My Favorite Cartoon Character Was a Dog
Someone asked me recently, Who is your favorite cartoon character?
It is supposed to be an easy question. Most people have an answer ready before the question is finished. Mickey Mouse, perhaps. Tom and Jerry. Snoopy. Garfield. Scooby-Doo, if you have excellent taste. There are plenty of obvious choices, characters who have been part of our lives for so long that choosing one feels almost automatic.
I, however, immediately thought of Romo.
That is a problem because Romo was not a cartoon character. He was a Belgian Malinois, a rescue dog with enormous ears, the body of an athlete and the emotional range of a badly written soap opera. He was also, frankly, considerably more entertaining than most cartoon characters.
For starters, he had the ears. They were enormous, upright and permanently alert, as though he were receiving classified information from outer space. Whenever something caught his attention, both ears would point toward it with such complete seriousness that I could not help wondering what important intelligence he had just received. A bird in the garden, a car passing outside, a noise from another room—everything was treated as potentially significant.
He could look deeply offended by absolutely nothing. He could look at me as though I had personally ruined his life, even when I had done nothing more serious than ask him to move away from the door. Then, five minutes later, he would be standing in front of me with a toy in his mouth, expecting me to participate in whatever extremely important operation he had just invented.
That was the thing about Romo. He did not need dialogue. He had facial expressions, body language and an impressive collection of sighs. So many sighs. A dog can communicate an entire paragraph by sitting three feet away from you and turning his head very slowly in the opposite direction.
Fine.
Clearly you don’t care about me.
I shall suffer.
Alone.
Without the chicken.
Romo was particularly good at this. He was also very good at making me believe that whatever I was doing was less important than whatever he wanted me to do. If I was working, he wanted a walk. If I was writing, he wanted a walk. If I was eating, he possibly wanted a walk, although he was also interested in what I was eating. If I was sleeping, he definitely wanted a walk. If I was simply sitting quietly and doing nothing at all, he had a proposal.
Walk.
I sometimes wonder whether dogs invented the concept of interruption. If they did, they perfected it. They have an instinctive understanding of the exact moment when you are about to become absorbed in something. That is when they need to stand beside you, place one paw on your leg, stare into your eyes or produce a sigh so dramatic that you begin questioning your entire character.
Underneath all that comedy was something I did not fully understand until much later. Romo had an extraordinary ability to make an ordinary day feel as though it mattered.
A walk was not just a walk. It was an expedition. A patch of grass was a newspaper filled with urgent reports. A suspicious noise required investigation. A squirrel was a national security threat. A person sitting quietly with a cup of coffee was clearly someone who had forgotten that she had a dog.
He made life immediate. I could not spend an entire afternoon worrying about my future when someone was standing beside me demanding that I throw a ball. Dogs are very good at bringing you back to the present. They do not care about your five-year plan, your unfinished list of tasks or the email you have been avoiding. They care about dinner, the five minutes before dinner, the five minutes after dinner and whatever you are eating that is not dinner.
Romo came into my life as a rescue, and somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of him as a dog I had rescued. He rescued me from several perfectly good opportunities to take myself too seriously.
That was probably his real talent. He made me laugh. He made me get out of the house. He made me notice things I might otherwise have missed: the weather, the changing light, the way a familiar path looked different in another season. He made me understand that love does not always arrive with a grand announcement. Sometimes it arrives with muddy paws. Sometimes it steals your place on the sofa. Sometimes it wakes you at 6:17 in the morning because apparently that is an emergency. Sometimes it lies beside you while you are having a terrible day and does not ask you to explain why.
That last one stays with me.
When Romo died, the silence was strange. Not dramatic. Just strange. There were little absences everywhere, most of them connected to ordinary things. The things I no longer had to do. The things I still automatically looked for. The space where he used to be. The sound that was no longer there. The ridiculous realization that nobody was going to judge me anymore for spending five minutes explaining something complicated to a dog who had absolutely no interest in my explanation.
Although, to be fair, he probably understood more than some people I have explained things to.
For a long time, I thought grief meant remembering. Then I realized it also meant carrying forward. Sometimes you carry someone forward in a photograph, sometimes in a habit and sometimes in a story. Sometimes, without quite intending to, you write them into the next thing you create.
That is probably what happened with dogs and me.
Romo was my first great lesson in what a dog can become in a human life. He was not simply a pet. He was part of the structure of my days, part of the way I understood home and companionship, part of the reason ordinary moments became memorable. Losing him did not erase any of that. It made me more aware of it.
Sauli came later.
She was another rescue, another Belgian Malinois, another set of enormous ears and another very convincing argument that I clearly had no authority over my own schedule. But Sauli had her own personality, her own adventures and her own ability to turn a completely normal day into a story.
She very much rules my world.
She decides when the day begins. She decides when I need a walk. She decides when writing is less important than attention. She decides, with complete confidence, where I sit, when I move and whether any moment is allowed to remain quiet for more than a few seconds.
I may tell myself that I am in charge.
Sauli knows better.
She has a way of making her decisions seem reasonable. If she wants me to stop working, she does not behave as though she is interrupting. She behaves as though she is correcting an obvious mistake. If I have been sitting too long, she looks at me with the patient disappointment of someone waiting for me to remember an appointment. If I try to ignore her, she becomes more persistent. If I continue to ignore her, she becomes creative.
Eventually, I get up.
Somewhere along the way, I began writing her stories down. That became Adventures of Sauli the Rescue Pup.
What began as life with one dog quietly became a whole little world of rescue, mischief, companionship, loyalty and the ridiculous things dogs do that somehow become the memories we treasure most. Sauli gave me new stories, but she also gave me a new way to understand the old ones.
She keeps Romo alive in ways I do not always expect. Not by replacing him—she could never do that, and she does not try—but by keeping certain parts of my life in motion. She keeps me walking. She keeps me noticing. She keeps me laughing at the same kinds of expressions, the same sudden bursts of energy and the same complete confidence with which a dog can take possession of a room.
Sometimes I see a familiar look in her face. Sometimes I recognize the same alertness, the same intensity, the same ability to turn a simple moment into an event. And sometimes she does something completely her own, something only Sauli would do, and I understand that love can carry the past forward without keeping it stuck there.
Romo remains part of my world because Sauli keeps giving me reasons to remember him. She also gives me plenty of reasons to pay attention to the present. She is here. She is busy. She has plans. Most of them involve me.
I like to think Romo would approve.
Although he would probably object to the idea that Sauli gets an entire book series. He would consider that a publishing decision requiring further discussion, preferably over treats. He might also insist that his contribution be acknowledged, perhaps in the form of a larger dedication or a separate volume devoted entirely to his opinions about squirrels.
That is also why I think dogs make such wonderful characters. They do not need to be invented very much. Give them a personality, a pair of ears, a little mischief and a human being who is willing to pay attention. The story usually takes care of itself.
Dogs are already full of contradictions. They can be brave and ridiculous, dignified and shameless, independent and completely dependent on you for the next decision. They can spend ten minutes investigating a leaf and then become deeply offended when you suggest that it is time to go home. They can make a mess, interrupt your work, steal your seat and still be the first creature you want beside you when something goes wrong.
That combination is difficult to manufacture. It has to be observed.
So when someone asks me who my favorite cartoon character is, I could give them the conventional answer. Snoopy is pretty wonderful. Scooby has his moments. Garfield understands boundaries around food.
But my favorite will always be the one I actually knew.
Romo.
A rescue dog with enormous ears, a serious face, questionable opinions about squirrels and absolutely no understanding of personal space. He was not a cartoon, but if he had been one, I suspect he would have been the kind of character who walked into every scene, stole the entire story and left everyone else wondering what had just happened.
Actually, that sounds exactly like Romo.
And Sauli is still here, ruling my world, keeping him alive in the stories I tell and giving me new ones every day. Perhaps that is why I am still writing about dogs. They keep reminding me that the best stories are often not invented at all. They are lived, one walk, one interruption, one muddy paw and one impossible expression at a time.
