Fragments From Floyd

Labrador Retrievers: Members of the breed are known for their mild dispositions and for their willing compliance with their owner's wishes. They are said to demand participation in all household routines. And in addition, this one individual out of the breed who lives with us is characterized by his unswerving insistence on arbitration of each and every real or perceived interpersonal conflict under his family's roof. He is a Labrador Resolver.

That's right: Tsuga considers himself a necessary intermediary in almost all conversations between the two humans in this household. Even routine conversations make him anxious, especially when I give up my animated gesticulations in the telling of a tale. But let the exchange take on tones of conflict and strife--as happens not infrequently in a home where two adults have more projects than energy, more elder-angst than answers--and the dog becomes something of a cross between a football referree with a whistle and a flag in his pocket, a marriage counselor with a hand on both combatant's chests as they arch defiantly over her desk, and a flower child pacifist who would say "Can't we all just get along here, people?" I tell Ann: "something has come between us" and it's always this wagging eighty pounds of neutrality and saliva that is our dog.

I have had a revelation with regard to the power of this dog's inner drives toward reconciliation. I am pretty sure that the threat of unarbitrated discord is so strong a motivator for the dog's presence that, next time he runs off somewhere and we can't locate him, we will simply stand on the front porch, wife and I, and pretend (or heck, maybe not pretend) to be arguing over potato versus potahto, and voila! The dog will have no choice but to come from even the most alluring dead carcass down the pasture, pulled by the genetically-endowed need to keep the Bickerson's at arm's length.

For more Things That Dogs Teach Their People, listen to Jim Minick's WVTF essay about his dogs. This is the essay Jim recorded (and I got to hear played back in the studio) when he and I both ended up over in Roanoke one morning a few weeks back.