On the Year I Bought a Chihuahua Named Milly Mae

I want to be clear, before I get into this, that I had a plan. The plan was that I was going to remain a person who did not own a chihuahua. I had read enough about the breed, in the course of writing about it for several years, to know that I was the kind of person who would not, under any reasonable forecast, end up with a chihuahua. I have a wife, a daughter, a job, a house, and a sense of dignity. I was, on October 14, 2016, none of these things by 4 p.m.

This is the column about the year I drove to rural Indiana and came home with a six-pound chihuahua named Milly Mae. The plan, in retrospect, had a structural flaw, which is that the plan had not consulted Milly Mae.

The drive, against my better judgment

A friend of my wife’s had mentioned, in passing at a Saturday morning coffee, that her sister-in-law in Bloomington had a small breeder of long-coat chihuahuas and was retiring a four-year-old female. The dog had had two litters; she was being homed to a quiet household. My wife mentioned this in the car on the way home with the air of a person who has not yet decided whether to ask the question. I gave the answer she was not asking, which was that we were not the kind of household that adopted a four-year-old retired chihuahua from rural Indiana.

We drove out the following weekend. I want to be honest, in case my future biographer is taking notes, that I drove the entire way. I do not know whose decision this was.

The breeder’s house was small and clean. Milly Mae was, on first introduction, asleep in a basket. She woke up. She walked over. She sat on my left foot. She looked up at me with the air of a small dog who has reviewed the available candidates and made a decision. I drove home with her on my wife’s lap, in a small soft carrier, on the way back through Indianapolis at sunset. The carrier had a metal carabiner backup on the latch. I had read about the carabiner in an article I had not, at the time, expected to be relevant.

The failure of the plan

Milly Mae has, in the nine years since, redesigned the household. She has annexed the bathroom mat. She has established a sun-tracking circuit through the kitchen, the dining room, and the back porch that follows the available radiation. She has trained me to deliver her dinner at 5:47 p.m. by means of a slow, patient three-legged walk across the kitchen tile that the veterinarian has, on three occasions, confirmed is not a real injury.

I want to plant a sincere paragraph here, because the rest of this column is going to be silly. The thing I did not predict, when I drove home from Bloomington with a chihuahua I had not asked for, is that the dog would be, in some quiet structural way, a daily kindness. She is the small fact of the morning at 7:14 a.m. and the small fact of the evening at 9:45 p.m. She has, on at least three occasions in the last decade, sat on my chest at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday after a hard day and produced, by means I do not have the credentials to explain, a measurable lowering of my heart rate. I am not the only person in this household who has noticed.

What actually changed, in concrete terms

A short, honest list of the things that have changed in our household since Milly Mae arrived.

• Bedtime is earlier. By approximately 22 minutes a night, on average, across nine years. I have not regretted this.
• The kitchen counters are cleaner. A small dog with an interest in human food at floor level has motivated a level of household discipline I had previously failed to achieve. A short list of safe human foods has become a fixture on the fridge.
• I take walks. Two short walks a day, regardless of weather, in a manner I had previously reserved for January resolutions that did not survive February. A reasonable approach to walking a chihuahua is most of the framework.
• I have read more about veterinary medicine than I would have anticipated. A six-pound dog with a complicated dental history will do this to you.
• I have, regrettably, become the kind of person who carries a small dog in a sweater pocket. I will not elaborate.

The research that, embarrassingly, supports this

I went, in the third year, to look up whether the cardiovascular calming effect was a real thing or whether I was making it up to justify the chihuahua. The research is not, on the available evidence, made up. The American Heart Association’s 2019 review on dog ownership and cardiovascular outcomes found a meaningful association between dog ownership and reduced cardiovascular mortality. The mechanism is not entirely settled; the association is. I am, statistically, a beneficiary.

This is not a sentence I would have predicted writing, on October 14, 2016, in the seat of a sedan on the way to rural Indiana. The chihuahua had not, at that point, consulted me about her plans.

The bottom line, with a small recommendation

I am not going to recommend that you drive to rural Indiana and adopt a four-year-old retired chihuahua. The decision is private and, in my case, was made for me by a small dog on a basket on a Saturday afternoon. What I will say, after nine years, is that the worst-case scenarios I was rehearsing in the car on the way out have not materialized. The household is, on balance, a quieter and slightly kinder place than it was. The carrier in the hallway has a metal carabiner on the latch. The mat at the door has been replaced twice.

If you are reading this with a small dog on your lap, I do not need to convince you of any of it. If you are reading this without one, I am not going to convince you either; the conversation, in my experience, happens not in the column but in a small clean breeder’s house in Bloomington, on a Saturday at 4 p.m., when a four-year-old chihuahua walks over and sits on your left foot.