Mom doesn't only follow me around so she can look at my handsome booty all the time. The eye candy is just a perk of being my sidekick. Wherever we go, I make Friends immediately. When my new Friends finally tear their eyes away from my handsome face, there's Mom, ready for anyone who wants to talk about what a handsome boy I am.
So even though I need no introduction, I asked Mom to introduce my story by writing the furword to my book. She said it might help people get comfortable with the idea of spending the next several hunerd pages talking to a dog. I think maybe also it made her feel special. Here's what she wrote:
What could your dog teach you about the most trying and confusing times in your life? After all, he watched you through the whole thing, even when you weren’t wearing the mask you put on for others. He didn't understand the brave words you said out loud — or to yourself — to get through it all. There’s no lying to a dog.
Oscar never planned to write a novel. Novels reflect a human’s way of seeing the world — where real life is so banal that we need to tell ourselves stories to give it all meaning. We layer in theme, metaphor, subtext, character arcs, and intricate plots to better understand and interpret our experiences. Dogs, with their short attention spans, have no time for that nonsense. Instead, they thrive on routine, which makes for a very boring story.
Dog enjoy life as it happens, unburdened by responsibility or self-reflection, and punctuated by frequent naps. Their emotions flow through them without the compulsion to assign meaning to them. Who even knows if a dog would count his life in days, or shorter increments between siestas, meals, or walks. Each time they wake up, the world begins anew with no thought to what came before or what is still to come. A life lived in the moment is better suited for episodic storytelling than a long-form novel.
Dogs don't have agency, either. They can't open the door, get a snack, or go most places on their own. They aren't even allowed in certain parts of the house (when you’re home, anyway). Without agency, dogs don’t experience inner conflict when they go through the trash the minute you walk out the door. Nor do they have character growth when they throw up all over the bed or sullenly watch you angrily sweep up coffee grounds.
Oscar and I do everything together, so we've developed a deep, intuitive connection to help us navigate situations that he’s never encountered before. He has learned to turn to me whenever he's in doubt, and I have an instinct for what he will find challenging. Our mind meld allows us to naturally move through the world together, stronger as a unit than we would be on our own.
The first six months of the pandemic was the first time in Oscar’s life (and mine) that I was as confused about what was happening around us as he was. Like Oscar, I found myself wishing I had someone to turn to who would tell me how to navigate the confusing and frightening world we were suddenly thrown into. Especially in those early days, when no one knew what to do.
The lockdown caught us on a road trip, living in a minivan a thousand miles from home. It was unclear how the safety recommendations and new societal expectations were supposed to apply to us. Oscar turned to me for answers, but who could I turn to? There was so little information in the early days that it felt like the very air was toxic, and death spread invisibly over every surface. Or did it?
There was no playbook. The only examples I had to follow came from film and literature. I wouldn’t exactly say I took my cues from books like The Road and The Stand, shows like The Leftovers and Walking Dead, or movies like Contagion and 12 Monkeys, but I certainly thought about them a lot as I tried to adjust to the new reality. Everything seemed to play out slowly through subtext, theme, and symbolism.
Of course, a dog who relies on others to tell him what to do would also use human mythology as told through TVs and film to put unfamiliar situations and concepts into context. As I struggled to navigate a world that changed from one day to the next, I found myself channeling Oscar’s perspective in a new way. What was it like for him, a dog that thought that people knew and controlled everything, in a world gone mad?
Living on the road for the first month of the pandemic, Oscar had a front-row seat (or should I say copilot’s chair?) to the changes that were unfolding around us. We saw people's first impressions of the new reality from cities and villages in nine different states. It’s hard to remember it now, but there really was a shared reality in the beginning, when everyone from San Francisco to Santa Fe and Sonoma to Snoqualmie was reacting with the same shock, disbelief, and apprehension. Back then, Oscar thought there was a real opportunity for unity as we pulled each other through a shared catastrophe.
By the time Oscar and I were able to travel again a few months later, he was dismayed to discover the unfriendly world that had festered without his supervision. He was just as friendly as he’d always been, but suddenly people weren’t as friendly toward him — or each other. Everyone was closed-off and withdrawn. The faces he relied on to read people’s emotions were hidden. For the first time in his life, people hesitated to pet him. It was heart-wrenching to watch him walking down the sidewalk with that big, dumb grin, trying to catch people’s eye, only to have them all turn away. My heart nearly broke to see his little face when he ran with unrestrained joy to greet someone, expecting nothing but praise and affection in return, only to have the object of his affection look straight through him, or even recoil.
Dogs don’t understand technology or politics, and a dog’s love transcends both. As time went on and society became more divided, this story began to take shape as a sort of fable to remind people that we are our best selves when we give each other the same compassion and benefit of the doubt as a dog gives us. With a call to adventure, a series of trials, and a seemingly invincible antagonist, real-life events created the plot structure that a dog’s perspective could not. The writing itself imposed the character growth that a novel requires.
Oscar’s vision for the story was always clear, but it took me longer to translate it into words for him. Although some events have been combined and details changed for the sake of the narrative, this story is more truth than fiction, derived almost entirely from drafts written on the day that the events actually happened.
The most painful part of the writing was tempering the optimism in those initial drafts so they would flow logically into the grimmer reality that actually followed. In the original account, we had so much faith that things would get “back to normal” soon that it was hard to maintain Oscar’s trademark cheerfulness in the revision. And yet, it’s amazing how much we did know at the time, and later forgot that we knew in the fog of cognitive dissonance that followed.
When we first tried to create this story in November of 2020, there were no vaccines, most places were still closed, some people were wearing masks even when they were alone, and families all over the world were planning to spend the holidays apart for the first time in their lives. We were all beginning to realize that there was no going back to the way things were before. In retrospect, those were the darkest days of the pandemic. No wonder it felt like trying to write a story that wasn’t finished yet.
So we closed the file, planning to come back to it. Someday.
Each time we came back to the project, I was still too overwhelmed with the grief of everything that we’d lost —that everyone had lost — to go back to those experiences and find a way to a happy ending. It took three years before we had enough distance to start to make sense of it all.
The period from 2020 to 2022 was difficult in other ways, too. I felt like I was on a long decline that began with the pandemic and gradually took over my whole life. Oscar kept writing new stories for a while, but I posted fewer and fewer of them. It was hard for his humor and sunny disposition to break through my gloom. I wanted to put this period behind me as quickly as possible, and I certainly didn’t want to go back to relive even the best parts of it through painstaking copyediting. The stories that we did share went up raw, with very little revision and absolutely no polish. Eventually, I couldn’t find the words anymore. The world was just too ugly a place for Oscar’s perspective in those days.
I even stopped taking pictures for a while. I just couldn’t see the beauty in the world, even with Oscar sitting right in front of it.
The beginning of 2023 was a kind of reckoning. I hit the sort of “bottom” that makes radical change unavoidable. Someday Oscar will tell the story that led up to that reset, but it ended with me selling our camping vehicle, quitting my job, and starting my own business. A few months shy of my fortieth birthday, I was facing several lean years ahead. Since there would be no time to travel and we wouldn’t have the budget to get out much, Oscar convinced me to pull out the old manuscript and give it another try. For real this time.
Returning to that period was tough at first, but writing it all down gave us the opportunity to retell the story with the enchantment and wit that got lost in real life. As Oscar retold me the story of our lived experience from his point of view, I began to understand that this version was also somehow true. Through searching for a coherent narrative with character arcs, three acts, and a satisfying ending, Oscar helped me find the positive things I’d missed on the first go-round. Perhaps he was right about the happy ending, too.
I healed a little with each draft. Writing Mom from an outside perspective made me realize how much I clung to anything that gave me a sense of control in those days. One of my main instruments of control was to quantify things. Numbers appeared on almost every page of the manuscript as I tried to make sense of what was happening around me. My need for control became painfully obvious when Oscar and I had to find ways to express my obsession with measurement through a narrator who doesn’t know how to count. Similar to how Oscar capitalizes everyday objects and nonspecific nouns to show that they have unique meaning to him, we decided to show numbers' special meaning for Mom by expressing them as numerals in her speech.
On another draft, we focused on making our reasoning and motivations more clear. Oscar’s motivations were easy —all he wanted were fun, friends, and snacks— but mine weren’t so straightforward. Trying to explain actions that seemed perfectly rational at the time made me see just how often I was acting irrationally out of a sense of self-preservation. These doubts and rationalizations turned into the many rounds of the Worry Game that Oscar and Mom play throughout the story.
The central theme of the book — suffocating isolation versus human connection — was the hardest to put into words. The pandemic was a chimera: you could read just about anything into it that you wanted. For me, it was like a worldwide manifestation of toxic shame. Wherever I looked, there were messages that confirmed that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and I could literally kill the innocent people unfortunate enough to come into contact with me. As the year became more tumultuous with ugliness, death, political unrest, civil rights protests, and wildfires, it was easy to feel like my poison had infected the entire planet. It took many, many drafts, but by the time we were done, the book was fun again.
The societal rift that Oscar wanted to heal was also the most challenging to write. I was (and still am) terrified to tackle it publicly. I have my own closely-held opinions, and there was no way to write the story without touching on controversial topics. Even in the time we’ve been writing, the thinking on matters like masks, shut-downs, and what we “should have” done has continued to evolve. Oscar wanted to bring people together with this book, not divide them, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find the words that wouldn’t alienate anybody.
Oscar and I made a real effort to write this story without taking sides. It would be impossible to tell it without touching on some polarizing opinions, but we took care that both Oscar and Mom expressed ideas from each side of the ideological spectrum. Yet, when reading about a time when leaving your house, showing your face, or even breathing in the presence of others was a political statement, most readers will probably find something that rubs them the wrong way.
When you have those moments, dear reader, remember that Oscar wrote this story hoping that you — someone who was also there — will recall what it was like before you made up your mind about what it all meant, when the world was coming down around you and you didn't know where to turn. If you feel your hackles starting to prickle, Oscar invites you to join the conversations between him and Mom as they try to make sense of what is happening around them. He also welcomes you participate with Oscar and Claire as they try to make sense of it all in retrospect. Perhaps you, too, will find that you’re ready to let some of the old beliefs go.
If you’re still upset about something you read and just can’t let it go, Oscar asked me to remind you that you’re reading a story written by a dog. In his official capacity as Life Coach, he recommends that you stop taking yourself so seriously.
So here it is: Just one dog’s perspective on what he saw when the world stopped and everything changed. Oscar, who loves people and has missed them so much, will be so happy to share it with you.
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