Ode to Jay:
If Dad didnt have the dog hed be fucked.
We were never dog people. Mum was from a farm and thought it was cruel to keep animals in the city. But we did have a dog once, in the 1970sJJ (named after a character in Cop Shop.) We got him through someone at Dads work. He once ate some bread dough that was outside in a bowl in the sun, provingand spent the next couple of hours vomiting. I thought of it expanding in his stomach.
JJ was a Collie dog, with a long pointy face, long and thin, with dark brown and light brown and white hair. My younger sister had been a bit of a fatty. Then in her early teens she stretched outshe got taller and thinner, quite suddenly. I came back home one weekend. She was wearing beige cord Lee jeans and a brown checked Miller shirt. She had long straight white blond hair. Her face was thin and pointy. My sister and the dog ran together in the park, the wind streaming their hair behind themall stretched outlong and thin and beige and brown and blond.
And then JJ got run over. It was 1975, Mum and Dad were away on their world tour (Paris, Rome, London, Sweden and Albuquerque, New Mexico), and I was looking after my younger brother and sister and the dog. When I picked him up off the road his eyes rolled back in his head. I knew you werent supposed to move people after accidents because of internal injuriesbut I didnt think there were such things as dog ambulances. I put him in the back seat of the car and we drove to the vets. He died in my arms.
We got Jay when Mum got sick, from a breeder in Shepparton. He did not make any sound. He didnt bark, he didnt even snuffle. It was actually difficult to tell if he was breathing. He was very timid. I thought maybe he was a dud. Speaking to a friend, a farmer, he assured me: sheep dogs, he said, are either all bark or all eye. He qualified this: sometimes they can be half bark and half eye. Jay is a Sheltiea Shetland Island Sheep doglike a miniature Collie. He is probably the reincarnation of JJ. He is very eye.
Although recently he bit my brother 11 times.
Whats good about dogs:
1) They dont talk
After Mum died, Dad complained that she never talked. He complained about this when she was alive too. She didnt talk much in recent years. One of the reasons she may not have talked much, was that Dad talks all the time. Not to anyone (certainly not with anyone), its just him talking, continuously. I went on a holiday with Dad after Mum died, he never stopped talking and always had a biro in his top shirt pocket.
Jay doesnt talk. Dad complains about that too. But, not really. Its okay that the dog doesnt talk. We make amends. We take it into consideration. We slow down to his pace. We make up other ways of relating to him. No one bothered to do that, with Mum.
2) Taking them for a walk
It is boring going for a walk by yourself. I used to think wouldnt it be great to be a dog, that you would get really excited just about going for a walk. I now like taking Jay for a walk.
3) Patting and cuddling, and other forms of physical contact
Jay was Mums dog. One day I smuggled him into the hospital. He spent his time under her bed. He was quiet as usual. One day, I dont know if it was that day, we had a conversation about cuddling. Someone said how good it is to cuddle Jay because he is warm. (Although Jay doesnt actually like cuddling much, as such.) Mum complained, I havent got anything to cuddle, or I havent got anyone to cuddle me. There was no come back. She was all skin and bones: there was nothing to cuddle.
It must have been my younger sister, the youngest in the family. I remember her lying on her back as a baby, naked, and Mum blowing raspberries on her stomach and the baby giggling and kicking its fat legs and clenching and unclenching its fists. Mum saying: youre so delicious I could eat you all up. Sometimes, I think of blowing raspberries on Jays stomach. But I havent yet.
4) You know them, but you dont. Theyre different.
5) Playing games
I play games with Jay. I know how to play the games, but I dont understand them. I dont really understand what the point of them is, what the game is about. We just play the games.
6) They like you
And you like them. Would it be the same with all dogs, any dog? Or is it only this dog?, I think. We think, that somehow, we got the right dog.