Lots of Pictures of Dogs
Our new dog is named after Mars Blackmon from She's Gotta Have It. Very cool.
Within the last ten days I became the proud owner of a dog. Mars, a half-Bernese Mountain dog and half-Irish Setter mix, has been living in my apartment for just over a week. This surprised some of the people who know me. Up to about a year ago I answered the question, “do you like dogs?” with the hilarious bon mot, “I like other people’s dogs.” Pushing the majesty of that joke construction aside, I never really had an interest in owning a dog. Growing up, we only had cats. As a young kid, pre-kindergarten thru fifth grade, our neighbors owned a very mean Doberman Pinscher named King. His meanness came about through no fault of his own. His owners clipped his tail and did not treat him well. King loved to bark at the kids who lived across the chain-link fence. While King never bit me, I didn’t exactly treasure the moments that I spent around him. These experiences, more than anything, informed my early opinion of dogs. I wasn’t afraid of them, but I didn’t seek them out. When a friend or acquaintance forced a dog upon me, I petted them a few times, but kept the interaction to that.
I don’t want to make it seem like I hated, or hate, dogs. I’ve met a few dogs over the years that I very much liked. My friend Jon’s dog Chester was a delight, an incredibly good boy. My parent’s current dog, Pauli is also a sweet girl. Various other dogs, usually in my life for only a few moments, have been wonderful and nice. Not like King at all. So I wouldn’t say I hated dogs, tolerated would probably be the better word.
We went to get Mars a week ago. Mars lived on an Amish farm in Cleveland. We found him because of a search for puppies within a three-hundred-mile radius. My girlfriend and I live in an apartment in Chicago. “Only five and a half hours away,” Sarah, my wonderful girlfriend and impetus behind the purchase of Mars, exclaimed. “Five and a half hours away,” I responded. If you’ve been paying attention to this missive, I’m sure you realized that we made the five and a half hour drive. We went east on a Thursday and came back west on that Friday. Two days of five and a half hour drives.
Despite claiming that I did not want a dog, I did have an answer for what kind of dog I would want if I had to had one. An old yellow lab. Smart, trained, beautiful, and most of all chill. I imagined myself sitting on a porch somewhere in the Montana wilderness with my dog, Scout laying down on my side. We’d watch the sunset together as I sat in a rocking chair reading a novel. I’d be wearing overalls and sucking on a hayseed. Scout would sit by my side, going to the bathroom by herself whenever she needed it. She wouldn’t bark. Scout would then sleep through the night and wake up at eight A.M. with me. The perfect life.
Mars is not that dog. Mars is a now nine-week-old puppy who likes to “explore with his mouth,” otherwise known as bite. Mars knows to go to the bathroom outside, but doesn’t always know to tell us that he needs to go to the bathroom. I don’t own a single pair of overalls, and not a single hayseed grows near us. I also do not own property in Montana with a sprawling back lot containing a mix of grassland, forest and various fruit and vegetable gardens. No back porch either.
Getting Mars didn’t go how I imagined it would. Mars’ owners, an Amish family, wanted us to point out a puppy and then leave. We wanted to make sure that the puppy would like us, and other important things. So we struck somewhat of a happy medium, played with the other puppies for a few minutes, did some puppy aptitude tests with Mars, neé Pepper, paid the man and headed back for Chicago. We had to take a somewhat circuitous route, stopping in a few places to do some social distanced hangs with the puppy. Sarah and I traded turns driving on the way home, taking turns holding Mars in our lap.
It was during this, holding Mars in the back seat, him asleep on my lap, surrounded by the darkness of I-90 that I fell in love with him. My legs ached, I couldn’t move them for fear of waking the little guy up, I smelled like Amish farm, and I was grumpy from the drive, but I didn’t want to let him go. Not just because he was cute. He was certainly cute, a little black ball, with a few white patches and a slight tinge of red. But he also trusted me, from the get-go. He let me carry him, turn him on his back, and looked to the crook of my arm when the bumpy road scared him. Maybe this is a selfish reason to love something, loving it because it looks to me as a place of safety, but that’s how it happened. I loved the little beast, and I was going to keep it. The five-and-a-half hours didn’t seem so long after that.
I won’t say that owning a dog hasn’t been hard. I didn’t sleep great last week, and I got an awful stress pain in my neck/shoulder. Keeping an eye on Mars is a full-time job, and even when I’m playing video games, reading a book, or watching TV I have to keep an eye on him, to make sure he doesn’t pee on the floor. Hardly relaxing. It’s like having a kid, but a kid who will never make enough money to put you in the home. I still wouldn’t trade him for the world however. When he’s not trying to bite you, something the internet says will end when he’s sixth months, he’s a very sweet and silly boy. He likes to dig his head into the couch cushions and fall asleep there. He’s very good at climbing up and down steps. He loves to chase after a green towel. He’s also starting to sleep through the night.
I don’t know what the future will bring with this dog, but I’m glad that my girlfriend convinced me to get him. Long live the god of war, and belly rubs.