Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs - Softcover

Knapp, Caroline

 
9780385317016: Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385317018 ISBN 13: 9780385317016
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

At the age of 36, Caroline Knapp, author of the acclaimed bestseller Drinking:A Love Story, found herself confronted with a monumental task: redefining her world.  She had faced the loss of both her parents, given up a twenty-year relationship with alcohol, and, as she writes, "I was wandering around in a haze of uncertainty, blinking up at the biggest questions: Who am I without parents and without alcohol? How to form attachments, and where to find comfort, in the face of such daunting vulnerability?"  An answer materialized in the most unlikely form: that of a dog.  Eighteen months to the day after she quit drinking, Knapp stumbled upon an eight-week-old puppy at a local animal shelter, took her home, and named her Lucille.  Now two years old, Lucille has become a central force in Knapp's life: "In her," she writes,  "I have found solace, joy, a bridge to the world."

Caroline Knapp has been celebrated as much for her fresh insight into emotional and psychological issues as she has been for her gifts as a writer.  In Pack of Two, she brings the same perception and talent to bear on the rich, complicated terrain of human-animal relationships.  In addition to mining her own experience with Lucille, Knapp speaks to a wide variety of dog people--from animal behaviorists and psychologists to other owners whose dogs have deeply affected their lives--about this emotionally complex, sometimes daunting, often profoundly healing alliance.  Throughout, she explores the shift in canine roles from working partners to intimate companions and looks, too, at how this new kinship, this wordless bond, becomes a template for what we most desire ourselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caroline Knapp's previous book, Drinking:A Love Story, was published in 1996.  She is a contributor at New Woman magazine and a regular columnist at The Boston Phoenix, and her work has appeared in Mademoiselle, The New York Times, and numerous international magazines.  She is also the author of Alice K's Guide to Life.

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f 36, Caroline Knapp, author of the acclaimed bestseller Drinking:A Love Story, found herself confronted with a monumental task: redefining her world.  She had faced the loss of both her parents, given up a twenty-year relationship with alcohol, and, as she writes, "I was wandering around in a haze of uncertainty, blinking up at the biggest questions: Who am I without parents and without alcohol? How to form attachments, and where to find comfort, in the face of such daunting vulnerability?"  An answer materialized in the most unlikely form: that of a dog.  Eighteen months to the day after she quit drinking, Knapp stumbled upon an eight-week-old puppy at a local animal shelter, took her home, and named her Lucille.  Now two years old, Lucille has become a central force in Knapp's life: "In her," she writes,  "I have found solace, joy, a bridge to the world."

Caroline Knapp has been celebrated as m

Aus dem Klappentext

f 36, Caroline Knapp, author of the acclaimed bestseller Drinking:A Love Story, found herself confronted with a monumental task: redefining her world. She had faced the loss of both her parents, given up a twenty-year relationship with alcohol, and, as she writes, "I was wandering around in a haze of uncertainty, blinking up at the biggest questions: Who am I without parents and without alcohol? How to form attachments, and where to find comfort, in the face of such daunting vulnerability?" An answer materialized in the most unlikely form: that of a dog. Eighteen months to the day after she quit drinking, Knapp stumbled upon an eight-week-old puppy at a local animal shelter, took her home, and named her Lucille. Now two years old, Lucille has become a central force in Knapp's life: "In her," she writes, "I have found solace, joy, a bridge to the world."

Caroline Knapp has been celebrated as m

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Family Dog

Scene:  a morning in mid-November, about fifteen months after I've gotten Lucille. My boyfriend and I are sitting in a couples therapist's office. I am speaking, near tears. This is our first meeting with the psychologist. We are talking about . . . the dog.

"I want to feel like she's mine," I say.

"But she is yours," Michael says. "The dog adores you."

"But . . . but . . ." I choke, half-formed thoughts about love and trust and exclusivity trapped somewhere between gut and mouth.

Lucille, it is safe to say, was an "issue" in our relationship from the beginning. This sounds ridiculous, like something you'd hear on a daytime talk show ("Women Who Love Dogs Too Much"), but it was true.

From the day I got her, I was a total hog with Lucille. Mine, mine, mine. The dog is mine. Pre-Lucille, I spent four, five, sometimes six nights a week at Michael's house. Post-Lucille, I started to spend three nights there, maybe only two, and I was starting to feel tense at even that number, compelled to be back in my own home. I had a rationale for this: my house has an enclosed patio, so when Lucille was a puppy, I could take her out to pee in the middle of the night without having to get dressed and put on shoes, whereas Michael lived in an apartment, with no access to fenced-in space. It was therefore more practical to stay at my house. But in truth I wanted the dog to myself. I wanted her to bond with me and me alone, and the ferocity of this possessiveness took me completely by surprise. I wanted her to follow me and not him, to sleep on my side of the bed, not his. If we were all sitting on the sofa and she put her head on his leg or curled up against him, I'd get a horrible, mean-spirited little stab of jealousy, and I found this so painful and embarrassing I couldn't even talk about it. Instead I started angling for more time alone. "I could use a night to myself," I'd say. Or, "I think I'll stay at my house tonight," and neither Michael nor I chose to comment on the fact that I didn't ask him to stay there with us. This made me feel horribly small and mean and tense, all this orchestrating of distance, but I couldn't help it; the reaction was so visceral it overpowered me.

Michael is probably the nicest man I've ever known, and by the time we started seeing the couples therapist, I'd known him for seven years. He'd been my primary caretaker all that time, and without question my best friend. I met him just after I'd stopped living with my old boyfriend, who was not a nice man at all, and Michael literally held my hand through that breakup, which dragged on for several years. I remember calling him up from work one day, just after I'd left Julian and moved into a new apartment, and weeping into the phone, telling him I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. He said he'd meet me for a walk in the Boston Common, and we sat on a bench in the sun. I cried and cried and talked about how miserable I felt about the breakup with Julian, and Michael listened, his arm around my shoulders. That's how he always was: a man who'd listen and hold you even when you talked about things that should, by all accounts, have hurt or dismayed or warned him away. Sometimes I thought this was a sign of deep generosity, and sometimes I saw it as an inability on his part to set limits, but whatever the motive, Michael is nothing if not steadfast. He saw me through the eleven months my father was dying, and a year later he saw me through the death of my mother, and eight months after that he saw me through my decision to quit drinking and go to rehab. He cooked a million homey dinners for me through that time, rigatoni with red sauce, and chicken with dumplings, and Italian sausages with mashed potatoes, and he almost never called me on the fact that I didn't give nearly enough back.

I got Lucille without consulting him. I'd told him the morning I picked her out that I was just going to look  at the shelter, and later that day, after I'd taken her home, I went over to his house to show him. Lucille trotted in, looking edgy and anxious, and peed on his carpet within thirty seconds. Then in short order she defecated twice, once in his living room and once in the bedroom. In retrospect, this seemed oddly apt to me: it was as though Lucille were delivering a little message from me, making a statement about how much of a mess I could make of things. Michael was annoyed but characteristically noncombative about this: I took Lucille outside, he cleaned up the mess, and he never called me on the fact that once again I'd gone and made a big life decision without him.

I'd done this with my house the year before, deciding almost overnight to buy a place in Cambridge that I knew was too small to accommodate both of us. I said it might: at some ill-defined point in the future, I said, we could turn the third floor into a work space for him, or maybe we could build an addition off the kitchen, but inside, I think I knew: My house. My space. Not ours.

Same with Lucille. My dog. She's mine. I kept hoping this would ease, kept hoping I'd relax about her a little, allow Michael to share in the caretaking and responsibility and delight of her, but that fierce sense of possessiveness persisted and persisted, and I simply couldn't let him in. I hated this about myself, hated feeling that selfishness rise up, but like I said, I couldn't help it.


Dog as symbol, dog as mirror, dog as barometer of human affairs. We tend to think of dogs as sweet and easy adjuncts to family life, simple beings with simple roles: the dog doles out affection to the nuclear unit, the dog offers the kids companionship and lessons in responsibility, the dog protects the family home. Dogs can--and often do--perform all those functions, but they often execute other tasks, as well, reflecting--and sometimes participating in--much more complicated aspects of family life.

Lucille turned out to be an expression of my limits with Michael, my inability to share my most important stuff. About a week after I got her, Michael and I were driving in the car with Lucille, and I made some reference to him as the dog's uncle: Uncle Michael. Michael turned to me and said, very definitively, "Uncle, nothing. Uh-uh. I'm Dad." That jarred me, the insistence in his voice, and I didn't say anything, but inside I was thinking: Nope, I'm sorry. You're the uncle. For a long time after I got her--for a good year--Michael would talk about us as a pack: Lucille seemed happiest, he said, when the three of us were together, when the pack was reunited. This made me feel unbearably guilty and conflicted, the hope behind such statements, because I couldn't share it, couldn't reciprocate. In my heart, Lucille and I were the pack, that pack of two, and Michael stood just outside the circle, close enough to be near it but a safe distance away from the center.

This feeling wasn't just a by-product of ambivalence toward Michael, or toward the idea of making a deeper commitment to him, both of which were realities that predated Lucille by some time. Instead, it was driven by a feeling of need that may have had very little to do with him: I need this, I need this dog to myself. That was the sensation: I need to cultivate a sense of belonging and attachment to this dog, and I need to do it alone, in order to learn that I'm capable of it. I need to love her, and to have her love me, before I can expand the circle, complicate it any further. The selfishness that sprang out of that need--the sense that I couldn't allow Michael to share in the bond or attachment--made me feel guilty and mean, but in some ways I was like a kid who's been denied candy for a long long time and then goes...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385317018
ISBN 13 
9780385317016
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
273
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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