escape artists

When we moved to Paris, we made the difficult decision to leave one of our dogs behind. Ruby was – and still is – an exuberant lab with a funny face and a sweet personality. But we just couldn’t keep her at home. At least a couple of times a week I would glance out the window and see her, either in the act of scrambling over the fence or already running full bore down the middle of the street. We built a six-foot fence; she dug under it. When people came to visit, she bum-rushed the door. It became a familiar sight for either S. or I to be circling the alleyways within a four-block radius of the house, trying to find the trash can that would stop Ruby in her tracks and allow us to wheedle her home. In the meantime, our other dog would stand at the window or in the yard, dumbstruck. A fellow shelter adoptee, her attitude seemed to be, “hey, two squares and we get to sleep on the bed. What the heck is your problem?” When we brought Ruby home, she always seemed happy to be with us, but not repentant, either.

Having a baby in the house only complicated matters. I had privately sworn to myself not to abandon our first set of dependents in favor of the human one. I had deeply absorbed the earnest animal shelter lectures about Responsibility Forever and Not Giving Up When it Gets Hard. But the mad dash around the alley got complicated with the added logistics of a floppy newborn to negotiate, and I had visions of locking all of us out of the house by accident in the middle of winter, me half-dressed in my bedroom slippers, G in a flimsy onesie, Ruby triumphant. And did I mention that she was also a terrible, lunging leash-walker and was unpredictably aggressive with other dogs?

On the other hand, Ruby was fabulous with G. Endlessly patient and gentle, she would lie on her side for an hour and make a living cradle while G. kicked his feet in the air and batted at her ears. That kind of trust and patience was something that took our other dog much longer to develop – she spent months circling the baby at a safe distance, and even now, having reached a co-dependency détente which revolves around shared and discarded food, she will still occasionally give me looks that say, “I am only doing this for you.” Ruby never did anything for us – she did things because she wanted to, but she always did them with joy.

When G. was about three months old, Ruby broke free from her leash, ran across a park, and forced S. to execute a pavement face-dive in order to stop her from going after an elderly poodle. Our already significant nightmares about Ruby roaming the streets of Paris suddenly assumed some Technicolor detail, possibly leading to an international diplomatic incident. And so now Ruby lives in the mountains, on a farm – really, with one of S.’s cousins – and we live here.

But in a bit of the universe’s glorious irony, she is still with us, in toddler form. There is no park gate, no doorknob within reach of a handy chair, that G. cannot breach. We’ve all become very accustomed to his rear view, speeding away as fast as his short legs can take him. He does it all with absolute glee, and when he cackles I swear I hear Ruby barking.