When I tell my dog that she is my angel, as I often do, I mean it quite literally. In many ways she is more familiar to me than anyone or anything else on earth, and she has filled my life with great affection, guarding and protecting me with her love. I suppose she could be any old dog, and I’d love her back just the same. But there she is, who she is, and however I look at her, she is a major part of my life. This is by no means the first tribute I have written to her.

I got my dog Lily by chance, almost by mistake. I was trying to stop smoking and felt terrible and bereft. A good friend, meaning to distract me, suggested I get a dog. I thought I realized in a flash of nicotine deprivation that all I wanted was a puppy, that all I needed was just one. No matter that I had just moved to a new apartment managed by an uncompromising cat-owner who had made me promise I would never get a dog. I thought if I just bought a smallenough dog, no one would notice. My thinking was a bit hazy. So two weeks later I went out and bought her. She came from a chain pet store in a mall. She was very little. I hoped my apartment manager would think she was a cat. I’ve never told anyone how much she cost.

She is supposedly a purebred Cocker Spaniel, but most people look skeptical. Even the vet I took her to the next day wasn’t sure. He did say she was definitely a runt, probably from a puppy mill, and told me she had a heart murmur and a bad case of mites. He implied I’d paid too much for her, whatever the sum had been. But I didn’t care: she was mine, and that was all that mattered.

She certainly doesn’t look purebred. She just looks like herself: small and black and somewhat stout, with an unmistakably dogged demeanor. When she runs across the yard to check the compost heap each day, it can best be described as a galumph. Her long, heavy ears flop up and down, as if she were trying to take off, albeit awkwardly, into the wind. Her paws look enormous, but they’re all fur. In the fall she gathers clumps of burrs, in the winter her legs and belly are all snowballed. In the summer she is covered with mud from the pond in the neighboring field. She is always messy.

Food (and drink) is a very big deal with her. She likes to kick her dish around both before and after a meal, and she will bark vigorously at a bottle of beer. Since my daughter PanPan arrived and learned to throw her food, Lily has taken up a military pose in front of the high chair during mealtimes. She sits stock-still, looking up fervently, shifting her weight only occasionally from side to side. When she does not get the food that everyone else is getting, she assumes a sincere and sorrowful expression that makes her look rather like Ronald Reagan, but I still love her. She also very occasionally looks uncannily like Donald Duck.

When she lies down now, it is often with a small grunt; at 10 years, she is starting to be an old dog. We often sit together under the nearest apple tree, on the set of steps I moved there from the cabin’s back door when the first addition was put on. Sometimes she will lean all her weight against me, perfectly content, asking for nothing more. Other times, she likes to have her ears tugged and the furrow between her eyes smoothed down. When I do this, she groans deeply with pleasure. She is a creature, after all, and she loves her comforts.

And yes, she’s comforting in return; I lean on her often, too. Even at the lowest of times and even when I am at my very worst, Lily stubbornly, if a little dimwittedly, continues to sit by my side, and for this I thank her forever and ever. I take her with me everywhere I possibly can; if for some reason I must leave her behind, I hate it as much as she does.

Before I got her, I had no idea how to measure out my life, or how to think about what a life spanned. Or, to put it more abruptly, how to think about death. She has given me one context, though I now have others, too. Her life is part of mine; may she live many, many more good years with me.

As I write this, I am sitting with Lily on the sofa. She has clambered onto my lap, and so I use her rather broad back to rest my notebook on. Although PanPan greets her with whoops of joy and whole handfuls of Cheerios, my dog is relieved to have me to herself after bedtime. At the moment, Lily is happily chewing perfectly round pieces from what remains of an old army blanket I gave her many years ago. She spits out each piece expertly, phphtt, phphtt, onto the floor. It reminds me of smoking, which I finally did give up some time ago.

After so many years together, you might well think we could have nothing more to learn from each other. Actually, however, my elderly, small, and stout black Spaniel continues to teach me what matters, over and over, day by day. Love, ordinary love, is its own reward. And so, while I suppose she could very well be any old dog, I know she is in fact my angel, watching over me, all spirit, showing me the way.

Reprinted by permission of author, Eliza Thomas from The Road Home, Algonquin Books © 1997.

My Boxer puppy is allergic to bees.

I found out as I barreled home from work on I-580 East toward the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge one recent afternoon.

Cali—short for “California”— goes to work with me every day. One moment, she was a spry, energetic, sporty Boxer; the next, vomit everywhere, bile and diarrhea all over the passenger seat. I accelerated, crossed two lanes of traffic and pulled onto a wide shoulder just off the exit to the bridge.

Within seconds, my door was open and I was crunching through gravel to the passenger side, driven by adrenalinesoaked instinct: “Dog is sick,” “Have to protect dog,” “Dog comes before you.” I got her out of the car and put her down, watching helplessly as she just kept throwing up thick, yellow bile. She ran toward the bushes and fell on her face, grinding to a halt in dirt and gravel. Out of answers, I picked her up, inadvertently coating my Sevens and Sperry Top-Siders with dog poop. Fashion goes out the window when you’re looking at your best friend dying. I might as well have been wearing a ratty, hand-me-down pair of sweatpants and slippers.

Instinct, that quiet genius that whispers the right answers in your ear in moments of trauma, kicked in again. I called 9-1-1. Who the hell are you supposed to call? There’s no protocol or schematic. Puppy-care books don’t have a section on “What to do when you’re emotionally stranded on the edge of a highway with a dying, breathless puppy.”

One ring, and a female operator picked up.

“9-1-1, how can I help you?”

“Ma’am, my dog is dying!”

Cars piled up at the nearby intersection and pale, worried faces turned toward a man holding a limp puppy and screaming helplessly into his phone.

Turns out, the woman who picked up the call was an angel. She was exactly the right person at exactly the right time—a serendipitous turn of events that allowed her to know exactly what I needed.

“Sir, there’s an emergency vet clinic in San Rafael. I’m putting you through now.”

The phone rang once, and a man picked up. He told me the address. With shaky, uncertain, too-large-to-be-effective-onan- iPhone-keypad fingers, I punched it into the phone’s maps app. Cali’s tongue was hanging out of the side of her mouth.

And this is where the story became all too familiar. The surreal events that were unfolding in front of me were uncannily similar to the scene in Pulp Fiction in which Vincent Vega (John Travolta) races across Los Angeles with his mob boss’s wife overdosing in the passenger seat. Because I’d watched the scene at least 20 times, I knew what I needed to do. When the action kicks in in real life, being a movie buff pays dividends. I went into attack mode. This story would have a happy ending.

I screeched through a red light to get back on the highway, and drove to the vet clinic. Cali was Mia Wallace—eyes rolled back in her head, froth around her mouth and nostrils— and I was Vincent Vega, driving at breakneck speed in his candy-apple red Chevy Malibu (or in my case, an unassuming black Toyota Prius). I weaved through traffic. Horns blared.

In the passenger seat, Cali continued throwing up. Weak and exhausted, she rested her head on my outstretched arm, her bloodshot eyes rolling lazily around in their sockets.

All I could think to do was talk to her.

“Cali, you can’t die. You’re so important to me. I know it’s ridiculous, but you literally are my best friend. You can’t die. The six months you’ve been alive—we’ve spent every moment together.”

The robotic female map narrator told me to take the next exit.

As Cali continued to slip away, I sped off the exit, right into a wall of traffic and nearly into the rear end of another car.

“Cali, Cali, Cali …”

Looking over at her, I thought she had died. Her eyes weren’t registering; they were glazed over and the inner eyelid covered most of her pupil. I stuck my face next to her muzzle and could feel only the faintest whisper of breath.

Back into adrenaline mode. This dog would not die if I had anything to say about it. The Pulp Fiction fanatic in me recalled John Travolta speeding through the empty LA streets—“Don’t f---ing die on me, Mia!”—as I whipped around the corner and through the next two red lights. Traffic began to pull into the intersection, but I could tell that Cali wouldn’t have a whole lot of time left unless I got to the clinic.

The robot woman told me the destination was on my right. In a move similar to Vincent’s when he drove through the front window of his heroin dealer’s house to get Mia the adrenaline shot, I pulled into the parking lot, angling the car haphazardly across three spaces. I left the car running, picked up Cali and ran inside.

A vet tech met me halfway across the lobby and grabbed Cali, taxiing her back to the examination rooms, past a door locked with a key code. The last image I had was Cali hanging from the vet tech’s arms, her too-long-for-her-body legs swinging awkwardly back and forth.

And then I broke down. Adrenaline only goes so far, to the point at which you can finally take a breath and process what has happened. I cried like I haven’t cried in a long time. I’m the last person to throw a self-pity party, but confronting the reality of a dying dog when you’re driving home from work on an otherwise-ordinary Friday shocks you right down to the bones.

That’s where the picture-perfect similarity with the scene from Pulp Fiction came to a close. I spoke with the lead veterinarian, who gave me a rundown of the procedures and measures they’d need to take. Cali had gone into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, which can be fatal. The cost of the treatment would run between $900 and $1,200. “Here’s my Visa. Keep it.”

I went out to the lobby to get some coffee to shock myself back to life before saying good-bye to Cali. I both thanked and apologized to the people working the front desk. They led me to the examination room to see Cali, and all I could do was fold down to her and sob. I needed comforting from her; isn’t that what dogs usually do? Our roles had been traumatically reversed. She shivered from the fluids they were pumping into her, and looked around in confusion at her surroundings. The vet, the technician and I comforted her. As she lay on the examination table, we went over the diagnosis and logistics.

This experience convinced me of three things:

One, even though I’m conditioned to be angry and resentful about speeding tickets and the CHP, I think it’s true that, for the most part, people working in law enforcement want to help. A hysterical man calls an emergency line about his dying dog, and the operator deftly handles the situation, pointing the man toward the best solution to the terrifying problem. It was the help I needed when I needed it.

Two, veterinarians and people working in animal health are amazing. A grown man bursts into the vet clinic with a wild look in his eyes, breaks down completely and they take over with both precision and grace. Within minutes, the dog is hooked up to the right concoction of medicine and fluids and slowly comes back to life.

Three, when a loved one is dying, all the mundane, ridiculous things we worry about go out the window. All the bills I have to pay and all the obligations I have to fulfill dissipate on the wind when I’m faced with a genuine existential crisis: my best friend is about to leave my life forever. For the first time in a long time, I was humbled, reminded of what really matters in life.

At the end of “Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s Wife,” as a kind of favor for saving her life, Mia Wallace tells Vincent the stupid joke she had refused to tell him at the beginning of the sequence: “Three tomatoes are walkin’ down the street. Papa Tomato, Mama Tomato and Baby Tomato. Baby Tomato starts lagging behind, and Papa Tomato gets really angry. Goes back and squishes him and says: ‘Ketchup.’”

Depleted by shock, Vincent only manages a crooked smile and a half-hearted laugh. After Mia turns away, he blows her a good-bye kiss.

Later that evening, I got a call from the vet saying that Cali was going to be all right. Within a half-hour, I was picking her up. And although this joke had a dark and ominous quality, I have to look back at what happened that day and do my best to laugh, even if it’s only an uninspired chuckle.

I know, I could probably ease up on the saccharine. But that day, I gained a better understanding of how precious life is. Since then, I’ve followed Vincent’s lead and blown my loved ones a kiss whenever I leave home—a tribute to Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s wife.

Our new Golden Retriever puppy is nearly six months old and her learning experiences are our learning experiences. Five times a day, she whimpers to go out; five times a day, we tell her Not now, Maisie. All three of us are learning what to expect from one another concerning patience.

Even though she is our fourth Golden in a long line of beloved dogs, the art of dog training and the understanding of canine behavior have exponentially increased since our last dip into dog parenting. But still, similar to child rearing, hundreds of “experts” offer completely contradictory advice: Have the baby sleep in your bed; never let the baby sleep in your bed. Let the dog sit on your lap; never let the dog sit on your lap.

During the first weeks of Maisie’s transition from being one of 10 littermates to the solo dog in our universe, she was the most adorable, cuddly, sweet-tempered puppy. Then, my husband and I began noticing unpleasant behaviors. Take away a toy or a stick and Maisie’s cute puppy face morphed into what looked like a snarl. I’m talking a display of fangs, which seemed more than mouthy puppy frolics.

Cartoon dogs bury their bones all the time, but when a real dog runs out the door, bone in mouth, and appears to be digging to China and growling if someone gets near, one worries. Our hands and arms were marked with scratches and scabs, and these made us even more cautious in approaching our new pup.

So we phoned an expert. For privacy purposes, I’ll call this person Susan. Susan responded to our SOS immediately, and arrived with an upbeat attitude—You can handle this. We can retrain Maisie—and oodles of information. Our sighs of relief must have been audible when, on her first visit, Susan modeled a cheery dominatrix and coerced Maisie into polite manners. She did this by using force. I don’t mean she used brutality; let’s just say that she out-bullied the bully, showing Maisie who was boss. Susan was not a big woman, but she knew how to square her shoulders and maximize her voice. At one point in the training session, she put a headlock on Maisie and called her “a stubborn little devil.”

We’d never used force with our other dogs and were a bit taken aback, but maybe this dog needed more discipline. Maybe we were the problem. Maybe we needed to buck up, tolerate less, use tough love. We felt badly about ourselves. How did we know what was right? We weren’t the experts, after all.

That evening, we reviewed Susan’s assessment of Maisie’s problems. It read like a profile of a kid destined for prison: hoarding/stealing, aggressiveness, dominance issues. Hoarding! My gawd, we weren’t just dealing with the ups and downs of normal puppydom, we had a delinquent dog on our hands. This was not what we had opted for. Yikes! Would Maisie be a problem dog for the rest of her life? Were we capable of training her? Did we want that responsibility? Our attitude toward Maisie quickly changed from devotion to disappointment and distress, and we considered returning her to her breeder.

Out of desperation, I suggested we try another professional. This time we chose a dog behaviorist, not a dog trainer (the difference is significant and too involved to go into here). Our second expert arrived with a bag full of dog treats and toys; a curious, attentive, non-judgmental manner; and ready praise on her lips. This may sound Disneyish, but Maisie responded immediately to her calm, patient, non-militaristic approach.

From this woman, we learned that very smart dogs like Maisie love to learn. Their puppy energy can be directed toward the playful learning of games and commands for which they earn praise and hot-dog rewards. We learned that the idea of dominant and non-dominant dogs is outdated and that dog behaviorists understand “possession aggression” as “resource guarding.” Dogs with leadership qualities, dogs who might be leaders of their packs in the wild, have an instinct to guard and bury their food because they will be responsible for helping to feed the pack. Bravo for them!

This gets me to my takeaway point: labeling others—children, dogs, ethnicities, races, genders—affects our feelings and emotions about them. What we call them and the spin we give to those names affects how we see and respond. Which sounds better to you: possession aggression or resource guarding? How about this: Your child is bossy. Your child shows leadership ability. Your child is hyperactive. Your child is energetic.

Name-calling can reflect our basest instincts and our uncanny proclivity to project onto others exactly the aspects we dislike in ourselves. Or it can represent our better angels. We can choose. If we apply this insight to the current world stage, doesn’t it seem we have entered a time of malicious name-calling? Maybe we should consider that what we vilify in others might be something we fear in ourselves.

P.S. Maisie has won our hearts. She shows absolutely no signs of unwarranted aggression. She is the dog of our dreams.

Patches joined our family as a puppy when I was two, so she was 13 when I accidentally killed her. She was a mutt and looked like the RCA dog, all white with a brown patch over one eye, but 10 pounds bigger. She had 13 puppies in her first litter, which I took to mean she was Catholic, like our family of nine kids.

Patches licked everyone who came to the house: the Fuller Brush man, the Bourbeau brothers who lived across the street, even my crazy Aunt Madge. Patches smiled like a person, and when she was excited, she pranced, her nails clicking on the kitchen’s linoleum floor like castanets. Otherwise, she was the sole calm presence in the cyclone of our loud, melodramatic family.

However, one thing did upset this otherwise placid dog: explosions, like fireworks and thunder. During thunderstorms, I sometimes crawled with her into her doghouse and held her. Her doghouse smelled like popcorn, like her feet. But holding her never quieted her trembling. After one particularly bad storm, I vowed to find a way to help her overcome this.

I had few friends then, not even in my family. I wanted most to be included by my older brother, Jay, and my cousin, Roy, both jocks, both popular. I was pudgy, smart and solitary. I didn’t know why, but I always irritated Jay, and he and Roy banned me from their fort in the woods. Once, I offered to line the trails to the fort with white birch branches. I thought it would look cool. They agreed, and after I did this, I thought I was in; I tried to join them in the fort, and they pinned me to the ground and stuffed pine needles and dog crap in my mouth.

So Patches was not only my best friend, she was my only friend.

The Scantic, a small river brimming with brown trout and foot-long white suckers, coursed from one end of our western Massachusetts farm town to the other. Every summer for years, Patches and I hiked behind our house in the woods along the Scantic, just the two of us. Sometimes I fished. Other times, we just walked for hours.

Patches never seemed happier than during these outings. Me too. I picked bouquets of wildflowers: daisies, yellow flag irises, flame-red Indian paintbrushes, blue cornflowers and my favorite, Queen Anne’s lace—hundreds of white florets with a few red petals in the center, “a drop of Christ’s blood,” my aunt taught me. Sometimes I’d pick gloriously scented snow-white water lilies, which meant walking into the stinking mud of the swamps. We came home filthy.

I always handed the flowers to my mother, who was loving to all of us, but unsentimental by nature. “Put them in a vase,” she said when I presented my bouquets, and never anything else. I was the sort of boy who picked flowers for his mother, and in our traditional family, boys didn’t do that. Her response made me feel embarrassed, made me aware of my difference, but I still gave her flowers every week.

At that time in my life, given that I was a social misfit, I gorged on books. I’d often turn on a light at four in the morning to read, and this drove Jay, with whom I shared a bedroom, into red-faced rages because I woke him, and because he hated me for being such an egghead.

One night when I was 13 and alone in my bedroom, my mom walked in. From the top of my dresser, she picked up a book I was reading, Howl, by the Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, which had, among many other indecencies, explicit descriptions of sexual acts with his lover, Peter Orlofsky. This was my first introduction to homosexual love as something to be celebrated.

She held the book in the air and looked me in the eye.

“I just want you to know that I know that you’re reading this,” she said, calmly. After her announcement, she set the book down lightly on my dresser and slipped out of the room. At first, I felt dread, then relief and confusion. Why didn’t she forbid me to read the book? I was aware of my attraction to boys, but didn’t think of myself as gay. I knew adult men in our town whom my brothers and I suspected were gay, all of them recluses and outcasts. I would never be one of them— would I?

I now know that she understood I was gay long before I did. In that moment, with a mother’s love, she chose to disregard a sin that her church taught her would deny a person entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The morning I accidentally killed Patches, the two of us found ourselves home alone. This rarely happened. The day evolved perfectly for the plan I’d concocted. A thunderstorm rumbled in the valley to the south, and I had stolen a pack of firecrackers—12 on a single fuse—from my dad’s underwear drawer. These, and my best intentions, created the perfect opportunity to cure her of her fear. Or so I thought.

From inside the house, I listened as the storm approached and the first booms of thunder echoed in our valley. Seconds later, Patches, who had been lying on the grass in the back yard, stood and bolted up the back stairs. If I hadn’t opened the door, she would have dived for cover into her doghouse; instead, she sprinted to the basement and squeezed behind the washing machine, shaking.

I ran downstairs after her and crawled behind the washer to be with her. In this cramped space, where moving an inch meant scratching myself on the rough concrete wall, I held her close to me. She trembled, she didn’t struggle, and she didn’t lick my face as she always did when I held her. Then, as I had rehearsed in my mind a dozen times, I lit a match, then the fuse, and tossed the firecrackers over the washing machine, 10 feet away.

I squeezed Patches against my chest as the firecrackers exploded in a rapid chain: POW-POW-POW-POW. The small room’s concrete floor and walls amplified sound, and the blasts echoed far louder than they would have done outdoors. My eardrums hummed, muting all sound. I looked down at Patches. She still hung in my arms. And she still shuddered.

What went wrong? She knew I loved her. This knowledge and a hug, I was convinced, would prove to her that the firecracker bangs weren’t to be feared. But I had failed her. If anything, her shaking seemed worse.

I stayed with her, huddled behind the washer. Eventually, she stopped trembling. I settled her onto a blanket, and she slept. I tiptoed upstairs to my bedroom, my ears still throbbing.

That afternoon, after my hearing began to return, I heard some of my siblings come home. Within a minute, Matt, my 12-year-old brother, came running up from the basement.

“Patches is walking in circles!” he hollered.

“What?” I yelled. I ran downstairs to the basement. Patches’ head tilted to the left and she zigzagged as she walked. I stood 10 feet in front of her and called her name.

“Here, Patches!” She lurched toward me and then veered to the left, then lurched toward me and veered again to the left. I felt my heart lurch too. Something was terribly wrong.

I held her. Within minutes, my parents came home. They picked her up and put her in the back of our family car, an early ’70s white woody station wagon, and drove her to the vet. I slunk back to my room and waited for them to return. Finally, four hours later, my parents drove into the driveway. All of us ran to the car and stood waiting. When they got out, Patches didn’t jump out after them, and when they shut the car doors, Cory, my six-year-old sister, started bawling. Silently, we flanked them into the kitchen, where they explained that the vet had told them that Patches had had a stroke, and she likely wouldn’t recover, given her age. With the vet, they decided that the best thing to do was to put her to sleep.

Today, now that I’m a vet, I know that it isn’t possible to pin with certainty the cause of a stroke on a particular outside event. But it’s also possible, even likely, that the extreme stress of the basement explosions kicked loose a blood clot to jam a small artery or even speed her heartbeat enough to burst a fragile vessel in her old brain.

Everyone was too stunned to speak. Some walked outside; others, like me, tiptoed to our rooms.

For more than 20 years, up to my graduation from veterinary school, I spoke to no one about that day. After Patches’ death, I built a shrine near a giant oak tree, the only tree that stood in the middle of a mile-long cornfield with a path running through it that we had walked together a hundred times. Under the tree there, I built a cross out of sticks. I left her threadbare leash, a cellophane-wrapped photo of the two of us and flowers.

In the ways that we communicate with our beloved dead pets, I spoke to Patches in the following years. I asked her forgiveness. And, at some inexplicable, fundamental level, I know she said yes. She gave me her forgiveness.

In later years, I felt it most during solitude, strolling the pebbled shores of Lake Champlain near my college in Burlington, Vt., or later along the lotus-covered ponds in Ueno Park, Tokyo, where I lived for three years as a teacher.

Gradually, her forgiveness spread through my world and made new beginnings possible; it was as if a mile-high blanket of oxygen covered the planet, letting me breathe with ease even at the steepest heights.

In Tokyo, I made the decision to apply to veterinary school. I also accepted I was gay. Before I could come to that, I first needed to forgive others for their unkindnesses, my brother’s and cousin’s especially, and myself for believing them. Because at last, I understood that no one needed to be forgiven for being gay.

Coming out as gay was not an act of defiance against church and family. More than anything, it was a celebration of the mercies that had made my adult life possible: those of a knowing mother and a smiling white dog.