Ruffly Speaking

Where is The Infant Cryer ? Where are the wonderful advertisements, the gorgeous photos, and the strings of letters and numbers attesting to health, intelligence, and temperament? Where, where, where are the brags? Nowhere. Why? The answer, sad and obvious: The game of human children is Monopoly with no Go and no two hundred dollars, nothing to brag of at all.
    Or so I assumed until I met Ivan, whose last name was not, in fact, The Terrible, but Flynn-Isaacson. This boy seemed to me definitely to merit a costly spread in Kiddy Kennel Review. I’d observed Ivan’s foray into Alice Savery’s territory, but the date of our first real encounter was Wednesday, July 1. The place was the Avon Hill Summer Program. The occasion was a hands-on grooming workshop. The hands were those of Leah’s eight students. The on was Rowdy, who’d been drafted into service because he was both big enough to go around and sucker enough to tolerate what I imagined would be the inept swipes and yanks of sixteen brush-and-comb-wielding juvenile fists.
    Perhaps I should say outright that especially since I got involved with Malamute Rescue, I have come to resent young children. I don’t have anything against them per se or in vacuo, as one not only says in Cambridge, but says aloud, preferably in the hearing of other people. No, what I increasingly have against little children is the same thing I have against cats, a species I unequivocally like, per se and in vacuo. I keep getting all these phone calls from people who would make great adoptive owners of rescued Malamutes if only, only, only they didn’t have those damned babies. Or toddlers. The policy laid down by Betty Burley, the coordinator of our local rescue effort, is that we don’t place rescue dogs in families with young children. Period. If you ask Betty why, she’ll explain that we don’t know the entire life histories of the dogs. The truth is that Betty doesn’t trust parents. Neither do I, and with good reason: How far can you trust people ashamed to brag and too cheap to advertise?
    Back to Ivan. By ten-thirty on Wednesday morning, my portable grooming table was set up on the grass adjacent to Leah’s classroom at AHSP, and all eight of Leah’s little beasts, five girls and three boys, were simultaneously practicing their rudimentary grooming skills on what was undoubtedly the happiest Alaskan malamute ever to grace a Goodrich nonskid easy-clean vinyl surface, and that’s saying something. Rowdy is crazy about children, and if you avoid water to the extent of not even whisper-
    ing the word, he loves to be groomed. Once Leah’s campers, if you’ll pardon the gross expression, started carefully parting and brushing out their assigned sections of Rowdy’s coat, he would’ve been content to stand patiently, his feet firmly planted, for as long as they’d continue to stroke him.
    Leah had wisely assigned Rowdy’s head to the tallest child, a round-faced Asian girl named Mee Lee, who had a trace of an accent and the deft and gentle touch you’d expect in a professional groomer with ten years’ experience. Mee Lee was dressed in brand-new pink Oshkosh overalls and a matching flowered jersey; and the tiny red-haired girl dutifully working on Rowdy’s left foreleg foot wore a lavender shorts-and-top outfit with appliquéd butterflies that might as well have been arranged to spell out “I’m from the suburbs.” The remaining six were scruffy Cambridge whiz kids with rumpled unisex clothes and uncombed hair. A golden-eyed boy with coffee-colored skin and a plump, yellow-haired girl discovered that each had accompanied a parent to Cuba the previous winter. He went with his mother, she with her father. Neither child seemed even slightly surprised to learn that the other, too, had met Castro. Was I impressed? Not at all. Whenever I find myself in Havana, I always pop in for a nice gossip, of course, but I’d always supposed that adulthood had its privileges.
    Ivan, who’d been handed the vital but ignominious assignment of brushing Rowdy’s tail and anal area, didn’t mention any recent hobnobbing with Fidel. He made quite a powerful impression on me nonetheless. Except for those big, round violet-blue eyes, he wasn’t much to look at, a scrawny, wiry kid whose brown hair still stuck up in the clumps and tufts I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him and evidently hadn’t been shampooed since. But as soon as I began to talk with him, I finally understood how