I started kindergarten as a shy and scared little boy with a slippery grip on the English language. Having never spent significant amounts of time with other children, in puppy terms, I had not been properly socialized in order to understand how to interact with kids on the playground. At home, I was the only child, and my companions were my familiar mom and dad with occasional appearances by older cousins who coddled and indulged me in my whims.
At school, though, I knew none of my classmates, and they weren't about to entertain any whims of mine. I struggled to understand them, they me, and I had not a familiar face to turn to save one: Cathy, the daughter of a family friend. She had been a preschooler there, already oriented and comfortable, so I latched on to her like Linus to his blanket. According to the various tellings of this story, I sought her out during every recess, every moment I was not at my desk, and I gripped her hand with tenacity, refusing to let go for a week. She obliged lovingly, helped me learn to cope without my mommy and daddy, to adjust on the playground and make friends.
Which I did soon enough. I took to her tutelage like a star pupil, and within a few weeks, found my own set of friends, spent time away from Cathy, and began my development into the person I would later become. I owed Cathy much gratitude for her patience and guidance, and I showed my thanks by shunning her, not wanting to play with her anymore, and at least one incident where I called her 'stupid,' as she had dutifully reported to my mom one day after school.
I don't know or remember why I treated her that way, and I certainly hope that this habit of betrayal disappeared as I got older. All I can say for myself is that I was five and felt a newfound sense of courage I had never felt before, and I had no other way to exhibit this bravery other than through brattiness.
Grr must have also found his missing courage because he has inexplicably developed a wicked bratty streak with a matching wiliness behind his eyes. When he ignores a command, such as "Sit!," where he used to just saunter off as if he didn't hear me, I now can almost hear the rebellion take shape in his little brain, gel together to become a thought, an impulse, then action.
After repeating "Sit!" a few times and towering over him in a futile attempt to assert my dominance, I would know that I've lost when he looks me straight in the eye with his mouth panting and tongue hanging askew, hears my command, and then falls flat to the ground. He does not sit, does not walk away. Instead, he leaves me to wonder, "How do I chide him for this in a way that he will understand? That I am not angry he laid down, but that I know he knows he should have sat, yet willfully did something else, something that I normally praise him for? Has he found a loophole to outsmart me?" He would then look up at me with his back legs tucked beneath him, his front ones splayed, tail wagging vigorously, taunting me, as if saying, "There. Your move."
Yes, he found his loophole.
If he were a sassy gay man or a big black woman, I imagine he would likely do that head thing where it glides laterally from shoulder to shoulder. While it is infuriating to be bested by my own pup, the very one I used to hug when a knock on the door would frighten him, the one who would trail two steps behind me for fear of being left alone, the same one Sam held up to the window, whispered words of encouragement as busses and traffic noise would threaten to send him cowering into the closet, I guess I would rather have a rebel of a dog, a flat-out defiant and teenaged one, than one who lived his life with us in fear.
But in light of Grr's 'betrayal,' I would like to take the opportunity and say this: Cathy, you have been avenged.
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