Status Updates From Amico Mio

In a world that seems so uncertain, in lives that seem sometimes to ricochet from challenge to
upheaval and back again, a dog can be counted on in a way that's true of little else.

Housebreaking a puppy and toilet-training a child have this in common: The adult in charge is made to feel absurd because of the need to praise the most basic bodily functions.

Occasionally someone will tell me that they won't have pets because they're messy… I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and that its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they
can keep it neat. Dogs make messes, it's true, but they clean them up as well.

Jason was an enormous redhead so good and gentle that he could have been a pediatric nurse had he had opposable thumbs.

Beau was so not good that nothing and no one was safe. Friends who came to visit in the country had to be repeatedly cautioned not to leave shoes or socks at ground level when they wanted to go swim-ming; he ate them both.

The eyes and ears may have gone, but the nose was eternal. And the tail. The tail still wagged, albeit at half-staff.

The year I turned forty was exceptionally good in most other ways…. My work and my family were in full flower. I was no longer wrestling with the uncertainty of youth and couldn't even imagine the challenges of age. I was fertile but not pregnant, busy but no longer crazed. No one was in diapers; everyone was in school. My hair had not yet begun to go gray. My life was in a kind of equipoise.

For children, the point of having a dog is something like the point of having a mother and fa-ther. Our job is not to do but to be, not to act but to exist. We are bedrock, scenery, landscape, to be often ignored and then clung to during difficult or frightening or, occasionally, happy times.