Satchi is our standard poodle, our first standard poodle, for now we have a second – Ganesha, who looks up to Satchi, who follows Satchi around and pesters him. Satchi loves it when he is allowed in the living room and Ganesha is not. He loves it when I open the gate just long enough for him to slip through and then shut it quickly before Ganesha can crash in. Quickly, because Ganesha moves quickly, with never a hesitation. He never stops to wonder if he should do this thing. No, no questions. Just go. Not like Satchi who considers his actions – going in and out of doorways, for instance. Before entering or exiting he always takes time to think, to consider, to be sure before he moves.
Sometimes I have to push him through. When it’s cold or rainy, when the wind is blowing in my face and I’m standing there holding the door open for Satchi while he ponders, “Should I stay or should I go?”
At these times, I put my hand on his rump and coax him through. But I feel I’m insulting him, not treating him with the respect he deserves, when I push him like that.
A Strong Sense of Justice
“He has a fine sense of justice.” That’s what the animal communicator said. We were at the agility trials in
“Compassionate Conversations” the sign read. “Strengthening the bond between owners and their pets.”
Two matching aluminum lawn chairs with floral print seats and backs were set up side by side. Most of the time when I passed by the Compassionate Conversations space, the chairs were empty. It wasn’t a popular booth. But sometimes there would be two women sitting in the chairs talking intently. A dog would be lying on the floor between them, its head resting between two front paws, following the conversation with its eyes, shifting its gaze from one woman to the other, depending on who was talking at the time.
I began to suspect that some type of counseling was going on in that 10’ by 10’ square. Maybe the woman running the booth was counseling people who recently adopted a rescue dog – a dog from an animal shelter – and were having problems with the dog – peeing on the rug problems, howling in the middle of the night problems, gnawing on the sofa leg problems.
By the second day of the Springfield trials, I realized that the woman who ran the booth, who’d carried those two chairs into the building from her car, was an animal communicator, an animal mind reader, a channel through which you could talk to your dog, find out what is going through his mind, why he does some of the things he does, especially the things you want him not to do, but obedience class doesn’t help. These are deeper, more complex – not just sit, stay or give me your paw. These are psychological issues.
I wanted to know why Satchi growls at certain people. Maybe “growl at” isn’t quite accurate, gives the wrong impression. The growl is more of a grumble. And it starts up when certain people lean over him and pet him vigorously.
Her name was Tina, this dog mind reader. Satchi seemed to feel comfortable around her. Like the other dogs I’d seen, he lay on the floor between us. Tina sat on my right, I on her left. He was between us with his head facing Tina.
She didn’t look like a Tina – not at all. She looked more like a Carol or Pat. She was dressed exactly as all the other women at the event, the agility show, were dressed. She wore loose-fitting jeans and a mauve sweatshirt with a line up of cute little dogs and cats painted across the font of her sweat shirt, skimming the ridge of her middle-aged breasts. She was plump, with short, reddish hair. She sat quietly with her eyes closed. I imagined she was listening to what Satchi had to say.
Suddenly, her face reddened. “He says it isn’t fair. It makes him angry that some people feel they can violate his space just because he is a dog.” She started fanning herself with her right hand. “He says, ‘Some people are such slobs, they have no respect, no sense of protocol.’”
“He has a fine mind,” she tells me. He is one of the finest dogs she’s ever encountered. “Maybe the finest,” she concludes.
Is she telling me this just because she knows I’ll want to hear it? I like to believe it’s true. Certainly for me – in my mind, in my eyes – Satchi is the finest, the highest. He is Sat Chit Ananda – Truth, Consciousness and Bliss. When I was choosing a name for him, at first I though of funny names, funny names for men. At that point even though we hadn’t yet picked out a puppy, we knew we would be getting a boy, a male, for male standard poodles are the sweetest, the most devoted. Females tend to be not quite as attached to their owners, their masters, their gurus.
I was thinking along the lines of Clem, Floyd, Dexter – a funny-sounding name. The sound of the name, itself, is funny.
But then I thought, if I want this dog to be great, I should name him a great name.
Sat Chit Ananda. The qualities of the Spirit. Truth, Consciousness and Bliss. Satchi for short.
“Emphasis on the bliss” I tell people when they ask about his name. For Satchi has brought me bliss – dog bliss. The bliss of big tawny brown eyes radiating devotion your way.
“If you didn’t shave his face, it would be covered with long fur, wouldn’t it?” Tina asked me ask she stroked Satchi’s head.
“Yes, and then his wonderfully plaintive, expressive eyes would be hidden,” I pushed the long, soft white hair back so she could get a good look at those brown eyes. Tiger’s eye brown.
Grumbling
Now, when I look at Satchi, I feel closer to him, and it seems to me that he might feel the same. He gives me meaningful looks. Of course he did that even before our session with the communicator. And Ganesha does it, too. He looks at me, gazes at me soulfully. My dogs’ eyes have depth, have warmth. I see love in their eyes when they look at me. They love me mostly because I feed them. They see me as a food dispenser, a petting machine, a person who responds quickly to their needs. All they need do is come up to me, stand next to me while I’m sitting at the computer, or standing at the sink or lying in bed. And they fix their gaze on.
When intentional staring doesn’t work, if they’ve fixed their gaze on me and I continue what I am doing – continue staring at the computer screen, continue scrubbing the dishes, continue lying there with my eyes closed pretending to sleep – if I have not yet turned to them, paid attention to them, they move on to phase two. Barking, for Ganesha. Talking for Satchi.
Yes, Satchi does that grumbling, that variation of a growl that was the cause for sitting down with that communicator in the first place. Tina. We’ll call her by her first name. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, even though she doesn’t look like a Tina. Ruth, perhaps. Tina is too tiny, too fairy princess-like for the woman Satchi and I went to see about his growling.
“He has a fine sense of what’s right and wrong, and he feels that it’s wrong to intrude uninvited on another person’s space – or dog’s space.” According to Satchi, speaking through Tina, just as it’s wrong for a dog to encroach on a person’s space, uninvited, it is also wrong for a person to horn in, to just assume that every dog out there is fair game for petting, for patting, for leaning over, for breathing on.
“But what about me, “ I said, horrified by the thought that he might not really like it when I pet him, that he would lump me into the rude slob category, that he only put up with my petting and kissing him because I feed him.
“I’m all over Satchi.”
“Oh, but that’s different,” she said. “He loves it when you pet him. He would be hurt if you stopped.”
“He thinks you’re wonderful,” she said.
Free Style Dancing
I love to dance, but my husband won’t dance with me anymore. He used to, when we were first married. I always knew he felt uncomfortable out there on the dance floor, but I thought if we just did more of it, he’d begin to enjoy it. But instead it became harder and harder to coax him up from the safety of his seat on the sidelines. At some point in our marriage – maybe it was the seventh year (a schmita had passed and we were entering a new phase in our relationship) – Russell put his foot down. His dancing days were over, he declared. I had no choice. I joined all those other partnerless woman who dance together in a group, hooting and carrying on.
So when I heard about free style dancing – dancing with your dog – I jumped at it. Satchi and I started taking lessons. At first Satchi seemed to really enjoy it. He had a big smile on his face during the first two classes – mostly we were moving across the floor together to music, prancing, gliding. He would follow beside me. Occasionally he’d leave my side and try to sniff on of the other dogs – the female beagle, the pug. Smaller dogs. The friendly ones. I’d have to steer him away, back to following me, heeling beside me, moving to the beat of the music.
But back to the communicator. “Does he enjoy free style dancing?’ See, the reason I asked is sometimes Satchi looks bored with dancing. He walks away from me leaving me dancing by myself out there on the floor. He doesn’t want to do it for as long as I do, even when I bribe him with treats.
He’ll pretend he has to go pee really badly. He looks at me and the sides of his mouth puff out. “A blow fish” I call him when he fills his cheeks with air. He looks like a bellows with his cheeks puffing out then caving in – rhythmically.
When I take him outside to pee, all he can come up with is a little squirt here, a little squirt there. Obviously there wasn’t any great emergency going on. He was just looking for an excuse to leave dance class.
“He does it for you,” Tina told me. “He wants you to look good. He wants everyone to know how wonderful you are.”
I couldn’t help it. My eyes welled with tears. I looked down at Satchi’s bushy head, leaned forward in my chair and kissed him.
