Much Grace

I spent much of the day yesterday hugging a service dog named Grace. Or maybe she was hugging me. It was hard to tell. If it sounds like I was engaged in some kind of good works, let me assure you I was not. Instead, I was at a poker table in Jacksonville, Florida. Grace belonged to the guy to my right, a fiftysomething, thrice-divorced guy with a bum knee and several hundred dollars of my money. I never learned his name. Why would I? He wasn’t nearly as charming as his dog.

The guy adopted Grace from the shelter, he said. Nobody else wanted her. Too old. “How old was she?” I asked.

“Two.”

Imagine being only two years old and already past your prime. He said Grace chose him, the way dogs will sometimes do, bounding up and slobbering all over him until he agreed to bring her home.

Originally, he called her Ace. He is, after all, a poker player. The dog he’d had before was called Joker. So Ace it was, until his mother began calling her “Grace,” and that’s the name that stuck.

Grace is big. Her short fur is the color of slate. Probably around ninety pounds. Half greyhound, half cane Corso, a breed I had to look up when I got home. They’re enormous, as pictured below.

Grace had this exact smushy face.

“She’s not as big as she ought to be,” the guy said, which was probably a good thing because Grace had a habit of sliding over to me, nuzzling the flat of my hand for pets, and then, when she got them, climbing onto my lap and poking that boxy head of hers right over the poker table. Several times, she knocked over my poker chips and several times I had to tell the guy that I didn’t care.

Nobody cared.

“My little attention whore,” the guy said after she did it for the third or fourth time.

“Me or the dog?” I asked. And yes, it got a laugh because I am a professional comedian.

Poker tables at local casinos can be dour places. Bunch of dudes sitting around playing cards on a weekday when the rest of the world is being, you know, productive. Throw a dog into the mix, though, and suddenly a bunch of pucker-faced card players are joking around and engaging with each other instead of staring into their phones when not involved in a hand. Dogs make most situations better.

I’ve always had dogs. Collies and English springer spaniels and Labrador retrievers and mutts. My dad remarried when I was nine or ten and his wife, Beth, brought with her a fluffy black Newfoundland named Bart. I’d never seen a dog so enormous, or so slobbery.

At the moment, we’ve got two dogs and a cat. One is a Lab named Ole (pronounced in the manner of the Norwegians rather than that of the Mexicans) and one is a little “shit dog” called Squash. We call him a shit dog because he’s just a little ball of genetic Play-Doh rolled into a dog, the way your poop is just all your digested food rolled into a turd. The cat is a black-and-white senior citizen named Alfalfa who is my favorite of the three because he demands the least of my attention. At the moment, for example, Squash is sitting at the back door asking to be let out. He will go out there for two minutes or so before asking to be let back in. We do this all day.

He really is a turd.

Ole and Squash.

The dogs drive my wife and I crazy, of course, because dogs can be super-annoying. Then again, the dogs probably annoy us less than we annoy each other. Dogs are always irritating to their owners and never irritating to anybody else. Grace, for example, was annoying her owner. “Get down from there,” he had to keep telling her every time she crawled onto my lap even though I assured him time and again she wasn’t bothering me.

One good thing about dogs. They remain unruffled by events beyond their control. Sure, they might bark at the mailman but they’ve never once yelled at the television news. They don’t complain about the weather, either, which has become, of late, an art form in our house. For 53 years, I never noticed the weather much beyond its general daily contours. Now, no temperature is comfortable. No humidity level correct. I am, like the first two bowls of porridge, forever either too hot or too cold. The dogs remain immune to my meteorological kvetching, content to raise their legs to all bushes regardless of the season.

I have no larger point today. I played cards and hugged a dog named Grace. Later today I’ll probably take Ole and Squash on a long walk to the park. They’ll pull and strain at their leashes, they will irritate me. People will approach and tell me how cute they are and I will ask if they would like to take either of them home. We will share a neighborly chuckle and go about our days. Small things in uncertain times.