I learned at a young age that animals have souls, the same as us, and suffer from the same things that hurt us.   Apparently not everybody is taught these simple things about animals, sad to say.

I learned these things from my father, and also from my mother who knew them too.   If you don’t like being cold, make sure the dog isn’t suffering from the cold.  Being hungry hurts, remember to feed the dog before you yourself eat. These things were taught to my sister and me in the home where we grew up.  Dogs lived with us from the time I was a young baby.  The first was a brilliant black and white spaniel mutt named Patches who my parents adopted before I came along.  

Patches had lived quite nicely on the street before she let my parents take her in.  She displayed this talent for hobo living throughout her life, raiding the nearby bar’s garbage container for chicken and other delicacies during her daily forages. She was almost never on a leash, and walked the neighborhood as she pleased when the weather was nice.   She ran, even before I was old enough to, with the neighborhood kids to greet the Good Humor truck.  The Good Humor man would open a cup of vanilla for her and wait for my mother to come out with the dime to pay for it.

“Patches and Pop would take off as soon as you toddled into the room,” my father would laugh every time he related it.  Pop was my grandfather, the only one of the two I knew, my mother’s father.  “Patches and Pop would be on the other side of the room, watching you.   You used to pull Patches’s ears and try to ride her, so she kept her distance from you.  And Pop had big ears and that temptingly pendulous nose too, so he had reason to be worried about you.   He used to sit with Patches on the far side of the room and the two of them would watch you like a pair of vultures.”

I remember the last night of Patches’ life, my father up with her all night.  Lights on, noises in the bathroom, water running, the muffled sound of my mother crying.  The day Patches died (at the vet’s) was the saddest of my young life. 

We went to the Westminster Dog Show soon after Patches died to find our favorite breed.  We chose the West Highland White Terrier and arranged, with breeders Frank Brumby and his wife, (Brumby had a great Scottish accent) to purchase a young Westie puppy bitch (as it said on her papers, to our great delight) we named Winifred, or Winnie.  She was adorable, if a little hopped up when we first got her to her new home.

“They respond to body warmth,” my father told me, as the puppy squirmed on the side of the upholstered chair I was sitting in.  Positioning the little dog along my leg, which was warm, seemed to calm her down.  My arm over her flank and my hand on her back warmed her a bit more.  In a moment she was snoring, dreaming those puppy dreams a warm puppy can dream when it is pressed up against a heat-giving friend.

Winnie was probably my father’s favorite dog.  She was a sweetheart, very patient, and with a good sense of humor.  There’s a shot of her wearing my father’s big horn-rimmed glasses.  She’s looking at the camera, deadpan.  She died young, after posing for the immortal shot sleeping on my napping father’s chest, his arm draped over her on the couch.  She was followed by Dodi, Dodi’s daughter Sassy, Ginger, and, after my father’s death, and tragically, an ill-fated dead-ringer for dead poodle Ginger my mother named Lovey.  The story of those dogs is another story for another time.

I just note here how deeply this love of animals was instilled in us.  The animals themselves, by their behavior, by the directness of their affection, taught us to love them.  This is how we learn to love whatever we do love, I suppose.  It is unusual, I would think, not to learn to love somebody who shows you nothing but love.

Until I was in my twenties I never saw the charm of babies below a certain age. They were kind of disgusting, it seemed to me, and it struck me as a little sickening the way everyone cooed over these little puking vegetables.  Then, in a flash,  I learned to love babies from a baby, a one year-old master teacher named Ana Jaya Saroj.  I remember the feeling of exactly how it hit.  It was at my parents’ dining room table, she reached out from her mother’s lap.  I took her somewhat reluctantly in my arms, her face turned up to me, smiling, arms extended for a hug.   It was as though she extended her arms directly into my chest, where they grew like a living plant to attach to my metaphorical heart.  Her hug was like vines that grew straight into my heart.  She was the gateway baby that gave me the insight to love other babies.

Likewise, it was a cat who taught me the love of cats.  We were all dog people in the house where I come from, I never had any connection with or sympathy for cats.   Cats, to me, seemed like arrogant, self-serving bastards.  My girlfriend at the time had saved a tiny kitten from boys who’d cornered her under a car and were trying to drive her out with a stick.  She was excited about it over the phone, cooing about this adorable pet I didn’t want, already in my home.  Little did I know, by the time I arranged to have her adopted the following day, that it was already over, I was already working for a cat.  

I packed her inside my jacket on a chilly night and set off on my bicycle to an apartment where I’d drop her off for adoption.  On the noisy bridge that connects 207th Street to Fordham Road she became alarmed, climbed upwards one step, put her paws around my neck, let out a soft plaintive cry, and bit me tenderly on the Adam’s Apple.   I rode back home with her still in my jacket, after the cats at the apartment I was dropping her reacted to her presence with hissing feline rage.  

A very doglike little animal, and beautiful, she would remain my tenderest companion until she died.  I have a fondness for most cats now, because Oinsketta taught me how lovable a cat can be and I see a little of her spirit in every cat I meet.

Phrases from childhood attest to the lifelong sensitivity to animals and susceptibility to their love. To this day, when my sister or I drive ditheringly around a parking lot, seemingly looking for a particular spot, we mumble “looking for some shade for the dog,” which our father said whenever the dog was in the car.   It was wrong, and sometimes deadly, to leave a dog locked in a car that would be baking in the hot sun.  He uttered the phrase so reflexively that my sister and I turned it into a joke, though it was, in fact, a humane and sound practice when parking a car on a hot day and having the dog wait in the car.

Likewise the Old Testament’s commandment (it may be in some related book, I don’t have the source handy) to feed an animal before yourself.  This is easy enough to do, get up from the table where you’re about to tuck into your own dinner, get the animal’s food, put it in a bowl, get some fresh water for the creature, give it a pat on the head and return to dinner.  The animals the Bible had in mind were donkeys, horses, camels, cows, chickens, sheep.  How much more did this simple decency extend to smaller animals who hop up next to you when they’re ready for a nap?

“Food is love,” my father once said when feeding overweight Sassy from his plate.  And while food is not, strictly speaking, love, good food is better than many things.  And preparing food for someone with care is an act of love.  And we all get it.  What really showed the love was the way my father gave Sassy her shot of insulin every night, after the heavy, paranoid, long-lived Cairn terrier developed diabetes in those last few years.