Things I Know I Know

After much list making and agonizing and searching, I found a breeder some sixty miles away. I drove over one night and saw the puppies and met the mother (I can admit now after having Rottweilers for twelve years that after all my careful research on What Kind of Dog Would Be Best for Me, my first reaction to seeing the mother of the puppies was--oh my GOD, that dog is BIG!). The puppies were bold and energetic and busy.

The next week I drove over with a friend of mine and brought Riley home.

Here are things I've written about her over the years:

I have a picture I took [of Riley] the night I brought her home. She's lying on the floor with her chest out and her front legs spread and she looks just exactly like herself. She was a wild, uncontrollable, but completely joyous puppy. She has a tremendous prey drive which would lead her to come running up behind me and bite me as hard as she could on the back of the knee. If I was sitting on the couch and she wanted to go out, she'd come up to me, look at me for a second and--POW!--pounce right on my chest with both front feet. She had Rottie jaws of steel which were a big shock to someone who grew up with labs and border collies and she could demolish anything in a under a second. She liked to carry huge things when she was really small, like big tree branches and the fireplace poker. We'd go for two, three, even five walks a day. Riley was never tired. Years later, I met a man and his son in the park walking a Samoyed puppy. "We went to puppy class and they said to tire her out, but we've been trying and trying and look at her,"; the man said to me. Welcome to the ride.

There are times when Riley has so much personality--the way she looks at me, the way she approaches a problem, that she seems human (not human, really, but I can't think of the right description--she seems real, intelligent, alive--but those aren't quite right either). And yet, this personality of hers is all dog. There's no human there. Living with a dog is living with an alien. It ought to be possible to learn something from that.

I read something today, I can't remember where, a retired endocrinologist said we need three things--companionship, health, and money. That's pretty hard to argue with. Riley is my companion. I wasn't lonely before I got her, but I would be lonely now without her. She's not perfect. There are lots better dogs, lots easier dogs to live with. But Riley's Riley.

I believed when I bought Riley that it was my responsibility to turn her into a well-socialized decent dog, that if she failed to make it in society that it was my failure, although she'd be the one to pay the price for it. I learned a huge lot of things from Riley...but one of the most important things I learned was that if you want something badly enough and you make a strong enough commitment to it, then it doesn't matter that you start out abysmally ignorant, and it doesn't matter that you have no timing or coordination or any natural dog training skills whatsoever. You can still get there one small frustrating step at a time and when you do get there, man, what a ride you've had.

I wanted Riley to be a dog I could take places. That, from the beginning, was my dream. The dogs in television movies or books for children who go on trains and to other people's houses and sit with tongues lolling at softball games. Riley was wild. And a Rottweiler. And the first dog I was wholly responsible for. And the only dog I'd ever had when I wasn't living at the end of a dead-end road ten miles from town. I took her everywhere, but she chased people, she barked at men who didn't approach her correctly, she barked at dogs she didn't like. She wore a muzzle at the vet's. She made me cry. She'll be seven years old in three weeks. And in that time, she's changed and I've changed. And suddenly I have the dog I wanted nearly two and a half years after I'd given up that dream completely....She still barks at other dogs. She still picks up on my feelings and if I'm nervous, she's the one who acts out my feelings to the world. But I give her more space to make her own decisions, which makes her less anxious. And she has more confidence. And I like going places with her. And she, as she always has, through all the years and all the ups and all the downs, loves people and excitement and rock music and rabbits. And me--I'm pretty sure she loves me too.

I would have done anything for Riley. I would have given her anything. And it didn't matter that she was just a dog.

Because she had given me her Heart.