Lenore and Brutus

Juy 14, 2008 – I’ve been thinking a lot about dogs lately, as I’m writing “Rose and the Soul Of A Dog,” about animals and souls, and due out next year. I don’t believe dogs make conscious choices to love us. I don’t believe Lenore gets up in the morning, and says, “Hey, I’m going to make Jon smile.” I believe the magic of dogs is the mysterious interplay between their instincts and ours, between what they need and the ways in which they read us and instinctively provide it.
   The other day a car broke down in front of the farmhouse and a young couple and their two kids got out, and it was hot and buggy and the kids were crying and I invited them in, but they said no, and they just looked miserable, and so I got some bottled water and called Lenore and when she first came out, they werre anxious as this big black dog charging towards them, but then, in a flash, Lenore was lying down next to the young girls, who were laughing and scratching her belly, and the mother was soon laughing and the grim dad, peering out from under the car hood, was smiling and I wondered at the power of that dog, cheering up a whole family like that in two seconds, and at how this has become her work, spreading smiles and light.
 Thinking about it, I suspect it partially came out in an interplay with me. When I got Lenore last summer, it was a challenging time in my life, and I just reveled in this doofy little dog, who had so much affection and personality that I literally could not look at her without smiling, and so I took her everywhere, on interviews, to stores, on rides in the car, and reinforced this tendency to love people and animals, and show affection to them, and I certainly reinforced it in me, calling her the “Love Dog, The Hound Of Love, The Light.” And by loving her to death.
  And so she took her well-bred instincts and generousity of spirit, and she built on that, through the opportunity to develop it in hospice work and everywhere she goes, surely on the farm. And a trainer said, Hey Katz, this trait was bred in the dog, you didn’t create it, but it is, in some mysterious way, a reflection of you, of something in you.
  That was a tough idea for me, because Lenore was this way from the day she arrived, and I wish I could take credit for her, but I really can’t. I do think it is true, though, that part of the magic of dogs, of our deep love for them, is this quality they have to see deep inside of us, and incorporate into their own lives and behaviors some of what we are and what we need.
  It is self-serving to say Lenore is so powerfully loving a creature because of me, and yet I do believe she is reflecting a part of me, and parts of things inside of other people and that that is the soul of a dog, the magic of a dog.
   Anyway, I was writing this this morning, and getting into a groove, and wanted to share it. The great thing about a blog is that you can work ideas out and think about them and let them stew.