Chance Flowers with his human
I never had children. At this stage of my life, I never will. And that’s okay. Not to sound too much like a Burt Bacharach song but affection is a chameleon, taking many different forms and variations. What the world needs now, is love. Period.
I happen to reserve what might otherwise have been an overwhelming and annoying devotion to my offspring for my pets. There is Bernie, the bearded dragon who conducts himself like a boyfriend who ghosts you and then comes back around when he needs something (like blueberries.) There were a family of Guinea pigs during the 80s who had names like Ollie and Fawn (adopted, as you might have guessed, during the Iran Contra hearings.) There were goldfish whose real names I don’t remember but who will forever be known in our house as Romeo and Juliet, having jumped to their deaths because someone who might have been named Christine forgot to put the protective screen on the tank. I found them the next morning, curled up together like little orange donut holes. I wept, then swept.
But my deepest love has always been reserved for the dogs. There was Maximilian Alexander Flowers, a white German Shepherd who pranced into our lives when I was 11. Maxie had the names of noble conquerors but was a wussy thing. He hid when the doorbell rang, walked meekly around the neighborhood on his “tinkle walks,” embarrassed to be seen in public doing numbers one and two, and generally sought a quiet life. Like Ferdinand the iconic bull, he just wanted to sit and smell-or eat-the flowers.
Maxie disappeared from our lives when he was only five, from an illness we never fully understood . Our parents kept that pain from my siblings and I. He was only with us for 5 years but my childhood seems filled with memories of him. His life stretched well beyond my childhood, into immortality.
Then, we got Chance. A big, bounding Black Lab who was born the day my mother died. I truly believe God looked down upon a grieving family and said “this one will heal their hearts.” And he has. Chance is loving, completely guileless, prone to seek you out if he’s in need of a head scratch (even if you’re on the toilet because he figured out how to unlatch the lock) and will lie at your feet when the world is pressing down on your shoulders. He says, with his warm, padded pillow of a body that you’re never alone. And even ten years on, he carries that spark and light in him that illuminates the darkness, with selfless, unconditional, eyes raised and locked into your own, love.
A few years after Chance, we got him a sister. Sophie is also a Black Lab, exuberant and feisty and flirtatious. She is the one strangers love because of her charisma, she is the one the neighbors call out to with familiarity, she is the “It” girl of our world. And Chance doesn’t mind because he knows his own place, which is at the top of every mountain, and nestled in the valley of my heart.
Sophie Flowers with her human
These creatures are God’s reminder that we are his first drafts. They are far above us in their ability to love, to sense danger and sorrow, to give without expecting anything in compensation other than our happiness reflected in their eyes.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are dogs who have been abused and react in violent ways. There are animals who have inexplicable moments of anger. But rarely are they spontaneous. More often than not, they’ve been provoked. More often than not, they’ve been misunderstood. More often than not, they are victims of our impatience, and our cruelty.
Which is why Kristi Noem, who killed the dog she “hated” because she couldn’t train her to hunt pheasant, is a worthless first draft. God forgive her, because I won’t. Nor should any of you.
I grew up in rural Oklahoma, which is similar to South Dakota. I raised and rescued all sorts of animals, from roosters to cats and dogs. We had to put a few down over the years and had to depart with the rare untenable dog that caused problems, but we never took them to a gravel pit and shot them in the face. We either found them a home or a humane way to euthanize them. That might have worked if she had expressed remorse and shared what she learned. But no. She has shot her political career in the face with both barrels.