It’s almost six years now, and I still think about that first morning we woke up with our dog.
We made a lot of boneheaded mistakes in the beginning, and that first night was no exception. We had brought Izzy home from a Queens’ shelter on a Friday night without any preparation. We had a few hours to let her wander around the apartment, introduce her to our cat Tillie, and take her for a walk around the neighborhood before it was time to go to sleep. We decided that the dog would not sleep with us until her relationship with our cat was stable and everyone felt OK about everyone. So we took Tillie into the bedroom and closed the door leaving Izzy on the couch with an old yellow blanket we found balled up in the closet (See above re: boneheaded mistakes).
After a seemingly endless night of tossing and turning and worrying and listening very hard for any crying or whimpering—and hearing absolutely nothing, I finally gave up. At about five in the morning, I opened the bedroom door. What would I find? Had she chewed the sofa to pieces? Gone to the bathroom all over the floor? Found a way to open the kitchen cabinets and spread garbage everywhere? But there, on the floor was our little dog curled up on her blanket. She was so close that I almost tripped over her when I opened the door. Izzy looked up at me with big bright eyes and wagged her tail. Thump, thump, thump.
She had pulled the blanket off the couch and dragged it across the apartment. She didn’t scratch at the door, she didn’t whine, she didn’t bark. She just curled up and waited patiently by the bedroom door.
She wanted to be as close to us as she could possibly get. Sleeping on the couch fifteen feet away from the closed door wasn’t good enough. If the best she could do was to drag that crappy blanket across the room to end up on the wrong side of a closed door, well that was just fine, thank you.
Why didn’t she freak out her first night at our house, separated from the two new people who had brought her home from the shelter? Did she worry? Did she think this strange place three flights above Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was going to be awful? Did she wonder if that bedroom door would ever open again?
I will never know what she thought or felt that first night at our home. I will never know what made her first family leave her tied to a lamppost on a city street in the summer of 2002. I will never know why the tips of her ears are scarred, or why she was housetrained, but didn’t know how to walk on a leash. There are many mysteries that I will never unravel about my little dog. But maybe the biggest one for me is how from the first night at our house, she knew to believe in us.
