Munchkin was a dog.While it's hard to imagine anything other than an lap-sized shitzu being named after the diminutive tribes of Oz (which, he was, in fact, having been adopted six weeks after our family moved to Kansas) I have to occasionally remind myself of this fact.
Munchkin was not like other dogs. Excepting the first few, inevitably, adorable months of his life, Munchkin was a foul-smelling, hazy-eyed rat-shaped creature with perenniel gunk in his eyes and a tongue that hardened just outside his mouth, with the personality of a psychoticaly possessive and pathologically grumpy old man. He may also, incidentally, have been my soul mate.
I bring this up now, because I had a dream about Munchkin last night. Having spent the last week or so fondling adorable dogs in one way or another, I guess dogs have been on my mind.
This dream, however, was not full of vacant puppy cuteness, or the kind of knee-jerk satisfaction that comes with meeting the needs of a creature designed to need.
In my dream, I was in Paris, which seems to be the sort of sound-stage of my pysche for dreams about Guam. And I had brought Munchkin, perhaps ill-advisadly, to live with me. There was also some sort of sprawling hotel, lazer-like tornadoes searing through the ceiling, and a death-defying climb on the tiled roof, but that's beside the point.
The point was that I was reunited with my long-lost (or at least buried) dog.
In my dream, I picked him up, and he did this thing he used to do whenever I returned home from a long absence. He'd unfurl his whole body into my shoulder, plying his neck against mine, and shaking from a kind of joyous relief at my return. It seems strange, because, well, he was a dog. But, he was also my dog, and no one else seemed to elicit this kind of response from him.
Whenever he did this, I would be reminded of the kind of unquantifiable psychic bond Munchkin and I had built up over, what were, admittedly, years of being friendless and awkward in Midwestern suburban monotony.
I don't remember when, but at some point I became increasingly convinced that Munchkin was in fact a soul mate from a past life, who, due to some past-life indiscretion, was doomed to share life with me, always at an arms- (or leash-) length distance.
When I left for college, the hardest part was saying goodbye to my dog. I promised him I would come back for him, patheticaly sitting on the stairs before leaving for what I knew would be months (months!).
The year after college, when I still harbored fantasies of New York being a habitable place to live, I decided to keep my promise, and Munchkin lived with me in a Queens duplex, and then we moved to my first Brooklyn apartment. He spent afternoons watching cable TV with my bartender hipster roommate, and waited patiently for my return home at 11:30 from my starvation wages job at a Manhattan bookstore.
When I started bringing Keith over, who slouched his way from the kitchen the bedroom with the same defiant aura of post-college disinterest, Munchkin would first try to take up space on the bed, until I moved him gently to the closet, where he would glower with unhappy disapproval for the rest of the night.
He hated Keith. And Keith wasn't exactly a fan of his either. They would stare at each other in a sort of distrusting stand off.
On days I worked, if I came home later than expected, he would alternately shit on the carpet, or tear holes in my blinds/lovebeads. On my days off, he would insist on accompanying me on errands around Williamsburg, riding atop the piles of laundry in my metal shopping cart, and sitting beneath my feet at Bubbles laundrymat until I was done.
Sometimes I would take him to the dog park in Union Square, putting him in a cart (he was too fat for a bag) and wheeling him onto the subway. He hated the noise, however, and usually got in fights with the other dogs.
The only things he really seemed to enjoy were licking things, and eating. He ate pretty much anything he could, especially if I ate it first. He was the only dog I've ever seen eat lettuce, which he did only after I had some.
After a year in New York, we both retired to Nebraska. My stay was briefer than his, and after a few months I headed back to the city.
I came back, on and off, but never again with the frequency of my college days. He always shook when I came home though, until the days when he didn't.
Eventually he went blind, and deaf, and started having seizures, or strokes of some sort. The last time I visited him, he was mostly indifferent to the world, existing in some half-wakeful half-sleeping state, in which he would occasionally howl at an unheard or unseen force, or waddle through the grass in the front yard to pee.
My last trip home was just weeks before he died, and I never knew if he realized I had come back. He died two days before my birthday, and my parents planted him under a tree, now known as the Munchkin tree.
When I finally went back, I thought I would feel his presence under the tree, and half-imaged being planted there someday, like the greek myth about the elderly couple that sort of just grow into a tree together.
But, it was just a tree.
In my dream, however, I had found my soul-mate dog again, and for a second, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to be reunited. Of course he was happy to see me. Of course we found each other again.
No comments:
Post a Comment