the tao of cute

The first time Pearl met her gentle, holistic vet, Pearl was in high Snarly mode.
“Good thing she’s so cute,” said Grace, homeopathist, as she watched Pearl run obsessively between the door and the window of her office, all the while letting Grace know that a move in the wrong direction would result in something decidedly unpleasant. The remark caught me a little off-guard, as did my own perception of Pearl, later standing outside the vet’s office with Patrick while I made future plans with Grace . As I looked out the door, and before I could fully orient myself, I thought “What a beautiful dog.” I was looking at Pearl, sitting high and lean next to Patrick, her fur aglow in the sun, but hadn’t yet realized it.

Pearl’s looks have been forced to compete with what I wanted her to look like, ie., like her predecessor English Shepherd, Lucy the Good. Lucy, sturdy of bone structure, fell on the large end of breed size. She was tri-colored, with a strong black saddle of impossibly shiny and soft fur across her back. She had freckles on her nose and legs and pouches at her cheeks. From the moment I saw her, I was smitten with her looks, even as her stomach sagged from giving birth and her tail, which would grow large and plume-like, was still skinny. I remember standing at the SPCA and proudly pulling her pouchy cheeks out: “Look at this!” I said, as though everyone would immediately see the extraordinary beauty of loose facial skin.

When my friend Randee, with her penchant for smaller dogs with furry muzzles, first met Lucy, she cupped her hands around Lucy’s face and said, “A face only a mother could love,” no doubt thinking that I agreed. But I agreed instead with a neighbor, whose funny looking dog Bob was an avid frisbee player: “I don’t choose dogs by looks, “ she said, “ but I would want your dog because of what she looks like.”

Pearl, on the other hand, is sable and white and as close to small as the breed gets. She’s also lanky and incredibly agile, with much thinner fur than Lucy’s and a tendency to sometimes smell like a dog, as Lucy never did. In other words, besides being the temperamental opposite of Lucy, she is also, breed limitations withstanding, her aesthetic opposite. So the idea that Pearl might be cute was something that escaped me at first and still has the capacity to catch me by surprise.

Is it, then, as Grace said, a good thing that Pearl is cute? The quality of cuteness, we are beginning to think is an evolutionary feature, the cuteness of baby animals a way of making them compelling to us, of making us care about them despite their tendency to offer us enormous challenges, to require of us immense energy and patience. “Cute” suggests many things, but perhaps primary among them, it suggests vulnerability. With vulnerability, need, and with need, the seduction to care for and about.

In the early days of Pearl, but with nothing very particular in mind, I made the picture below the screen saver on my computer at work. The picture was taken during the period when Pearl’s ears, which have now settled on both sides of her head, seemed to be traveling, so that on any given day you might find them anywhere. When I pointed the camera at her, she looked up, causing her errant ears to stand straight up, if floppily, on her head. Though I didn't think about it then, I see it now as a picture that catches something vulnerable about Pearl not otherwise in view at a time when she was all barking demands, snapping teeth, willfulness. And it’s a picture that probably kept me connected to her until she needed me less, or differently, when I could replace it with my current screen saver, a shot in which Pearl seems to be laughing--at me, of course, and not necessarily with me, but certainly not imploringly and certainly not with the kind of heart-melting cuteness that could save a person's life.