Best In Show

Last night I tuned into the Westminster Dog Show for a few minutes of background noise. I was happy to hear a beagle won for best in show for the first time ever. I was also happy to hear Uno, the blue ribbon beagle (pictured to the right), has a lot of personality.

‘Spot’, a beagle, was the first family dog I knew growing up in Medway. I don’t remember much about Spot other than that he or she (I told you I don’t remember much, I don’t even know Spot’s sex) lived to about 14 or 15 and started going bald in those last years. The only other memory I have of Spot was while I lay on the floor in front of the television at night I would be spooning with him, or was it her?

Spot was followed by various other dogs that never seemed to live very long, mostly, if I recall correctly, due to our proximity to Village Street, one of Medway’s bigger streets. In our household, dogs never seemed to have too big a role, at least in my memory.

For his part Atticus was not at all interested in the dog show last night, not even as background noise. He slept just feet away from the television and didn’t bother to twitch a bushy white eyebrow once.

Some years ago, soon after an eight-week old Atticus arrived in Newburyport from Big Sandy, Texas, some paperwork also arrived. It was a form of some sort about getting him registered as an AKC dog. I thought little of it and even called Ruth Freeman, his breeder, to ask her advice. In the end I made the decision not to register Atticus because it didn’t interest me and I didn’t think it would interest him either.

I’ve never looked back upon this decision with regret. I didn’t and will never need a piece of paper to tell me his or any other dog’s worth. And I must admit to some satisfaction that people often consider Atticus a mixed breed because it seems so much less stuffy.

About four or five years ago while visiting my father in Medway, Atticus and I made a stop at the newly constructed dog park. Medway is a changed town, a town that used to be open and less self-important in its pre-Starbucks, pre-$700,000 home days. There’s really nothing that makes Medway remarkable, other than the fact it is close to Rt 495. Instead of a downtown there are a couple of strip malls.

Atticus always gets excited when he sees dogs in the distance. However, soon after making their acquaintance he becomes aloof and disinterested in playing with them. He’d rather sit off on the side and watch them. We share this trait to some extent.

That being said, whenever we drove into Medway and neared the dog park Atticus would stand up on his hind legs and lean his ‘elbow’ out the open window and look excitedly in the direction of the dog park. Once we pulled in he would often whimper with excitement at the thought of saying hello to the other dogs. Inside the double gate the other dogs would gather to meet him, as they did to every other dog, reminding me of prisoners investigating every new inmate introduced to the ‘yard’. But as I wrote, soon after, he would always become disinterested in the other dogs and would go off to sniff and then squat or raise his leg in the various nooks and crannies of the park.

I was an outsider in this new Medway and often brought a book with me or my latest copy of the New Yorker and I’d sit on one of the benches with my reading material after picking up whatever Atticus dropped.

There’s something altogether queer about returning to the very ordinary small town you were raised in only to find it has been taken over by those striving to be self-important. In the parking lot of the dog park there were numerous upscale and overly-big SUVs and inside the humans residents of the dog park were just as decked out as their SUVs. They wore the ‘right’ clothes, had the ‘right’ electronic gadgets, and took part in the driest self-congratulatory conversation about their honor role dogs. As is often the case in newly upscale suburbs, games of one-upmanship spills into nearly every corner of the suburbanite’s life in a town like Medway. It even went so far as their dogs and the breeders they used and bragging rights to money spent on their training and agility.

Joseph Campbell once said that the he never felt more out of touch with his spirituality than at a cocktail party. That, to me, is what the dog park in Medway was like. And that is the reason I would often bring something to read.

This was not the Medway I knew.

It was always the same. Once within a half-mile of the park Atticus would get excited. Approaching the gate he would get excited. Once inside he would allow nearly every of his orifices to be sniffed. Once the other dogs, typically named after loveable Irish drunks like Dugan, Brady or Murphy; or SUVs like Dakota, Sierra, Cherokee or Denali; lost interest in the new dog’s scents, they would return to whatever it was they were doing. Atticus would then go around signing his name in all the appropriate spots. After making sure he was okay I would look for a friendly face, maybe greet a person or two if they were making eye contact with the guy driving the Ford Focus, which was unlikely; and then I’d find a bench out of the way. I would be half reading, half paying attention to Atticus and his welfare, when after only a few minutes of his discovering Atticus would come over and hop up on the bench with me and there we would sit, man and dog, he surveying the other dogs as if he didn’t belong and me doing the same with the suburbanites.

I must admit, there have been times in my life when I longed to fit in with the norm but that was long ago, long before my return to Medway, and often if I listened in to their conversations at the dog park I would find myself instantly exhausted by their need to impress one another and my recollection of what it was like to go through this exercise.

I was not entirely misanthropic, just without the desire to try to impress and play the game.

From time to time another owner would approach our bench, note how Atticus was sitting above and apart from the other dogs, surveying the scene and he or she would comment on his cute looks and inquire what kind of breed he was. I will admit to being an incorrigible mischief maker from time to time. (Go look it up in my yearbook under the superlatives and you will find three awards after my name: Class Wit; Class Flirt; Most Mischievous.)

Because I couldn’t help myself I would sometimes make up a breed name and say it quickly (so quickly they couldn’t make out what I was saying); matter-of-factly; and with the same smug look many at the park wore that intimated “of course you have heard of this breed and if you haven’t you’re behind in the game”. They would then offer Atticus a reverential look as he appraised them from his seat and they’d say one of a few different things.

“That’s what I thought he was.”

“Is there a breeder nearby?”

“How much does that breed go for?”

The breed I invented varied each time I was there; sometimes it even varied during the same visit to the park. It could have been anything from a Ugandan Lap Dog to a Russian Lionheart to a Napoleonic Mountain Dog or anything else I could come up with quickly that would send them scurrying to their computers once they returned home.

Suburban one-upmanship.

On other occasions, when I wasn’t feeling all that imaginative, I would simply say, “Oh, he’s just a mutt.” This would produce a level of pity and a look that said “Oh, what a shame” or maybe something more equivalent to “that poor thing”.

One day at the park something different happened. I had been weighing whether or not to have Atticus “fixed”, or as an acquaintance of mine notes, “broken”. I was sitting on a corner bench, reading my book, a gaggle of well-to-do women were comparing notes on their latest dinner parties or maybe their latest exotic vacation, I cannot remember which, when I heard a scream and in my parental response I looked to make sure Atticus was right by my side. He wasn’t. Instead he was the center of attention and the focus of many a shocked stare.

There he stood in the middle of the park, on his hind legs, leaning into a pure white, well-coiffed pure bred something or other three times his size, his hips working like pistons while the well-to-do purebred in front of him seemed to be enjoying the moment so much so that she lowered herself to allow him easier entrance.

The owner, as equally well-coiffed as her dog and dressed in a designer pantsuit as glamorous as her dog’s pink and rhinestone covered collar, was appalled and looked as if her life’s work had been ruined. She howled at Atticus who may have thought she was cheering him on because he just kept going and going and going; a canine Ron Jeremy.

The owner and her friends quickly moved to break up the two dogs and when they succeeded Atticus then trotted over and jumped up on the bench to join me as if he hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps it was a bit of personification on my part, but I could have sworn he offered me a cool slant of one of his eyebrows and a wink before sitting down.

The woman unleashed so much vitriol upon me that I admired her more now than I had before and I apologized for Atticus’s actions. It didn’t matter. She continued to be horrified at his bold effrontery and grew angry at his indifference to her.

I don’t remember much of what she said but I do remember one last plea for something good to come out of what had just happened, “Is he at least a pure bred?”

Time slowed. I thought of all the great names I could come up with, the exotic breeds I could refer to Atticus as so that she might take some bragging rights home with her and be able to regal her peers with. Ah, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Um, no. Found him on the side of the road a couple of weeks ago. Vet says he’s just a mutt. At least the worms are gone though.”

I think to this day that that woman may still be crying even though I later learned there was no pregnancy to follow for a mutt had his way with her dog.

This all started with me thinking about last night’s Westminster Dog Show. Atticus, not AKC registered as any breed, not a Russian Lionheart or Napoleonic Mountain Dog or even a Miniature Schnauzer, has noted it is snowing out so he’s happy to be here snoring by my side as I write this. And to think if I had only raised him differently, maybe, just maybe I could have shown him in something like the Westminster. But alas, instead of strutting his stuff for the judges yesterday in the Big Apple, he was climbing to the top of East Osceola and Osceola, his 38th and 39th peaks of the winter. Where did I go wrong?