i.
Schnauzers look at you.
I mean they really look at you.
Not through you, only people do that.
If dogs, in general, are correctly credited for living entirely in the moment, anyone who’s owned or known a schnauzer can confirm that they live within the millisecond. They are not only acting—and reacting—to their own internal and external stimuli; they are measuring your mood.
As a result, their mood is inextricably connected with yours. In this regard they are like all other dogs, only more so. If you are obviously not altogether there, for whatever reason, they feel you. They get it, and they make it clear that they get it.
(We got this, they don’t say.) You can always tell when a dog is unhappy because the rest of the time they are either ecstatic or asleep.
Suffice it to say, they are happy and they need you to be happy. That’s all they want, besides food, shelter and their Dog-given right to sniff other dogs’ butts.
A common misconception is that, as dog lovers, we crave subservience, and it feeds our insatiable egos. That’s not why people have dogs, it’s why people have children (just kidding). In truth, it’s a great deal more complicated, more philosophical than that. Sure, what’s not to love about an incorruptibly honest, obedient, affirmative presence one can count on every second of every day?
And yet, I suspect, if you spoke with people who are not just dog people, but those people—the type who not only talk incessantly about their own dogs, but other dogs, and are up for talking about dogs, and meeting new dogs, even if it occasionally involves stalking an unsuspecting owner on the trail or outside a supermarket, because it’s not only bad form, but impossible to not make the attempt—they’d suggest that the secret ingredient of our obsession is at once selfish and something more than a little noble, in an aspirational sense: dogs, with their total lack of guile and excess of fidelity, are ceaselessly humbling, and remind us of what’s so lacking in our fellow humans, and within ourselves.
ii.
Schnauzers talk to you.
They say different things to different people, but a schnauzer is going to make things abundantly clear.
Most dogs are content, not to mention genetically equipped, to let their tales do most of the talking.
Schnauzers do, too, but if you want to know what’s what, they let you know with their ears, their eyes and their mouths.
The only time they get truly frustrated is when they talk to you and you can’t seem to figure out what they are so obviously telling you.
iii.
Schnauzers also listen to you.
All dogs, of course, are avid listeners, especially when they hear things like doors opening, bags crinkling, strangers (or better yet, friends and family) approaching, thunder rumbling and, above all, the rhetorical—but crucial—question of who, exactly, is a good boy?
If you’re lucky enough to own or know a schnauzer, especially one that has not had its ears clipped due to outdated, immoral and aesthetically unconscionable standards (the people who care about these sorts of arbitrary standards and regulations aren’t merely missing the whole point of dogs, they’re failing in any and all attempts to become either more human or dog-like), you’ve seen the way those ears work. The ears are satellites and the tail is signal: affirmative, message received.
iv.
But really, schnauzers look at you, and they convey everything with those eyes.
I’ve never had a dog look at me the way Leroy Brown, who was my designated best friend between 1999-2009, did. It wasn’t obsequious, it was never angry, it was seldom disappointed, it was invariably earnest, and—as anyone who has loved a dog will testify—it was always honest.
Having eyes always watching you does not make you aware of being watched so much as cognizant of yourself. I am accountable, that look reminds you. Aside from the aforementioned things every dog needs and wants, the look reinforces the fact that you are everything to that dog. And while some (probably many) people parent dogs the way they parent their human puppies, with a combination of best intentions, carelessness and competence, the enlightened among us are kept in check by that look.
The world is bigger than you, that look explains.
Companionship and culpability are too big a burden for some. It’s okay: most dogs will meet you more than half-way. And then they’ll meet you the rest of the way. That’s the way it works.
But if you’re sagacious enough to understand, and embrace the responsibility, the look you get from your dog reimburses even the most modest efforts with exhilaration and allegiance that can never be explained with words.
If you’ve been on the receiving end of that look, you’ll do anything in your power to deserve it, and encourage it. You eventually comprehend that dogs do far more for us than we do for them. A dog can tell you more about yourself than anything you can read, say, write or hear. If you’ve tried to see yourself in a schnauzer’s eyes, you can fathom how rare unqualified love is. And you know, with a sadness that can’t overwhelm your gratitude, that nothing else can replace them once those eyes are no longer looking up at you.
*Thanks again to Elephant Journal, in which this piece originally appeared. It’s included in the recently-released collection Murphy’s Law, Vol. Two.
