The Raging Elitist

For most of Sammy’s life, she’s spent the night separated from us by a baby gate. It allows her free rein of the living room, kitchen, and den, and it allows the rest of us to sleep. Sammy wakes at odd hours, and somehow, she manages to be extremely loud while making hardly any noise. As my wife put it when we were discussing our mutual inability to sleep with her in the room, “It’s just her presence.”

Lately, we’ve been reorganizing, and the baby gate has been temporarily removed. Sammy has taken to sneaking into the guest bed once the lights go out, and sometimes she even dares the forbidden threshold of our room, a risk normally reserved for when someone mistakenly puts the lid down in the half bathroom out front. You can always tell when she’s breached the master bath by the trail of puddles leading away from the commode. This, I don’t mind. Catching her in the act is comical – the way she guiltily prances away dribbling and stealing a glance at you; it’s like seeing her get a taste of her own medicine, and I always picture it when I encounter the mess on the floor, which I often do first with a bare foot. The nighttime shenanigans are different, though. Stepping in potty water is one thing, but I really don’t like being awakened in the wee hours by a noiseless animal shame-stalking me. Somehow, “just her presence” is enough to make you feel guilty for almost letting yourself go back to sleep.

Last night, sensing her just on the other side of the doorway, I got out of bed and closed the door. Only I couldn’t close it all the way. Instead, I closed it halfway and felt it squish against a dog, who frantically and clumsily jumped up and crashed to her left and right before successfully, and noiselessly backing out of the way. I should’ve known. Lying in doorways is kind of Sammy’s thing. She likes to position herself in the one between the kitchen and the mudroom. That passage leads to the most oft used exterior door, and she’ll nap while blocking the opening to make sure that nobody leaves the house without her knowing. Of course, this behavior sometimes leads to her getting stepped on, an apparently necessary evil which she bears soundlessly.

I’d like to think that Sammy’s quiet demeanor is out of consideration for us, but it’s almost like the idea of whining or barking just doesn’t enter her head. If she were really being altruistic, I wouldn’t have stepped in her vomit walking out of my bedroom this morning and then discovered a turd in the living room. That would be a twisted favor, to avoid offending us with a whine or a bark only to have us scrub shit stains out of the carpet. Granted, Sammy likely hasn’t thought all that through, but I still don’t think she’s trying to be polite. I think she just really expects us to be aware of her presence and to interpret its meaning. I mean, she’s right there transmitting. How dumb could we be?

Pretty dumb as it turns out. Every night when we let her out for the last time, Danyelle and I have to stand watch or else she’ll sit there at the door staring at us without our knowing when she wants back inside. If we forget about her for too long, she’ll jump the fence and go on a food-about all through the neighborhood rather than bark or even so much as paw at the door. It’s like she’s a teenager, and rather than stoop to actually talk with her parents, she gets annoyed and says only, “You just don’t get it.”

We’ve seen an uptick in Sammy’s quiet rebelliousness of late, we think owing to Danyelle’s recent ankle injury and Sammy’s dissatisfaction with her replacement leash holders (the kids and me). While Danyelle’s been on the mend, Sammy’s taken to digging and lighting out on her own. Just the other day I was standing in the front yard talking to a neighbor when Danyelle reported Sammy had bolted through the front door. Not wanting to believe it, I walked inside and called her to no avail while Danyelle set out on the golf cart to search the neighborhood. It was a pleasant Saturday afternoon, and people were out, but nobody had seen Sammy. Finally, Danyelle and I stood in the front wondering where she could have gone when Danyelle gasped. “Oh my God. Look,” she said pointing to the house.

It was the type of scene that scares the hell out of you in a horror movie, the moment when you finally see the creepy ghost that’s been darting behind the curtain heretofore, except in this version the ghost in the window had been replaced by a white-faced dog, completely still, wearing an expression of sad disbelief. Sammy had gone into Scotty’s room to play with the kids, and they’d closed the door on their way out, accidentally trapping her. Now she stood there in the window, silently watching us look for her outside. Danyelle and I shared a little laugh while she pouted, humans and canine separated by a pane of glass and a mutual inability to comprehend the extent of each other’s dumbness.

There’s no telling exactly how much we take Sammy’s presence for granted. Safe to say, it’s a lot. The kids are probably the guiltiest of it despite my efforts to impress upon them that they have the best dog in the world and that one day not too long from now, she’ll be dead, a concept that I think they’re beginning to grasp. I’ve noticed that they pay Sammy more attention when they come home from school these days. She greets them by jumping down from her chair in the den and wagging so vigorously that she can’t help but dance around a little. I call it priss paws, because she steps so lightly while she does her little shuffle, occasionally landing on a socked foot so that you feel her delicate little pads spread apart as they press on you. She makes a noise too, one that is like all the noises she ever makes: involuntary. It’s a kind of guttural snort that comes from excitedly exhaling. Yesterday, when Cartter came home from school, Sammy greeted him thusly, a furry snort, wagging and dancing on priss paws. I noticed him laughing just a little while I asked him how his day was. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “What are you laughing at?”

“Just how funny Sammy is when you come in,” he said not taking his eyes off her, smiling while he petted her. As he stood to leave the room, I caught him throw a glance towards a picture on the wall, the watercolor he did of Sammy when he was in first grade last year. She’s wearing a green scarf, and snowflakes are falling behind her. It’s the picture I use with all my essays about Sammy when I post them on my blog. I could tell Cartter didn’t want me to see. His smile evaporated, and he looked away quickly. I can tell he knows. One day that presence that we so often fail to notice will be gone, and we’ll still be tripping over it, surprised it isn’t there.