Me and My Shadow

Me and My Shadow

I always loved the song, “Me and My Shadow” especially the chorus.

“Me and my shadow/Strolling down the avenue/Me and my shadow/Not another soul to tell our troubles to.”

But I never realized how apt its lyrics would be for me until I adopted a poodle last May.

One of the hardest things about giving up my full-time job and spending much more time at home, especially in a new town, was the sense of isolation and loneliness. I think that one of the reasons it's taken me two years to seriously sit down and start writing like this is that I felt so alone spending hours in a big, empty house.

If I had sat down in front of a computer screen, I think the only thing I could have written were the words pounding in my head: “Get me out of here! I want to go home!”

So Diana's arrival was fortuitous for me in ways I hadn't anticipated. I confess I've always been subconsciously aware of my destiny as a “dog person.” Many of my earliest childhood memories involve the family dog, and especially the dog and my dad. It's hard for me to imagine my dad without a dog at his side-- reading his Bible in the early hours of the morning--reading the newspaper in the evening in his favorite chair. Dad driving me to school with a dog sticking his nose out the window to catch the breeze.

I always knew that it was just a matter of time before I succumbed to the family destiny and brought home a dog.

Yet I managed to resist the compulsion for years. There were so many reasons not to have a dog: writing a dissertation, my husband's aversion to small “yap-yap” dogs who always seemed to love him when he simply wanted to “punt them across the room,” my full-time job, a move across country, a major remodel.

And yet there finally arrived a moment when I'd run out of excuses. I'd promised my boys a dog, and now I had no more reasons not to fulfill my pledge.

So last April my husband and I dutifully went to PetSmart during a city-wide adopt-a-thon, certain that we could just look around, while still keeping our options open. After all, we both had allergies, so we had limited our choice of breeds to poodles, Portuguese Water Dogs, and any other dog with hair, not fur.

But as fate would have it, there was a poodle among the plethora of pit bulls and German Shepherd mixes. An elderly gentleman who had just put his wife in a nursing home had given up their three small dogs, including one very frightened miniature poodle. One of the volunteers told us this sad tale, including the detail of the elderly gentleman sitting in his car and crying for half an hour, before he finally left his dogs for the last time.

My husband picked up the poodle in his arms and asked me, “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” I wondered silently. “You, the small-dog-hater, are sitting there with a trembling poodle in your arms, and you wonder what I think? If you like this dog as much as I suspect you do, then this is the dog for us.” So aloud I said, “Why not?” and suddenly we were dog-owners, the proud new adoptive parents of a miniature poodle, apricot in color, with one slightly protruding tooth that makes her look as if she has a single fang.

We took our poodle home, and immediately discovered that my husband had acquired a shadow, and if he wasn't there, so had I.

It was so funny watching this little dog follow my husband's every move, that the kids and I burst out laughing. Every time he got up to go to the kitchen, the bathroom, the front door, he was always followed by the distinctive clip-clip of her toenails on the brick floors.

But for me, having my little shadow, was something even more special. I now had a comforting presence in the house, a companion, someone to talk to on our walks along the irrigation banks and down to the river. “Me and my Shadow,” is a song about the blues, but for me, it feels like a song about keeping the blues at bay, as long as I have my poodle at my side.