I have been staring at her on and off for the past few hours, and I keep asking her what she’s thinking. Is she pondering her purpose in life? No answer except for a polite wag of her tail if I ask excitedly enough. I’m watching for behavior that looks as though it is prompted by her brain, but so far I attribute everything she’s done to other organs. And I’m quite sure my black Lab is just herself, Hattie, rather than a reincarnation of my former dog, or dogs. I’m mulling these thoughts because I just saw “A Dog’s Purpose,” based on the book by W. Bruce Cameron.
The film taps into every dog owner’s fantasy: to know that your dog is thinking about you, your needs and feelings, and to have your wonderful dog return after death in the body of another dog. It’s funny, poignant, and ultimately heart-warming. (Those negative reviews were written by cat-lovers.) And the dogs are amazing.
ReaIistically though, while I guess Hattie “loves” me, there’s no doubt in my mind that she thinks only about food—how to get fed on time, how to steal food off plates and the counter, and how to play tricks on me to get a treat (like pretend she wants to come in and then run away until I’m so exasperated I offer her a carrot as a bribe to come in). And I don’t see in her any vestiges of her predecessors.
The writer with her childhood dog, Nance. (Courtesy photo)
I had only one childhood dog, Nance, a collie-shepherd mix who arrived in a wooden crate shipped from Vermont that my dad picked up at the railroad station, a ball of fluff that tumbled out on the linoleum kitchen floor. My brother and I trained her to jump up into the vee of an old apple tree and to play hide-and-seek. One of us would hold her until the other was in a hiding spot and yelled, “Let her rip,” whereupon Nance would race to find the hider. Her only flaw was running off for hours at a time and rolling in something disgusting. I remember the early morning my brother poked me awake and I looked up to hear him say, “Nance is dead.” Maybe her purpose was to teach us about companionship and also loss.
A PR-savvy shepherd
Liebe, whom we aptly named the German word for “love,” was a gift from my sister-in-law’s mother, who raised German shepherds in Carlisle. She had way too much dignity ever to roll in disgusting things, and she left the yard only once, shortly after we had moved to town. My younger daughter, a first-grader, walked to school, where her classroom was on the ground floor. One afternoon the class heard a scratching sound at the outside door, and Mr. Wheeler went to investigate. He opened the door to find a very large shepherd standing on the threshold. After my daughter had identified her, he said she could come in because it was almost the end of the school day. Liebe went around and greeted each child. Maybe her purpose was to do PR for her breed. She was fiercely loyal, sweet, and appropriately protective.
Our next two German shepherds had none of Liebe’s good traits and lots of bad ones of their own—terrible for PR. (How naive was I to think all shepherds were wonderful and no “background check” was necessary.) Kater was the runt of the litter, which we thought was an endearing thing but turned out to be a liability. She was skittish and had some truly gross doggie behaviors. Several years later, we drove to New Hampshire to answer an ad in the paper and returned with a puppy whom I named Taika. I had taken her name from a lovely young woman I had as a student teacher at the time. The dog was a bit aggressive from the get-go, and every time I angrily screamed “Taika,” I felt bad. She ended up doing the unforgivable—biting a friend.
A loyal companion
Cole was a complete switch: male, black Lab-Doberman mix, already had a name, and came with a unique recommendation. That Christmas my brother and his wife had visited, bringing their 6-month-old puppy, Molly. I fell in love with her and she reciprocated by often sitting in my lap—all 60 pounds of her. I hated to see the humans go, and, even more, I hated to see Molly leave. A few weeks later, my sister-in-law called. Did I want Molly’s brother? Turns out the family who had taken him had a small yard and a new baby and he was proving too much for them. My younger daughter drove to Maine to pick him up. That March my husband died, and maybe Cole’s purpose was to help me endure that loss. He followed me everywhere, took me for long walks, and slept on the bed. Many a night I would wake up, squished on the far side of the bed, unable to budge the 110 pounds of dog. He was a pushover, but he intimidated anyone who visited by his barking. I tried in vain to curtail it, but I think I was perversely pleased that he was so protective.
Hattie, named by her breeder, has Nance’s sweetness, but, even if we had the right kind of tree, she could never get her plumpness up in it, and she prefers to stroll. Unlike Liebe, she is not very dignified, often sprawling in unladylike positions, and she has none of Cole’s protectiveness. Always looking for food, she is like the dog in the cartoon whose humans come home to a ransacked house and the dog says, “They offered me a biscuit so I gave them everything.”
So Hattie is just herself, and the more I stare at her and interrogate her, the more I think her purpose is just to be here and to let me love her.
