Stanley and Sophie

1. A Cappella Joe Cocker, the rock star, was underestimated, even in his heyday. He had the voice of an angel and the appearance of a mental hospital patient. His signature song, unless you count "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," was the antiphonal Lennon-McCartney tune "With a Little Help from My Friends," which Cocker made his own by using waltz time and incorporating chorics with raw rock, much as the Rolling Stones did in "You Can't Always Get What You Want." My favorite part: Cocker's girl group carols, "Do you need anybody?" and Cocker confesses with distinctly manly candor, "I need someone to love." Then the girls ask, a cappella, "Would you believe in a love at first sight?" and he answers, "I'm certain that it happens all the time." I always shake my head at this. Doubtful. Very doubtful. I've been insanely, destructively in love several times in my life, the details of which I'd rather not remember. (Neither adverb is an exaggeration; such was my derangement that certain people still walk out of a room when I walk into it. My excuse: I was young; it was the sixties; derangement, courtesy of R. D. Laing, had cachet.) And I was married for many years to a man for whom, I always said, I would walk a crooked mile. But love at first sight? No. The only time I've fallen in love at first sight was with dogs. The first was Stanley, an aristocratic alpha male border terrier. Best of breed, pure princeling. (Kennel name: Bramblebee Borage, out of Wizard Notice of Bramblebee and Faithful One of Bramblebee.) The second was Sophie, a streetwise, scrappy, orphaned alpha female, also a border terrier, not to be confused with a border collie, an altogether different kind of dog. In my love for these two dogs lies a tale about human need, the kind that blots out all sense -- in this case, the sense of having two rivalrous terriers with more volatility and energy than the ocean in a New York City apartment. Human need -- immense subject. And because Stanley came into my life in 2001 and Sophie in 2004, it's a tale, tangentially, about Manhattan in those first confounding, politically charged years of the new millennium. Years when our lives were a rhubarb of noisy emotion: a devil's chorus of fear, blatting rage, birring anxiety, tweedling incredulity, roupy sorrow. Copyright 2008 by Kate JenningsJennings, Kate is the author of 'Stanley and Sophie' with ISBN 9781416560296 and ISBN 1416560297.