When I first met Brutus, I wanted nothing to do with him.
He clambered into my car in a tornado of black fur, pointy ears and scraggly beard, then looked up at me with saucer eyes, threatening to unleash drool all over my passenger seat. All I could think was: “This is going to be annoying.”
I had just started dating Brutus’s owner – and I was not a dog person. I didn’t hate dogs, but I was indifferent to them, at best. And I was certain this schnauzer would be an inconvenience, with his need for regular feedings and pee breaks. But Brutus, in turn, was indifferent to my feelings about dogs.
The next day, he jammed his body beneath my desk and hooked his bearded chin over my feet, refusing to budge until I did. It was a sweet gesture, I thought, but it was going to take more than a couple of snuggles to convert me from a lifetime of canine apathy.
But Brutus wasn’t deterred. When I got ready for a run, he bounded to the door, with his tail nubbin wagging. He tap-danced like Fred Astaire while I laced up my shoes. Once we got out, he pranced more than he jogged, shaking his hairy rump, as if his hips were saying: “We both love this! Let’s love this together!” Much to my dismay, it warmed my heart a few degrees to see his unabashed joy. My steps reflected the pep in his.
Brutus kept chipping away at my hard exterior. He wasn’t the best-behaved dog in the world and he wasted no time trying to convince me that he was. Instead, he saw that I was charmed by his acts of mischief and so he flaunted them. The guy I was dating was a regimented Scandinavian, who loved tight schedules and vacuum cleaners more than anything else.
But neither Brutus nor I wanted to be tamed. We wanted to leave our running clothes in a pile and snag breakfast sandwiches off the kitchen counter. We wanted to be five minutes late and swipe a football from the kid next door. We bonded over our shared desire to buck discipline and be feral creatures running through the forest. I started to see Brutus as a friend and a sidekick.
But Brutus saved his best moves for a rainy day.
When I met him, I had recently started therapy. I would come home with puffy eyes and a leaky nose and immediately curl up on the couch. The second I showed any hint of emotion, Brutus would scamper over and nuzzle his body into mine. If I kept crying, he would find a new way to dig his butt into my body, like a miner looking for gold, as if a more effective snuggle would fix everything. While I struggled to find love for myself, his was unflinching.
When I left the relationship, I told my now ex-boyfriend that I wanted to keep Brutus. He had taken a job in another state and had no plans to bring Brutus. He didn’t waste a single breath resisting.
This was good, because I don’t know what I would have done if he had. Commit canine kidnap, probably. By now, I wanted nothing to do with a life without Brutus.
