What is a dog? At some cloudy, pink point in my life, I didn’t know the answer to that question, same as I didn’t know the answer to, What is blue? What is a tablespoon? What is fear? I imagine eventually my mother or father pointed to our old Afghan hound, Ytse, and said, “Dog.” Okay, I must have thought. I see the dog, but what is it? I see its eyes, its nose, its tail trailing fur like tentacles. But what is a tentacle? What is a dog? I was around four years old when Ytse collapsed in the kitchen. My mother took her to the animal hospital in lower Manhattan, and I never saw her again. Cancer had invisibly, wickedly filled her up. So a dog must be nothing. A dog is a dream I once had. A dog is a disappearance, a dog-shaped hole in an otherwise identical house. When I was six, my parents gave me Agatha, a sweet slip of a Scottish terrier puppy. My dad bought her from a pet store; back then, we didn’t know better. I think we have only one picture of her because she immediately came down with parvovirus, my mom took her to the animal hospital, and I never saw her again. It was the first time I remember seeing my mother cry, her face stiff and contorted like a house several days after a fire. I laughed. That was the first thing I did. Then I cried, because I realized I knew what a dog is. A dog is death. A dog is abandonment. A dog is sorrow. As soon as the period of parvo contamination in our house had passed, my parents got another Scottie puppy, this time brindle, and this time from a breeder in White Plains. My dad and I went to pick her out from the litter. I sat on the woman’s plush red carpet and let puppies run all over me. I wanted the one that came over and curled up in my lap; my dad wanted the one that peed on him. “That’s character,” he said. So we went with character. She was the runt of the litter, and until we took her home as Agatha, she’d been called Ida Red. Maybe a dog is a second chance. A dog is death and life. A dog is plush red carpet and fresh warm pee. I’m an only child, so perhaps my bond with Agatha took on extra weight. Along with a handful of humans, she was my favorite company for 13 years. Almost perfectly, she died the summer before I left for college. I say almost perfectly because the pain was the greatest I’d ever felt. I cried for days that stretched into weeks, months even. Years. I wore her nametag as a necklace and broke down regularly in stores at the first note of a sad song—much like after my first breakup. Among other notables, two things stand out about Agatha: she once ate an entire pack of gum out of my grandmother’s purse, and I trained her to run from one end of our living room to the other, jumping over my extended leg along the way like my very own urban show pony. She was hilarious and sweet and loyal. She was a dog. Oh. A dog is hilarious. A dog is sweet. A dog is loyal.
Chloe Shaw, “What is a Dog?”
