How Arizona turned me into a dog person, in 1982

Like most people, I knew everything when I was 18. The next year, when I turned 19 and moved to Arizona, that confidence started slipping away, and by my mid-twenties, in 1982, as I learned more and more, Arizona had transformed me into a dog person.

Of course, it could be that it was just that I was being exposed to a different world than the one I grew up in in Minnesota, but since this is my Arizona memory, I'm going to give the credit to Arizona. And things were very different in Tempe than in Minneapolis. If you've never lived anywhere except where you grew up, this is probably just gonna sound like google-dee-gook, so I wouldn't be surprised if you tuned me out. But I'd like you to stay with me.

No, Arizona wasn't all that different from Minnesota in most ways - people drove the same cars (although with less rust), and talked pretty much the same. The same big "corn-fed" Scandinavian people lived there, as well as the beautiful blondes, that I figured were from the same area as where I grew up, or maybe Norway. But the dogs were different, and that's what I want to talk about here.

As a kid in Minneapolis I just hated dogs, and feared them. They roamed the neighborhoods, especially alleys, and would often attack kids. And yes, this was a nice middle-class neighborhood! Grownups just tended to laugh it off, and being bitten by a dog as a kid was just seen as something that happened to kids, like skinning their knees. I never thought it was funny.

When I moved to Arizona, there was so much space that it was just amazing. Dogs roamed around, of course, but they weren't pinched into the tiny spaces that I knew in Minneapolis. By the way, if you're familiar with Minneapolis, it was around 48th Street and Bloomington. If you know, you know.

It's 1982, and I had just moved from my apartment in Phoenix to a converted garage in Tempe, which reduced my commute to ASU considerably. And since my neighbors had dogs, I decided to befriend them. There were two particularly memorable dogs, Australian Shepherds as I recall, with one of them looking just like the dogs you see chasing after bad guys. This was big, powerful dog! Her name was Kamaya.

So one day I simply asked my neighbor if I could borrow their dogs, just to go for runs in the open field, and it was fine. I learn best by doing, and this was the beginning of my learning about dogs.

No, the dogs weren't on leashes. They had them, but we never used them. This was a, ahem, less-than-fashionable neighborhood, and I'd just open up the gate where they slept and let them loose. If there were any rules about dogs I didn't know them, nor did my neighbor, so I never gave it a thought.

We would run and run and run until we got to the canal, and then we would run some more. Well, the dogs would run some more - I was in good shape, but nothing compared to Kamaya, who never, ever seemed to tire. I taught them to come to me with a whistle, and they taught me the joy of just being out there, running around, maybe sniffing rocks.

I became a dog person that year, and the next year, when I moved to California, I continued borrowing dogs, which I did up until just 17 years ago when I got my very first dog. And if I've learned anything in that time, it's that dogs are good people.

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