Every Boston Terrier is a baby and you cannot convince me otherwise
Not a real human baby, but you knew that
I drove home from therapy and an unusually stressful trip to the pharmacy tonight in a car with a broken air conditioner, bathed in the combined haze of extreme humidity, 90 degree heat, and the Canadian wildfires’ southern drift. So, typical July dog days Tuesday, and I was not feeling any of it.
Until I drove by a man walking a Boston Terrier, pulling frantically at its leash, effectively walking the man, because that’s how these weird little dogs relax and get their exercise.
“BABY!” I screamed in my car, all windows down, to no one and to the entire neighborhood. “IT’S A LITTLE BABY! BABY!”
I have no control over the fact that I do this. It’s like…an autonomic nervous system response (I say wrongly, because I had to drop AP Biology) but the good kind, like the opposite of fight or flight. I’m not fighting this feeling anymore, because I can’t, and why? You know the drill by now: because dogs are better than people.
I don’t even know this dog. This dog could be 17.5 years old (though a 17.5 year old dog who could still move at a nice trot) but it doesn’t matter. This dog was a baby, like all dogs, but especially all Bostons (and puggles, I need to add, so my dog doesn’t get upset) are babies. I don’t make this rule, I just enforce it by screaming in my car when I see them.
I grew up with Bostons, and besides Catholicism they were the most important religion in the house. My grandmother’s Boston Oscar attended her wedding reception, drinking beer from an actual glass at the 1947 Washington, DC, backyard event. She had no objectivity about these dogs — apple, tree — and would allow them to behave poorly, including the day our very anxious dog Boss bit her toe badly, when she said “He didn’t mean it, he’s a good boy” while she fashioned a toe tourniquet out of a kitchen towel.
(I am not advocating for poor dog training, so please do not send me angry dms. I’m just telling you how things were in our very informally-disciplined 1980s house. Boss had no complaints, and he never bit anyone else as far as I know, sticking with attacking any basketball that crossed his path like it had a pulse. And maybe to him they did. He had significant problems, poor little dude.)
When I was in my 20s, living in Ohio for graduate school, I got two Bostons of my own. Smart, no, because I didn’t have money for anything and pet care is not cheap, but I somehow kept them in the care and increasingly expensive sensitive stomach diets these dogs always seem to require. I didn’t care. They were two of the great loves of my life, and they needed what they needed.
I wish I had more photos of these two beloved dorks, but this era pre-dated digital photos, and my scanned archives aren’t cooperating tonight. Here’s Louis Armstrong with his Boston, General, instead.
This breed is a serious thing, for people who love this breed. This is why I can be in the worst kind of shitty mood, driving home from a mind-numbing errand after mind-scrambling therapy on a terrible weather day — I have to say, this Tuesday did not start out strong — then I see one of them trotting along the sidewalk, not a brain in its teensy black and white head, and it’s all fine. I’m not an asshole anymore, and neither are you, or you, or you. I remember that goodness and laughter and acceptance despite toes bitten all to hell exists, in a short-nosed dog with terrible flatulence and a snoring problem, and the kind of love that surpasses most logical understanding. I scream “BABY!” to no one, and everyone, whether they hear me or not. And I’m okay.
Also here’s Helen Keller with her Boston, Phiz, which sounds like a dj name. Ask me how much I love that she had a Boston, and I will try to tell you, but I’ll fail to adequately quantify it. Phiz. What a badass name.
Dog Dopamine hits from around the web:
My friend Sue’s cousin Cathy has a dog named Murphy. She still has him after a scare, because Murphy is amazing. Read all about his travels.
Caroline is a Pygora goat, and for our purposes, Caroline is an honorary dog. I love this story, and I’m excited because Stargazer Farm is close to me, so I can go visit.
Scooter won the 2023 World’s Ugliest Dog award which is a terrible award because all dogs are beautiful. Scooter is a looker and I don’t want to hear it. He has also taught himself to walk on his front legs because his back legs have plans besides walking, and there is nothing ugly about that kind of tenacity. Scooter can hire me as a rebranding expert and we’ll be hotter than the Ulimatum: Queer Love cast doing every Pride event from coast to coast, I promise.
That’s all for now. Stay cool and hydrate! Also yell “Baby!” at any dog you see who inspires it. Tell me when you do it! Joy shared is joy doubled.
I do this and add PUG… EVERY time I see one, and I don’t see many roaming the streets of Washington DC.