Name
“What’s his name?” The woman down the block asks, referring to my senior husky, perhaps, malamute mix.
“Boots,” I point to my feet.
“No, what’s his name, your dog?”
“Boots”
“That’s quite a name”
“Isn’t it?”
Typically the name of an inanimate thing that covers our feet and allows our toes to stay warm. But for some reason after all the other iterations from the original Dillon I was given, Boots is what felt right.
Sturdy, made for the outdoors. Nothing sweet and fluffy, though he can be. But not in the cuddly puppy way.
He’s worn in like an old pair of shoes. Nothing shiny nor chipper. Grumpy even, but uniquely comfortable for only the wearer. He’s mine.
He’s stubborn. The way a boot is initially resistant to your foot, there’s wedging-in before relief.
He tantrums in the vestibule next to the real boots like a child taking off their wet gloves after playing in the snow. Both hate to be dried off.
The vestibule of any apartment is always what happens when people enter in from the elements and let it all out before settling into the comfort of the warm home.
It’s the portal of transitions. Shoes, coats, bikes with chains that snag your sweater as you lift it off the brace mounted on the wall. It’s dirty mats and smelly wet dog.
There was a family I use to nanny for with a mom who always had fresh flowers on the living room table and the dad built a multi-functional shelving unit in the vestibule. 3 kids. A radiologist and a yoga teacher. Apartment in the LES.
I’ll never forget how the doors of this multi-functional wooden shelving unit would open up to their chronicles of Narnia inside. Bikes stacked, stroller and scooter folded, tote bags hanging on hooks, balls on shelves, chalk in bucket. The verbs of a family in this modern day forest closet. Everything had a place and name. Every nook and crevice was a product of this families creations.
Next to the handmade shelving unit was a chalkboard wall of continual art and charts. Upcoming school events, hang man, scribbles and doodles. Better than most things at the MOMA.
How envious I was of their vestibule. Chaos made into order that wasn’t fabricated. Sure, it’s stuff. But it was worn in, stained, held stories of spills and accidents, tantrums and playdates, grocery lists and wishes. It was only theirs.
Like Boots is mine. Snarling in the vestibule when I dry his soggy paws.
And for the first time he’s becoming someone else’s.
Epileptic, likely from a brain tumor, arthritic with kidney disease, Boots at 13 years old paces anxiously crying in pain. Follows me into the bathroom, hovers over my shins as I sit on the toilet, gets his head stuck in the kitchen stool unable to turn around.
And I am baking bread, re-writing a screenplay, grading, editing photos, intermittently walking the dog with his intermittent drugs trying to do what I did when I crashed the car in Costa Rica - everything, alone.
Until his familiar, ever-growing dependable name appears on the screen of my iPhone.
“Gabe”
Gabe is calling. It doesn’t take long for him to ask through the tone of my voice, “what’s wrong?” And for me to start unraveling. Tears falling like a kid in the vestibule trying to take everything wet off.
And he holds my snot nosed overwhelm somehow virtually, with empathy. After silence he says,
“Alison”
And for the first time I hear it. Like my dad with the 1989 mustache calling my name in the video recording of my 1st birthday.
“Alison” with intention.
“You’re an amazing mom. To Boots.”
And without moving, we left the outside elements of uncertainty, through the portal of the vestibule with dirty mats and onto the warm velvet turquoise couch.
Photo: Boots