Walks with Leporello, Thoughts on LOVE, GOD and DOG - 3. III. Springtime in the Park

III. Springtime in the Park

May 13, 2011

In one of my high school American Literature classes, Sister Elaine Freund gave us broad analogies for Hawthorne’s brilliant novel Scarlet Letter. The color white, she told us, Hawthorne used to designate pure and good; black, was suspicious and doleful. She pointed out how Hester was often couched in white or off-white language, and Dimmesdale, via his very name, was often mired in inklike self-broodings. One day, after she had moralistically hinted that the daughter of their illicit union was murky in sin because of her birth, I raised my hand and dared to point out that Hawthorne had named this daughter “Pearl.” Hawthorn had titled this character after nature’s purest white. In several scenes, like the one where she sits in her father’s lap, Hawthorn drenches Pearl, and the people she touches, in radiant sunlight. Indeed it seems Pearl is the only one who brings some cleansing warmth to Dimmesdale’s self-tortured heart. Surely, I dared to assert to Sister Elaine, Pearl is a statement of nature’s absolute innocence; absolving in its very presence any taint or mark, visible or deeply buried. So too was Leporello – a nature dog of anti-apathetic-crushing boldness, a personality who put others at ease via the very ease which he had for himself, and with the world he seemed to run.

Our puppy, freshly installed in our lives, daily grew stronger and more confident. As Teddy Roosevelt stated it, “An Airedale can do anything any other dog can do, and then lick the other dog, if he has to.” [i] This judicious restraint of kingly power is well suited for city settings. The open-eyed puppy assessment of all expressions of joy from Sunny and me, and from the myriad people he chanced to meet, he internalized to an outward joie de vivre. The walks to one of the many parks near our house – Duboce, Buena Vista, Corona Heights – always meant making friends, as people were helplessly drawn to his adorable face and smiling tail. It’s hard to think of a time when Leppy did not ‘own’ the crowd of canines who greeted his park entry with an eager flocking around him. Like a canine Good Shepherd, he let the little ones come to him with jiggly backsides and sniffing fronts. Leporello would stop stiff-legged, head erect, but for all who knew him, this was a show, his nom de jeu, his calling card by which he boldly made his first assessment of any dog’s willingness to play. His system worked like this: pose with stance stiff and still; give a moment for the other dog to sniff; then meet them eye to eye; pause. This was followed in quick succession by an inexplicably energetic lunge to the side away from the other dog. The play aspect of this jog to the side was usually hammered home with a quick bobbing of the head, bent elbows, and the front paws patting the ground. Sometimes the other dog would start at the sudden bolt and retreat, in which case Leppy let them pass; or the other dog would become aggressive and bad tempered. They’d snarl and yap; maybe take a step towards Leppy, but he’d never be led into ill will, and would simply leave them cold in their dead-end humor. But the third kind, the ‘correct’ reaction that Leporello lived for, was a dog who instantly responded to his play with like kind; the ones who, watching Leppy’s joyful gavotte, followed after him with their own. Then the two would be off in a running exploration of the sunshine world of the parkland together. Countless are the dogs our growing pup enchanted with his greeting dance.

Much can be taught from dog to person or from person to dog. But by far the most information any dog gets on dogliness comes from other dogs. One day Leppy was with a few roving pals in the leaf-littered undergrowth of the trees that mark the edges of Corona Heights Park. Leppy was sniffing something while a random dog lingered close by, in fact, right in front of him. Without warning, that dog stiffened his legs, and scissor-like, scratched the fallen eucalyptus leaves and bark strips. This debris hit Lep straight in the face and startled him. Intrigued however by what had happened, he stuck by this dog until he did it again. This time the Airedale observed carefully the form of the other, and at the third scratching display, Leppy stiffened his own legs and joined in. “This is fun. This is a release of pent up frustrations.” And this was a permanent new behavior passed from one canine to another.

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He grew. That was beyond our guidance, but he grew mentally and emotionally stronger too. How do parents raise children, how do adoptive dog parents raise puppies that are true nature-beings, expressions of the best of dogged optimism? How to raise a perfectly well-natured, well-adjusted individual when you lack these attributes yourself? The answer is – he raises you. Nature in its pure form can easily deal with unstable inconsistencies. I speak for and of myself, for while my foibles are nearly legion – short in patience, often myopic and afflicted with forest-for-the-trees syndrome – his virtues trumped those of nearly every saintly man and woman. He was patient to a fault, generous, non-passive, and most non-human of all, a truly non-conceited, non-judgmental receiver of love.

As we gathered on a clear November day to celebrate his first birthday, we were proud. Puppy had raised us well, and as beaming acolytes, Sunny and I planned an appropriate party. Several dogs were invited to our house: there was the black Cocker Spaniel, Betsy, and the other Airedale of the neighborhood, Jackson, to name but two. Jackson was a well-loved dog by his two moms, but he, about 6-months older than Lep, was a problem. He was insecure and developed into a paranoid adolescent. That day at the party, I recall looking into his eyes and thinking he was only partially with us; the other focus of his attention was absorbed by phantom sights, sounds and smells. At that moment, the doctor in me thought Jackson most probably suffered from a form of clinical schizophrenia, despite the no-doubt loving environment his parents provided him with at home. I believe nowadays, vets prescribe “people meds” to dogs to help with the outward signs of this condition – a condition prevalent in some breeds, mostly in Dalmatians, but unfortunately also to some degree in Airedales. In 1996 though, such treatment was still unheard of.

In the park, people would often become rigid at the first sight of Leppy, calling out to us “Jackson?” “Leppy!” we would reply, and they instantly relaxed the collars of the dogs they were holding back. One time a young German shepherd attacked our angel. Leppy would have made Teddy Roosevelt proud, for he held his own; was neither hurt, nor hurt the attacker before the shepherd’s owner pulled the aggressor off. We later learned that this dog had been bullied and bitten by Jackson when a pup.

At the party, an Alpo cake, made of canned dogfood, was greeted all around, even by the taciturn Jackson, with happy abandon. At the end of the day, Leppy lay amid a sea of new toys like a Roman Emperor just stepped from his treasure bath. His canvas mouse, now with one chewed ear, rested unceremoniously at the bottom of his toy chest. Sitting there, I reached a hand to Sunny. How lucky were we? Fate, with her thrice-told ‘almosts,’ had moved much to allow us to raise him, and he to raise us.

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I have often thought, even the average dog makes a better person than the most saintly of our own kind; their run-of-the-mill betters our stamped-in-gold. This acceptance of fact leads to the realization that there are some things in the soul that need a proper airing once in a while. These are like sheets set on a line to be bleached naturally by the sun – disinfected by the Sol of the Lysol brand. When we take out our neatly folded and tightly packed linen is a random guess, because the scheduling works on a timeframe devised by others. When we chance to meet someone whom we feel lives better than we do – by better, I mean more wholly, more connectedly to their environment or to themselves – then we are forced to shake out the bugaboos of our own character and hang them out for neighbors and ourselves to see.

That Leporello was a nature-boy should not be a surprise anyone. But that he was a pure expression of the noblest unnatural – that is, of unself-advantageousness – should surprise. For we are taught that Nature is a dumb, greed-handed brute, and that a dog-eat-dog world exists save for the redeeming grace of mankind and the fragile society we have built up. But, what a peccadillo of deception this belief is. Pearl in Hawthorne’s world is the absolved one. She is Nature referred to without sin, and if her parents could shed the blinders of social self-hate, they too would see this. On a personal level, the truth of the matter embarrasses me to say, but Leporello was a better person than I am. Freer, more connected both to himself and to others than I feel I can yet achieve in the life left to me. Even though, enlightened as I seem to be, at least to myself, I cannot seem to find the way back into being the faultless Nature-child that was Leppy’s birthright.