Of course I should get a dog! I coo at every dog I see on my daily walk. I moon around the dog park so long, people treat me like a shabby old man lingering outside a schoolyard; repeatedly, I’ve been asked to leave.

So why don’t I get a dog?

Because anyone who adopts a dog these days needs to be as loaded as Elon Musk. Never mind forking over five or six grand to buy a 100 percent genetically pure Shih Tzu from a breeder. Even if you rescue a three-legged mutt from the local shelter, the fees can set you back a few thou, especially if you add in: the license, the microchip, the neutering, the routine checkups, the vaccinations and medications to prevent rabies, distemper, Lyme disease, kennel cough, parvovirus, Leptospirosis, canine influenza, heartworm, intestinal parasites, fleas, and ticks; the bags of premium chow and treats; the doggie bed, crate, baby gate, pee-resistant covers for your car seats, brushes, bowls, leashes, harnesses, collars, biodegradable poop bags, and adorable plush squeaky toys you can’t resist even though they are thirty dollars apiece and your dog will gnaw them to a saliva-soaked pulp in half an hour, after which you will buy toy after toy until every square inch of your apartment is littered with their soggy, mutilated carcasses.

And a puppy will outgrow all of the above in weeks! A teething newborn can destroy your shoes and boots, sofas, chairs, wires, cables, rugs, even the wainscotting around your walls. Unless you want to raise an ill-mannered cur, you will need to cough up tuition for a good obedience school. If you can’t stay home all day, you will expend big bucks for doggie daycare. If you manage to scrape up enough cash for a vacation, you will pay $125 a day for a sitter to tend your pet. If you live in an apartment, you will incur an additional fee to insure against any damage your dog might wreak (my already exorbitant rent would go up eighty-five bucks a month). Unless your dog is bald, you will need to budget boodles a year to groom him; unless you live in the tropics, you will attire your pet in fashionable sweaters and raincoats so he or she won’t shiver or feel underdressed at your upscale dog park.

Most daunting of all, you will face vet bills that approach the price of an SUV. A tiny tube of medicine to cure a yeast infection in your Bernedoodle’s ear might set you back $500. Maybe your Chihuahua gets a bone lodged in its tiny throat. Or your insatiable German shepherd wolfs down an entire bag of edibles. Or your terrier develops allergies. Or your trauma-ridden Doberman is prescribed a daily dose of anti-anxiety meds to calm his panic whenever you leave the house. Or that lump on your Labrador’s head turns out to be malignant. Or your sheepdog starts limping and requires orthopedic surgery.  I have a friend who shelled out $11,000 in a last-ditch attempt to save her beloved poodle, only to have the dog expire a few days later.

Even more daunting is the societal expectation that you be a doggie parent rather than a doggie owner. Whereas an owner refuses to allow a pet who has spent the day rolling in rotting carcasses and sniffing other dogs’ butts to lap them on the lips and snuggle beneath their comforter, a doggie parent regards the kissing and snuggling as the reasons for adopting a fur-baby in the first place. A doggie parent doesn’t feel self-conscious appearing in public covered in the hair of her hirsute husky, never grimaces in disgust at picking up a poop, no matter how huge or runny. If faced with a five-figure bill for an operation that might or might not save a decrepit dachshund’s life, the doggie parent doesn’t hesitate and is offended that the vet even needed to ask.

Admitting I am more of a doggie owner than a doggie parent is scarier than revealing my many failings as a mother to my human son. Before you unfriend me, let me assure you that I have lavished a great deal of affection and a considerable chunk of my 401K on the dogs in my life. After I left my marriage, I decided my son and I needed a third creature in the house so we wouldn’t become too emotionally enmeshed with each other. Too fastidious to adopt a beast that shed and slobbered, I brought home a sweet, elderly greyhound with which we immediately fell in love. A veteran of the track, Suds had never climbed a set of stairs, never nestled in a comfy doggie bed with his very own stuffed duck and platypus, never needed to endure a human’s insistence on dressing him up in a silly hat and New Year’s glasses. Maybe I didn’t allow Suds to sleep beneath my sheets, but I pretended I didn’t know he was sleeping beneath my son’s.

The poor creature had been treated so harshly that if I forgot to crate him when I left the house, he spattered pee on every surface like an incontinent Jackson Pollock; patiently, I mopped up the puddles and comforted him. Even though I assiduously brushed my canine’s canines, they rotted and grew infected and I (grudgingly) paid a thousand bucks each time he needed to be anesthetized to have them pulled. I swaddled my skinny sweetie in a soft plaid coat to keep him warm in the Michigan chill and wiped the salt from each paw when we came home from a winter’s walk.

When the neighbor’s pit bull sprang from her pickup and mauled poor Suds, I screamed and cursed and fought off the attacker, then carried the bleeding victim home, wrapped him in a quilt—his exposed rib cage was as delicate as the bones of a trout about to be filleted—and rushed him to the vet, where I didn’t even ask how much it would cost to bandage his wounds and salve his pain. When he grew too frail to manage the stairs, I carried him up and down, even in the middle of the night when he needed to go out to do his business.

Toward the end of Sudslife, I reluctantly left him with the rescue society so I could fly to Florida to care for my dying father. A day later, the head of the society texted me to say Suds had passed away in his sleep (“and now he rests in peach,” she texted, causing me to imagine my gentle greyhound floating on a cloud of peaches for all eternity). I cried for my dog as I didn’t seem able to cry for my father, who, after all, hadn’t gone bonkers with joy every time I turned my key in the door, hadn’t placed his head on my knee and pawed my thigh to signal his abject devotion.

So, yes, I know what it means to adore and mourn a four-legged companion. Also, not everyone who pretends to be a doting doggie parent actually is one. I once was asked to housesit for a minister and his wife who were widely regarded as the saintliest pair in town. As part of the deal, I would be caring for their senior setter, let’s call him Morton. Day by day, I came to suspect Morton had been neglected. His gorgeous red coat was matted; when I tried to brush it, the brush got stuck. If I wasn’t playing with him or taking him for a walk, he would race in circles, biting his flank and tail. When the owners refused to pay for a visit to a groomer, I took Morton at my own expense, only to be confronted by an irate staff member who had called the humane society to report me for abuse; a choke collar around Morton’s neck had become so tightly ingrown it was buried in his flesh. I managed to divert the poor dog from biting himself, but he still seemed to be in pain, and I wasn’t surprised when he died from cancer a few weeks after his “parents” returned from their sabbatical.

After that, my longing for a dog grew insatiable. I moved to New York, then Boston. Lonely, confined to my apartment by the pandemic, I searched for a furry companion, only to discover that millions of other shut-ins were competing for the same few rescues. I asked for a laid-back senior mutt; six months later, my take-it-or-leave-it option was a puppy that was mostly Jack Russell terrier, a breed known for its unquenchable energy, stubbornness, and highly aggressive prey drive. But how can you turn your back on an adorable big-eyed pup with a stuffed llama in his mouth, climbing your pant leg and begging to be taken home?

I promised the rescue society I would care for this defenseless newborn no matter what. But I had never before raised a puppy, let alone tried to train one while living in a second-floor apartment in the midst of a New England winter. I found myself racing to put on my hat, coat, and boots, hurrying down two flights of stairs while holding a squirming creature that was spraying pee left and right, then trudging through an underground garage until we reached the tiny patch of bare ground beside the exit, begging the pup to do his business as I shivered and stomped and tried to open the poop-bag with frostbitten fingers, then climbing the stairs, crating him, and returning to the stairwell to mop up the urine, only to repeat the entire ordeal every few hours through the snowy, dark, frigid night.

No matter how diligently I administered the anti-worming medication the vet kept giving us, Ollie’s poop was infested with what appeared to be wiggling grains of rice; I even found a few of those creepy crawlies on my lap after we’d finished cuddling. I took Ollie to the dog-park three or four times a day, but he still raced endless zoomies around my living room. I drove him an hour each way to the only obedience school that was open during the pandemic, but my nuclear-powered pup wouldn’t sit still long enough to listen to the instructor, let alone his befuddled owner.

Within six weeks, I had lost a tenth of my body weight and ruined my shoulder trying to keep Ollie from yanking me into the river whenever he saw a duck. Luckily, a friend’s niece—the daughter of a vet who lived in a house with a fenced-in-yard, wife of a dog-loving husband, mother of a five-year-old girl who was begging to be allowed a pet—fell in love with Ollie and pleaded to let him come live with them. Guilty as if I were selling my child, I delivered Ollie with his hundreds of dollars’ worth of accoutrements and, for the first time in months, enjoyed a good night’s sleep.

Ashamed as I am to be more of a doggie owner than a doggie parent, expending outlandishly extravagant resources on a fur-baby when so many human children—and adults—go without adequate nutrition, medical care, dental care, or housing strikes me as indefensible. The real reason I cannot bring myself to get another dog is that if I were confronted with a choice between paying $10,000 to save my pet or allowing a vet to end its suffering, I would reluctantly choose the latter … and feel justly hated by the veterinarian and all my friends, especially those who would sacrifice anything to save their four-legged companions.

When I was a kid, most people just got a dog, whether from a farmer, a pet store, or the pound. The owners let their dogs run around outside all day, fed them table scraps or kibble, tossed them a bone or a tennis ball now and then. If the dog got injured or sick, they took it to a vet. But hardly anyone would have spent a few months’ salary to save an animal’s life, not that the technology existed to present them with that dilemma.

Of course, those adorable furballs in the pet store probably came from a horror of a puppy mill. Dogs got into the neighbor’s trash, gave birth to offspring no one cared for, suffered from heat and cold, endured illnesses and cruelties no one today would allow a pet to tolerate. Certainly, no one should get a dog if they are unwilling or unable to meet its needs. But if we allow only doggie parents who are willing and able to sacrifice anything and everything to adopt an animal, then too many kids—and grownups—are going to be deprived of loving and being loved by their pets, and something seems very sad and unfair about that.

 

Fly, My Darling: a love story

By Lisa K. Richter

  A soulful memoir of desire and a woman’s midlife quest to let go—in jazz and in life   Lisa—a classically trained pianist, wife, and mother—yearns for something she can’t define. After she begins a study of jazz improv with an outspoken, trailblazing musician from the ’70s girl band era, a woman who encourages Lisa to let go musically and emotionally, life takes an unexpected, irrevocable turn. When they become lovers, what began as a desire to learn jazz becomes a lesson in letting go: with music, with an old way of living, and finally with life itself.


With rhythmic, imaginative prose, Fly, My Darling explores the resilience of love, the weight of loss, the undeniable pull toward freedom, and the transformation that occurs when a woman finally asks, What do I really want? Based on the author’s years together with musician and visionary composer Lynda Roth, past and present weave together in this intimate journey of awakened eroticism and music.

“A graceful and spare memoir of personal transformation and loss.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Available at Bookshop, Simon & Schuster, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local independent bookstore.

More at LisaKRichter.com

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