Some Days...

I woke to the sound of gentle rain.

This is a good thing, as our region is as dry as your Great Aunt Martha's fruitcake three bites after your last swallow of milk. Dry as the devil's laugh. Dry as dust. We need this slow, soaking rain.

This is a bad thing because the nine dogs believe that during times of slow, soaking rain, the Human Servant is responsible for providing (a) entertainment in an indoor venue, (b) two miles of dry outdoor area for walks, and (c) indoor bathroom facilities for Canine Americans. They swear it's in their contracts.

I take them downstairs from our bedroom in three shifts. (Trust me, otherwise it is a Great Whippet Race and the kitchen door becomes the starting gate/bottleneck/fighting pit, and I start swearing and when I do get the door open, at least three sets of accelerating Whippet toenails launch from the tender tops of my feet, and I screech obscenities while howling in pain, and right then my sweet neighbors are coming down from their second floor apartment with their first grader and pre-schooler, not fifteen feet from where I'm standing, and the first grader asks, "Daddy what does [insert that really bad word that I just shouted] mean?" and the pre-schooler practices the word outloud to herself all the way to the car.)

So I get the last shift of dogs downstairs, only to see all nine of them huddled up on the breezeway by the edge of the steps to their potty yard.

"Go out in the rain to poop? I think not!"

"It's raining. On us!"

"There is definitely a clause in the contract against this."

"Bad Servant. Awful Servant."

Fanny by fanny I push the disgusted dogs out in the drizzle to do their business.



Later, after dogs and humans break their fast, and I get enough coffee in me to pry one eye open, I decide to walk, rain or no. Bill gamely took his two regulars, sporting a large black plastic poncho which came in its own little pouch from the dollar store for ninety-nine cents and makes him look like a cross between Antonio Banderas and Grampa Smurf. I walk Giacomino and Maria around their one block and they are pretty darn good sports. They poop immediately as they had been holding out for the walk. If they have to "go" in the rain, there better damn well be a walk attached.

Mama Pajama and Fat Charlie are next, and the drizzle has devolved into a mild spit. I notice that all the critters and vermin - squirrels, evil cats bane of the earth, and loose dogs - have yet to emerge and our walk is down right pleasant.



The last walk is five year old Sam I Am and the two yearlings, William and Lindy Loo. The rain has for all intents and purposes stopped and the dogs are in high spirits. We walk the fifty feet from the side gate to my corner garden and all heck breaks loose. There is a cat in the garden. What sort of Darwinian flunky cat thinks my garden is a cool place to hang? Nine dogs bred to chase, catch, and kill small furry things live here, duh head!



Tra la the cat runs off down the sidewalk. Tra la the cortisone injections I got in both shoulders on Thursday are now a total waste of time and money. Actually, the dogs were really pretty good, after they got over their initial instinctual urge to chase. Sam and Lindy Loo turned to get their treats because they didn't bark (good dogs) and William thought about it for a moment, and decided it was more fun to bark. I tried to get my shoulders back in their sockets in order to render my hands useful enough to dig the treats out of my pocket. Oh, rats, I noticed I was swearing out loud. And then I see my brand new across the street neighbor on her porch.



"I hate loose cats, " I explain. "What a horrible way to start my walk." (In all fairness, my shoulders were still screaming in pain.)

"Oh, I hope it wasn't my cat."

(Wonderful. I forgot this neighbor has a cat or two that go outside. Now I've offended.) The dogs recognise the perfect opportunity to fulfill the bad-poop-timing contract clause, and all assume their individual but collective positions. I whip out my baggies, only to see two monsterous poops that some irresponsible citizen with two Very Large Dogs has left right next to my dogs' little gifts. So now I have to pick up after my three, plus the Creep who didn't's. I have sandwich sized baggies, not gallon. Yuck. But if I leave the Monster Piles, my newly offended neighbor will naturally think that it came from my dogs.



Who lets their dog dump and just walks away? It is exactly the same as if you pull your pants down and poop on your neighbor's yard and leave. And people do it next to church sidewalks! You can't change your shoes once you're in church. Some sermons can be long enough, but add the smell of dog poop.... glory be. It is so bad here that it was discussed in the last City Commissioners Meeting. There can be a $10 to $1000 fine for not cleaning up. I'm going to look into the cost of supplying the neighborhood with motion activated infra-red video recording devices. We should be able to pay for them with the fines levied. I think I'll bring it up at the next Commissioners meeting.

My dog is getting old

My dog is getting old.

Actually, there's no "getting" about it. My sweet dog is old. Giacomino (pronounced, for the non-Italians in the group "jocko-MEEN-o") is thirteen and a half. I've been through this many times before, and though I'm better at knowing what to expect, it all still comes as a surprise.

Giacomino - Beans - started out as a for-profit-breeder's leftovers. We rescued him when he was a nine and a half week old starved puppy.




The photo was from a week after he came to us, and in that week he had gained three pounds. He was just the ugliest of ducklings. When he arrived, Bill scooped him up and carried him around, crying. Bill's soul is entirely too gentle to conjure up the cruelty involved in that tiny puppy's introduction to this world. And of course there is so much worse out there.

Giacomino was named for an immigrant who helped Bill's father in the olden days on the farm. A wizened little man, down on his luck, who cheerfully dug ditches and did odd jobs with a strength impossible from his wiry small frame. It fit the puppy perfectly.

He was supposed to stay ugly and sweet, but he missed that message. He stayed sweet, but he didn't stay ugly, and he became my most accomplished whippet, in terms of titles earned and show wins. He won Best In Field at the American Whippet Club National Specialty in San Diego, CA. (Actually the Field Trial was in Temecula.) He won a Hound Group even before he was a champion. (That means of the 3200 dogs entered in the show, he was one of the seven that made it all the way to the Best In Show competition.) He got obedience titled and was a registered Therapy Dog. And through it all he was my shadow.

I've stepped on that poor dog a thousand times, because he's always right behind me. He follows me into the bathroom, but discretely turns his head. He came to us with a forehead full of worry wrinkles, and they have appeared throughout his lifetime when I'm doing something stupid. Like going somewhere without him. When he became the oldest dog, he moved from his crate in our bedroom to our bed at night. The previous oldest dogs always jumped up onto the foot of our bed when it was time, and curled up in a little ball. Giacomino has, every night for the past two years, jumped onto my pillow, closed his eyes and feigned sleep immediately. And every night for the past two years, I've dragged his dead weight, passive-resistive self to the bottom of the bed. He sighs.

But right now, Giacomino is not in his bed a foot behind my computer chair. He is asleep downstairs in the kitchen. I snuck up to do a quick post and take my shower, and he's deaf enough that I was able to sneak. I put the baby gate across the bottom of the stairs, so that he wouldn't fall up them. I have to help him up and down, because he's got enough disc disease in his back that his legs don't always do what he tells them. Not a good thing for narrow, curving, steep steps. Or for old dogs.

Sometimes when he is up here, and I'm writing or sewing I get up to use the bathroom. When I come out, there is Giacomino peering down the steps, ears all a-kimbo, wrinkles galore, wondering where I disappeared to. Damn the deafness. I hate embarrassing him that way. He sees me come through the bathroom door, and he wags, drops his ears, and tries to be dignified in his blunder. In his world it's unthinkable to lose his Human.

He walks around the block each morning with his beloved twelve and a half year old Maria. They scan for squirrels and evil cats the enemy of all. They leap - sort of - and "woo" when the leashes come out, and wag rewards my way. They love their walk, no matter that it is one block instead of two miles. His back feet drag as we go along making a jazz riff scratch beat on the sidewalk. I sing to him, trying to keep up Bill's good work from more than twelve years ago.


My sweet dog is old. Every day is a gift.

I will never post my picture on my blog.

photo by Laurie J. Erickson

check out her website

I will never have a blog.

Never. Why would I give away my writing for free? Of course I give it away in the local NPR commentaries that I write and record for the awesome WKMS. And I have given it away on the dog lists and groups for years on a daily basis. And I post stories on my store's website. (In fairness, it has been a couple of years since I put a new story there.) But blog? No way. No sirreee. It is so cliche' right now. Everyone has a blog. Blog, blog, blog: it's the new blah, blah, blah.

Mary says, "You really need to have a blog." Nah, not me. Jeannie asks, "Why don't you have a blog?" I'm so above blogging. Rhonda gently nudges, "Have you considered a blog?" I have, and I've soundly rejected the notion. Then husband Bill creates a blog. Well, that makes sense; he's kept a journal for years, and he is wise and quietly spiritual and funny. But I've never kept a diary for more than a hopeful week of Pollyanna enthusiasm, and I'm drowning in the middle of a novel. (Writing one, not reading one.) And besides, who do I think I am?

So stepdaughter Amy calls this morning. Seems there's an article in the Chicago papers about a new blog that created so much buzz that literary agents are knocking down the blogger's door. Literary agents? Oh I had heard about bloggers being discovered, but Amy made this sound so possible. She said wonderful flattering things about my writing, and when she heard my standard arguments, she smilingly ignored them all. I could hear the tone in her sweet voice, which subtly screamed, "Get with the program! Hellooooo? Just how stuck in the last decade are you?" I still don't get it because I don't see how people find blogs. I spent the whole morning, OK, an hour, OK, at least 3 minutes doing a search for "dog blog" and I got a whole bunch of nothing.

But I trust my friends and relations, so Mary, Jeannie, Rhonda, and Amy - this blog's for you.

Who cares???

I live in western Kentucky in an Arts Community with my husband and my nine dogs. Whippets. They look like small greyhounds, but aren't the tiny Italian Greyhounds. My husband is. Italian, I mean. We didn't always live here, but have since June of 2002. My husband moved to this town, Paducah, for the Artist Relocation Program. I moved here because I love my husband. He is a gifted artist. I am enormously talented and extremely well versed at picking up dog poop.

Today, when I was walking the dogs, which I do in shifts, the workers were already on the neighbors' house putting on a new roof. I take the two oldest dogs, thirteen and a half year old Giacomino and twelve and a half year old Maria only around one block because more than that would do them in. It's only seven-something and as I'm waving my pathetic good mornings to the roofers who just think I'm weird because they've seen me walking all these skinny dogs for hours every morning, I see Giacomino start to hunch.

Oh please don't poop right here. Why do the dogs choose to poop when I would least like them to? The rough hewn shirtless roofers are finally starting to offer half-hearted, begrudging waves back at me. And now Giacomino is going to poop right here and the roofers will be grossed out, and I don't know why but I care. The bad poop timing never fails. The dogs can be all de-pooped, but let the president of the bank be walking on the same sidewalk and have him stop to offer pleasant salutations and at least dog one will get a sudden urge to purge. And when the Mayor and his beautiful wife drive by, and stop to chat - that guarantees multiple simultaneous poopage. That's a conversation killer, you betcha. Three pooping canines and my whipping out baggies to scoop it up and carry it along? Yup, any non-dog-owner is out of there.

So I gently drag and cajole the evacuating Giacomino behind the next parked car, and we make it in time. Maybe it's going to be a good day. Maybe it's a good sign for my infant blog, I don't know, but we didn't gross out the roofers.

So. Now. Wasn't I right? Who wants to read a blog about dog poop? I suppose I might post some exerpts from my novel from time to time if there's any interest. Here's a paragraph:

She was lying in the sun next to her litter-brother Proper. They were lying in the grass next to the picket fence. Kind of a cliché that picket fence, but they couldn’t help it. And anyway, it fit. This was home – safe, comfortable, familiar. Everything a picket fence stood for. Home. The Woman was talking to someone over the fence. Their voices made a buzz that harmonized nicely with the summer bees and the background traffic from the Interstate. You had to listen for the traffic noise to notice it, otherwise it was just there, five miles or so away, just in the trunk of your consciousness, humming Interstate traffic background music. Proper stretched and curled his toes to deepen his appreciation of the lazy sun. She looked at the Woman, blabbing away with the person on the other side of the picket fence. She wondered if it was worth her energy to figure out what they were talking about. Listened for a moment, but didn’t hear the good words: “dinner”, "car”, ”walk”, ”Jake”, ”cookies”, or ”OK”, so she lay her head back down in the grass, worshipped the Sun God, closed her eyes and felt the soothing medicine of peace creep over her. She was running. Making a path through the wheat, which felt like whips beating, “faster, faster, go faster” and then disappearing into the rows of corn, the running lanes, cool and dark. Little cries of running joy crowding into her breathing in time with her strides. Run. For the sheer joy of feeling every muscle reaching to its absolute capacity. Fast oh my God she was going so fast. The corn stalks passing in a blur of insignificance. Go go go go there was nothing faster in this world. She was a heat-seeking missile, soaking up her speed. Chasing what? The illusion of some prey? Just chasing; that was for sure, not being chased. For the running was the joy. No fear. Just symmetry of perfect athleticism and grace and rhythm. Run. The cornfield ended abruptly and she dreamed she was back in the sun. Back with Proper in the grass by the picket fence. She felt that glory of pure physical exhaustion. She felt her heart beating so hard that it must be a foot in diameter. Felt her breathing so deep that it hurt in a great way. She felt it all, as she felt the comfort of her brother’s nearness and the warmth of the sun and the thirst. The good, honest thirst from the long run. And she felt the heat from her exertion. She thought she better find a shaded spot with a cooling breeze, where she could still see Proper. Still hear the Woman in the background buzz. She opened her eyes.

So that's it. And that's that. Lord help me, I started a blog.