Dogs . . . and Cats (if I must)

    Let me be frank. I love dogs but am highly allergic to cats.  This puts me in an untenable position when trying to discuss either mammal fairly. Around a cat, my nose runs, my eyes itch and tear up, my voice gets hoarse.  I found this out the summer before I started high school.
         
     Those years were in the Dark Ages.  They may have been in the 60s, but “The Sixties” hadn’t officially hit yet.  I left a Catholic grammar school where there were at least girls in the room but where none of the “boy-girl thing” was condoned. During that summer, I didn’t know that a classmate, Alice, liked me.  But in my innocent and not-yet-grown-up boyhood, I liked another classmate, Margaret, who never liked me in that way.  This was awkward because Margaret and Alice were close friends.  
 
     These were two of the smartest and most sophisticated young women in our class.  Margaret had short, blond, school-girl hair, now longer and stylish in preparation for high school.  She was beginning to show her curves.  Slender Alice had long straight brown hair and stood taller than her friend. 
The pair had lost all girlish gawkiness and moved like women, not kids.  I was the self-conscious, scrawny boy who wore braces and who had very low, presentient standardized test scores that absolutely ruled out me ever going to college.
      
     One sultry afternoon, Margaret invited me over to sit on her shady patio
and imagine what high school would be like.  I had no illusions of my angelic blond sweeping me off my feet in an outburst of unrestrained emotion, but jumped at the chance.  I knew that at best ours was to remain a totally Catholic-guilt scripted, early-teenage scene of friendship as depicted in those stilted movies set in the English countryside with a dog nearby and no suggestion of even holding hands. 
 
    Alice was there, the only other guest. Here was my chance to behold the deity I adored, Margaret, and befriend her acolyte, Alice.  
 
     While Margaret fussed about making iced tea and opening potato chips, lithe Alice sat thigh-to-thigh right next to gangly me on a swinging bench meant for three.  We were both in Bermuda shorts; our legs even touched. 
Hers were shaved.  This position left no room for a phonebook between us. 
Girls in her class had been sanctimoniously instructed by stone-faced
Sister Mary Joseph, our former principal, to always keep a Yellow-Pages distance between themselves and boys sitting by them to avoid any near occasion of Mortal Sin.  
 
     Margaret owned a large tomcat, Merlin, whose black and white coat reminded me of our nuns.  Inexplicably, this feline took a liking to sweaty me.  He curled up on my lap and began purring.  Reaching over to pet him, Alice told me animal lovers made for caring friends, a fact she confidently knew.  

    Casting his dark and mysterious spell, Merlin immediately made me wheeze.  Soon defeated as if by Sister Principal herself, I rode my bike home hardly able to see, my first murky sortie into adulthood ended with swollen eyes brought on byallergic reactions not emotional rigidity or spiritual remorse.  
 
     They moved on to McClatchy, the public co-ed high school.  I went to Bishop Armstrong High School which at that time had no girls but, fortunately for me, no cats either.  Only in my senior year did I have a class that included young women.  Six of them, in uniforms, came over from Bishop Manogue, the all-girls’ high school.  My physics teacher, a Christian Brother
dressed like a Medieval monk, needed special permission from Rome to teach them because they were non-male.
  
     Although I was never supposed to do very well in my studies, I did okay
in high school and eventually I enrolled in an all-men’s college.
        
     My first year, I ended up with a puppy living in my dorm room, which
didn’t work since such creatures live to eat, sleep, eliminate, and whimper when ignored.  This was my older brother’s pup, but his RA was onto him and threatened to have him thrown off campus for keeping a dog.  Here I was, a lowly freshman, coerced into taking care of this dog as though it was suddenly okay for new students to house a yapping pet while upper-classmen
couldn’t.  Furious, I gave in to this forced-on-me, fraternal burden. But, in one week, I totally had it.  Fortunately, my brother was engaged and his future father-in-law agreed to take that canine off my hands.   
          
     It’s a tangled web, my relationship with cats and dogs.
  
     Here in Marshall, a friend, Cathy, often hosted us for dinner.  Several colleagues would sit around eating, telling stories, joking, when without warning Cathy would shout at the top of her lungs, “GET OFF THERE!” at her cat behind me tiptoeing on the spread of food.  She was a tall, robust woman and could be indescribably loud.  Her cat ignored her.  

    Cats are vertical, I’ve been told, with an attachment deficit.
      
     When Cathy went on sabbatical, friends agreed to take care of this cat for a year in their home. But, when she came back, the cat wouldn’t stay with her; it wandered back to that cat-sitters’ house, an independent feline to the
end.
        
     Dogs are loyal. They usually figure out who is the leader and follow that leader faithfully.  Man’s best friend after all.
          
     For five summers, I helped run a summer camp while I was teaching high
school.  The camp’s year-round caretaker, called by his initials, T. V., got a month off once 100 screaming campers descended on the place.  T. V. had an old black mongrel dog, Luke, which followed him everywhere.  Luke was no longer in his prime, but he was gentle with the kids, easy to care for, and always at my heels once the caretaker took off.
   
     Luke didn’t bark or fuss.  He was smart enough not to put his nose into porcupines which says something because we had other camp dogs, purebred St. Bernards, that never learned to avoid those smarting quills. (Saint Bernards are not a bright breed.  Those lunkhead dogs kept doing the same
thing over and over and expecting things to change. Vet bills for quill removal proved this.) 
          
     Luke followed me everywhere around camp.  If I needed to leave in the jeep, he moved off to the shade and waited until I returned, sleeping not far from where I parked.

    One hot morning, I walked across camp with Luke shadowing me.  After ten minutes in the nurse’s cabin, I came out to find Luke there on the nurse’s porch as always, but stone dead.  Dead!  Not even my dog.  Dead!  With a fly-covered trickle of blood near his breathless snout.  But steadfast!  He had followed me to the very end even though for eleven months each year he had plenty of time to shuffle off his mortal coil on the caretaker’s watch, not mine.

    The stupidest dog I ever owned was a yellow-Lab mix named Sugar.  She hated men, me in particular.  She was way too much dog for a housedog, and way too independent to live anywhere near a man used to having dogs obey him, accustomed to having his canines die at his feet.   

    Sugar ended up in Pig Heaven.  Unable to keep her, I gave her to a friend who owns a swine breeding farm.  Sugar was content to live out in the barn, eat all the hog carcasses she could dig up, and occasionally run with a pack of wild dogs.  But she lived long, died fat, and never bothered me again.
         
     The smartest dog I ever owned was really my mother’s kinetic and strong
Airedale.  I wanted to call him Brutus, but she wanted him to be Magoo. He became Brutus Magoo, but she couldn’t keep him after I went off to
graduate school.  Hyper Brutus ended up at my summer camp, living the good life until he was hit by a car.  He limped back to camp to die, but not
while I was there.

    The luckiest dog was Mollie, rescued from the local pound.  She was the oddest-shaped creature ever to walk this earth:  a sort of black Lab with stubby legs, a thick neck, a stubborn disposition, but as gentle as can be. 
Abandoned as a pup, she became a garbage gut; she’d gobble without
chewing any roadkill or dead bird she found.  Sit anywhere near her and she’d fling herself onto your lap.  She weighed 55 pounds, so if she caught you off guard, you were in for a surprise.
        
     But Maya takes the cake.  She is our Lab/Bassett mix with short non-Lab legs, long Bassett ears, and sad Bassett eyes. When excited, she barks like her Lab self then bays like her Bassett self then stops to ponder the whole confused process.  But she’s a keeper.  If a bit spoiled, that’s my fault for hiding dog treats in my office which she begs for whenever I sit down to write.  Maya was originally our daughter’s dog, but remained with us after she went off to college.  Now, several years later, there is no way Maya’s moving out to live with her “owner,”possession being 9/10th of the law. 

    And Maya’s not a cat.