A lucky draw

Happy birthday, Allie

Today’s accompanying tune: “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood

My plan had backfired. That much I knew, as I sat outside with my dog Alice at 1 a.m., hoping to convince her to come back inside. My partner Andrew — Alice’s favorite human on the planet — had been away on a work trip for a few days, and she had officially had enough.

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When I first talked to Andrew about getting a second dog, I campaigned hard for a puppy. Our older dog Oliver is picky with other dogs at his best — a puppy would grow up with his quirks, learn to read his socially awkward behaviors, leave his favorite toy alone. Andrew, who’d only grown up with dogs at arms’ length, hesitated. He was nervous about the work, the time, the noise. The chaos of crate training, leash training, potty training. The unknowability of her own quirks, her personality, her likes, her dislikes. How big she would get. What she would grow out of, what would stick. How we’d manage two dogs, where they’d stay if we traveled, where they’d sleep. As the hesitations mounted, my plan clicked into place.

“But, she could be your dog.”

Oliver had bossed him around for half a decade, treating him as second fiddle when I wasn’t around. To Oliver, Andrew existed to take him on walks and refill his dinner bowl, but little else. They coexisted, but inroads were never made.

Here was a chance to have his own dog! To experience that all-encompassing joy of finding and knowing your soul dog, the dog who looks so deeply into your soul that there’s little doubt they originated there. The dog that communicates with you effortlessly, whose personality acquires all your best qualities and mirrors the rest of their own accord. The dog that forces you to change, to reevaluate your life, because you’re willing to do just about anything to make them happy, to give them a fraction of the life they’re giving you. The more I pitched the plan — with Oliver’s assistance as a nuisance, generally — Andrew had indications of giving in. It would happen, once we had more rooms than dogs. Getting a second dog while we lived in a single-bedroom, cramped apartment in San Francisco was out of the question, though we fostered dogs here and there when we could.

We picked up Alice before we had a working hot water heater or figured out what was wrong with our gas range in the new house in the desert. We had minimal furniture — the couches had come a week before, and our bed was recently assembled. We drug the dog bed into the main room and recommissioned the old crate we’d brought with us from San Francisco from Oliver’s younger days. With our three whole bedrooms, the sky was the limit.

I saw Alice — then just one of the Lucky Thirteen litter — in a photo of a jumble of little black pit mix puppies. The rescue organization had listed the litter just one town over, so we put our names in and hoped for the best. After weeks trawling PetFinder, we’d joked about how silly it would be to drive hours to adopt a dog, any dog, when so many were languishing away in shelters nearby. Certainly we’d be able to bring home a local. As we video chatted with the rescue organization — showing them our bare home, our fenced yard, our other dog — we also discussed logistics. Would we be available to drive into Compton, where the foster family was located, to see the litter that weekend?

At this point, though, she’d also shown us the puppies, little grainy specks climbing over and around each other in the background as we conducted our admissions interview. How could we not?

Alice’s given name was Cubby, a touching tribute to another family’s pet that had passed away. The foster family listed Cubby as one of the several puppies that hadn’t yet been spoken for, but noted that, since she was the last of the litter, she was much smaller and more hesitant than her siblings. She’d wait to play, to eat, to interact just to see how it would be received. She followed her mother, a gorgeous pit bull named Blue, closely. When left to her own devices, she scaled the walls of the wire kennel her and her siblings were stuck in. We watched her climb out once, twice, three times, for good measure. One of the volunteers told us to please take her, please, she is leading a puppy uprising in the house, teaching her siblings through her actions how to escape, how to evade capture, how to generally wreak havoc. She also looked much different than the rest of the litter — her massive, round head betrayed her bully breed lines, but her athletic, extremely long body and long hair spoke to something else deeper still. Andrew looked at her, this strangely shaped dog expertly maneuvering a ladder climb out of her crate, and told the volunteer that we would happily take her off his hands. On the hours-long drive back to the desert, we settled on naming her Alice. Just a girl, on her own adventure into Wonderland.

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As she grew, we realized the name didn’t entirely fit her personality. Far from a dazed and confused character, Alice was opinionated, she was smart, she was fierce. We started calling her Allie weeks after ordering her a personalized dog tag engraved with Alice. She had a tendency to overreact and a deep love of other dogs. She was fascinated by birds and would simply stand, motionless, watching them traverse the sky day in and day out. She severed a tether ball from its tether after months of spinning in circles trying to liberate it. She mimicked everything Oliver did — even some of his less-than-stellar habits — hoping to earn his own adoration, protected only by the reluctant façade he attempts to maintain each day. She became a favorite at her boarding facility and assaulted each and every visitor we’ve had with a full lick regimen. She graduated from crate training and has earned the ability to roam free range while we’re away. We’re working on her leash training, her reactivity. She’s a woman of big emotions, always.

Which is exactly what I told the vet this summer, where we sat after spending hours in the yard in the dead of the night. I’d consoled her, fed her treats, let her get her anxious energy out, without any improvement. Nothing I did helped, and I called the vet’s office as soon as they opened angling for an urgent care appointment. Eventually, after a thorough examination, they deduced that she’d had a panic attack.

“Has anything changed recently, any big schedule or routine adjustments?” she asked.

“My husband’s out of town, and he’s her favorite person.”

The vet nodded, agreeing that that would do it. On normal days, calling her his shadow may be an understatement. She is where he is at all times, often underfoot with all 60 pounds of herself. She goes to work, lounges in the sun, heads into the park for walks, rides in the car, with him. She has never wanted anything more than to be in his presence, to gnaw on bones while he taps away on the computer, to follow him around the yard during chores. Though she loves everyone canine and human alike, she adores him. To her, there is no second fiddle, no understudy. She tolerates me, accepts my presence and my treats. But she is not mine, she never was.

We’ve gotten closer, Allie and me, as the years have gone on. She’s learned that, yes, I do enforce the rules, but I also am loose handed with the treats. I scratch the one spot on her back she can’t reach; I abdicate my spot on the couch after it’s warm. I insist she come with us on walks even though we’re working on her manners and her reactivity and it’s not exactly how must people would want to start their mornings, all because I think she deserves the best life she can have. She isn’t a dog you can raise your voice to — even reprimanding Oliver sends her into a spiral. Managing her emotions is making us all that much more in touch with our own, with hers, with ours collectively.

When Andrew returned, it was as if nothing had ever happened. It was simply the best day of Allie’s life, to see him again. Nothing mattered from the past few days, only the pure joy of being reunited and the relief that he’d returned. She leapt and spun and whined, heralding his return. She was complete; the other half of her own soul had returned.

Allie is a gift of a dog, though not mine to share. She trusts without question, loves without restraint, runs without fear. No emotion is too small to feel, to express. No stick of butter cooked with unnoticed, and no ball kept away from people or dogs unaware they’re the second half of a two-person game. She is skeptical of blonde women and is convinced that carrots are the height of luxury. She is itchy all the time and lives to chase bunnies out of the yard at night. She still watches the birds, entranced as they fly overhead. She lives to play ball — the tether never stood a chance. Her floppy ears bounce to the cadence of her still strangely shaped body, her front legs doing almost all of the work of propelling her through space. She dismounts the couch front legs first, dragging her outstretch hind legs for their full length off the surface. The puppy who would rather climb out of her cage than sit and wonder what to do next is, today, a four-year-old dog giving herself, and us, grace in growing into the beings we want to become, as aspirational as they may be. She sees it, even if we don’t. She is what living with love, with care, with yourself, at the forefront truly looks like, and I couldn’t be happier to be sitting ringside and watching it all happen.

Happy birthday to the Lucky Thirteen — here’s to the strangest, most unique, silliest, gentlest, most sensitive dogs we all have ever known. May they guide us, heal us, teach us, and may we hope only to give them a fraction of the life they’ve given us.

See you all in 2025.

- Megan