Mira

Sometimes when my dog is nearby and she opens her mouth I can smell her breath. All of her bottom teeth are broken, their top halves missing, a result of  “probably eating rocks,” as one vet put it, during the years that she lived outside without a human. There’s a particular smell — not rotten, not like old food, but something mineral and fleshy — that comes from her mouth. It makes me aware of her presence, like her too-long nails on the hardwood floor do, like her sighing herself to sleep does, even when I can’t see her.

Sometimes when I can see her, like this morning when I let her lick the spoon I’d just used to scoop peanut butter into a small rubber tire I then put in the freezer so that it’s solid when I give it to her later, I get so overwhelmed with emotion — look at this beautiful animal — that my eyes well up. Mira is a big dog. She weighs around 70 pounds, down from the 80 she weighed when I got her and she couldn’t exercise because she had heartworms. She’s also getting to be a “senior dog,” as they say — she’ll turn seven this year — and she’s graying modestly but steadily (incidentally, the same way I am). Her head is enormous and powerful; the other day she found a piece of raw fish on the sidewalk and tightened her jaw so forcefully around it that all I could do was stand next to her in the grassy patch in front of the building where we live while she ate it, mechanically, like it was her job. 

I don’t always feel that patient. Sometimes we go on walks during which she wants to stop and sniff every wet leaf on the ground but I want to keep walking, so I get tense and annoyed, I feel like I’m waiting for her to get with the program, when really the program is that she’s the one on a walk, not me. Sometimes she grabs one of her toys with her mouth and presses it against my leg, hard, so that I’ll grab it from her and toss it across the room so she can gently trot over to get it — she never runs in the house, even though I never trained her not to, she just knows, she understands how big she is, she doesn’t want to make a mess or break anything — and maybe I’m cleaning the kitchen or chopping some onions or putting away the laundry, and I think, “Really? Right now? Can’t that wait?” Then I imagine I can read her mind, and she’s thinking about the kitchen or the onions or the laundry: “Really? Right now? Can’t that wait?” Except I don’t think she’s thinking that at all. She’s perfectly happy to wait until I’m done doing whatever if I ask, or she’ll settle for my half-assed tosses of a stuffed duck down the hallway while I fold sweaters and stack them in a pile. 

It’s possible that in the times when I feel impatient or annoyed I have good reason to be. Maybe I’ve had a bad day, maybe I’m trying to blow off some steam with a brisk walk, maybe I’m tired or hungry or too busy. But acting out of impatience is a choice to feel even worse.

A few days ago, we were walking in Prospect Park, and I was in a terrible mood for several reasons, the only one I can presently remember being that I had dressed too warm and my back was sweaty. Mira kept stopping to sniff the ground, which was starting to annoy me because when she lowered her head she’d pull on the lead, which was hurting my hand. You’re hurting my hand! I almost said, but then I let myself look at her: flipping over onto her back, rolling around, paws in the air, smiling, then flipping back onto her feet and shaking off, doing a little trot. I could be here with her for this. I could loosen my grip on the lead. She wasn’t the one hurting my hand.