Come by, come by lad

I've never owned a dog before, and I was very scared of getting one.

My little sister has always wanted one, and my parents were always against it because they knew Jemma would not be the rock of responsibility and reliability she swore blind she would be, and they would end up doing all the work. So they fobbed her off.

"Well we're not sure if you're responsible enough. It's a big responsibility, you know, a very big responsibility. Tell you what, we'll get a hamster, and if you can feed that, and clean it out, and look after it, then we'll know you can be responsible."

Sure enough, even though she loved the hamster, after a month or so my sister's interest waned and my Mum cleaned it out and played with the little lass.
It happened again a few years later with an adorable rabbit called Bungie.

And all the time when my sister would ask, "It's a HUGE RESPONSIBILITY!" was wheeled out.
Consequently, at the age of 28, with a job, a marriage and a mortgage, I was scared.
In terms of responsibility, Getting A Dog towers over all else.

I bought a book on Monday of last week, 'Your Adopted Dog'. A marvellous source of information it may be, but it's not very well organized and it's written from the point of view of people who really really love dogs. I mean really. So much so that the book was packed with case studies of happy adoptions...all involving people who worked in dog shelters and already had three, four or in some cases five dogs. This was not terribly inspiring.
The chapter on illnesses and medications was ENORMOUS. So much so that by the end of it I was considering dropping the whole idea and avoiding dogs on sight for the rest of my life. Do you know about coccidia? Heartworm? ANAL SACS?

Yep. Some dogs need their anal sacs emptying manually. Regularly.
WITH YOUR HANDS.
Here is a handy animated page that explains it all..
I'm sure you will find it awfully interesting.

But then there was Nano.

So that was alright. And he shows no signs of needing his anal sacs drained.
We toured the ASPCA for three hours and found Nano and another Chihuahua hanging out in the staff offices. The other dog was there because he was due for heart surgery soon, and Nano was there because he was so nervous he couldn't cope with the regular shelter glass kennels and all the passersby. He was very edgy, jumping at every sudden sound or movement, but he had a lot of energy and despite being scared of everything, that didn't stop him being curious about it all. He would scamper up to something, say, a cardboard box, and sniff it as he approached. When his nose actually made contact he would skip backwards, as if surprised that something he could smell and see was solid as well. This struck me as pleasingly existentially unassuming, like the Ruler Of The Universe in the Hitchhiker's books:

He picked up from the table a piece of paper and the stub of a pencil. He held one in one hand and the other in the other, and experimented with the different ways of bringing them together. He tried holding the pencil under the paper, then over the paper, then next to the paper. He tried wrapping the paper round the pencil, he tried rubbing the stubby end of the pencil against the paper and then he tried rubbing the sharp end of the pencil against the paper. It made a mark, and he was delighted with the discovery, as he was every day. He picked up another piece of paper from the table. This had a crossword on it. He studied it briefly and filled in a couple of clues before losing interest.

So now Krissa and I are dog owners.

What does that mean?

It means that our hopes and fears are tied inextricably to the bowel movements of a small animal.

It means listening to strange, subdued, pelican-like warbling sounds in the middle of the night and wondering if Nano needs to take a crap, or if he's just pissed off that we're trying to sleep rather than keep him company.

It means me acquiescing, for the good of the pack, to Krissa's insistence that Nano walking around the apartment sniffing things is in fact 'pacing' and that Nano needs to go out to have a shit.

It means worrying because Nano doesn't finish his food.

It means idly wondering if lowering your eyes as you walk through a bunch of subway workers would be considered submissive behaviour if you were all dogs.

It means worrying because Nano has discovered the sofa, and this is where he runs whenever he sees us, because it's where most of the petting happens. Is this healthy?

It means sitting watching TV and having a little golden bundle slump down next to your leg and sigh, and put his head on your knee and look up at you with enormous eyes while you stroke him.

It means playing with a green paisley fish, a red rubber cone with a biscuit inside, and a rope.

It means smooshing someone's ears during the commercial breaks.

It means seeing the fabulous New York City harbor view at dawn from the top of Sunset Park, watching the Tai Chi practioners, squirrels and pigeons together with Nano in the half light.

It means enormous praise and pride when Krissa got Nano to start playing fetch, rather than just pouncing on the thrown object and then losing interest.

It means having someone very excited to see you in the morning.

It's generally pretty awesome.

I've just been chatting to a coworker about Nano and explaining that we named him for the measurement prefix nano- as in ten to the power of minus nine, as in really really tiny - and NOT for the iPod Nano - when he said, "That's funny, because you know why nano is used as a prefix? because in Greek Nanos means dwarf."

So...sleep deprivation notwithstanding, I'm happy we got our dwarf.