Caroline Knapp's canine connection

Dear Dog Lady,

There are so many books about dogs -- training tomes, breed books, humor paperbacks, collections of essays, sentimental memoirs. I go into Borders, Walden, Barnes and Noble, or I browse Amazon.com and I’m overwhelmed by the canine oeuvre. I can’t possibly read them all. So I turn to you. If I were to select just one book about dogs, which one would it be?

-Ralph, Boston, MA

Ralph, your query opens the door for Dog Lady to tip her chapeau to the doyenne of Dog Ladies. The late Caroline Knapp wrote, I believe, the book that best captures the gentle, joyous spirit of the human-canine connection. Knapp’s “Pack Of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs” (Dial Press) is a splendid story of Knapp’s relationship with her own dog, Lucille, and how Lucille changed her life in a multitude of rich and unexpected ways.

Sadly, Lucille, a Shepherd-mix, outlived Knapp.

Caroline Knapp died of lung cancer at 42 on June 3, 2002. The Boston Globe obituary carried the exquisitely tender detail that, when the end came, faithful Lucille was at hand, sitting vigil by her keeper’s bedside.

Talented Knapp wrote of other things. She authored a best-selling memoir about her addiction to alcohol, “Drinking: A Love Story.” She was a columnist for The Boston Phoenix whose vivid, edgy stories about being single were collected into “Alice K’s Guide To Life: One Woman’s Quest for Survival, Sanity and The Perfect Shoes.” But it was “Pack of Two” that most touched Dog Lady at just the right moment.

Dog Lady never met Caroline Knapp, although we traveled in overlapping circles. Still, I feel enormously grateful, even indebted to her. When Dog Lady first got her dog, the five pound puppy seemed like a creature from another planet. Dog Lady had no idea what she was doing with a small animal crated under her roof. Each night -- exhausted after a grueling day of walks and house training that began at 5 in the morning -- Dog Lady would crawl into bed with “Pack of Two.”

The book made sense of the nonsensical during a confusing time spent trying to bond with a perplexing furball. Had Dog Lady, a fiercely independent pack of one, made a dreadful mistake in getting a dog? Would this new relationship endure and deepen? Knapp’s words soothed the savage beast of doubt.

Certain passages, read over and over, gave comfort and assurance, such as this: “Before you get a dog, you can’t quite imagine what living with one might be like, afterward you can’t imagine living any other way. Life without Lucille? Unfathomable, to contemplate how quiet and still my home would be, and how much less laughter there’d be, and how much less tenderness, and how unanchored I’d be without her presence, the simple constancy of it. I once heard a woman who’d lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without a dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I’d amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness, nurturance and trust and joy.”

A rainbow of fulfillment comes when you open your home and heart to a dog. Caroline Knapp helped Dog Lady to see the brilliant colors.

Posted by Dog Lady at February 14, 2003 12:00 PM