Column: Savagemama

How a Baby can Turn the Family Dog Into, Well, a Dog

By Jennifer Savage, 5-04-07

When I met Seth he kept his nose tucked in heady academic books and I obsessively scrubbed my apartment. Seth lived that spring with my best friend and her boyfriend in a house on a hill and I would show up, often unannounced, to borrow their mop in one of my cleaning frenzies. More than once I opened the door to a lanky guy in a black t-shirt and glasses. Smelling like cigarettes and reading some bent paperback about globalization or fascism, he’d smile and start chatting about whatever it was the he was reading. Most of the time, lost in my own head, I’d nod, agree, get the mop and leave.

Back in my apartment scrubbing floors, bleaching the sink and removing mold from the magnetic strip on the refrigerator door—those things I would do instead of write-- I remember thinking Seth was intense, smart and totally not for me.

My dog Imogene thought differently.

When Seth’s roommates bought a house in the country, he moved in with them to help with some projects around the place. I had just finished graduate school and had about $20 to my name so I moved in with them too. Imogene was four months old and she and I lived in a little guest house out in the back pasture. In the mornings, I’d let her out to pee and, though I did not know it then, she would bounce down to the open door in the basement and lick Seth awake.

One morning he mentioned it over coffee.

“Imogene came to say hello this morning,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can keep her in until I get up.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” he said. “She does it every morning.”

I had no idea. I looked down at her. She was wagging her tail.

I still tell Seth that Imogene picked him before I did. Like a kindergartener who wants her single mommy to meet her boy teacher, she investigated. He called her cutie pants. She woke him up in the mornings. They had a thing. Then Seth and I had a thing and Imogene would perch herself between the front seats on long car rides like it was all a part of her master plan.

When I got Imogene she was six weeks old and almost fit in my hand. I drove 30 miles to get her from a farm in the Lorianne Valley outside Eugene, Oregon, where I lived then. As I crested the final hill I got a little teary thinking that I was on my way to pick up the dog I’d always wanted and that with any luck she’d be by my side when I bought a house, got married, had a baby.

That morning I arrived to a barn full of puppies. Black and white. I was to have the third pick of three females so I reasoned destiny would take care of the choice and all I would have to do was pick up my little fuzz ball. But when I got there the breeder, Susie, told me I was the first one there so I got the first pick. I was a little shocked. How was I supposed to pick just one? As Susie swept the barn, gathering dog poop into one corner of the place, all the puppies followed her nipping at her broom. All but one. This one sat in the middle of the barn turned her head and watched all the other puppies. I asked to hold her. I put her to my chest, she licked me on the chin. I called her Imogene and we went home.

That first night, she peed in the bed and kept me up all night. I spent the first month waking in the middle of the night to take her out so she could sniff the rose bushes in my yard, jump at shadows in the grass and squat in the darkness. When she was a puppy she chewed my shoes and chased my cat up the bookshelf. She once opened a bottle of ink on my white down comforter. The ink wore off of her in a few days, I wish I could say the same for the comforter.

But she also slept under my desk chair as I toiled away on my master’s thesis. She’d wake around noon and we would go for a walk in the rain. On those days she forced me out of the house and out of a must-finish-this-thesis funk. During those first few months we went to the beach to chase the waves, to the river to swim in the heat and spent our mornings walking through the pasture. We kissed on the lips. We had a pretty good life.

We moved to Montana in the fall of that year and Seth and I bought a house the following summer. Imogene has full run of our small, fences-falling-down farm. She sniffs, she eats cow poop, she chases the chickens. She swims in the irrigation ditch and leaves a muddy trail through the kitchen. She sleeps on the couch even though she knows it’s totally illegal, she wiggles herself into the compost bin and eats and eats and eats.

When I pull in the driveway she acts as though I have a steak in my back pocket just for her. When I once was in the hospital, she lay in bed with me as I came out of an anesthesia daze. When I was on bed rest just before I had Eliza, she curled up next to the couch on which I was beached and kept me company.

All these years she’s been my angel-faced girl, my baby dog. My one, my only.

Then last summer Eliza was born and poor Imogene has had to take a back seat both in terms of time and affection. I tell her to be quiet when the baby is sleeping, I won’t let her lay on the rug because she gets muddy paw prints on the baby’s blanket. Dinnertime is no longer the begging free-for-all it used to be, I usually tell Imogene to get out of the kitchen because she is just one more thing in my way. She stays outside most days now; she sleeps in the laundry room instead of our room. We’ve even talked about having her sleep in the garage.

Imogene’s status has shifted without any of us meaning for it to happen. She’s still the baby dog but there’s new angel-faced girl in the house. Lately it seems as though we’re treating Imogene differently. We’re treating her like a dog not the go-everywhere-we-go companion she’s always been and somehow that’s strange.

And Imogene, as loyal as ever, rolls with it. She’s happy to take whatever Eliza has to offer from her highchair. She greets Eliza in the mornings by licking her on the face. Eliza blinks, smiles and reaches out for her. When I call to Eliza from across the room, “Who’s beautiful, who’s perfect?” Imogene wags her tails as though I’m talking to her. And maybe it’s just as well that she thinks I am.

This morning as Imogene trolled around Eliza’s highchair waiting for castoffs, I reached down to scratch her ears. I felt the rough patch of a scab. She’s been scratching them enough to make them bleed which means her ears are infected and have been for a little while. I felt awful. I should have noticed. When was the last time I really scratched her ears? I called the vet.

Now Imogene is asleep on the living room floor covered in mud and cottonwood sap. She’s shedding; a big fury, sticky mess. She’s sleeping the sleep of the dead and I’m not going to kick her out. I’ll go this afternoon and pick up ear medicine, get her some way-too-expensive food for her allergies and hope she stops scratching her ears. She’ll sleep in the laundry room tonight but I don’t see her moving to the garage any time soon, if ever. 

Jennifer Savage writes about being a new mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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