Portrait of the Housepet as a Young Pooch

Titan is a dog who's been mentioned in this space before. A stout fellow and true, strong-limbed and brimming over with good intentions, a good man and a handsome devil, he looks like a coal miner thanks to his black sooty snout. For the sake of posterity and scholarship, I'll now set down some observations and anecdotes about the guy. The public has a right to know, you know.

Sometimes I'd peek through the blinds to see Titan locked in a death struggle with some Tiki torch that was clearly asking for it. (For some reason, this house has a kind of Asian landscaping scheme. By which I mean it's ringed with bamboo and, until Titan laid them low, there were three Tiki torches standing outside in brave triangle formation. I don't think they were ever lit so it's no huge loss, from the standpoint of beauty.) There were times when I thought the Tiki torch was ascendant and had him on the run, but Titan would surprise me and bounce back and bring that sassy lawn decoration down. Other afternoons saw Titan doing battle with enemies that seemed, by my lights, to be entirely fictitious. Maybe they were elemental spirits or invisible woodland creatures. At any rate, despite my not being able to detect them, I have no doubt he fucked them up, and I salute him and his courageous stand against beings from another dimension.

From this you might think that Titan has a rich inner life, at least for a dog, an Emerson in a dog collar, a Marcel Proust on all fours, but I tend to think of him as more of a social being, meant for pack life. When he first arrived, his manners were a little on the barnyard side of the spectrum, but Sam ran a whole My Fair Lady routine on him, and now our canine friend knows a fish knife from a soup spoon and can publicly kiss his crotch with enough dignity and taste to shame any hoity-toity Aristocat.

He's perfected this move that's somehow a combination lick, sniff, and bite. It might be truer to say that it begins as a lick, turns gradually into a sniff, and resolves itself into a bite before becoming a lick again, continuing the cycle. It's a little confusing for anyone who finds himself on the receiving end. I actually sometimes doubt that he himself knows what's he's trying to do. Zen-like, though, he goes with the flow. Good man. Never apologize, never explain.

I have a coffee maker that I often carry from my room to the kitchen. Strangely, Titan seems to hold this little appliance in awe, imbuing it with an almost religious significance. I once held it up like a relic just filched from a cursed tomb, and he backed away staring and would have said, "Oooooh..." if he could've, I guess. Nothing else that I've seen catches his fancy that way.

My other big discovery is that when I do this particular whistle, he'll go wherever I tell him to. It shoots straight into his brain and blocks whatever mechanism usually makes him distrust my commands. Guy's totally enchanted. It's a little like what violin music does for Peter Boyle's monster in Young Frankenstein. Very useful little birdcall.

To conclude, I endorse the hell out of this animal. Long may he thrive and wag in the righteous light.