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My Father Said No to Getting a Dog. Here’s Why I Said Yes
A lesson about joy
I was seven years old and bored in my suburban Long Island home when I turned to my father, whose nose was buried in Newsday.
“Can we get a dog?” I asked, as if for the first time, not the forty-eighth time in the last three days.
My father raised his head, removed his glasses, and pursed his lips, a way of saying, “We’ve been over this before.” Dad was like a record player stuck on a scratch. I knew what was coming next.
“Do you remember Harriet the Guinea Pig?” he said.
I had no memory of Harriet, a class pet that visited our home for a weekend during my older sister Jennifer’s first-grade year. I was a toddler at the time. I knew only what my father had told me about this pet.
That he permitted Harriet to stay with us on the condition that Jennifer would care for her. That Jennifer didn’t keep her promise, and my father, who wanted to be watching re-reruns of Hawaii Five-O, instead needed to play with Harriet. He needed to feed her chopped carrots. He needed to clean up her pellet-like poops.
Thus, a rule was born: There Will Be No Pets in the Snyder Home.*
* Except for ones that swim in transparent tanks, require little attention, and can be neatly flushed down the toilet at the conclusion of their natural lives.
Sometimes, when my mother heard me beg my father for a dog, she would remind him that he had a dog growing up. I’d seen proof of this fact, a black and white photograph of my father, an only child, holding Tippy, his mixed-breed terrier. In the photo, Tippy takes up the full length of my father’s outstretched arms. It’s the young version of my dad at no more than 10 years old, and he wears a wide smile.
My father looks, there is no other word for it, happy.
But maybe all the years had dulled my father’s memories of childhood days spent chasing Tippy in his yard. Maybe the memories became hard to access because of his present — the mornings when he pulls a bulletproof vest from the closet for a visit to a parolee with a history of violence, the evenings when he pages through crime reports with mug…
