Gaits of Heaven

weight at sixty pounds. His coat, however, was a motley assortment of colors and textures, and consisted of uneven patches of gray and yellow, some long and silky, some short and wiry, as if his body had been inexplicably carpeted with a dozen or more ill-chosen remnants. His floppy ears and exceptionally hairy feet, in combination with his goofy smile and his long, heavily furred tail, gave him a clownish appearance. One of his eyes was hazel, the other deep brown. So odd was the creature’s appearance that to the casual observer even his membership in Cants familiaris might have been open to question. I, however, had been raised not merely by golden retrievers but as a golden, and had spent the rest of my thirty-plus years with dogs. I train dogs, I show dogs, I earn my living by writing about dogs, and I live with my two Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, my husband’s German shepherd, India, his pointer, Lady, and the aforementioned Sammy, Rowdy’s son and the household’s third malamute, the only one of the five dogs Steve and I co-own. The previous October, I’d added a new credential by marrying not just any veterinarian, but my own veterinarian, Steve Delaney. In brief, I was in a position to conduct an expert assessment of the bizarre-looking animal running from one end to the other of the armory’s front walk, with pauses to leap on the man and woman who accompanied him, and authoritatively to reach the counterintuitive conclusion that he was most definitely a dog.
    I learned his name, Dolfo, from his strikingly coiffed and dressed owners, who were uselessly repeating it, the man in a deep, pleasing voice, the woman in a high squeak. “Dolfo! Dolfo, good dog! Good Dolfo! Good, good boy!”
    In violation of the Cambridge leash law and the rules of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, Dolfo was off lead. When I had pulled a spare leash from my pocket and brushed past the woman, who was blocking the dog’s access to the traffic on Concord Avenue, I discovered that he wasn’t even wearing a collar. Having applied my expertise in dogs to identifying Dolfo’s subspecies, I should have gone on immediately to apply my knowledge of Cambridge and, in particular, my familiarity with Cambridge psychotherapists to the simple task of realizing that the absence of a collar was a sign of owner lunacy and therefore a sign that Dolfo’s owners were probably psychotherapists. As it was, I naively assumed that Dolfo had slipped his collar.
    My spare leash was a four-foot leather obedience lead with a snap at one end and a loop handle at the other. When I reached the dog, felt for his collar, and found none, I ran the length of thin leather through the handle and slid the resulting noose over the dog’s head and around his neck. Pleased with the success of this makeshift arrangement and the dog’s consequent protection from the cars on Concord Avenue and in the nearby rotary, I smiled at the owners and said, “He’s safe now!” As I awaited their thanks, the dog jumped on me, but I didn’t correct him and didn’t really mind. After all, if a guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and faints from a panic attack or announces that he’s Jesus, the shrink’s task isn’t to criticize and complain, is it? So, my principal reaction was happiness that the dog had arrived where he belonged, namely, at a psychoeducational facility where he could gain control of a symptom that irritated people and could go on to master skills that would transform him into a delight to himself, his owners, and the community as a whole. Also, I was wearing old clothes that had been ruined, in part, by dogs a lot bigger than Dolfo. My female malamute, Kimi, was seventy-five pounds, Rowdy was a lean eighty-five, and his young son, Sammy, was eighty-two pounds and still filling out. India, Steve’s shepherd, was a big girl, but she was too perfect ever to have ruined a piece of clothing, and Steve’s pointer, Lady, was small by my standards and too gentle and timid ever to have done any harm at all.
    Anyway, instead of thanking me for capturing their loose dog and instead of apologizing for his uncivilized behavior, the couple exchanged knowing glances. Clearing his throat, the man said in that strikingly pleasant, deep voice, “Oy vey! It’s hard to explain. Let’s just say that we don’t believe in leashes.”
    Evidently feeling that her partner had failed to express himself properly, the woman confided in a soft squeak, “Dolfo