Review: Starter Dog by Rona Maynard
Review: Starter Dog - My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World by Rona Maynard
Starter Dog - My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World is a heartfelt, well-crafted love story about finding purpose and fulfilment with a rescue dog. However, the book’s subtitle says more about the journey author Rona Maynard relates in her second book. And it’s not one of sappy, sentimental pet anecdotes, (though there are more than enough to satisfy the pet-obsessed.)
For within its 274 pages, Maynard tells how she felt lost in retirement after her stint as editor-in-chief at Chatelaine Magazine ended and she’d faded from the publishing spotlight. The woman who for a decade helped three million Canadian women redefine their voice at the end of feminism’s second wave had become a project person, engaged in work that satisfied neither her intellect, nor boundless curiosity. Leaving the magazine, “stripped me naked” Maynard wrote in an online journal about her return to freelance writing, workshops and touring the lecture circuit. She craved a special project, one that would kick-start her soul. “I longed for the Project the way, in my teens, I had longed to fall in love, with a hunger for completion that beat against my ribcage.”
Never in a million years did she imagine that project would be falling in love with a dog. Still, the surprising devotion she felt for the new family pet helped her break out of the doldrums imposed by ageist attitudes. Soon, her bond with her ginger Mut Lab Pug, Casey, would bring a renewed connection to life and transform how she saw herself and her world.
“Every story I tell, including this one, is to some degree about time and what it carries off — people I loved or used to be, animals who found the sunniest corners of places I called home,” she writes. “Every beginning holds the seed of an ending.”
Initially, when Maynard’s husband of more than five decades suggested they get a dog, she’d scoffed. It took two years of research into everything doggie for Maynard to finally warm to the idea. By then, the couple had bought an SUV and rented a dog-friendly vacation home to prepare. Once Casey (named after a previously owned beloved pet cat) was on the scene her skepticism faded. Maynard found she saw world through new eyes, much like after her baby boy was born.
“The last time I touched a living creature with such devotional attention, I was powdering my newborn,” she writes of examining Casey when he first arrived. Life with Casey became filled with new firsts that slowly redefined her relationship to almost everything. Before Casey, she’d dash outside on a quick errand dressed down with no makeup. After Casey, their first walks sparked a new morning routine that demanded, “lipstick, eyebrow pencil and presentable attire. . . poop bags and liver treats for Casey.”
Casey changed almost all her perceptions and relationships. She became kinder to her husband after she nearly slipped in a puddle of Casey’s drool and lost her temper. Quickly she realized the dog had done no wrong and said she was sorry. Then she reflected on how rarely that word was spoken in her home. This, “opened a space in which I could imagine being as considerate to my husband as I am to our dog,” she writes of how Casey changed her marriage.
At the dog park, she made friends with fellow dog owners, people she’d never have reached out to before. One day Casey’s play interfered with an “exceptional” dog named Molly. Molly’s riled owner spouted a stream of harsh profanity at Maynard and her pet, forever after dubbed “F-bomb,” man.
“He seethed, he spat, he trembled,” Maynard writes of the “furious overgrown toddler who could speak barely more than one word. . .. Language all but dwindled to the single word that he aimed, like a hammer against a skull, at my dog and me.” Yet once she calmed down, Maynard felt compassion for the abusive man. “Casey had softened me,” she realized.
The book is written in the intimate, confessional style that was Maynard’s hallmark when she wrote her columns as Chatelaine’s editor and shows her to be an excellent wordsmith. “… things kept morphing into other things,” she writes, elegantly, of her neighbourhood “post-Casey.... The saplings at Corktown Common into trees, a vacant lot into empty townhouses, the builder’s newly finished white boxes into homes where TVs flickered through windows and geraniums bloomed on patios. Down a laneway five minutes from home, a forgotten brick wall became a mural of a giant golden lynx. as well.”
Amid Maynard’s unique insight, there may be a few too many details about the nature of doggie bathroom habits for some readers, (especially a cat lover like this reviewer.) Overall, however, it’s an intriguing, poignant and entertaining book by a talented, engaging writer.
Starter Dog - My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World by Rona Maynard, 274 pages, ECW Press, $24.95