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I Speak of the
Pupitous of Love
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When I was a kid, I always had Shetland Sheepdogs or Shelties (also known as miniature collies). There were three and I named them Socrates, Maxwell, and Joshua. Soc and Max passed through quickly. I forget the particulars, though I remember that Max got very sick. Josh was with me forever.
I grew up in a very regimented household. My father was not a drill sergeant–it was worse than that. My father was a scoutmaster. He had a merit badge psyche that he wore on his sleeve.
By house rules, therefore, if we owned a dog, that dog would go to obedience school and compete in dog
shows. In fact, the whole thing became quite an obsession for my father. A commercial insurance underwriter with a suburban house in close proximity to New Jersey’s horse country, Dad was somewhat ambitious socially. Horses being out of the question, the dog show circuit seemed like a kind of entrée to him, and he locked in.
My first memory of Joshua was of putting him through his paces in the back yard. I can still see the rows of pinewood kneelers we built to simulate the kind of long jump apparatus used at dog shows. We had a wall for him to jump that could be raised by sliding 8 inch wide pine boards down the stanchions that held the thing up. We conditioned Josh, and he did well. We molded that pliant puppy into the dog my father wanted him to be.
Then something happened that my father could not control. Josh refused to stop at miniature. He grew to within actual collie size-range, which everyone said would knock Josh out in the stand-and-look-pretty-while-the-judge-yanks-your-hind-quarters round. We soldiered on, of course. Locked-in is locked-in.
I vaguely remember my first and only dog show. According to the photographic documentation, I was wearing dark colored clam diggers with white piping and a white shirt and black sneakers. The judge was a very pretty lady who looked to me like a school teacher–as a Catholic School student, my only exposure to secular school teachers was on television, so to me, school teachers were very pretty ladies. She ran us through the drill–the jumps, the running. The stopping and sitting and coming when called. Finally, I was told to go stand with the others and their dogs in a line. The judge walked up and down the row of dogs and kids with a stern, discerning look on her pretty face–I remember being the youngest kid by far, this being typical of the kind of situation my father would thrust me into. I didn’t know that the judge was in the process of making the big decision until she walked briskly up to Joshua and handed us the Blue Ribbon!
I was whisked into the winner’s circle, comprehending things on about the same level that my dog did. They photographed us, and the photo to this day is framed on my mother’s dresser. The day had started badly–Josh had been booted from the pretty-boy main event because of his size. I had shown him in a kind of back lot obedience attraction. I remember my father being rather pissed. I also remember the very serious look on the judge’s face when she awarded my dog and posed with us–Josh really did nail all the events–and the big smile on my father’s face driving home in the blue Impala. Our boy had kicked a lot of pretty-boy ass on obedience.
Dad put Josh in one more show, in the middle of which the dog simply laid down. Dad kept calling, “Josh, come!” No Boy Scout would have disobeyed him, but Josh was wasn’t having it. He had laid his hammer down. The judge walked over to the old man and said something like, “let’s give this animal a break, pal.” This ended Josh’s show career, and it brought down the curtain on yet another of my father’s country club dreams. From then on in, I enjoyed Josh as a pet rather than as a platoon mate. He was, as dogs should be, a boy’s first love. It no longer mattered that he was a lummox by Sheltie standards. I loved him more for that.
Obedient, cheerful and thrifty,
Vanx
een with you.
