The Dogfather

talking about what was going on between Steve and me as well. Damn! This is what comes of hanging around with a psychotherapist. According to Rita, everything always has to be some kind of symbol or image or metaphor. Hah! I did not tower over Steve. He was not about to roll belly up.
    We took our walk. With Sammy setting the pace, the so-called walk took us only a short distance down Walden Street. Reversing direction, the four of us returned to the corner of Walden and Concord and were heading home when we had a minor but unsettling encounter.
    Because of the rain, hardly anyone else was out, and most of the people we’d seen had been hurrying. A few had paused briefly to smile at the puppy and say how cute he was. Heading toward us now was a woman shrouded in a dark rain poncho with the hood up. Accompanying her at the end of a long retractable leash was a little dust mop of a dog, part shih tzu, part Lhasa, at a guess, with maybe some cocker mixed in. Spotting the new dog, Steve swooped Sammy up in his arms. As a vet, Steve was an especially protective owner. Until Sammy had had the last of his puppy shots, at about four months, Steve wouldn’t want him exposed to strange dogs. My concern about Kimi had to do with aggression rather than disease, but I immediately saw that there was no reason to worry. Kimi was much better with other dogs than she’d once been, and now, as the wet little dog scampered toward her, she seemed relaxed, amiable, and altogether happy to return what was clearly going to be a friendly greeting. The cheery dust mop bounced and wiggled up to Kimi, who returned the wiggle. If both dogs had been waving white flags, the peaceful nature of their intentions wouldn’t have been more clear than they were now. At the risk of repeating myself, I must stress that I, a human being and therefore fallible, might’ve missed a warning sign: a soft growl, an almost imperceptible raising of hackles, or a subtle change in the little dog’s respiration. Kimi, however, would’ve noticed even the most elusive cause for alarm.
    There was none. One second, the little newcomer was making friends. The very next second, this same harmless-acting creature had darted underneath Kimi and was ripping into her underbelly. A sneak is one thing. But a dog sneak! And a clever one. Fast, too.
    In a dog crisis, I’m pretty quick myself. Before Kimi could take revenge, I bent down over her and, with one hand on her collar and the other under her chest, lifted her up while addressing the poncho-clad owner. “Get your dog out of here now!”
    The owner was about ten feet away. When she yanked off the hood of her poncho, I recognized the woman whose bicycle had scared Frey a few weeks earlier. She was a real Cambridge type. Perhaps sixty-five, she had a boney, intelligent face and short, straight gray hair cut in an unflattering Dutch boy clip. While retracting the leash, she apologized to me in Harvardian pseudo-British tones and scolded her dust mop in the same voice. “So dreadfully sorry! I can’t imagine what got into her. Elizabeth Cady, bad girl! You had no reason whatsoever to display belligerence, did you? We’ll toddle off back home this very minute and contemplate our sins. So terribly sorry.” The retractable leash was now short, as it should’ve been all along. To my relief, the woman soon found a break in the traffic and led Kimi’s pint-size attacker to the opposite side of Concord Avenue. Elizabeth Cady. Stanton. Pioneer advocate of women’s rights. Cambridge, my Cambridge.
    When we got back to my house, we ended the evening as soon as we’d made sure that Kimi was uninjured. Steve trained dogs, too. Both of us understood the importance of keeping sessions short and happy. If everything is going well, it’s always tempting to push for yet more progress. That’s a beginner’s mistake. Steve and I weren’t novices, especially with each other.
    A few hours later, as I lay in bed awaiting sleep, I searched for a moral to what struck me as the parable or fable enacted that evening. Its title was evident: Kimi and the Dust Mop with Teeth. What eluded me was the moral. I wasn’t alone in the king-size bed. Rowdy was asleep on the floor under the air conditioner, which on this cool April night was, of course, turned off. Savoring happy memories or dreaming of Arctic blasts, he was in a sled dog tuck, his body in a fetal curl, his tail wrapped over his nose. Kimi was stretched out on the bed, her