It Takes a Village (and a Library)

It Takes a Village (and a Library)

When I was a child, I loved dogs and hated going to after-school daycare.

While still in primary school, going home by myself to an empty house while my mother worked was simply out of the question; she would not hear of it.

In retrospect, the aftercare program I’d attended seems like a lot of fun now (time for sports, cooking, and crafting – I’d kill for that as an adult!) But at that time and being the introvert that I was, I just wanted to decompress by myself at the end of a long day.

After significant back-and-forth on the issue, my mother and I finally came to a compromise; I would not be forced to attend aftercare each day, but nor would I be permitted to return home by myself after school. Instead, a magical third option materialized: go spend time at my local public library.

Here is the part where you may expect me to gush about the myriad literary worlds that I explored every day after school, transported by my love of reading, yes? No.

No, instead of flitting from fantasy to science fiction, roiling romances to romans français, I only ever felt compelled to visit one section of the library.

Dogs.

That’s right, every weekday at around 3:30PM, I would haul my ten-year-old ass to the library, stroll over to section 636.7, select half-a-dozen giant hardcover books exclusively on the subject of dogs, and then go to town on them until around 6:00PM.

Back then, I had a type when it came to books, and because that type (section 636.7, as I said) was located on the main floor, practically next to the library’s entrance, I never strayed far, never flirted with another genre. YA fiction who? Didn’t even occur to me. I was loyal as a dog, you could say.

From The Dog Bible to Cesar’s Way to Dogs for Dummies, I read them all.

I could explain start-to-finish, how to assess one’s household for puppy readiness to how to mourn the loss of a furry family member.

I could rattle off the seven American Kennel Club (AKC) dog group categories (Herding, Sporting, Hounds, Working, Toy, Non-sporting, and “Miscellaneous”), the most suitable dogs for training (Sporting, Working if you have the spine, Herding if you have the sheep or sheep-substitute), and the health perils of each breed (hip dysplasia in Labrador Retrievers, eye issues in Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, pretty much everything in English Bulldogs.)

Every now and then, I picked up a canine lovers’ magazine and challenged myself to name the photo of each breed pictured on sight (Pekinese, Rhodesian Ridgeback, Border Collie, Mixed Breed.) No peeking at the captions.

From the tone of these books, I had a sense of which authors/trainers relied on techniques rooted in achieving dominance rather than a relationship-based philosophy towards dogs, before such training divides were commonly discussed (or maybe I just wasn’t tuned into those discussion – after all, I was a kid at the library!) I felt righteous when I found a “mistake” in a book (such as when an author said that smacking a dog with a newspaper was acceptable), and mentally recited what the “correct” author would say (re-direction is a substitute for physical discipline that does not risk harming your dog psychologically.)

Perhaps to your surprise, there was no wagging-tailed friend waiting to greet me at home post my library “after-school program.” In fact, the absence of a dog of my own may be the reason why I researched the canine world so intently and so singularly. It would be more than a decade later before I first adopted a pup of my own – her name is Sappho (Rottweiler), and you can see her picture attached.

I want to thank the library for giving my young weirdo dog-lover self a place to be, a place to learn, and a place to process the world after those long days at school.