It happened accidentally: viewing a litter of golden retrievers, in a moment of weakness, we took two instead of the one puppy we’d promised our kids.
No. We didn’t “take two”. What happened was: after our teenager had chosen his pup, Earl, I cracked, and took another I named Monty.
On the drive up, my husband had suggested taking two. The kids seconded the idea but I, the pragmatist (read: the realist) and also the person who mops the floors, said: “no way.”
Two puppies at once is a terrible idea. They’re harder to train and to socialise, and they will form a dyad of destruction around your home and garden. But sitting on the grass in the neat back yard of the breeder’s house, I fell instantly in love with one of the five fine, fat, furry four-week-old kidney-bean-shaped boy babies – and it wasn’t Earl.
So I “gave in” to my family’s misguided desire for two dogs, in order to get my dog. I justified my weakness – after all, they’d keep each other company when we were out of the house. As it happened, it was about to be 2020, and we never left the house for several years.
A month (and a second eight-hour return drive to collect them) later, we were the custodians of a rare and precious thing: beauty.
The pups were as cute as all get-out, of course. There’s a reason they use golden retriever puppies in toilet paper ads, with their classic teddy-bear faces: yellow fuzz, a long muzzle, three black buttons for the nose and eyes. But as their legs lengthened and their bodies became slender and supple, as their coats grew longer, wavier and more golden, they became simply beautiful.
That beauty triggers a particular kind of delight in people. When I walked towards strangers in the street with the puppies trotting at my side or tumbling over each other at the ends of their leads, I could pick the moment when the other person saw the dogs. Their faces changed. They smiled, even laughed aloud, came up with clever things to say. (Mostly variations on “cute”, “TWO puppies!” and so on, and my favourite: “lion cubs!”). Many of them took on a kind of yearning look.
Even now, when the dogs are five years old, the sight of their golden coats gets a second look, a third, a timid reaching-out of the hand, from more people than you’d think. Some of that delight and admiration extends to me, as I stand with the dogs at my feet and an admirer crouched before me, offering words of praise.
Children mobbed the puppies in the school playground at drop-off time. They’d sink to the earth and bury their faces in the puppies’ fur. They’d beg to pat them, ask their names and a thousand other questions. This was not so much admiration as fellowship: puppies and kids have a lot in common.
Come lockdown (and then another, and another), the dogs were a naive, perspective-forcing presence in our house: they only knew that we were there for them and that they got a lot of walks. At times they were the circuit breaker that four people stuck home for months on end couldn’t do without.
Two puppies was a bad idea. My garden was, remains, destroyed. The lounge room floor needs sweeping and mopping daily (and doesn’t always get it). Small plastic toys mysteriously vanish, only to reappear in unspeakable ways, sometimes having been processed by a canine’s stomach – in one direction or the other. We’ve lost count of the emergency runs to vets at the slightest hint of a swallowed battery or toxic weed consumed.
Each day’s roster of tasks has had feeding, water, walks and brushing added to the checklist. The teddy bears have been replaced by needy, barking, always not-quite-brushed-enough dogs that require a lot of picking up after, if you take my meaning.
The pups were constant motion. When we walked, they swirled around my feet clockwise and anti-clockwise until I was tangled up in blue and red ribbons, bound tight around the knees and I had to slowly extract each lead to free myself. It was a complicated dance that left me feeling fettered and besieged. It was a bit like having kids: freedom ripped away and replaced by love.
But they learned: to heel, to walk beside me, two golden shadows keeping pace (the kids, not so much).
Now, when I walk with the dogs, I am something more than just myself, more than human. We are a pack.
