Robert & Napoleon

Clinton, Maryland

Conducted by Kenneth Crab

This is the third interview in what will eventually become an oral history called WOOF: Americans Talk About Their Dogs, edited by John Bowe. The goal of the project is to interview as radically diverse a group of people as possible, to get them to talk about dogs from every angle possible, and, in so doing, to describe what it means to be a human living in the United States at this moment in history. If you’d like to interview, transcribe, edit, or find subjects, please contact John Bowe at johnfbowe (at) gmail (dot) com. Interview subjects can choose to remain anonymous if they prefer.

The first time I saw Napoleon he was chained to a shed in a dirty, junk-filled backyard in Washington, DC. He didn’t look like any dog I had seen. He was really wild-looking. He saw me and went crazy, jumping and pulling at the chain. It was obvious he’d been abused. 

He was originally my uncle’s dog. My uncle was in the military and basically vanished. First he moved to Texas with my aunt Melody and my cousin, but then he completely disappeared. I think he had issues that surfaced after leaving the military. Anyway, when he took off, he left the dog behind. My Aunt Cheryl called my mom and told her to go get him. 

That summer, I was probably eleven, and I went off to a Mennonite camp in Pennsylvania.  When I came home, my mom picked me up, and right there in the back seat was the same dog. My mom had decided to take him in.

I had always wanted a dog. Our neighborhood was in the suburbs of Maryland. There was a creek, and all these woods. My friends and I spent our time outside, building forts. If we found somebody’s dog roaming through the woods, we would adopt it. I remember tying up some stranger’s dog in my back yard and then being really sad when the dog got away. So for me to actually have my own dog was incredible. From the beginning, he slept in my room and I was responsible for him.

Napoleon was a Cairn terrier. Cairn terriers basically look like Toto, Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz, but Napoleon was a sandy, tannish color with blond highlights. He was tiny, but he lived up to his name because he had so much attitude. If you said “Go to your room!,” and he didn’t want to go, he would growl. We slept in the same bed. He had his side, I had mine. One night, he...