By Dinah Daly
By Dinah Daly
Our
kids always wanted a dog and what we did over the years was ply them pretty
aggressively with the cutest cuddliest dogs we could find made by Disney, Gund,
Steif, and Ty.
We snapped real collars and leashes on the stuffed animals
and the kids invented all kinds of pretend games. Pet shop, vet, circus, zoo,
normal life. No one had to be home at any certain time to feed these stuffies or
walk them in the rain or scoop up their poop. A few of them evolved into floppy
tattered favorites hugged tight every night in bed. But none of them really
filled that spot in a child that wants a dog.
More than once, the kids threatened to go over our heads and
ask Santa for a puppy and we had to quickly counter threat with our own Dear
Santa letter of explanation. We live in the city—what kind of life would a dog
have in the city, I have allergies, the landlord wouldn’t allow one, I was
trying to get a career going again, my husband works essentially three jobs, and
with all the kids’ music lessons, swim and soccer teams, water polo practices,
SAT tutoring, theater, dance, and every other miscellaneous school activity we
jam pack into our day, a dog just wasn’t possible.
Time went by and eventually—with one kid headed off to
college and the other into high school—we felt satisfied we had pretty much
dodged getting a real dog.
Then last Fall I started to think the kids were right. They
needed a dog. We were gypping them and if we were going to get a dog we had to
do it right away. Before the high school kid completely vanished into
adolescence and while the college kid was still coming home now and then. I
don’t know why I changed my mind. Maybe I felt our family dynamics were
changing. Our home, a little emptier. Everyone that much more stressed. The
loss of the last gerbil. And things just different after 9/11. Plus some of our
rationale against a dog had become inconsequential. We knew now about the
hypoallergenic quality of Australian Labradoodles. And a couple of years before,
when our landlord nixed the kids getting chinchillas, they’d petitioned again
for a more ordinary pet and the landlord had relented saying it would be okay to
have a small dog.
So, not really aware of how humongous a change we were about
to bring on all our lives, the high school kid and I drove two hours up to
Hudson Labradoodles last October and picked out a chocolate puppy. We wrote a
check we hoped wouldn’t bounce and brought home this beautiful hilarious beast
more plush and impossibly wonderful than any Disney or Gund or Steif or Ty
creation all rolled into one.
After arguing over a list of 76 different names, the four of us finally agreed
she was Stella, a name we had no way of knowing would become more and more
perfect every day. People stop us all the time walking on the street. Cars pull
over, roll down their windows. Mothers with babies in Snugglies have crouched
down without even asking first to let her lick their baby’s hands or dangling
feet. They all want to know what kind of dog she is, remarking how soft her
coat, how beautiful her eyes. She greets everyone so happily. Boys always want
to play with her. One girl walked up and buried her face in her fur. Residents
of a nearby retirement home call to her from their sidewalk bench and she goes
over to rest her head on their knees. Everyone is impressed by how calm she is,
how gentle, how smart, how well trained, how much fun. They laugh at her tricks.
Just the sight of her trotting along beside us—pure dog joy in a dancing
chocolate muppet coat—makes all kinds of passing strangers break into a smile.
We are so lucky. Stella is a star. Our star.
We take her everywhere we can and instead of being yet another
responsibility and complication in our busy urban lives like we feared, she has
enlarged and sweetened our world, brought us closer together as a family. Made
us scads of new friends. Made us silly. We are totally her entourage, her fans,
her paparazzi
.
Whether Stella is trying to get our goat by stealing our socks and underwear or
stepping up to pose majestically on a tree stump or dashing through an agility
tunnel or relaxing with a bison bone or just jumping for joy, we shutterbug her
daily life as if she is a real celebrity.
It is a little embarrassing, but we must have thousands more
pictures of this ten-month-old raggle-taggle chocolate girl than we ever took of
our daughters when they were little. Part of this, I console myself, is the
advent of digital cameras and the Internet. Our whole family is doing the
picture taking now and some of us are sharing them on Facebook or Livejournal or
Flickr or sending them like postcards attached to emails with family and
friends. But, really I think all these pictures are because Stella is Stella—a
wonderful dog. So doodle hilarious and gorgeous and soft and smart and willing
and friendly and athletic and playful and mischievous and intuitively gentle
when she needs to be and totally rambunctious when it is okay to cut loose and
also so very curious and patient and spirited and go-with-the-flow contented and
delightfully easy to train and the adjectives could go on and on, but all these
qualities make her endlessly entertaining and irresistibly photogenic. More fun
and poetic than we ever imagined.
Sometimes I suspect that she does things now just to get us to take her picture,
as if the sound of our shutters clicking has become some kind of reward. Other
times I think all our daily dog photography is baffling and annoying and she is
probably saying to herself—could you please just leave me alone to eat this
Cornish hen now by myself?
Recently (probably in a polite effort to get us to stop
clogging the Hudson Labradoodles email with our latest images of Stella) Curtis
Rist invited us to put together a smorgasbord of snapshots of our favorite
Australian Labradoodle and luckily along with these, Stella graciously offered
to tell us in her own words a few things about herself and her typical
doodleday.
