My Master, Rose Baby Gorgeous

One of the great saints of our time is an Irish setter. She turns 3 on April 29. HBD, RBG!

I don’t like when my dog, Rose, licks me. I don’t like imagining what she has licked with that very same tongue that is now licking my body. Her anus, for example. Her vagina. Corpses. Feces. I don’t like the sound of her licking: the sucking, slurping soup of it. I especially don’t like the sensual activation of it, how it strikes an uncomfortably close distance away from the lightning bolt of erotic pleasure. Because the weird fact is, it does kind of feel good, and this disturbs me, so I tell her to stop, and she does. She does pretty much everything I say. It’s kind of messed up, if you think about it.

I feel bad sometimes, being her master. I hate to say it, but I really am her master. She comes when I say come. She stays when I say stay. She’ll sit there with a bowl of food in front of her, drooling, quivering, barely able to contain herself (kibble! again!), and even then, she will not eat until I say, “Okay.” For no good reason at all, I’ll ask her to “sit pretty,” and she will sit up on her hind legs, quite unnaturally. I’ll make her wait like that, just because, until I deign to give her the treat. Am I her master, or some kind of monster? Can you imagine someone ordering you around like that, controlling your behavior, suppressing your instincts, making you do things that go against your nature? On second thought, we’ve all been to school.

But I really am a monster sometimes. Like that time she ran too far off into the woods when she was eighteen months old, just didn’t come back when I whistled, and I’m yelling for her, whistling for her, not crying yet but that did come later, after I hit her, after she came trotting back to me in that happy-go-lucky way of hers that indicates no awareness whatsoever of human cruelty. I didn’t mean to do it. It was almost like I was watching myself do it. I grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and cuffed her across the muzzle with the back of my hand, and then held her down against the hard, cold autumn ground and said No! a few of times and then You come back when I say come, you understand? as if she could understand, and That was too far, that was too long, you come when I say come, you come back, you hear me? until the anger passed like a bad dream and I awoke to find myself pinning my puppy dog down on the ground.

My mother said to me once that my future children owe Rose a debt of gratitude for how she’s helping me to master myself before they arrive: how she triggers me just so, just right, exposing me to myself, honing me, humbling my bloated spiritual ego. Because before Rose, I really did think I was good. Maybe even great. I walked across America, didn’t I? I sat in not one but two silent meditation retreats. And get this: I’d been accepted (nay, chosen!) by a Diné medicine man to apprentice in his ancestral lineage of healing wisdom. I mean, maybe that didn’t qualify me for greatness, necessarily, but certainly I was up there.

Rose blew this illusion to kibble-sized bits. Not that I’m a monster, per se, just that I’m no better than your average man in the muck, like my mother’s father for instance, a man much beloved by his children, who also hit them sometimes, his eldest son in particular. What darkness would a man have to have inside him to hit his own kids?

Well, that day in the woods with Rose, I got to find out for myself.

Rose Baby Gorgeous. That’s her full registered name. Purebred Irish setter. A goddamn saint. Literally the whole time I was holding her down by her ear, her neck, she just laid there, panting from her big adventure in the woods without me, her mouth open and curled in what looked like a smile. There was still no indication that this dog, this holy woman, had any awareness whatsoever of human cruelty. When I let her go, she shook herself off, gave me a lick, and seemed happy to be on leash for the rest of that walk at twilight, pulling as she likes to do on-leash. Because how could you not pull when every atom of you is so psyched to be alive, to be so utterly with everything that happens, everything, including those unpredictable and infrequent-but-not-insignificant acts of violence that the man who is your most trusted companion occasionally commits against you. Psyched, to be with, everything. A saint, I tell you.

A few days after that walk with Rose, I slipped unexpectedly into some tears, realizing that I had struck her not because of some megalomaniacal desire to be obeyed, not because the deeper truth of who I am beneath my decency is a roiling sea of violent rage, but because I wanted her to be safe, wanted her to come back to me so she wouldn’t get hurt, wouldn’t die, and I felt out of control, felt powerless to protect her, and in a fit of fear-muddied love, unmastered love, I hit her. It doesn’t make sense, but then again, I don’t think love is sensible. I think love is wild. I think love is a wolf, not a dog: it obeys the commands of a master far more primal than reason.

Another thing my mother said to me once is that there’s no such thing as love and evil. “There’s only love and love-not-yet,” she said, “love and love-on-its-way-to-understanding-itself-as-love.”

I wonder if that’s true, if every monster is just love confused, love afraid, love overwhelmed by itself. My grandfather loved his kids, you know? When his eldest son returned home one night unexpectedly after fighting in Vietnam, my grandfather met him at the door sobbing, as I, too, sobbed, realizing that the monster inside me was some kind of love-not-yet and that my dog was helping me to master this wolf, or at least to learn its wild ways. She came over to lick me, of course, which made my cry some more, to be in the presence of her mastery, her mercy, her uninterrupted mahogany flow of instantaneous forgiveness.

But Rose doesn’t forgive. In her world, from what I can tell, there is never anything to forgive. There is only what is, what’s happening in the present moment, and whatever’s happening is endlessly fascinating, never personal, and always worthy of being sniffed, nibbled, galloped alongside of, frolicked with, nuzzled, cuddled, and licked, and licked, and licked.

So back to the licking. I don’t like it, but I think I need to submit to it. Let it happen. Let it soften my monstrous tendencies. I want to be softened, you know? I gotta chill, for the sake of my future kids. Relax. Just let her do her thing. Just let it be, man, let it be.

But, see, I can’t just let her be. There are some things Rose wants to do that are definitely not okay. Like jumping up on people. God, I did a month-long writing retreat on Lake Erie a few years ago, just me and Rose at a friend’s cottage. On our first morning around sunrise, we went out for a walk in our new neighborhood. After months of training, Rose would come to me about 99% of the time I called her, so I thought we’d be fine off-leash that morning, even in the unfamiliar suburban context. And anyway, it was dawn. No one would be out this early.

She saw them before I did: three women who were also on their morning walk, turning the corner right where the dirt driveway met the road. Rose surged forward, crying out, exuberance incarnate, so overwhelmed by the desire to celebrate the existence of these people that she didn’t hear my calls to come back or simply didn’t care. Something else was commanding her: enthusiasm, from the Greek enthousiasmos, “to be possessed by a god,” in her case, the god of unconditional, uncontainable love. This was how she greeted every human being back in those puppy days: as if they were long-lost family members, or a best friend back from the dead, or God. Everyone.

She made a beeline for the women, circling them with her wagging tail, and then leaped up, all sixty pounds of her, to lick the lips of the eldest of the trio, a stoop-backed woman in her 80s. Rose only ever touched this grandmother with her tongue, but the elder was taken by surprise and flinched backward. Slowly, terribly, she began to topple, tried to keep her balance, then dropped, her pelvis making first contact with the concrete, then her lower back, shoulders, and finally the back of her head.

It all happened in about two, maybe three seconds. As I ran up the driveway to her, I felt the dread certainty that I was going to prison.

Her friends gathered around her, and the grandmother let me come close as well. She rested there on the pavement for a few minutes, my arm on her shoulder. She kept assuring me she was okay. Neither she nor her friends uttered a single word of ill-will, threw not a single shard of shade, no You should’ve had her on a leash, or What the hell were you thinking, or a backhand cuff across my muzzle.

“She was just trying to kiss me,” she said, which was true, and then, “It’s okay, I know how puppies are.” Jo Byham. Definitely one of the great saints of our time as well.

Later that day, I left a note where Jo had fallen, saying I’d like to bring her some cookies if she was open to it. Her friends found the note the next morning and brought it to her (she was taking some time off from their morning walks to recover). She called me, alive and well enough, and said yes, some cookies would be lovely.

The next day, Jo welcomed me into her home and sat me down in the living room, brought out some tea to go with my cookies. She lived alone now after a long life of raising children in that very same house, running the farm with her husband, who had died many years ago now. A steady stream of visitors kept her company, including one of her daughters who was there with us, who kept a careful eye on me. We chatted for a couple hours. Jo had some bruising on her back and a bump on her head, she said, but besides the soreness she was feeling okay.

I asked her how she could be so merciful, even in that brutal moment on the concrete, and she said it just never pays to be unkind. Never. Eventually she told me the story of how, one Sunday morning when she was a young mother, a car had T-boned her at an intersection on her way to church, killing one (or I think it might have been two) of her children. She’d had the right of way.

“Took me a long time to heal from that,” she said. “I think I’m still healing.”

So. Jumping up on people: not cool. Can’t just let that be. And no ignoring the call to “come.” No biting. No agro barking. But the licking. There’s no good reason to stop that. Why do I shut it down?

Licking is about tenderness. Everything Rose licks, she licks tenderly, no matter how repulsive or frightening it might be. That’s what a monster needs, doesn’t it, a tender touch.

Rose and I were out on a run this afternoon and she tore a claw in the woods. When we got back to my apartment, I dabbed the bloody nub with a powdery coagulant. She wanted to lick it of course, right away. I stopped her. She was quivering to lick herself, like she quivers to eat her kibble, and then she started panting with the unexpressed energy of the instinct I was asking her to suppress. But still, she followed me, let me lead.

After ten minutes or so, she went to lick her paw, eyeing me sidelong, and when I didn’t stop her she gave it a lick, and when I still didn’t stop her she tucked in and didn’t stop licking her wound for almost an hour, licking away the coagulant, licking away the blood, just licking, licking, licking away. Her claw is fine now. Totally fine.

So, I think I’m going to let her lick me. Licking is for healing. I’m going to give it a try. It’s going to be difficult. Uncomfortable. It’s going to make something inside me turn, but something inside me needs to turn, wants to be turned, mastered, and what the master teaches me is that to master is not to control or to dominate, but to love, to lick, what is.

Lick my wounds, Rose. I can’t lick them myself. Not all of them. Not by myself. Teach me to lick like you. Well, maybe not exactly like you. It really is pretty gross what you do with that tongue. But, you know, metaphorically. May I, metaphorically, lick myself so tenderly, lick my world so willingly, lick my way every day a little closer to healing.