Our patient, plodding dogs with their matted ruffs in no way resembled the grand animals of the novels, but they did follow my brother and me protectively around the neighborhood. But I noticed none of that as a child, for we had collies, too.

And the Master’s disgust for Negroes and the “rich city dweller of sweatshop origin” was virulent and unashamed. Ellis and family, Midwestern tourists come to take a gander at Sunnybank in their Ford sedan, ran over the beloved champion Sunnybank Jean. There is a wonderful story by James Thurber describing the Master’s highborn rage (“like summer thunder”) when a Mr. Terhune heatedly defended the rights of dogs and trees, but he was not a man of the people. As impeccably bred as Sunnybank Lad, the Master claimed ancestors who had come to the New World from Holland and England in the seventeenth century. Terhune, who in the books referred to himself as the Master, raised collies on a sprawling estate in northern New Jersey, which in his novels was called The Place. Sunnybank was two generations and several classes and ethnic groups away from my world. I also learned about “carrion,” in which his dogs would roll luxuriously, and a “veranda,” on which they would sit of an evening, curled contentedly at the feet of their god. It was from the novels of the popular writer Albert Payson Terhune, treasured by my father before me, that I learned the word “puttee.” Terhune would don a pair to walk through the grounds of Sunnybank. I grew up reading books about heroic collies. Perhaps the rescuers were blinded by hope, since we had lifted the dog from his crate and hugged and kissed him with no ill effect. She neglected to tell us that the dog was not safe for us. After we discovered Buster, a representative of the group came to our house to make sure it was safe for the dog. and dumped in the city pound, where, we were told, larger dogs stole his food, until, the day before he was to be euthanized, he was saved by a private rescue group that tried to find a home for him. A tough stray missing two toes on his left hind foot, he had been picked up in South L.A. He yodelled like a beagle and shook his toys with the neck-wrenching vigor of a pit bull terrier. His face had the big, worried eyes of a Chihuahua, the anxious furrowed brow of a pug, and the markings of a German shepherd. One ear stood up, the other flopped down. His tail was far too long for his body, a dachshund’s tail. “When you went to college, I got a geranium.”īuster, which is what we named him, was a seventeen-pound bowlegged mutt with a nondescript coat of short brown hair and a bulldog chest. Because your son is going to college.” She looked at me pityingly. “Why do you want a dog?” my mother asked me.

When I picked him up, he squirmed with joy and lunged, ecstatic, licking my face, overwhelming me with a wave of urgent, instant love. He wagged his tail in vigorous anticipation. He stood politely, his head cocked expectantly. It was a spring day, and he stood at the end of a long line of caged dogs in a Los Angeles pet-supply store, all strays to be adopted, all barking and yapping and hurling themselves against their wire enclosures. He appeared to be a lovely little dog, about two and half years old, when we first saw him.

Or, as my friends and family pointed out, he was “just” a dog. (I had made one of those unforeseen middle-aged discoveries and was living with a woman.) My looming, destructive, desperate, and compelling companion was not even a human being. He was not my husband, with whom I had just split up. At night, I lay in bed, felt the warmth of his body beside me, and tried not to move. Even a short walk on the street held the threat of an ugly brawl. Nor were we welcome at anyone else’s house. In fact, no one came to visit us anymore. My mother was terrified and refused to set foot in our house. My younger son, who still lived with us, tried to reach out, but more often than not his kindness was met by violence. When my older son came home from college, he was greeted with a scene of loud, belligerent menace. Four years ago, I was in a relationship that everyone who cared about me considered abusive.

Dog trainers hand signal say crossword