Flashback 2010 — Notice: This is not a column about a dog

Kitty, August, 2010

   

     Billy Goat owner Sam Sianis died this week. While I certainly did my share of holding up the bar at the Goat, I never wrote about it, or him, much — someone else did that. My relationship with Sam was a distant one. I did check the archive to see what I had written about him, and he makes a cameo in this column which is too much fun not to share, and also explains why I avoided Sianis and his bar, as a topic if not as a watering hole.

     My younger kid nailed his bar mitzvah last week -- really nailed it; letter perfect, no muss, no fuss, no heavy lifting, out of the park on the first swing, chugging around the bases, doffing his cap.
     He did so well that I bypassed the several days of foot-dragging and delay that I would typically enjoy before doing something that I absolutely did not want to do, and instead took him directly, two hours after the luncheon ended, to pick up his bar mitzvah present: a new puppy.
     The first half dozen or so colleagues to whom I mentioned our new household addition — 2 months old, cute as hell — all said a version of the same thing: "You must write about this!"
     To which I answered, in ruffled indignation, that I certainly was not going to write about the dog, that I would never write about the dog, because my colleague Mark Brown has already laid claim to all matters canine, and that if I started doing so as well, not only would I be poaching on his preserve, but there would then be two columnists at the paper exploring the world of dogs, and that was one too many.
     (Writers can be odd that way. I am certain that, were I to find myself sitting on the white paper strip in a physician's office, and the doctor were to somberly inform me that, he's sorry, but I have a dire illness, my very first thought, before any personal woes sunk in, would be a frantic: And I can't even write about this, because Roger Ebert already has. Roger planted his flag on that frosty pole, and anything I might add on the subject would be merely derivative, like someone hanging out at the Billy Goat and writing about Sam Sianis as if Mike Royko never existed).
     So this column is not about the dog.
     I guess it's about me.
     See, I never wanted a dog, I see now, because I was completely unfamiliar with dogs. We never had any growing up, nor did my father, nor his, nor, as far as I can tell, any Steinberg going back to bondage in Egypt. I disliked dogs. They bark. They smell like dogs. They lick you. If you took every minute I've spent within a yard of a dog in my entire life and added them up, you wouldn't have been able to fill an hour.
     What happened? As much as I was dead-set against dogs, there are other people in my life beside myself and — surprise, surprise — they can be just as stubborn and mulish as I am, if not more. My younger son wanted a dog as much as I didn't want one, and wheedled and noodged me for a dog for about the past year, then saw his opportunity and pounced. He quite cannily seized upon the chance offered by his bar mitzvah — a big accomplishment, requiring mastery of ancient Hebrew — as a lever he could use.
     He was right. As much as I was set against dogs, I was even more reluctant to be the Dad Who Didn't Get His Son A Dog, Not Even For His Bar Mitzvah.
     He found this puppy online — I've had more than a few gimlet-eyed PETA sorts ask me where the dog is from, not in a friendly, curious way, but in a leering, gotcha mode, to see if the source of our dog passes the moral purity test. Let's put it this way — we've gotten five cats from shelters, so we did our share, and if you need to know exactly where this dog's from, OK: I run an animal-testing lab as a hobby, squirting oven cleaner into the eyes of puppies to see how they react, and this one was an extra. Satisfied now?
     Anyway, this puppy belongs to the boy, but she really, really likes me, for some unfathomable reason, and when I come home she goes crazy, doing backflips, spinning around, her tongue lolling out. She runs up to me, and I lean down to pet her, and next thing you know I'm rolling on the floor, giggling as she licks my face.
     My family, of course, is horrified.
     "Stop it!" my older son, who has become quite the fussbudget at 14, commanded. "You hate all creatures, big and small."
     Not anymore. I am born again in dog heaven. Having sworn I'd never take care of the dog, I now stand happily at 3 a.m. outside in the rain as she does her thing.
     But what amazes me — what allows me, just this once, to poach on Brown's turf — is recognizing what has happened here.
      I was against a certain class of individuals — in this case dogs — of whom I was completely ignorant, based on my preconceived notions of what they might be like and my fear of being inconvenienced.
     And then I met a specific member of this class, this bichon/shih tzu pup which my boy has named, delightfully, "Kitty."
     Now I'm a different man. A dog person.
     Is there not a moral here? People are not dogs, but the mechanism is the same. Much of our national discourse in this shameful historic moment has to do with groups of people dismissing other groups, based on fear, based on nothing, keeping them at a distance and missing out.
     If only they could set aside their fear and get to know a few individuals in the class that so disconcerts them. They might be in for a big surprise. I was.
     — Originally published Sept. 5, 2010