(8:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

I can't find my brittle youth

Growing up, I usually had a dog. Our first dog was named Candy. A vicious hell-spawn, she destroyed everything she touched. She barked uncontrollably at everyone and sought out things to chew up -- the worst was one of my dad's CCM's, which I later came to understand contained an interview with Steve Taylor. Seeing that magazine in shreds was sickening; what she did to the kitchen cabinents was inexcusable. We took her to the vet to be "released," in the euphemistic terms made famous by The Giver.

Our second dog was named Pumpkin, although she was most frequently called Punky or Punker. She was a dark colored "yorkey-poo," or Yorkshire Poodle, and she was perhaps our best dog. When my dad was on worker's comp for a brief period, he bonded deeply with Punky. We had her for years, and we came to trust her too much to stay in our unfenced yard when we let her out. One night we left her outside for too long, and she was hit by a car. My sister, believing it was her fault, was for a time unconsolable. We kept her collar and other memorobilia and believed that we were not "ready" for another dog, so deeply did we lover her.

Within weeks, my mom was at the barber shop and overheard someone discussing a thoroughbred Lhasa Apso that a disgruntled husband had to give away in order to please his wife. Although Hannah and I didn't realize it at the time, the loss of Punky had hit my dad really hard, and my mom felt like we needed to get the new dog as soon as possible. She was already named Chloe when we got her, and she was and remains one of the dumbest dogs in history. At first she seemed like a bizarre interloper -- too "already-trained," too thoroughbred for our family -- but after my parents moved into their new house while I was at college, she was the rock of stability our family needed to get through that difficult time. She now has my family trained to give her a treat on command, and she occasionally expresses her displeasure at me and my sister's absense by urinating in the house. Her nickname is "Cloafy," a take-off on an old Saturday morning cartoon interlude featuring a dog named Loafy. I am the only person who is still conscious of that etymology -- my little cousins (sadly, not so little anymore) almost certainly believe that "Chloe" is a nickname for "Cloafy."

A word about my little cousins, the sons of my mother's sister. The older is named Tyler and the younger Tanner. They are approximately 12 and 10 years old. Tyler is just like me at that age, painfully so: awkward, easily embarrassed. His brother Tanner helps to bring him out of that shell, however, in a way that Hannah couldn't do for me -- he is outgoing, hilarious, and clinically insane. He looks just like my dad, which at times leads to awkward jokes when people realize that he's not technically in their gene pool. He loves to play board games, and even when he's obviously going to win by a landslide, he will do whatever it takes to make the game last longer, making disadvantageous deals in Monopoly with reckless abandon. At Thanksgiving, the ladies and children of my family (a group that includes me and my dad -- basically the people who don't watch football) played dominoes, and in the version we played, the double blank domino was the kiss of death. Tanner stacked the deck so that my dad would get the double blank one, in a fairly obvious way, and as we all laughed over it, he announced, calmly and unembarassedly, that he had wet his pants. If we brought it up again to him in the future, he wouldn't be embarassed -- he would laugh with us. The only problem was the exact process he should follow in cleaning his pants.

I said much more about Tanner than about Tyler, which is completely unfair, but from their infancy, they were paired off -- Hannah got Tyler, and I got Tanner. Tyler is the more athletic one, like Hannah, and Tanner is the one people just don't know what to make of, like me. From a very early age, everyone in the family had noticed a special bond between me and Tanner. When I was in late high school, going through every imaginable kind of struggle with my family, he was the only one I could relate to.

He and Chloe. I still maintain that I was Chloe's favorite. Just like now, I was a homebody in high school -- while mom and Hannah were off at a dozen athletic events and dad was working twelve hours a day with an hour commute each way, I was sitting at home with Chloe. We had our rough days, a few times when my neglect could easily have led to a replay of Punky's demise, but by and large, we remained close. Then during the summers and breaks, the same situation obtained, when everyone else would be running around with their "busy lifestyles," leaving me and the dog at home.

There's a new dog in my life now, named Wrigley. He will be leaving soon, and I feel slightly sad about it. I feel like there's something I should have done -- he's horribly misbehaved and barks uncontrollably at new people and jumps up on everyone, but over the weekends when (again) it was just me and him and the cats, he was manageable. He's not even my dog, but a "surprise" Richard launched into our life on a caprice, yet I still feel like I've failed him in some way. I think that I'm still responsible for the other, even when I never asked to meet the other -- isn't that what Levinas/Derrida are talking about, anyway?

That I can only think this way in terms of a dog says something about me -- after all these years, during which it should have become clear that not everyone is like me, I still feel like they should be. A dog or cat represents "the other" as Levinas describes it -- vulnerable, saying "thou shalt not kill." A self-reliant American adult is not "the other." They should be able to take care of themselves, damn it. They should be able to fall into a job like I did, and pay their bills on time, and keep the house spotlessly clean, and remember to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and get their assignments done, and write their own stupid papers.

I have a high degree of self-reliance. That might be why I am becoming a cat person. Wrigley aside, the life of a cat has long appealled to me, and in point of fact, my small female dogs were always more like cats than dogs, functionally: jumping up to cuddle occasionally, but mainly just hanging out. They would enjoy the occasional game of fetch, but they didn't need it in the same way that Wrigley needs it, just like he needs a daily walk. Aside from a brief spell of pooping throughout the house, which was really my fault, Soren has been a wonderful cat, and our new temporary cat Toby has been good, too.

I will miss Toby when she's gone, and I think I need Soren -- so that I won't ever really be home alone. I can handle being by myself for long periods of time, generally, but I start to break down when I'm physically alone -- when I've had no physical contact of any kind with anyone for a while. Having a cat to sit on my lap occasionally is no replacement for a real human person, but it's good enough. That's why spinsters get so many cats, and I don't think it's pathetic, not really. They can handle life alone, maybe even prefer it deep down, but sometimes they just need to touch someone, and a cat can be good enough -- just barely, but good enough. I'm sure Soren looks at me in the same way.

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