Once You’ve Had a Bichon

My first dog was Blackie, a hound from my childhood in Bald Knob, Arkansas. Blackie understood the school-bus schedule as well as I did. He waited with me in the morning, and he was there again when I returned.

As a child, I assumed that was simply what dogs did. You left. You came back. The dog was still there. The arrangement seemed permanent because children are briefly allowed to believe that important things will remain where they left them.

Only later did I understand what Blackie was giving me. Another living creature had organized part of his day around my departure and return. He did not need a theory of loyalty or a speech about what the relationship meant. He was simply there.

I would spend a good part of my life learning how much of love looks exactly like that.

Lucky belonged somewhere in my elementary and junior-high years. I cannot place him cleanly inside a particular grade. Memory preserved the dog better than it preserved the calendar, which seems appropriate. School years are administrative boundaries. Dogs do not care which form you were filling out when they loved you.

At some point, Lucky disappeared. I do not remember exactly when it happened or exactly how long he was gone. It may have been close to a year. It was long enough that his absence stopped being an event and became part of ordinary life, long enough for a child to begin accepting that the world had taken something away without explaining itself.

Then Lucky came home.

I do not know where he had been, who fed him, where he slept, how far he traveled, or what happened during that missing stretch of time. He was not exactly the same dog when he returned, and there is no clean explanation waiting somewhere in my memory. What remains is simpler and stranger: he disappeared into a world much larger than the one I understood and somehow found his way back to Bald Knob.

I wish I remembered more. I do not. Lucky was gone for a very long time, and then he came home. That is what survived.

Later, during the final part of high school, we had Mindy, a miniature Doberman. I have photographs of us from that period, although I cannot identify the exact year. I was probably seventeen or eighteen. Mindy was small enough to hold easily, but she occupied a much larger place in that part of my life.

She was there as I finished school and prepared to leave home for the Air Force. My life was beginning to move outward, and Mindy belonged to the home I was leaving behind. Years later, when I returned to Bald Knob after Germany and before Tomoko and I headed west to California, Mindy was still there. She did not live much longer after that.

That puts her near one of the great boundaries of my life. Mindy belonged to the boy who had not yet left home, but she remained long enough to see me come back after I had become someone slightly different.

Smiley belonged mainly to those later Bald Knob years too. He did not technically belong to us. He was a stray the next-door neighbors took in, but I absolutely loved him. They called him Smiley because he seemed to show his teeth constantly while wagging his tail.

Written down, that sounds like a dog issuing two contradictory legal notices at once. In person, it looked like a grin.

Smiley lived next door, but affection is not particularly interested in property lines. There may have been some overlap between Smiley and Lucky, but I cannot reconstruct that chronology with confidence. When I remember Smiley, I remember him mainly alongside Mindy and those later years before I left Bald Knob.

Mindy stayed inside the family. Smiley lived one yard over. Both became part of the same memory. Dogs manage this without paperwork.

Years later, I was stationed in Japan, and that is where Tomoko and I began our life together.

My next assignment was Germany. The move created a very practical problem: I was going to leave Japan, and Tomoko was not simply going to appear on military orders because we loved each other. We wanted to stay together, so we got married.

In December 1988, Tomoko and I tied the knot at the American Embassy in Tokyo. There was urgency to it because Germany was coming. This was not an eighteen-month wedding-production program involving color palettes, seating charts, and an industry of professionals explaining how we had been doing marriage incorrectly. We wanted to be together in whatever part of the world came next.

A few weeks later, probably in late January or February 1989, we left Japan together. The exact departure date is fuzzy now. The important part is not: we went together.

Germany became the first place where we had to figure out married life away from everything familiar to either of us. We arrived as newlyweds with no established household waiting for us and no roots in the place. We were going to have to build a home.

We made that home in Melbach, Germany. We were young, had not been married long, and did not have much money. We were a long way from Bald Knob and a long way from Japan, still figuring out what marriage looked like when there was no familiar place around us to tell us what home was supposed to feel like.

Then Lady arrived.

An old high-school friend of mine was also stationed in Germany. He had to leave and could no longer keep his dog, Lady, so we took her in. There was no grand plan behind it. We were not shopping for a breed or conducting a household-capacity assessment. A dog needed a home, and two newlyweds still trying to build their own somehow decided they had room for one more responsibility.

The photographs from Melbach matter to me now because they show more than Lady. They show Tomoko and me when we were both young. They show the fields and hills around the village where we lived. They show the beginning of a marriage that had already crossed half the world almost before it had time to settle in.

One photograph is almost absurdly simple: Tomoko, me, and Lady. Not much money. Not many possessions. No idea where the next decades would take us. Enough to call it home.

Lady eventually had a litter of puppies in our apartment in Germany. There is a photograph of her watching over them from the edge of a cardboard box. Inside are the puppies she had just given birth to, and there, front and center, is Indy.

I love that photograph because it records something memory alone could easily flatten into a sentence: Lady had puppies. The sentence is true, but the photograph gives the event back some weight. There she is looking down at them. There are the puppies. There is Indy before he was Indy in any meaningful sense, just one tiny dog among the others.

We kept him.

Another photograph shows Tomoko holding Indy when he was still very small. We were young, newly married, already navigating a new country, military life, limited money, and the ordinary difficulty of becoming adults. Naturally, one additional dog seemed exactly like what the system required.

Families are not always built through planning. Sometimes they accumulate.

Around that same period, I bought an Amiga 500. This was not a responsible purchase. We had little money for anything else, which would normally suggest that an expensive computer and monitor should not rank especially high in the household procurement strategy. Unfortunately, I had discovered enthusiasm, and enthusiasm has bankrupted better plans than ours.

One day, I was playing the Lucasfilm adventure game Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade while we were deciding what to name the puppy we had kept. He became Indy.

The name came from Indiana Jones, but it also came from that room, that computer, that young marriage, and that particular version of our lives. Tomoko had every right to be irritated about the computer. She was right. That is an important sentence in any honest marriage.

Still, the Amiga became part of my technical life, and Indy became part of our family life. Both emerged from a period when we had very little, were learning almost everything, and somehow kept adding responsibilities.

Lady and Indy were also helping us answer a question I do not think Tomoko and I could have articulated then: what makes a place home when neither person began there?

Eventually, Germany ended too. Military life has a way of turning places that feel permanent into departure dates.

Lady and Indy crossed the Atlantic with us. We flew into St. Louis, where my parents picked up Tomoko, me, and the dogs and brought us back to Bald Knob for a visit.

For me, Bald Knob was home in the oldest sense of the word. It was where Blackie had waited beside the school bus, where Lucky had disappeared and somehow returned, and where Mindy and Smiley belonged to another version of my life. Now I was returning from overseas with my wife and two dogs. I had once been the kid leaving that house. Now I was coming back with a family of my own before leaving again.

After the visit, Tomoko and I loaded Lady, Indy, and the rest of our lives into a brand-new Ford Escort station wagon and drove west. Our destination was Sacramento, California. My next assignment was at McClellan Air Force Base.

Germany. St. Louis. Bald Knob. Sacramento.

Lady and Indy made the entire transition with us. Dogs are not cargo moved from one chapter to the next. They become part of the continuity between chapters. They carry the old home into the new one because they remember the people, the voices, and the routines. An address changes immediately. Home changes more slowly.

A later photograph shows Lady and Indy in Sacramento, probably in 1992 or 1993, not long after we arrived in California. I like it because it closes a loop. Those dogs had begun that chapter of their lives with us in a small German village. Now they were in Sacramento.

So were we. The scenery changed. The assignment changed. The country changed. The family did not.

Years later came Sophie, our first Bichon Frisé.

She changed our standard for what a dog could be. That sounds unfair to every dog who came before her, and I do not mean it that way. Blackie, Lucky, Mindy, Smiley, Lady, and Indy belonged to their own eras of my life. They were loved as themselves. None was a preliminary model waiting to be replaced by a superior breed.

Sophie changed something else. She changed the emotional intensity of the relationship.

She was affectionate beyond reason, emotionally attentive, funny, dependent, demanding, and completely woven into the atmosphere of the house. A Bichon does not merely live in a room. A Bichon monitors it. They want to know where you are, what you are doing, why you moved without consulting them, and whether the arrangement could be improved by placing them directly beside you, preferably touching you and ideally occupying the exact place you had planned to sit.

A Bichon treats personal space as a temporary clerical error.

They are needy and high maintenance. They complicate plans that would otherwise be simple, notice departures before the luggage appears, and interpret closed doors as governance failures. They are also capable of giving a kind of constant, unembarrassed affection that makes inconvenience seem like a weak argument against them.

Sophie lived to nearly seventeen. That is long enough for a dog to become embedded in the structure of a family. She was there through ordinary mornings, illnesses, celebrations, changing schedules, family stress, quiet evenings, and all the unrecorded days that make up most of a life. Our routines formed around her. Our understanding of the house included her presence.

When Sophie died, the loss was devastating. The furniture remained. The walls remained. The ordinary machinery of life continued functioning with its usual indifference. But emotionally, the house had changed dimensions. A familiar room can feel strangely wrong when the small creature who animated it is no longer there.

Silence is not always peaceful. Sometimes it is evidence.

Tomoko and I waited two years before bringing another Bichon home. There was no formal decision that two years represented the correct period. Grief does not operate against a published service-level agreement. We simply were not ready.

Another dog could not replace Sophie because dogs are not interchangeable emotional components. Eventually we met Peko, named after Peko-chan, the familiar Japanese character and mascot.

Peko did not replace Sophie. She entered the space Sophie had made visible. Loving another dog did not reduce what Sophie had meant; it confirmed how much room she had created in our lives and that grief did not have to close that room permanently.

Later we brought home Peko’s half-sister, Sachi, from the same breeder. We now had two Bichons moving through the house, following us, studying us, demanding attention, rearranging schedules, and making themselves central to nearly everything.

One Bichon monitors the household. Two establish a supervisory committee.

It is easy to describe Bichons through the parts that photograph well: the white coat, dark eyes, round face after grooming, cheerful expression, the little cloud moving across the floor.

That picture is real. It also leaves out the work.

Bichons look effortless. They are not. Their hair requires frequent brushing and combing. Small tangles can tighten into mats close to the skin. Professional grooming is essential, but it does not eliminate the maintenance between appointments.

An honest article cannot describe the dogs as wonderful and then quietly remove the labor required to keep them healthy and comfortable. I would be lying if I wrote “we” as though that labor were evenly divided in our house. It is not.

Tomoko does most of the daily coat and dental care. She sits down with the brush and comb and works carefully through Peko’s and Sachi’s coats, preventing tangles from becoming mats. She brushes their teeth in the morning and again at night and notices small problems before they become larger ones. Their care shapes the rhythm of her day more than it shapes mine.

That needs to be said plainly because it is easy to admire a beautifully groomed dog when somebody else has already worked through the knots, cleaned the eyes, brushed the teeth, noticed the small problem, scheduled the appointment, and repeated the process the next day.

Love for a dog is easy to romanticize. In practice, it often looks like Tomoko working through another tangle before it becomes a mat. That is the less photogenic part of devotion, and it may also be the truest part.

Joshua contributes too. He gives Peko and Sachi their weekly baths between professional grooming appointments. The rest of us contribute to the surrounding routines and logistics, but there is no value in manufacturing an equal distribution that does not exist. Honest gratitude requires accurate attribution.

Tom and Jen of Jadorable Bichons have also remained part of Peko’s and Sachi’s lives. They are wonderful breeders, and they groom the dogs approximately every four to six weeks. That professional care matters, but it complements what happens at home. It does not replace it.

A good breeder can remain part of a dog’s life long after the puppy leaves. We are grateful that Tom and Jen have.

The dogs shape travel because it is harder to leave. Plans require more thought. The household schedule bends around feeding, brushing, bathing, dental care, grooming appointments, and the simple fact that two deeply attached dogs expect the family to remain available for consultation. You cannot explain an absence to a dog using a calendar invitation. They know only that the suitcase appeared and the household has become suspicious.

None of this is an argument against having a Bichon. It is the honest price of the experience.

Their beauty is inseparable from the care behind it. Their devotion creates obligations, and their dependence requires consistency. This is one of the things dogs expose about love that people often prefer to leave abstract. Love is not mainly the intensity of a feeling. It is repetition: another meal, another walk, another bath, another grooming appointment, another morning brushing teeth, another evening working through a coat, another day of noticing what cannot explain itself.

Peko and Sachi are still moving through the house, following us, watching us, and making themselves part of the day’s routines. They make leaving more complicated, travel less spontaneous, grooming unavoidable, and quiet harder to take for granted.

Sophie is not here, and nothing about Peko or Sachi changes that. They are not replacements. But the space Sophie taught us to make for a Bichon never closed.

That is the part of the story I understand better now than I did when Blackie waited beside the school bus. Dogs become part of the architecture of a life through presence, dependence, inconvenience, grief, and care repeated so often that it stops looking remarkable while it is happening.

Then one day a photograph turns up.

Tomoko with Lady in Melbach. Lady looking down at her puppies. Tiny Indy in Tomoko’s arms. Lady and Indy in Sacramento after crossing an ocean and a continent with us.

A dog’s name opens a room in memory, and for a little while the room is inhabited again.

Peko and Sachi make sure the house is inhabited now.

Once you have had a Bichon, it becomes difficult to imagine home without one.