I’m not a dog person. To all you dog lovers, I promise this is not a moral failing. I’ve just never had an affinity for our furry canine friends. No past dog bite, no growling incident, no slobber on a silk shirt to trace it back to.

I’m just not that into them.

Which, as any dog lover knows, makes every dog on this planet drawn to me like a bad boyfriend post-bender. The Finleys and Bellas, the Baileys and Teds — they all want to sit on my lap, lick my face, jump up with sharp claws and leave a mark. I am inordinately interesting in my authentic disinterest.

So when a house-sitting gig in New Orleans came with a dog attached, I said yes to the house (ten days in a city I love, 30,000 steps a day around Audubon Park, my favorite daughter sighted regularly), and quietly dreaded the rest.

Her name was Olive. A black lab. I’d met her before, racing around the fenced yard of my regular Uptown airbnb.

Naturally, I had a plan. Morning walk. Food in the slow-down bowl. Meds tucked into cream cheese. Water refilled. Poop scooped. Done.

Except a dog is not a to-do list. Olive had not received the memo.

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On our first morning walk, we had just settled into a brisk pace when I was yanked sideways. I looked down the leash to see Olive in a full commando crouch: low to the ground, creeping forward, in theory sneaking up on a bushy, twitching tail… the squirrel long gone before she got anywhere close.

This turned out to be Olive’s favorite way of making her way around the park. She didn’t care about people or ducks or even other dogs. But every time we saw a squirrel (frequently!), she’d abruptly stop and crouch, doing an awkward but earnest impression of a stalking panther.

A white-haired gentleman stopped to watch her. “Look at her getting lower and lower!” He was delighted. So, weirdly, was I.

This was the first place my plan fell apart. I could not keep a consistent Fitbit-monitored pace: I had to slow down for her. Olive operated on squirrel time, not my time, and all I could do was surrender.

Together, we entered a timelessness I don’t know is available to me in my regular life.

I started seeing things I would have missed if I’d been able to maintain my typical march. The guy playing harmonica alongside his boom box. Another making tea on a concrete bench with his camping stove. Swans, white herons, maintenance workers fanning out across the golf course at dawn with leaf blowers and weed whackers like a small, safety-goggled army. I spend plenty of time in nature at home, but many times I’m so far up in my own head I might as well be in a windowless room. With Olive stopping and starting like a game of freeze tag, my head was not an option.

She also turned out to be a social credential I didn’t know I needed. Strangers don’t talk to strangers in most cities, but they’ll talk to a dog, and sometimes even to the person holding the leash. “Is that a puppy?” (Nope, just a maniac.) “My dog is friendly! Is yours??” (Great, I’m just the sitter, so I truly cannot say.)

And then there were Olive’s actual people — the FOOs, Friends of Olive — who recognized her yellow collar and stopped to say hello. “She’s such a sweet dog!” one woman in a sun hat told me, and I nodded, because I couldn’t deny it.

So the results of my dog experiment are in: I was right all along, I am not a dog person. Ten days with Olive confirmed it, not cracked it. That thought I used to have — maybe someday when I’m older and less nomadic, I’ll get a dog for company — is gone.

I didn’t fall for the dog. I fell for the life the dog made me live. The walks I wouldn’t have taken at that stop-and-go pace. The things I wouldn’t have seen moving at my usual speed. The strangers who stopped to chat because of the tail-wagging creature on the end of my leash. The routine of another living thing depending on you in the early morning quiet.

To trying a new gear,

Sue

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