Hi Honey: the cavoodle that’s building a community

Maybe it was my alarm over the latest warnings of climate catastrophe, along with those nightmarish scenes from Kabul filling our screens every night. Or maybe it was that, by the midway point in Sydney’s recent lockdown, amid the growing worldwide tally of the sick and dead, the endless spectre of lives and livelihoods smashed and the ceaseless parade of human folly masquerading as free thinking, that I decided to do what every other person in my neighbourhood seemed to have done these past 18 months.

Buy a puppy.

The idea was that I would co-parent with my younger daughter Hannah, who lives around the corner from me. We would buy a cavoodle because, as the promos told us, they combined the best traits of the cavalier and the poodle: “smart, affectionate, playful, eager to please, eager to train and obedient”. Plus they were gorgeous, didn’t shed hair and they adapted well to small apartments.

We met on FaceTime, loved her immediately, then the breeder gave us exactly 15 minutes to make a decision before putting her up for sale online.

I thought about the order of my life, the neatness, the structures, the routines, the freedoms that I’d come to cherish. I weighed this against the potential joy of a co-parenting venture with my daughter, along with the importance – in my case – of refusing to let habits of body and mind harden in late middle age.

After 15 consequential minutes, I said to Hannah, “Okay, let’s do it,” and three days later this adorable, tiny, furry bundle of trembling, red-haired cuteness arrived at my door. We named her Honey.

I barely slept those first four nights as I listened to her heart-rending mewls above the Spotify Puppy classical-music playlist that I’d put on repeat next to her upstairs enclosure. I wrestled with demons, old and new. I was a terrible sleeper even at the best of times.

This would prove a disaster.

I hadn’t thought to consult my partner about what this would mean for our lives. (Note to appalled readers: we live separately but, still, I know, poor excuse. Plus, she already owned a cavoodle I loved.)

This could prove a double disaster.

I didn’t fully consider my previous experience as a dog owner – an abysmal failure by any reckoning – and how little I knew about puppy training. I also didn’t reckon with my knowledge of how the choices we make often follow us for life.

I said to myself, “David, this might be the stupidest decision you’ve ever made in your life. Have you lost your f…ing mind?”

On the third night, Honey managed to tear her way out of her enclosure, jump the makeshift barrier on the upstairs landing, then navigate her way down a perilous spiral staircase to stand whimpering outside my bedroom. It was 2am and as I took her into my bed – against all advice from the breeder – I said to myself, “David, this might well be the stupidest decision you’ve ever made in your life. Have you lost your f…ing mind?”

Yes I had, but then things began to change. Honey began answering to her name. She stopped doing her oopsies on the Persian carpet and under my desk, and instead began aiming – however imperfectly – on the designated fake grass mattings. She began responding (with genius-like intelligence, I have to say) to commands like Come. Sit. Leave it.

She began using me as her human lollipop, smothering me with warm, wet licks, curling up beside me into a tight ball, lying at my feet, sticking to me like velcro. And she stopped whimpering at night, learning how to self-soothe in her zipped up – and mended – enclosure.

For my part, I began seeing the sunrise for the first time since my daughters were young, 25 years ago. I began taking Honey with me down to the beach – liver treats and pieces of diced, poached chicken stuffed into my pockets – to watch the intermingling of seagulls, dogs and humans. I began meeting people I would never otherwise have met. Like soothsayer Susie from North Bondi who asked me “What’s her name?” and, before I could answer, declared, “I bet you it’s Honey.”

And Maria from Greece, who had lived in my street for 50 years and who, when she saw Honey, began smothering her with kisses and every word the Greek language had dreamt up for love. “Come visit any time,” she said, “and bring Honey.” Ach mikri mou agapi. (“Oh, my little darling.“)

I met the garbage collector who literally crossed the street to give Honey a cuddle and then Flora, an elderly Jewish woman who cooed at the sight of her before telling me how she’d been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia. “I live just here,” she said. “Please come visit.”

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I met three young Spanish-speaking women who had just finished yoga on the grass and who saw Honey in my arms and, quite literally, came rushing towards us like, well, honey bees. We ended up talking for half an hour – in between pats and cuddles – about yoga, the riots in Chile, attachment theory and the release of oxytocin that occurs when you love and are loved in return.

Leaving the beach one morning, I met an Irishman and his daughter because the father saw Honey and said, “Very cute. How much did she cost?”

“You don’t want to know,” I replied, and somehow that led us to a 40-minute conversation about the impoverishment of Ireland in the 1950s, the farm he’d grown up on in the west of the country, and the role of music, storytelling and craic in the Irish imagination.

Our little puppy won’t heal the great tear in the fabric of the world. But in her short life thus far she has changed mine, my daughter’s, those of my little neighbours, and possibly the entire apartment block.

In my own apartment block, I’d been listening to my downstairs neighbours’ two children, Izzy and Louis, learn to walk and talk ever since I’d moved in here six years ago. Suddenly they were visiting because they could feel that my Honey could be theirs as well. And, just as suddenly, six-year-old Izzy was announcing plans for high tea in our common back garden, where she would bring the tea and cookies and I’d bring the cheese treats because she knew already how much Honey loved her cheese.

My three very cool next-door neighbours, Josh, Rachel and Ira, fell in love with Honey, too, and as they did, the four of us seemed to deepen our kinship. Josh and I began playing chess on the landing outside our respective front doors, while Honey moved between our apartments for cuddles with Rachel and Ira.

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I mentioned all this one day to my friend Ruth – about how Honey, single-handedly, was knitting together a new community – and she said she now wanted to put her very large cat in a knapsack so that she, too, could make similar connections when she stepped out into her neighbourhood.

Any long-time dog lover will regale you with a dog’s extraordinary capacities. They helped pioneer space travel. They can rescue people from rubble, lead the blind, cushion the injured, sniff out disease. (Yes, I’ve seen the Netflix episode on dogs in Explained.) What they will also tell you – endlessly, repeatedly – is that a dog has an infinite capacity for love, and that when a puppy starts looking at you with her “I will love you forever” eyes, you’re a goner. They will tell you this with certitude, but none of it will register until you feel it yourself, percolating deep down in your own waters.

Our little puppy won’t bring peace to the Middle East, of course, nor solve the climate crisis, nor heal the great tear in the fabric of the world. But in her short life thus far she has changed mine, my daughter’s, those of my little neighbours Izzy and her brother Louis, and possibly the entire apartment block. That’s because she’s proved – in Victor Hugo’s words – to be “the flower for which love is the honey”.

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