Being an Old Dog and Finding my Ass, my Pussy, and my Cock

For the past four or five years, I’ve been a little obsessed with the work of Mexican artist Geraldo Ortega.

I’ve collected quite a few pieces of his wildly colorful clay artwork over the years. Geraldo comes from a family of artisans who have practiced their craft for generations, using techniques now preserved by only a handful of families in Mexico. He grew up in it. Clay, color, tradition, family, imagination. This wasn’t something he discovered later in life. It was waiting for him when he was born.

Today, he’s an award-winning artist whose work travels far beyond his family workshop. But one of the things I love most about it is that no matter how far the art travels, there’s still something wonderfully handmade and rooted about every piece.

And then there are the dogs.

Geraldo creates these fantastic sculptures of animals stacked one on top of another. Sometimes there are three dogs. Sometimes five. Sometimes even more. Usually, somewhere at the very top, there’s a rooster surveying the whole ridiculous, colorful situation below him.

Naturally, I became obsessed with those too.

Eventually, I bought the tallest stack he makes, a sculpture standing just over seven feet tall, filled with brightly colored dogs and crowned with a rooster.

There’s a charming reason he doesn’t make them any taller. He can’t. The ceiling in the family workshop is only a little over six feet high. It’s the same low-ceilinged space where his family has worked for generations. So one of the largest, most joyful pieces of art in my home is quite literally as tall as the room that gave birth to it.

I also own two smaller stacks. Both have dogs. Both have roosters perched on top.

For years, I simply loved them because they made me happy.

Then one day, I finally wondered: Why are these animals stacked on top of each other in the first place?

And that sent me down a rabbit hole.

Or perhaps, considering the story, a donkey-dog-cat-rooster hole.

The image traces back to an old Brothers Grimm story called The Town Musicians of Bremen. It tells the story of four aging farm animals: a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster. They have worked all their lives, but now they’re old. Their usefulness, at least in the eyes of their owners, has expired.

And their reward for all those years of service?

They’re going to be discarded or killed.

So the animals do something wonderful.

They leave.

One by one, they find each other and decide they’ll head toward Bremen, where they’ll become musicians and create a new life for themselves.

Along the way, they come upon a house filled with robbers. Looking through the window, the animals realize they need to get a better view, so they climb onto one another’s backs: donkey on the bottom, then dog, then cat, with the rooster perched at the very top.

And then they let loose.

The donkey brays. The dog barks. The cat yowls. The rooster crows.

Imagine hearing that coming through your window in the middle of the night.

The robbers take one look at this bizarre creature outside and run for their lives.

The animals move into the house, eat the food, settle down, and make themselves comfortable.

Later, one robber is brave enough, or foolish enough, to return in the darkness.

That does not go particularly well for him.

The cat scratches him. The dog bites him. The donkey kicks him. The rooster screams into his ear. By the time the poor man escapes, he is convinced the house is occupied by witches, monsters, giants, and other horrifying creatures.

The robbers decide they want absolutely nothing more to do with the place.

And the animals?

They stay.

They never even make it to Bremen.

They were looking for a new life and discovered they had already found one.

Over time, the image of those four animals evolved. Artists have substituted other creatures. Cows. Camels. Different farm animals. And, in Geraldo Ortega’s wonderfully colorful world, sometimes an entire tower of dogs with one very determined rooster sitting on top.

But the older I get, the more I realize that the story isn't really about animals at all.

It’s about what happens when the world decides your best days are behind you.

These four creatures had done exactly what was expected of them for years. They worked. They served. They carried loads. They guarded homes. They caught mice. They announced the morning.

And then somebody else decided they were no longer useful.

They disagreed.

I love that.

They didn’t spend the rest of their lives begging the farmer to appreciate them. They didn’t sit around mourning the days when they were younger, stronger, faster, or more useful to somebody else.

They walked away.

And along the road, they found one another.

That may be my favorite part of the entire story.

Because there is something powerful about reaching a point in life when you realize you are allowed to build a community of your own choosing.

You can find the people who understand you.

You can walk away from places where you have outgrown your usefulness to somebody else and discover places where usefulness was never the price of admission in the first place.

And sometimes, when life throws a bunch of aging misfits together, the answer is quite literally to stand on one another’s shoulders.

Alone, each of those animals had been written off.

Together, they scared the hell out of everybody.

There’s a lesson in there for all of us.

Getting older does not mean becoming smaller.

It may simply mean discovering that the farm you spent your life serving was never meant to be your final destination.

Maybe somewhere ahead is a strange little house filled with people who become family.

Maybe your tribe looks nothing like what you expected.

Maybe you’re the donkey holding everybody up. Maybe you’re the rooster making all the noise. Maybe sometimes you’re the dog in the middle wondering exactly how you got talked into this.

But together, we can become something much bigger than any of us could have been alone.

So now when I look at that enormous tower of colorful dogs standing more than six feet tall in my house, I see something completely different.

I still see Geraldo Ortega’s beautiful work.

I still see generations of Mexican craftsmanship.

I still see color and humor and dogs stacked impossibly on top of one another.

But I also see a group of old animals who refused to accept someone else’s definition of when their story was supposed to end.

They found one another.

They found their place.

They stood on each other’s shoulders.

And they made enough noise to claim a home of their own.

I can think of worse ways to grow older.