"My wife and I do a lot of rock climbing," Mills tells me, "and he likes to go along."
He climbs rocks?
Mark Graham
Janet Healy believes her Jack Russell rescue dogs "soften the atmosphere" at her photography studio downtown.
Mark Graham
Gus, the wire fox terrier, wears "doggles" downtown.
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"Uh, no," Mills says. "One of the groups of rock climbers we go with has a lot of people in it who have dogs. We go to places where there's good camping and some of the shorter rocks. The dogs like to swim and play around at the bottom. It's more of a family outing."
A few blocks away, Janet Healey and her husband, Joe Grisham, operate a commercial photography studio in a renovated low-rise building. The second floor has been opened up into a long, broad brick-walled studio space in which a small crew of people are scurrying around, helping arrange purses, jewelry and other products in front of large-format cameras for advertising and catalog photographs. Healey and Grisham are early middle-aged and have been in business 10 years. They moved to this building from a location in the design district because they wanted a space with more light.
From far shadows three terrier snouts come snaking slowly through the hurried tangle of legs and feet. They present three wet snouts to sniff the new person and see if he needs to be barked at. When the sniffing is over, they move off and exhale small sighs of approval.
"BiBi is a Jack Russell rescue dog," Healey tells me. "We're very much into rescue. Duncan is some kind of terrier mix. He's a rescue dog, too. They both came to us through Jack Russell Rescue, which we're very involved in. And then Bela is also a rescue. She came to us, I think, through the Richardson Humane Society."
All three dogs come to work at the studio almost every day. It's their job.
"Occasionally, if we've got a client in the studio or something big is going on where we don't want the dogs all over, we'll leave them at home, but then we'll pick them up in the middle of the day and bring them down here."
I asked about professionalism issues--dogs howling in the background when you're trying to talk on the phone and so on. She conceded it can be a problem.
"Occasionally I am on the phone, and the doorbell will ring or something will happen, and the dogs will go nuts. And I know that's very unprofessional. Someone will pick up the dogs and drag them down the stairs."
But in a work environment that calls for a lot of perfectionism, where there can be pressure and tension, she thinks the value of having the dogs around far outweighs the disadvantages.
"The way I feel about it is that for the most part it really helps soften the atmosphere and set a tone. The dogs create a friendlier, warmer bond between the people."
I think I'm beginning to get it. I like the idea of dogs as social glue. Downtown Dallas needs some glue. There's so much going on now that's cool--people living and working in these great renovated spaces. But it's all kind of tentative and spaced out, a patchwork, the very beginnings of community, the way it must have been on the frontier when a homestead popped up here and there and then over there in the forest primeval. Former Governor Ann Richards has a story she tells about the West Texas pioneer lady who couldn't kill her chickens because she needed them for company. I think these downtown dogs are like those chickens.
One evening as I'm about to leave the Observer, I see a smartly dressed young woman hurrying down the sidewalk across the street with a little Lhasa Apso on a leash. I don't know. I feel as if I haven't quite done my job until I get somebody to gas me. So I go over there and give this bizarro line about being a reporter for the Observerand working on a story about people who have dogs downtown.
She's thrilled that someone wants to talk about Buddy. The dog. "I walk him three times a day. I take him on one big walk to the dog park and then shorter walks in the morning and evening."
She explains that Buddy, 13 years old and failing of eyesight, is a stepdog. "My husband had him since college."
She and her husband have renovated a small building that is now their home. He works elsewhere. She runs her own business on the telephone from an office in the building.
I see her all the time now. She really gets around with that dog. And I do get it. The spaces between people and buildings get long and dark toward the end of the day. It's fine to say downtown is almost there as a community, but it's also not there yet. In the evening when the cars have all escaped, the silence between the buildings is the sound those pioneer wives heard on the high plains.
Buddy is Laura Zane's buddy. That's what dogs are for, no more, no less. Downtown needs its dogs. Downtown dogs have it made. We should all have their lives.
