Sometimes I get this blasting sensation of love like being hit with a fire hose.  That’s how I felt looking at the dogs this afternoon.  It’s a choked-up feeling that absolutely storms you, wipes you out.  It’s a little scary.  Of course I’ve had that before with people, sometimes with places, but it’s not particularly common.  When it happens, you feel bowled over and acutely dependent.  With your whole being you long unconsciously, a desperate, blissful subject, for it not to go.

Seeing as my life has revolved around dogs lately, I thought I’d write about them (again).  Dog pee, dog poop, dog love, dog whining, dog playing, dog naps, dog kisses, dog walks.  Everything dog.  It feels soothing to have my world channeled so singularly into one focus.  Maybe this is how novelists feel when they are completely absorbed in their work, writing in a cabin by a lake somewhere, escaping only for an hour or so in the afternoons to take a solitary walk.  So I feel with the dogs.  There is so much fleeting, flitting information in my day, tweets and blurbs and snippets of info, the internets synapses firing 2.5 times a second, so the dogs are this calm, steady flowing river.  They need me.  They are reliable.  Morning walk and food and nap and play and evening walk and food and play and sleep.  These are set routines and the dogs are happy within them.  I sit on the floor, they come curl up in my lap, and I take refuge from all these questions, pressures, thoughts.  I close my eyes and listen to Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” and feel that smoke-curling melancholy love, the one that you know is totally impractical and nostalgic and sentimental because in 2.5 seconds the music will stop and the dogs will go get up to chase an ant or play fight or race around the house with a sock, but while it lasts, you let yourself hover in that sweet transporting emotion.

So I was briefly transported this afternoon by Bon Iver and two sleeping dogs in my lap and then, of course, Stella took off to go observe activity from the balcony, leaving me feeling like a jilted lover rubbing my eyes on the floor, and a second later Pasa started peeing on the most inconvenient of ledges tilted above the stairs, and so went my mournful Northern Wisconsin breakup music and drifting love-ache feelings as I got my socks wet shouting, “NO!!!  NO!!!”

Still, there is something about dogs that rips my heart out.  It’s the kind of radical love that completely supersedes you and your pedos (farts, as the Mexican would say).  When it leaves you and you need to focus on yourself again, you settle back into your ego and your mind dully disappointed by that meddling, boring, familiarly self-absorbed self you find.

The other night I took them for a walk on the Cerro Fortin and we met a whole bunch of kids from the Casa Hogar, an orphanage of sorts in Oaxaca.  Being the dumb innocent I can be at times, I had no idea they were from the Casa Hogar, which has somewhat of a reputation for being a madhouse (this info via Jorge, who once taught a photography workshop for these kids).  The kids came rushing en masse towards the dogs.

“PERRRRIIIIIITOOOOO!”  shouted a big older girl followed by a gang of dirty scruffy little boys.  They scooped up the slightly miffed Pasa.  We began walking together towards the summit of one Fortin peak, which gives a view west out onto the valley from which toots and honks and gas truck jingles rise, and a view north and east onto the Sierra Norte and the scattered gold maze of the city.  One kid told me the group was from D.F, visiting Oaxaca.  I bought that hook line and sinker until I was sitting in the midst of a group of them, and a teenage boy was asking the Stella to shake again and again, and a kind older man with a mustache said, “did you tell her where you’re from?”  He said it in a therapeutic way, as if they needed to let it out.  I knew then before they said it but I appreciated that they told me anyway.

“La Casa Hogar,” said the teenager with Harry Potter spectacles.  He was a bigger kid with smooth white skin and a kind, childish face.  He was the one who took the most real interest in the dogs, really wanted to know about them, to work that mystery of dog-human communication out.  He looked at me carefully, following my words when I said, “Down.”  “Stay.”  I left him with the Stella for a moment to make sure that the horde of kids gathering around Pasa wasn’t going to traumatize the poor girl.  When I came back, he was muttering, “Good girl, good girl,” with the Stella’s paw in his hand.  He was wrapping his mouth around the “r” of girl, a hard sound for Spanish speakers, carefully trying to get it right.  Not for me, but for Stella.  I paused, heart in throat, before such an act of tenderness from this boy, a gesture of selfless interest in and concern for another living being you don’t find everyday.  There’s a lot of hoopla around the perros, but this kid, he had a natural love for them.

Soon enough the crowd had bored of the puppy and come to check out the Big Dog, which scared the bejeezus out of the smaller kids.  The braver ones wanted to walk her, which to them seemed comparable to leading a tiger around at the circus.  I let them make circles around the small parking lot with a beaming, tolerant Stella, who seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing.  A little girl, maybe eight or nine, was also named (E)Stella, and the kids teased her about sharing a name with a massive German Shepherd.  She was scared of Stella to the core, but I asked her to just touch the dog, just once, so she could see that it was a nice dog.  She reached out her hand very, very carefully, stroked Stella’s back, and squealed.  Then she came back.  Again and again, closer and closer, until she touched Stella’s ear and seemed finally to give herself over to the experience.  She looked at Stella for a good long time.

I must’ve sat and walked and talked with those kids for a half an hour, talking about dogs and life.  They were bursting with kid exuberance, rolling down the pavement hill of the parking lot and jumping this way and that.  I finally had to say goodbye as the light was falling, and they followed me, falling back one by one, saying goodbye again and again to the dogs.  When I’d made it halfway down the hill towards home, their truck passed, fifteen or so kids standing in the back of a beat-up pickup, shouting, “ADIOS, ESTELLA!  ADIOS, PASITA!”

I was choked up.  I know I’m a sentimental fool, but c’mon, it takes a lot of ego not to feel enormously lucky at such a moment.  Who knows what those kids lives are like; it would be an indulgence in dull and cheap sentimentalism to wax poetic about how hard they have it, but growing up an orphan in Mexico is no grand fiesta.  They seemed happy enough, and the people taking care of them exuded warmth; no Dickensian exploitation there.  But the way they latched on to the dogs, hugging them, staring at them, made me realize that I get this outpouring of canine affection everyday, this free, unquestioning, unending stream of pure love, something which for them is most likely unknown.  It’s hard to find that in a person, hard to find that in many families, and I have it from many people and two big fuzzy fat-pawed dogs.

Back up on the hill one of the little boys, a shyer one who kept a circle of distance around him and the Stella, had finally come up to join the line of kids getting Stella to shake.  Once he did it once, he was thrilled, and did it again and again:  “Shake.”  Paw.  “Shake.” Paw.  “Shake.” Paw.  When I gave Stella pats and kisses after the consecutive shakes, he looked up at me and asked, “Why do you pet her?”  It was an earnest question.  He really didn’t know.  And I didn’t think about it before I said, “Because I love her.”  And he didn’t look at me, he looked at the Stella, and this little boy, who had been so scared of her ten minutes earlier, wrapped his arms around her thick neck and held her.

That.  Love.  Some people, some kids, really don’t know that.  “Why do you pet her?”  What can we do?  In another life, I’d start a non-profit devoted to training street kids to train dogs.  But in this life, maybe, I’d hope to take my dogs to the Casa Hogar again, talk about dogs and why we pet them, and write about it.  And feel so grateful for the opportunity to take a nap in bed with two dogs on the floor, and to wake up and have them come up and greet me, wagging tails, big smiling eyes, bursting at the seams with unconditional love.  To get hit with that fire hose again and again and again.