One hundred dogs is a lot of dogs. When we embarked upon this adventure I had no idea how long it would take to accomplish; a month? A year? Should we have a time limit or a deadline? With all of the possibilities, I finally decided not to worry about it at all. The longer we work on this project, the more TyTy will practice handwriting, sentence building, journaling, and several other lessons that I'm probably not even aware of.
Apart from the obvious things we are learning from this little project, there is another, more subtle thing I've realized I'm trying to teach TyTy, and it's derived from my attempts at behavior self-modification. As a child, I started collecting things at a young age. I don't remember when it started, but I remember being obsessed with my various collections. Postcards, stamps, postmarks, patches, badges, coins, bottle caps…I collected these things in shoeboxes. I also collected images in my head, and still do; I have a dream of making a coffee-table book of these collected images one day. Maybe it’s undiagnosed OCD. I’ve learned to live with it. I indulge my collecting nature, but I have also learned to sometimes say no to it.
TyTy was never a very materialistic child; he never had the attachment to a fetish item most toddlers develop. But now, as we pursue his quest to meet one hundred dogs, it is becoming clear to me that he does have some of these same obsessive tendencies, they just came out differently. He is becoming obsessed by the possibility of meeting dogs.
Although I’ve never laid it out to him formally, I feel that in order to keep this project pure we need to add the dogs as we come upon them and not seek them out deliberately. For instance, one of his grandmothers has five dogs living at her house and we totally plan to have them in the journal. But right now she is undergoing chemotherapy and the very last thing I want to do is set up a meeting to see her just to include her pack in the journal. It feels wrong to me to do that. Friends have offered hospitality just for the purpose of meeting their dogs but I keep turning them down. When we are at their homes for what I would call normal reasons, we will jump at the chance to get their dogs in the journal. Likewise, I refuse to go trolling for dogs at dog parks or pet adoption events. I know myself well enough to know that I should avoid seeing pets for adoption until I am ready and able to bring one home.
As with everything else I find myself teaching TyTy, I stepped back for some self-examination. Why do I want to do it this way? Why shouldn’t we loiter at the dog park with a box of milk-bones? Why shouldn’t we volunteer to clean kennels for a Saturday every month just to get an “in” with the shelter? I know there are probably some Uber Moms out there who would think of a way to parlay this project into some kind of fabulous fundraiser for an animal welfare group. But that’s just not me. So why am I so strict in my idea of spontaneous dog meetings?
When I used to make jewelry, the pieces I was most excited about always incorporated found objects. The best pieces (for me) included rusted, twisted metal bits, although rusted bottle caps came in a close second. Inevitably, in my search for rusted metal and TyTy’s search for dogs, people want to help. I found this to be a burden when I was seriously collecting metal for jewelry. It was hard for me to explain what it was that I was looking for and in their eagerness to help, my friends sometimes unloaded a lot of junk on me that I was unable to politely refuse. Worse, sometimes they would come to my shows looking for that piece of metal in one of my jewelry pieces and then admonish me for not having used it. It was almost as if someone giving me the found object made it no longer a random find. I realized that the random way in which they were found was as important to me as what they looked like. I liked the way they looked and I liked the fact that they were randomly discarded for me to randomly find. I think this is one of the aspects of the 100 dogs that I am most interested in – the randomness of how we find the dogs.
That is why, when we went to City Park last Friday for the weekly homeschool park day, I was a bit apprehensive. There is a dog park there, and TyTy knows this. Sure enough, he was already talking about meeting new dogs en route. I never want to disappoint him or squash his enthusiasm, so I just kept quiet and decided to react to what we found instead of trying to anticipate an unknown scenario. This is a lesson I’ve learned from parenting.
We arrived at the park and of course there was a horde of dogs there, but TyTy was much more interested in his human friends and he went straight to the other homeschoolers. I was in conversation with the other moms when he came rushing to me a few minutes later. “Mom! A dog! Bring your phone!!” Which means of course, bring the camera on my phone to get a picture. That was Dog #17, Ringo. A very nice dog with a nice owner, who acted the way people always act when we tell them about the project. “Sit, Ringo!”
Ringo and his owner were not in the dog park, they were sitting at a bench near the playground, as were Ezra and his owner. Ezra became Dog #18. His appetite thus whetted, TyTy turned his eyes hungrily to the dog park.
Mom: TyTy, we can’t go in the dog park.
TyTy: But look at all the dogs we could meet!
Apart from the fact that children aren’t allowed in the dog park itself, a rule with which I entirely agree, going in there and deliberately meeting all those dogs was exactly not the way I wanted to go about this project. But there’s only so much of your own personality (and personality problems) that you can force upon your own child, so I compromised. We hovered near a knot of several dog owners who were congregating a few yards outside of the gated entry to the dog park. Thus were we able to get Dogs # 19 – 21, although that was not all the dogs in the group. I could not help but notice that some of the owners shied away from the eager child. And really, that’s fine! I don’t blame people for not wanting to meet my kid. I often do not want to meet their dogs.
Since that day, there have been several instances when we see a dog but are unable to get to it. While walking we saw a lady way down the street checking her mail with her dog, but they were in the house before we were even a block away. Likewise, we’ve seen dogs in backyard fences whom we cannot really meet. TyTy is learning to let these go, and I’m very proud of him. There is so much in this large world, so many dogs, so many bottle caps! We can let them go sometimes because there will always be others. Not the same, thank goodness, but different and wonderful in their own ways.
