Absent: me

Recently, a kid I know said to me, "We have two cats here, Liz, so you should never bring over your dog."

I used to have a dog. With Stacia. That was last summer, in another life, and this kid would have no way of knowing this.

"What do you mean...my dog?" I asked, carefully. Had I mentioned Luna at some point? Perhaps in a mourning blackout? Or did this kid get the juice from the other, older kids at the pre-school, who knew me when I really did have a dog? Maybe there is an underground gossip circle among the five-year-olds. ("Jimmy, did you know that Spanish teacher Liz used to have a dog? Yeah, and then she left her lesbian relationship and lost all her parental rights. Now she can't keep the attention of her part-time undergraduate lover and has placed her cats in the care of a bunch of pot-riddled bachelors. She's really going downhill..")

"Your dog, silly," the kid said, as though I should know exactly what she was talking about. "The one you told us about!"

I tried to remember when on earth I had mentioned Luna. I have been very careful not to mention her over this past year because kids love animals and they love identifying outside-of-school family life, and the prospect of explaining a lesbian break-up to other people's children seems really complicated to me. How could I sufficiently explain that Luna is not my dog anymore, and that I never see her but that she still exists?

As I considered all of this, of course I felt that old pang of sadness rearing her weary head. I miss Luna. I miss Stacia. I miss that life sometimes. I miss the predictability of a puppy, of a partner. To make it all the more pertinent, I had recently discovered an issue of Animal Tracks, the Animal Humane Society's quarterly magazine, in which Stacia and Luna were featured.

Surprise! There is my old life, plastered on the glossy pages of a magazine.
Absent: me.

The article detailed Stacia's process of adopting Luna. How she chose her. How she named her. How she trained her. Indeed, in the real story, I was there for all of it. We chose her. We named her. We trained her. But of course, I was blaringly absent from the article. I mean, of course. Why on earth would Stacia mention me? (Oddly enough, though, her ex-ex-partner in Australia got a mention in the first paragraph!)

In any case, I stood there, trying to decide how to respond to this kid. I still, for the life of me, couldn't figure out how she knew that I used to have a dog.

"I told you about my dog?" I asked, confused.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "Your dog. You know, Bingo!"

Then she burst into a rendition of the song Bingo in Spanish. "Un perro grande tengo yo, y ya se llama Bingo...." and I burst out laughing.

I teach that song in Spanish class. In Spanish, the words are a little different than the English version. Instead of the farmer owning the dog, the narrator owns the dog. Therefore, since I teach the song, I am always saying, in Spanish, "I have a big dog named Bingo."

This kid took it literally. She had no idea about Luna at all!

The encouraging part of this story is that I have never directly translated the meaning of that song. She understood the literal translation quite well! Next time I sing, "I have a big dog named Bingo," in any language, I will be prepared to end with a disclaimer about how the "I" in the song is actually a fictional narrator, not Spanish teacher Liz.

And if all those kids believe that I actually embody the narrator of these goofy songs, I must appear to have quite the enchanting life! I wonder what they think when I sing Puff the Magic Dragon. Or the song about dancing vegetables. Or the one about bear who combs his hair!