The city of Frederick has a population of 85,000 people and almost as many dogs. I wish we had fewer people, but as long as they’re here I’m glad they brought their dogs. Here’s what a few of the dogs in our neighborhood are like.
Izzy, who lives across the street, is a tiny, desperately old mutt. If you held me at gunpoint and forced me to guess her breed, I’d try terrier mix, but I’d rather you asked me another question because at this point in Izzy’s career she has transcended mere doghood, having become so wizened that she looks more like an ancient deep sea creature than any dog I can think of. Wrapped in a cloak and seated in a chair, you would take her for Yoda. Our own dog, Libby, who barks and growls when meeting any others of her kind, only sniffed confusedly when our neighbor V. dangled Izzy’s decrepit pill-bug body over our picket fence like chum over a shark. “They like each other!” our neighbor gushed. “Izzy, you have a new friend!” Unfortunately I’m not sure Izzy is capable of having friends anymore, because she’s blind and deaf and has fully disassociated herself from our material plane. Suspended with her legs in the air over Libby’s open mouth, Izzy made the same expressions she would make sitting on a couch, which is to say she looked contentedly grumpy. She no longer barks to be let out or in but simply for the random expulsion of sound, which comes out at strange times and sharp angles in a “BAH!” sort of noise, like an old woman snorting derisively at the blonde host of a morning talk show. For some reason, I find it comforting. I like Izzy.
Cuddles is another dog who lives a block down from us. I am 100% sure of his breed: He is a pug. Now you can picture him perfectly and know exactly what he is like. His face, as you are right now imagining, is exactly like an unbaked Cinnabon. I don’t have much else to report on him except to note that he disproves a common theory that dogs look like their owners. S., his owner, is everything a pug is not, meaning he is tall and spindly with long hair, tight pants, and a great penchant for Hawaiian shirts. He’s the sort of person who would buy a pug, name it Cuddles, and then pinch its cheek affectionately several times a day. In fact he’s done it. The two of them walk by our house often, S. always in a happy mood and Cuddles always in a dark one, as delightfully contrasted a duo as Frog and Toad. One time when they walked by I was trying to dig an old mulberry stump out of my yard, and S. told me I should borrow his pickaxe. It didn’t really help with the stump, but I appreciated the thought, and even more so the sight of S. hurrying down the street in tight pants and a bright Hawaiian shirt carrying a pickaxe. He and Cuddles are good neighbors to have.
There is also a corgi just a few houses behind us. I don’t know his name, but he’s inarguably the best-behaved dog on our block. You aren’t supposed to let dogs off their leashes in Frederick, but the corgi is always off his leash and nobody minds at all because he’s a model citizen, as chipper and trustworthy as a good accountant. His owner, A., is a single woman in probably her late 30s who can communicate with him telepathically. Sometimes A. takes the corgi four blocks down to the park, across streets and intersections, off the leash the whole way, and there is never any idea in your head that he might run off or get hurt or do something bad, because even when he stops to sniff at something you can tell that all A. has to do is make a quiet sound or send a small thought and he will come trotting back to her like a yo-yo. “Maybe someday we’ll be able to take Libby off the leash like that,” I told Alli, and then we both laughed.
In the yard that backs up to the edge of the park there’s a big, playful golden retriever. He’s like the other lion in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the one that bounded around after he was un-statued saying “Did you hear that? He said ‘us lions!,'” a little bit noble if you can get past the pathetic earnestness. Like all golden retrievers, he is friendly to the point of belligerence. He has a habit of hiding behind a shed in his yard and then rushing out toward the fence the moment another dog walks by, barking maniacally like he’s Jim Carrey doing an impression of a dog. The first time this happened it was utterly terrifying. I was walking Libby right by his fence, and when he appeared from nowhere she jumped like one of those cartoon characters getting struck by lightening, where you see all their bones inside them. It yanked my arm and heart out of place. Now we’re used to it so we always watch out for him, and his big-surprise-barking routine has gotten so familiar that I think Libby even sort of likes him. Out of all the dogs in our neighborhood, he is the most like Doug from Up.
There’s a pack of long-haired dachshunds that I have never met personally but that I have been quietly frightened of from a distance. Their terror is in their fecundity. I’m never sure how many of the dachshunds there are – there might be three or four or seven, but they’re all identical and they’re all on different leashes that keep twisting up with each other, so keeping track of them is like trying to count a pile of ants. They’re the dog version of those seagulls from Finding Nemo, simple and cute but vaguely threatening, and I’d hate to see them hungry. The kid who walks them is like thirteen. He always wears flip-flops and sweats, and he holds all sixteen dog leashes in one hand while holding his phone an inch from his face with the other. I think he’s probably watched a lot of TikTok. Alli and I have judged him. Well, I don’t know if Alli has judged him, but when I said he should put his phone away sometime so he could keep track of his twenty-seven dogs, she didn’t disagree. I’m sure he’s a decent kid; at least he seems to like dogs, which is a good sign. But I think he’s in danger of drowning in the dogs and short-form videos.
There’s a dog named Gunner a few homes back who, like Libby, is a rescue mutt. He is brownish and medium-aged and medium-sized and generally has the temper of an old blanket. He’s mostly nondescript, except that for some reason I have not uncovered, Libby, upon arriving in our home, immediately identified him as her arch nemesis. Whenever Gunner passes within 50 yards of our house, she knows. She raises her ears and growls and froths at the mouth until I think she might pass out. Maybe he peed at the wrong place in our yard or committed some other atrocity back in the early days, I don’t know. But one time I was walking Libby down the sidewalk and Gunner’s owner was coming the other way walking him, and it had just snowed so we were forced to pass within inches of each other. We pasted grim smiles on our faces and reeled in our leashes to within an inch of our dogs’ collars, and that was as close as I’ve ever come to death. (That’s an exaggeration. It really wasn’t that bad. But Gunner and Libby snapped at each other, and she and I both hyperventilated the rest of the walk.)
Finally I guess I’ll tell you about Libby. She is part hound and part collie, or at least that’s what the rescue listing said. But the rescue listing also said lots of other things, like “She is great on a leash!” and “She has great house manners!” and “She shoots 90% from the free-throw line like Air Bud!” that make me think the whole blurb was probably closer to ChatGPT’s platonic ideal of a dog than the actual truth. She does look a bit collie-ish, but all we know for sure is that she had puppies, that she’s from Kuwait, and that she arrived in our home six months ago. The rest of her life is a mystery.
We got her because I really wanted a dog, and because Alli thought she was the cutest one we could find during the week we pored over all the rescue photos. She really is cute – even pretty. She’s a rich, brown-red color, with cream on her snout and tail and paws, as if the ends of her were dipped in white paint. She has natural eyeliner, and her eyes are so expressive that sometimes when she turns them toward me I think she’s just about to speak. If she could, I am sure she would ask repeatedly for food and a walk in a concerned tone of voice.
She is always concerned; she is sweet and overly submissive, but anxious. She has a scar on her nose and a protruding rib that make us suspect she’s been hurt before. When unfamiliar people or dogs walk by our door, she is afraid. Like Shrek, she dislikes home intruders, so we’ve taken to keeping her on a leash when new people come into the house. After they enter, she’s mostly fine; it seems to be the opening of the door that’s her main issue. She’s destroyed every door we’ve kept closed in our house by scratching and biting at them in futile attempts to escape. She hates, above anything else, to be trapped, but she would also prefer not to be bothered. If you make a noise louder than the sound of a normal talking voice she will leave the room, glaring at you while she does like a passive-aggressive toddler. She is a couch potato and a surprisingly good cuddler. More often now, she greets us at the door when we come home, and her wagging tail is something very close to real joy. We are almost always tired of her, but we love her.
And those are the neighborhood dogs.
