Love That Backpack Dog

I’ve got my dog’s face pinned between my hands, her ears smeared back against her neck. The soft, gray insides of each ear canal sprout outwards between my fingers. Her watery eyes blink at me.

“Are you real?” I ask her. She stares.

“Are you? Are you real?”

She’s got that dog smile on her lips, the one that looks like contentment dunked in ordinary, daily life joys. I want to take my hands and shake her, swing her around and into my arms, and then plant a big kiss right on the end of her nose—right where she’s starting to lose her hair in her old age.

Instead, we keep staring at each other.

We’ve been negotiating “backpack time” for fifteen minutes now—part of the old dog’s routine in preparation for the time when traveling longer distances requires more carrying than walking. The dog’s weasled her way out of the dog carrier twice now, and the smirk on her face tells me she’ll do it again if we try for a third time.

And I know I’m seeing her with my own eyes. I’m smelling her stinky dog breath, and my hands are buried in her fur. And somehow, I still can’t imagine how my dog is real, and mine, and still here with me.

I open the dog backpack, shaking it a little. At fourteen, she has decided that the commands “sit,” “come,” and any other command she knew when she was little are below her.

Backpacks are below her too, I guess. She climbs in my lap instead, swinging her rump around in a circle and sighing. It’s a big sigh. I comment on it.

But all I have to do is think about how there’s no universe in which I want to have to take a walk outside in the spring air alone, when someday her joints catch up to her, or her stamina starts to shrink. It’s got me picking her up from her slumber and plopping her bodily into the dog backpack, legs first.

The dog backpack is black, but my dog’s frizzy gray hairs help her stand out. I was a third grader when I met you, I think as my dog squirms until she’s more or less situated in the backpack. I can’t figure out how to get it onto my back without flinging her out of it, so I wriggle into the straps and wear the backpack on the front of me.

I feel ridiculous.

I buckle the straps on anyway.

When we step outside and see our reflection in my car window, I giggle and swing us around in a slow, giddy circle. She sniffs and looks up the driveway.

“You can’t be real,” I say out loud into the cold evening air. “I’m not lucky enough for you to be real. So you have to be a dream.”

A dream that I’ve had nightmares of its ending since the day my family brought her home, waking up sweaty and teary, my brain forcing me out of bed to find her and place my hand over her belly to check if she’s still here. She snores when she sleeps now, loud and steady.

It’s the most comforting sound.

I walk slow, trying to minimize the way she bounces up and down in the backpack. She sniffs more, and I can feel the way her chest expands through the bag’s fabric.

That should all make her feel real. Shouldn’t it?

Shouldn’t it?

We walk to see the ducks, and I whisper in her ear my plan to kidnap a duck one day. Just sneak up right behind it, pick it up under my arm like a football, and run as fast as I can. I tell her she can be my accomplice in the ducknap. She just blinks at the fat white birds, sniffing.

I can imagine the two of us as we were, back in the day. Both of us in a little less danger of having too high of BMIs. Both of us with a little less scraggly looking hair. We’ve been walking together for fourteen years. The same two routes.

I think of that stupid poem—you know, the one about footprints in the sand? And there’s that person grouching to Jesus that they only see one set of footprints on the ground when the times were tough?

I look at my feet and then at my dog’s feet, all tucked into the backpack she is patiently waiting for me to let her out of. Her watery eyes squint up at me.

I think Jesus answers the complainer that “that’s when I was carrying you, buddy.” And then they probably kept going on long walks to see the ducks and maybe even talked about ducknapping.

It’s a dumb poem. But still.

Now I have watery eyes too.