DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Adam McGovern
May 5, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.

DOGS

I think I always believed I needed a disapproving presence in my life to keep me on my game — informed and to-the-point as a writer, diligent as a professional, demanding better of myself as a person. And to the purpose of working for acceptance, nothing was more perfect than having cats. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade a minute I spent loving the cats I lived with, but there is a built-in need to win over their solitary, self-reliant nature. For someone who needs to prove themself anew each day, cats are good practice.

Though their independent nature can lead to isolation in yourself. A cat doesn’t need to go out, so you don’t either. Or, a cat can be left alone and take care of themself, so you can go your separate way for long stretches. I thought this was the balance in my life that I wanted, and my self-image was influenced and mirrored by it — cats were fastidious, like me; indoorsy; quiet and studious-seeming (though I couldn’t claim to be graceful). Felix to dogs’ Oscar, and Felix was even a cat’s name.

I just showed the other side of that card: Dogs seemed to me unruly, noisy, too prone to get into dirt you had to clean up. Don’t get me wrong again, I always got along with them, and could much enjoy their company at someone else’s house, but I was never responsible for them. And thus I never knew what a privilege that obligation could be.

I also never had to bear the burden of their affection — let me try to explain. The joy of a dog at their human’s homecoming is legendary, but it’s given so freely that I would always fear that, in my case, it would somehow be unearned. It wasn’t ever that I didn’t want to have a dog because I associated them with a kind of person I didn’t respect, but with a person I didn’t think I wanted to be.

Having a cat already in the house was a permanent excuse not to have to think about it, so it was an idea I put off like having kids, only in this case, to sometime in our undefined older-age, when my late wife Lynn and I had slowed down and could devote more time. My wife Heather is seriously allergic to cats, so that cycle didn’t ever start… and our life, for many reasons, is to be lived now. And now is what dogs do best.

Fittingly to that, it wasn’t planned. We were on our way to an outdoor indie comics festival at an old factory complex in Brooklyn, and between the fest and the door to the courtyard was a rescue agency holding an adoption day, where out of 30+ capering canines we met and fell for Sidecar, a scruffy stray straight outta Dallas, TX.

Bringing him out of his wary, street-dwelling shell and getting him to relax and trust and cuddle is something we earned, it turns out. Contacting the earth and sky through his explorations is not getting my hands dirty but living and breathing. Seeing his wonder at every new place — or even the same place on every new day — refreshes my happiness to be one more day above that ground too. The trust he looks back at me with on these adventures puts a profound responsibility on me and grants me the gift of someone to look out for. And his joy when I come home or contentment when he falls asleep against me, my pack-mate, my den-dweller, puts me in touch with something evolution worked at for millennia and I didn’t know was a natural part of me.

My dog is happy to see me. And now I can see myself, and maybe think I’m worthy of it.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

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