DOG. I really want a dog. I chant it to the world. I Want A Dog. Get the idea?
I’m a smartass and I spend too much time wandering around in my head. What better way to stop the dreaminess than to have a non-speaking breathing pal like a dog? It would work. He could save me. I know it.
Yeah, yeah, you are thinking why not go the traditional route. Get a man. Well, I don’t want one. I am too strong for a man. I meet them. They are nice. I am nice. And before long, short actually, they start to use my words, my mannerisms, my smut. So, why would I want to be with someone who is me? Makes no sense. I want convictions. I want strength of character. I want them to remain themselves.
Over and over I hear women talking about men, “I’ll train him. Shouldn’t take too long. Hahahaha.” How freaking sick is that? Why bother? Try to marry yourself first.
But let me get back to my dog. That’s the important savior factor here.
My dog Alfred was abandoned. One winter morning my Aunt Bridget found him along the side of the road nearly frozen to death. Many people take summer homes up here, move all of their stuff in, then get a pet to complete the ideal-life-at-the-lake picture. In late summer/early fall, when they move back to the city, the pets they once loved are just leftovers. Packs of dogs gone feral plague the area farmers. They get into the barns and even try to suckle off of the dairy cows. Some are rescued, most are shot.
Well, that’s where my dog came from. I got him when I was two years old. So I really wasn’t the one who took care of him in his early life. I just remember that part from family stories I overheard. I do have a picture of me drinking a bottle using his black fur as a pillow. My mother said I had trouble sleeping anywhere but on Alfred. She said that Ashley Montague the anthropologist, said it had to do with the need for some babies to hear a heartbeat.
Alfred would sit on my Red Racer sled with me and slide down Mason’s Hill. He wasn’t very fond of snow. He didn’t like water either. He would never go swimming like the big muscular labs. In fact he hated water so much he would avoid puddles when we took walks after a rain. My uncle said Alfred should wear a beret because he acted snooty and was so brilliant.
When I called Alfred “Allie”, strangers thought he was a girl. “What a nice dog.” they would say when they petted him. “Good girl.” I liked that because Alfred was a boy through and through. Well, an intellectual professor-type boy who wasn’t afraid to be called a girl.
He even ate his own puke, so I never had to clean it up. He was that good.
I just loved the the way Alfred cocked his head when I would talk to him. He knew everything about me. He was my diary. And I never ever had to worry that he would betray me.
One summer when I was twelve my parents had an idea to buy a travel trailer and take a road trip out west. Three months of packing dishes in the little cupboards, putting extra blankets and towels in the cubbies, welding on the bar that would attach the Suburban to the Silver Stream and we were off. We headed for Mount Rushmore...four heads of rock...Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
Donkeys, free range, came right up to the windows and we gave them peanuts in the shell, left over from the night before, bought out of a vending machine at a motel pool, somewhere in Minnesota. By the way, people in Minnesota speak just like those peeps in the movie Fargo (even though that is about South Dakota).
But the donkeys, Alfred didn’t even care about them. He looked up and put his head back down and went to sleep. That’s how he was.
Yellowstone was magnificent. Shot straight up into the Wyoming sky. And it smelled like farts, all sulphury.
Late the next day we found ourselves on Highway 1 in Bur Sur, California. My dad had talked about it for months. He had been here when he was a young man. I knew Big Sur from Henry Miller’s writings, secret readings until the blankets with a flashlight. It was to be the feature of the trip, but we arrived during the busy rush hour.
The highway is very curvy with rolling hills to the east and the dazzling Pacific Ocean to the West. The end of America all bathed in golden light and splashing surf. Alfred and I cozied up to the window to suck it all into our brains. Within a few minutes the cars behind us started honking. My dad started yelling. My mom kept saying, “Oh my.” My dad said he couldn’t drive any faster because of the length of the trailer. The honking continued on and on. Soon he found a turnout and pulled in there yet was still hanging into the road, so he began again. More honking. More yelling. I started to cry. My dad’s dream was exploding in my face. I grabbed Alfred in my arms and held him tight burying my face in his fur. He started to shake too. We were messy, but safe together.
Big Sur. Fuck Big Sur.
Alfred went to my parents funerals with me. I slept most of the next year. Sometimes for twelve hours straight. And Alfred never peed or pooped in the house during that time. I don’t know how he managed it.
But it wasn’t long after that that things changed.
My lovely Alfred was getting old too. Nineteen. He would go around and around in circles, lay down and get up again. It took him many tries just to find a position where his bones didn’t hurt too much. He started to walk into walls and he would be walking along and peeing at the same time and not even notice it. Everyone said it was time to put him down, but I was too afraid to lose him too, so I dishonored him by keeping him with me.
He died two months later.
I miss placing my head on his black fur.
Want. Want. Want. Want. Want.
Aldous Huxley once wrote: I want God, I want poetry. I want danger, I want freedom. I want goodness, I want sin.
All I want is a dog.
Alfred.