Los Realejos Dear Jadie,

I want to start by saying I love you.

That part is important, what follows is going to make it sound like I don’t.

I am trying to write fiction. My first real attempt. I have waited most of my adult life for this moment. I have a laptop, a legal pad, two sharpened pencils for no reason, and a backyard with actual shade. The conditions, by any reasonable measure, are ideal.

And then there’s you.

You weigh 80 pounds. You are a chocolate Labrador, which means you were engineered by math or Darwin or someone with a very dark sense of humor to carry a fur coat through the San Fernando Valley in May.

You are aware of none of this.

What you are aware of is that I am sitting down, which means you should be touching me.

You do not rest nearby. You rest against me. On me. Partially beneath me. You locate the exact square footage of my free body and occupy it with devastating precision.

And then you start panting.

Not the polite panting of a small dog after a short walk. You pant like a greyhound who just finished the Kentucky Derby. On a tarmac. In July. You pant with the commitment of a method actor.

I have written exactly one sentence in the past 40 minutes, and I’m not sure it’s a good one.

I have heard of emotional support animals. They are trained to reduce anxiety, lower blood pressure, and restore calm to their humans. I respect them.

What I have instead is you.

You are not an emotional support animal. You are my emotional rapport animal. One that’s happy to fritter days, dine through deadlines, ignore frustration.

You do not reduce my stress. You generate distraction, then fall asleep on top of it, and then breathe heavily on it for 90 minutes while I try to write dialogue.

I looked into whether I could get a formal designation for this. A card, a certification, something official I could present to guests. Caution: This animal provides no therapeutic benefit. Approach with helmet and a spare shirt.

The application does not exist. I checked.

Here is what I know.

You have no agenda. You are not trying to exhaust me or derail my creative process or make me question every life decision that led me to a backyard couch at this particular hour.

You just want to be close.

You have wanted this since the day I brought you home. You wanted it when I was healthy and when I wasn’t. You wanted it when I was writing and when I couldn’t. Rapport in a heartspent sense.

You have never once asked whether my work was going well. My emotional rapport animal knows I got this.

In this way, you are better than most editors I have had.

So here is my offer.

You can stay. You can pant. You can press your enormous warm body against mine and breathe like a locomotive and make my laptop fan work twice as hard.

But I am getting new pencils.

Love,
Dad