I’VE HAD strange urges this past few weeks for a dog. I find myself surfing internet sites, gawking at pictures of shaggy border collies, and imagining them at the foot of my bed, or sitting in the passenger seat of the jeep, with a pair of earphones.
It’s very strange because I’ve never liked dogs. I cringed with horror the first time my daughter, at the age of five, pleaded with me to get one. I said, ”No!” And then she insisted, and I said, “Definitely not!” And she looked me in the eye and said, “Ah Dad, go on,” and I said, “What kind do you want?”
So I was forced to live with a black Labrador for five years in order to maintain domestic harmony and satisfy the child’s need for company after school.
But what really troubled me was the way a big dog with short hair could manage to expose his private parts, as he stretched himself at the fire, and the level of noise he could make when he chose to groom his nether regions during the Late Late Show.
There were times it was hard to hear the scintillating cut and thrust of conversation on the television, because of the din yer-man made in the corner, sucking everything clean.
I don’t know why a dog’s testicles should have had such an unnerving effect on me; it’s probably just that we never had a pet dog when I was a child.
My father wasn’t spontaneous with any form of animal life; he was born in Dublin in 1903, and reared with Victorian values, by a severe grandmother who would barge into any neighbour’s house and lift the lids off their pots to see what they were cooking. He didn’t marry until he was almost 50, so by the time I came along he may have thought about me as an idea, rather than as something to hold or cuddle, and so I grew up, more or less, in what sociologists call a non-touching family, where if you happened to brush your foot against another person’s leg below the dinner table, you immediately apologised. As a child my personal space was more secure than a military bunker, which is very likely why I went into my teenage years without the remotest understanding of love.
No matter how many times I heard it in lyrics by the Beatles, the word “love” never made me sweat, swoon or palpitate as a teenager; it just made me nervous. Love was some kind of invisible object to be contemplated but never touched, like the wafer on the golden plate every Sunday morning.
Love was theological, ontological, and almost as precious as the Waterford Crystal in the china cabinet that my mother forbade anyone to touch; fluted glasses given to her on her wedding day; the sacraments of a remembered love. She protected them from dust and breakage by placing them under lock and key and I often sat on the floor as a child, gazing in at them in the cabinet, though it would have been out of the question to hope that I could ever touch them, never mind play with them.
The sad fact is that my mother, much later in life, looked into that same cabinet one day and imagined that the glasses had changed shape. And since that could not be, she then deduced that someone had robbed the originals and replaced them with inferior work. One way or another she never looked at that china cabinet again without feeling profoundly unhappy.
As soon as I could I fled from that suburbia of restrained emotion, and found refuge in the mountains of west Cavan, where instead of posturing around china cabinets in a drawing room, people huddled around Stanley ranges in kitchens, where men with blue fingers ate big lumps of bacon between slices of thick bread, and lambs sucked milk from bottles in cardboard boxes, and pet donkeys nuzzled the window looking for oranges. There was always a black and white border collie under one of the chairs, who eyed me cautiously, because I wasn’t like the others; I didn’t rub behind his ears, or scratch his belly or tease him with bones from my plate.
Fortunately I found love in marriage and in the rearing of a child, but now, as my hairs go grey, I am still haunted by that little mutt beneath the chair, and I still ache to reach out and touch him.