18 newyork| march30–april12, 2020
this morning, I walked the dog. I hadn’t
slept much (who’s sleeping?) and at 2 a.m.
was on the couch texting with a friend about
earthquakes and World War II and our sud-
den alienation from our regular lives, which
seem, in retrospect, almost silly in their pret-
tiness, but then 8 a.m. rolled around and the
dog needed to go out. And now, having
walked her, I understand a little bit better
the reason for dogs. At least three times a
day, our dog requires that we behave (osten-
sibly for her good, but really for our own) in
ways that are familiar, reasonable, and sane.
Our dog, a rescue, came to us from Texas
in an 18-wheeler tricked out as a kennel on
the weekend before Hurricane Sandy. As the
clouds gathered on the Sunday before the
storm, our new dog disembarked in a park-
ing lot in North Jersey, skinny, not yet a year
old, and shivering with fear as a man handed
us the business end of a red leash. “Thank
you for saving this dog’s life,” he said, and I
wept. She is part hound, part shepherd —
“with eyebrows,” my husband likes to say, by
which he means light-brown markings
above her eyes that make her look extra
intelligent, which she is. The storm hit 24
hours after we brought her home; tree
branches whipped at our windows and
crashed into the street. In the midst of it all,
my husband took her out to pee and the cops
stopped him and ordered him indoors. But
what are you supposed to do in a disaster
with a dog?, we wondered at the time. She
had to go out, so we took her.
The dog seems to understand that we
saved her life, and her attitude toward us is
one of unqualified gratitude. Like me, she
prefers to do things on a strict and predict-
able schedule, so this morning, after not
having slept much, after having awoken
and spoken with my husband first about
the loss of our savings and then about the
necessity of remaining productive and
forward looking and maintaining our good
humor, after drinking some stale coffee
because we’re suddenly worried about
squandering food, I put on my dog-walking
clothes and went outside.
And it was like a miracle, like a doorway
to before. For an hour, everything felt exactly
the same. The dog needed to go out. It was
my turn to take her out. We walked together
down our beautiful block, the front yards lit
with gas lamps and planted with trees just
beginning to flower, a block I am grateful for
even when reasons to be grateful are more
abundant than they are now. We went to the
park where we usually go and saw the same
people we usually see. Six feet apart is pretty
normal with dog people, who are only half
paying attention to the conversation as they
watch their dogs or are wandering off mid-
sentence in search of their dog or the shit the
dog just took somewhere in a distant patch
of grass. Dog-park intimacy is already con-
ditional. We know not to expect too much.
The feeling of normalcy the dog walk gave
me was so intense I could almost pretend
that what was happening in my apart-
ment—the rearranging of furniture to make
more work spaces, the teenager sleeping in
on a weekday, the cooler of vegetables out
on the fire escape—wasn’t. I noted that the
trash can was empty, meaning the garbage
service in the park was functioning, and also
that workers in trucks were doing mainte-
nance on the baseball fields and shrubs were
being pruned. Other people out with their
dogs said hi and smiled, and it all felt very
busy and regular, like the park on any other
day, except that I was a little more awakened
to what was beautiful about it.
Order is what we need now. The dog rep-
resents a stupid chore that simply needs to
be done, that can’t be deferred out of anxiety
or being overwhelmed. In doing it, I get so
much—sunlight and daylight and spring-
time and also the recognition of my own
loneliness and fear in the faces of my neigh-
bors. We are not built to live on Zoom.
Our dog gets this; she loves her people.
And she has anxiety, mostly about whether
the people she loves are together in one
place and within her herding radius. So she
doesn’t like it when the doorbell rings or
when strangers come over, because she likes
to be clear about who’s in her pack. She hates
it when one of us brings a suitcase out from
under the bed, because it makes her wonder
whether she’ll be coming with or left behind.
But what’s beautiful about her—what’s
beautiful about all pets—is that her anxiety
is almost entirely present tense. She can’t
imagine what I was imagining in the middle
of the night. She’s content to be in isolation,
as long as the isolation includes us. ■
4
Walk the Dog
PHOTOGRAPH: PICTURE POST/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Illustration by Eugenia Loli
BY LISA MILLER
L I C K T H E
POOP BAG
DIRECTLY
5
I can’t open dog-poop bags anymore. Now that my former
go-to method—licking my thumb and forefinger and, aid-
ed by the wetness, rubbing the top of the bag apart—is not
an option, the task has become impossible. So here is a
solution I have come up with: Lick the bag as if it were an
envelope. I know it sounds bad—and trust me, it looks
worse. You just have to lick the part that was safely tucked
away in the roll, untouched by your potentially contami-
nated hands, free of germs other than whatever ones
were on it to begin with, and open it. kelly conaboy
