Dogs would much rather eat dog-sized portions of human meals; pasta is a particular favorite. They would like it served on a dinner plate placed on the floor near the human table.
Instead of a cage as a refuge, dogs like a nice little cedar house with a pointed roof and a small entrance with the dogs name painted in big letters over it.
Dogs prefer to sleep snuggled right up beside a human, their head on a feather pillow, with ears nicely spread out, and the rest of the body curled on an innerspring mattress covered by percale sheets smelling of human breath and sweat.
Children understand all of that. I wanted a child. But there were none in sight.
Back on the main street, I watched the brisk crowd of humans going about their day. It made no sense to attach myself to the side of a human with a briefcase, though there were many such, both male and female. They entered the doors of large buildings and pushed buttons summoning noisy mechanical cages, into which they disappeared.
Suddenly I spotted one man who did appeal to me. He was dressed in a multi-aromaed collection of clothing, and his beard—for he had a long, uncombed one—smelled of several past meals. He was not hurrying. He seemed, in fact, to have no destination at all. He simply stood beside the wall of a building, talking to himself. His hand was cupped in front of him, and occasionally someone dropped a coin into it. "Money for coffee? Money for coffee?" he was saying to the passersby. "Bless you, bless you," he murmured when a coin was dropped into his hand.
I liked his smells. No soap, no shampoo, no toothpaste, no aftershave. Just coffee and tobacco and dirt: a wonderfully earthy combination, layered over by a whiff of old doughnut and some stale hamburger.
I went and arranged myself unobtrusively by his side. When he reached down and scratched me behind one ear, I knew that he was the next best thing to a child.
"Good boy, good boy," he said to me. He seemed to say everything twice, but I didn't mind. At least he had not called me "Good girl," a lapse I didn't think I would tolerate as cordially as my brothers had.
Tentatively I licked his hand. Aside from the repellent infant, Max, whose hand had been gluey with mashed cookie, this was my first taste of human flesh. The man's hand tasted of many things, some of them edible. O hand of man! My first to lick!
O dirt! O beer! O licorice stick!
In truth, I was not positive that it was licorice stick I tasted. I think it might have been cough syrup. But I was learning, even at this earliest stage in my literary career, that a poet may take some license, may stray lightly from absolute truth, if the verse seems to demand it.
The man reached into the pocket of the outermost coat that he was wearing (there seemed to be at least two others underneath) and held a morsel of something mysterious under my mouth. I was too hungry to investigate it carefully. I gulped it down and looked longingly at him, wondering if his other pockets held more.
"Sorry boy, sorry boy," he told me. I sighed.
"Feed a hungry puppy? Feed a hungry puppy?" he began to say in his singsong voice. To my surprise, people stopped, looked at me, smiled, and dropped money into his hand. Now and then someone patted my head.
Pasta? I thought. Stew? I remembered all the things Mother had described: the human foods that best suited a dog. Vegetable soup? I wondered where we would go shopping for my meal. My new friend was dropping coins into his pocket, then holding his empty hand out again and repeating his phrase, entreating the passing humans to donate to my welfare.
He shook his jingling pocket and patted my head happily. "Sit," he murmured to me. "Sit."
I decided to do exactly as he said. We were still quite close to the fast-food place from which I had fled so ignominiously, and I felt that I needed a protector in case Scar should come looking for me, since I had, after all, defaced his territory.
In addition, it was clear that the man planned to feed me. I decided to walk politely by his heel when we went to the grocery store. Judging by the number of coins in his pocket now, it wouldn't be long. We had enough money for a substantial amount of grocery shopping.
"What's his name?" a woman asked, searching in her purse for some change.
Stay!: Keeper's Story
My new friend looked down at me. I sat with my best posture, tilted my head, and waited to hear his answer. A name is an important thing, and except for little endearments from my mother and sister, I had not had one until now.
"Lucky," he told the woman. "Lucky."
Creativity overwhelmed me, and I began to compose. Lucky I am, and Lucky I'll be!
O lucky lucky lucky me!
It was not one of my finest poems. But it was the first to incorporate my name, and I had composed it quickly in my surge of tender appreciation that I had a human of my own. I wondered if he had soft sheets on his bed, and perhaps a thick quilt that smelled of spilled leftovers. I felt immensely happy and poetic, and resolved that my next ode would be better than Lucky I am, which I knew to be inadequate.
I was to be disappointed, at the end of the day, in most of my expectations. In the evening he led me to his home, and it was barely superior to the one I had left. My last resting place had been under a piece of corrugated cardboard in a dirty alley. This man's home was on a riverbank, below a bridge, under a large piece of flattened tin.
"Here we are, Lucky," he said as he lifted a corner of the tin and indicated that I should enter, with a somewhat courtly gesture of his hand. Then he made a small fire and heated some of the cans of food that he had bought with the coins from his day's collection.
Together we dined.
"My name's Jack," he told me, and I was touched by the introduction, since most humans do not bother with such courtesies toward dogs. Even in my short and unsophisticated life to date, I had observed that there is a brusqueness toward dogs. "Hey, boy!" is often used as a greeting, for example; and food, even the finest French food, is simply tossed on the ground toward its recipient. My mother, a fastidious female, commented on that. "You'd think," she said to me once while cleaning her paws and chin after a visit to Toujours Cuisine, "that they'd serve something as elegant as saucisson en brioche on a plate, at least."
I didn't, of course, compare my first dinner with Jack to fine cuisine. It was shared stew from a can, with river water to wash it down for me and a beer for Jack, who burped afterward without apology. But there was a sweetness to the camaraderie, and I felt a sense of safety which made up for the lack of elegance. I curled beside him under the tin, and we slept soundly together, covered by an old army overcoat, frayed at the seams, which he tucked around us both.