had brought up something my father’s conscience had hoped to ignore or overcome. For all the hypothetical pros in our domestic upheaval, the one family member who didn’t have any say in the matter seemed to have been landed with a major con. And watching Patch sniffing and pacing out there for the first time wasn’t helping matters. Patch seemed surprised by the brevity of his tour, the speed with which he had covered all the available space. He was a dog used to freedom, to surveying his domain by turning from side to side, not bouncing from one boundary to the next, forced to strain his neck upward in search of a glimpse of the world he used to know. I gazed up at my dad staring at Patch and later, much later in life, I would come to realize how the expression on his face reflected a sentiment my emotional palate was just starting to discover. I didn’t know its name but I knew exactly where I had felt it once before. It had been during a school trip to our local zoo, staring at an animal that seemed so improbable on an unusually hot summer day—a polar bear. More than appearing to beuncomfortable, this impressive creature seemed so sad and frustrated, pacing back and forth in a space that felt all too small, his murky pool more suited to paddling than laps. There’s nothing unusual about a kid getting all anthropomorphic in a zoo, but when it came to Patch, this nameless feeling seemed far more personal and disturbing, something close to what I might later come to think of as empathy.
Making Patch’s precarious circumstances worse was the fact that our new next-door neighbor took an immediate dislike to him. Not that Mr. Peevish, as I will call him, singled Patch out in particular, he loathed canines of all shapes and sizes and he was particularly averse to any dog that, in his opinion, looked as though he could tear you limb from limb.
Sometimes, if I heard him in his backyard, gardening or mowing or plotting Patch’s demise, I would take Patch out and make a point of fussing over him, brushing out his coat, roughhousing with him, hoping he might overhear how at ease a defenseless young boy was around this four-legged killer, hoping he might peek through a gap in the fence and see that Patch was really a big softy, all bark and no bite, or, as they sometimes say in England, “all mouth and no trousers”! I never envisaged the two of them becoming friends. I simply wanted to prove that Patch was not a mean dog, that with a little tolerance and respect we could all get along. But, sadly, as far as I could tell, Mr. Peevish never looked and he never listened. His mind was already made up. If there was ever the possibility of crossing paths with Patch when Patch was out on a leash with me and Dad, Mr. Peevish would visibly panic, as if calculating his odds of survival, all the while slowly backing up, Patch deemed no less terrifying than an escaped lion.
It seemed so unfair for Patch to be the subject of canine profiling. Then again, the Peevish disdain for dogs also included anadorable, submissive, perfectly affable two-year-old black Lab called Sam, who lived across the street. His owner, Martin, and my dad became friends, bonded by the universal camaraderie of dog lovers everywhere. The same was not exactly true of Sam and Patch. Theirs was more of a grudging respect—a brief circle and sniff, an indifferent and cautious “wassup,” with an option for a little trash talk, and that was pretty much it. Their biggest battles were over who would be the last one to leave his signature over disputed territory like lampposts.
One thing I’ll say for my father, what he lacked in decent dogtraining skills, he more than made up for in consideration for others when it came to Patch’s etiquette in public. Martin, on the other hand, had no such qualms about letting people like Mr. Peevish know how he felt about irrational hostility to all canine companionship and Sam gave him the perfect opportunity to make a show
Making Patch’s precarious circumstances worse was the fact that our new next-door neighbor took an immediate dislike to him. Not that Mr. Peevish, as I will call him, singled Patch out in particular, he loathed canines of all shapes and sizes and he was particularly averse to any dog that, in his opinion, looked as though he could tear you limb from limb.
Sometimes, if I heard him in his backyard, gardening or mowing or plotting Patch’s demise, I would take Patch out and make a point of fussing over him, brushing out his coat, roughhousing with him, hoping he might overhear how at ease a defenseless young boy was around this four-legged killer, hoping he might peek through a gap in the fence and see that Patch was really a big softy, all bark and no bite, or, as they sometimes say in England, “all mouth and no trousers”! I never envisaged the two of them becoming friends. I simply wanted to prove that Patch was not a mean dog, that with a little tolerance and respect we could all get along. But, sadly, as far as I could tell, Mr. Peevish never looked and he never listened. His mind was already made up. If there was ever the possibility of crossing paths with Patch when Patch was out on a leash with me and Dad, Mr. Peevish would visibly panic, as if calculating his odds of survival, all the while slowly backing up, Patch deemed no less terrifying than an escaped lion.
It seemed so unfair for Patch to be the subject of canine profiling. Then again, the Peevish disdain for dogs also included anadorable, submissive, perfectly affable two-year-old black Lab called Sam, who lived across the street. His owner, Martin, and my dad became friends, bonded by the universal camaraderie of dog lovers everywhere. The same was not exactly true of Sam and Patch. Theirs was more of a grudging respect—a brief circle and sniff, an indifferent and cautious “wassup,” with an option for a little trash talk, and that was pretty much it. Their biggest battles were over who would be the last one to leave his signature over disputed territory like lampposts.
One thing I’ll say for my father, what he lacked in decent dogtraining skills, he more than made up for in consideration for others when it came to Patch’s etiquette in public. Martin, on the other hand, had no such qualms about letting people like Mr. Peevish know how he felt about irrational hostility to all canine companionship and Sam gave him the perfect opportunity to make a show
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