Dad, Can I Have a Dog?

Did I ever mention how we came to have Ricky in the first place?

Well, before Greg (Robby’s second brother) was even out the door en route to his college career, Robby began playing the “only child” card to lobby for a dog. This was the summer of ’02, and he was eight years old. To his credit, his campaign was never whiney, always upbeat and pleasant. “Dad, can I have a dog,” he’d ask at least once a day, often two or three times, and sometimes even more. All the time with a smile on his face.

This went on every day, for over a year. I probably heard Robby ask, “Dad, can I have a dog?” oh, maybe 750 to 1,000 times. There came a point when I realized that if I didn’t want to hear this question three times a day until he was 87, I’d have to do something about it.

So I called Robby into the living room for a full-blown, sit-down, heart-to-heart. I explained to him for 15 minutes, in great detail, why it was impossible for us to have a dog. I said my office was in the house, and with a dog around during the day while he was at school and his mom was at work, I’d never get anything accomplished. I said I didn’t grow up with a dog, and wouldn’t really know how to take care of one. And on and on and on. Throughout the explanation, I saw Robby blinking back tears — but I plunged ahead. I had to end this once and for all. When we were through, I asked him if he understood. He bit his lip and nodded.

The next afternoon I was looking out the bedroom window and saw him walking home from the school bus. I rushed down the stairs to meet him at the kitchen door. He dropped his backpack with a thud. There was a smile on his face. “Dad,” he said, “can I have a dog?”

And that was the moment I knew I was licked. A few months later Ricky became a part of our household, and the rest is history.

Now here’s the postscript. For years I carried with me the memory of that living-room summit meeting, during which I had reduced my son to tears, and I always felt kind of rotten about it. Until I found a tell-all story about that stretch of time that he’d written for eighth-grade English class:

Albert Einstein probably couldn’t even keep track of the number of times my dad said we couldn’t get a dog. I certainly couldn’t count on my fingers the amount of sit-down-and-talks we had where he vigorously tried to come up with every possible reason why we couldn’t get one. I never really paid much attention to what he said in these conversations. I knew in my heart my stubbornness would outlast him.

And so it did.