I am sitting on the lawn in the sunshine. The grass is cool and green and bristly. I don’t move, because I’m still a baby and the world comes to me. The dog approaches, sniffing. She has a wet black nose. She has a curled tail. She has fur the color of butterscotch. I’m not afraid of her, and I put out my hand. I call her “Ginge,” though her name is Ginger. She is my first memory.
What I remember about Ginger is that she is old. My brother and sister are both ten years older than I am and she is older than the both of them. She is as old as my parents’ marriage. My father tells the story of surprising my mother with her when they were newlyweds living in Brooklyn, back in 1947. “I kept her under…my coat,” he says, in his characteristic speech pattern, his melody of pause and dramatic emphasis. She was a mutt, a mongrel puppy owing half her bloodline to a type on its way out of popularity in the United States—the spitz. There are ancient photos of my parents with her, just the three of them together, and even when she’s sniffing my hand on the lawn of our split-level on Long Island, she’s simultaneously a denizen of the distant past. She’s a living fossil, an artifact of that personal Pleistocene when my parents loved one another and had a happy marriage. She has more right to be there than I do.
I was three years old when my father had an affair with the mother of my first friend, with whom I shared a crib as a newborn. My parents were never happy after that, and to love both of them required me to surrender to warring impulses. I was my mother’s ally and confidant and lived in fear of my father. And yet I could never get enough of his stories, especially the ones about dogs. The stories he told about his days as a street tough in Brooklyn made him out to be invincible, and the stories he told about his days as a big-band singer in World War II confirmed my suspicion that Lou Junod was like no other human being on earth, never mind the workaday dads who commuted back and forth to New York City on the Long Island Rail Road. But my father was tender when he talked about dogs. He was vulnerable. He was a boy, just like me.
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