How to Survive This Plague – 4 Walk the Dog

THIS MORNING, I walked the dog. I hadn’t slept much (who’s sleeping?) and at 2 a.m. was on the couch texting with a friend about earthquakes and World War II and our sudden alienation from our regular lives, which seem, in retrospect, almost silly in their prettiness, but then 8 a.m. rolled around and the dog needed to go out.

- By Lisa Miller

And now, having walked her, I understand a little bit better the reason for dogs. At least three times a day, our dog requires that we behave (ostensibly for her good, but really for our own) in ways that are familiar, reasonable, and sane.

Our dog, a rescue, came to us from Texas in an 18-wheeler tricked out as a kennel on the weekend before Hurricane Sandy. As the clouds gathered on the Sunday before the storm, our new dog disembarked in a parking lot in North Jersey, skinny, not yet a year old, and shivering with fear as a man handed us the business end of a red leash. “Thank you for saving this dog’s life,” he said, and I wept. She is part hound, part shepherd — “with eyebrows,” my husband likes to say, by which he means light-brown markings above her eyes that make her look extra intelligent, which she is. The storm hit 24 hours after we brought her home; tree branches whipped at our windows and crashed into the street. In the midst of it all, my husband took her out to pee and the cops stopped him and ordered him indoors. But what are you supposed to do in a disaster with a dog?, we wondered at the time. She had to go out, so we took her.