Last night when I got home from Zumba, Leo followed me around the house (like he usually does). The sensation of his soft warm face nuzzling against my legs brought me such joy I cannot tell you. I knelt down, wrapped my arms around him (like I do about 37 times a day), smothered his head with kisses, and told him, “You have no idea how much you mean to me.”
Sorry, it’s not in my nature to be wordless, but when I stumbled across these photos taken of Leo at a golden retriever’s first birthday party in the summer of 2011, I decided to participate in my first ever (Who am I kidding?) Wordless Wednesday.
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Do you ever wonder if domestic dogs would be happier if they weren’t confined by our homes? I keep my dogs inside when we’re not home because I’m afraid of them escaping or getting kidnapped or digging under the fence or annoying the neighbors by barking. They’re safer inside. When we’re home, we let them play outside as long as they want, which winds up being only as long as we’re outside playing with them.
Leo’s never known a life other than this, but Mia was “cage free” for at least part of her life before she came to us. She shows no sign of missing her freedom.
I almost retweeted an article I read the other day about stray/feral dogs on Indian reservations. I almost wrote, “If it weren’t for us, Mia would have ended up like these poor reservation dogs with a life expectancy of only two years.”
But that didn’t quite ring true. Mia had a home before she found us. Two, actually. So we’ve been told. For some reason I cannot begin to understand, her most recent owners reportedly left her behind when they moved away. Mia was being informally fostered at a home on an Indian reservation. Not the same as running in a pack, biting people, and having to fend for her own food and shelter. The family brought her inside at night, where she slept under a little girl’s bed. Terrible life we rescued her from, right?
Mia on the day we got her.
I remember wondering why Mia’s foster family even bothered to find another home for her. Don’t dogs just roam freely on the rez?
Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks rez dogs are leading the life. This article in Indian Country Today declares that rez dogs will rule the world one day.
I always like seeing off-leash dogs on the reservations I frequent, but then, they never strike me as stray, homeless or feral. Surely these aren’t the dogs with a lifespan of two years. None has threatened to bite me. For the most part, they seem less reactive than the dogs I raised from puppies. Mia is less reactive than the dogs I raised from puppies.
So there’s something to be said for letting dogs roam free: no barrier frustration. And two excellent reasons to keep them confined: their safety and the safety of people. Roaming dogs can get hit by cars or abused, and people could get bitten.
Whether there is a rez dog “problem” or not, I can’t say. At least one reservation around here requires dogs to be fenced or tied up, and according to part two of the above article, a rescue group is finding homes for strays on the Crow reservation.
Leo would love to climb this ladder, but I doubt he ever will. He doesn’t seem to understand the nuances of his hind legs. Not that he’s disabled in any way. He can run and jump just fine. He is capable of jumping or climbing on the furniture, but half the time, he just rests his front paws on the bed or couch, leaving his hind feet on the floor. I help him out by lifting his back legs up the rest of the way. It’s weird.
I took this photo yesterday to represent a commitment to move forward. To help our Leo be the best Leo he can be.
He’s sort of a problem child. I found myself saying the other day, “Leo is not reactive like Isis was. When he barks at a bicycle, he’s doesn’t have a full-blown, out-of-his-mind reaction. We just have to watch out for his redirected biting … oh, who am I kidding? He’s reactive.”
Leo experiences barrier frustration. When he’s on a leash and sees a bicycle, he barks at it. Confined by the leash, he can’t get to the bike. He gets frustrated and lashes out at the nearest thing. Sometimes Mia’s head, sometimes our legs. Mia’s head can take it. Our legs are more sensitive.
Joggers and other dogs present a similar problem, but usually I can get him far enough away that he doesn’t bark. Lately, bicycles have become more of a challenge. Rob and I like to walk the dogs after dark, when there are fewer people around. Last Saturday night after 10 pm, we encountered two bicycles. I couldn’t get Leo far enough away. He barked and lunged.
I’m overwhelmed by the prospect of training this behavior away, because of what I went though with Isis. Writing her memoir, I’m still living those two years when I was obsessed with fixing her. With Isis, we got to a point where I could safely walk her around the neighborhood. I need to revisit those techniques to make Leo less reactive.
We started last week by taking Leo to a neutral location with Rob’s bicycle. Leo had no trouble walking beside us while we walked the bicycle. We got overconfident and tried walking around a larger area, inhabited by other people. A person riding a bicycle passed. I clicked and treated Leo, who didn’t react. Hooray. I let my guard down further and missed the approach of a second bicycle. Leo barked and lunged.
I burst into tears, something I don’t remember doing with Isis at this phase of her training. I failed him. Why is this so hard?
Nothing is worse for reactive dog training than losing your cool.
I realized we need to go back before we can go forward.
We tried again yesterday with the goal of keeping it short and successful. Make sure Leo is calm before we get started, able to make eye contact with me. Have Rob walk by with bicycle. Click and treat Leo for calm. Have Rob ride bicycle slowly past us at a distance. End on success.
Leo became very agitated when Rob mounted the bike. He barked a high-pitched nervous bark (as opposed to the Big Boy ferocious bark) and I could get him to calm down. I moved him farther away, had Rob get off the bike and stand next to it.
Leo could not calm down 50 feet away from Rob standing next to a bicycle. Part of that could be anxiety because he wanted to get to his daddy, but it shows that we tried to move too fast.
So, that’s our starting point. Next time we will start with Rob standing next to the bicycle at a greater distance away. I will try some BAT techniques of rewarding Leo by moving him farther away when he shows calming signals.
I drafted this post before I saw this week’s Weekly Writing Challenge: Image vs. Text, and was struggling to pick an image to accompany it. Should I borrow Evernote’s logo, since I’m giving them free advertising anyway? Maybe Rob has a picture of me using my Nook. I was tempted to steal photos of Louis CK, Fred Armisen and Vanessa Bayer, or at least embed the videos I link to below.
Given the challenge at hand, I have taken a post I didn’t know how to illustrate with one picture, and illustrated it with four images.
The Next Generation of Typos
I no longer know how to write things by hand, so I’ve begun making notes to myself on my Nook and my iPod touch. Evernote seems to be designed for such things, because it syncs to become available on multiple devices.
evernote.com
I turned off the autocorrect feature on my digital devices long ago, because I trust my own ability to spell over the computer’s assumption that when I type pissy,what I really mean is pussy. True story: my stepmother emailed my significant other that her Blackberry tried to autocorrect her message to him thusly.
In a pinch, I’ve used Evernote to jot down what could be described as a journal entry. Let me explain. In a world before blogs, people wrote things down for themselves as private documentation. Today I felt sad, or My best friend really pissed me off. Things you don’t want other people to read, but make you feel better to express.
I expect that these personal musings will be useful for future memoir or fiction projects, but because those pesky little touch screens are so small, my literal notes to self are riddled with typos. I’m terribly afraid that after my death, some historian will come across them and won’t understand that my spelling errors are a result of the technology of the time.
I do all my writing by keyboard, but I still edit with a pen.
I suppose everyone else in the world has an iPad or whatever, and has been word processing remotely for years, but Evernote has been something of a revelation to me. The members of my writing group provide one another with typed critiques. On a few recent occasions, I’ve wanted to work on my critiques in places that weren’t convenient to take my laptop. On an airplane to and from a weekend getaway, as one example. In the car at the Canadian border crossing, for another.
Celebrating Rob’s birthday. Didn’t feel like taking the laptop with me.
On the way back from Disneyland in January, I wrote three critiques on my Nook, then uploaded and corrected my spelling errors on my laptop before printing. On Sunday, I planned to do the same, but when I got in the car, I realized that my Nook’s battery wasn’t charged. I handwrote (as legibly as I could) two critiques before I remembered that I had Evernote on my iPod. I wrote the third critique on the tiny handheld touchpad keyboard.
Sometimes technology really a-freaking-mazes me. And I don’t even have a smartphone that uploads photos to Instagram.
Pretty sure the coolest thing about my Nook is the sticker I put on the M-Edge case.
I will say (lowering voice like Kim Jong Un’s best friends from growing up), the Nook Tablet is not a great tablet. It’s a fine e-reader and the price was right. But it’s seriously deficient in apps (none for Facebook, for example, which would have been a dealbreaker if I’d known ahead of time) and the web browser is pretty shabby. My next electronic device will be a true tablet (unless my iPod dies and needs replacing first). Probably the iPad mini.
UPDATE 3.24.13: I spent $19.99 to turn my Nook SD card into a Nook 2 Android card. This may have resolved all of my tablet complaints, namely the lack of a Facebook app. Now I just have to adjust to the Android interface, which on first use does not seem as pretty as the Nook’s. Fortunately, I can easily switch between the Nook and the Android just by rebooting the device.
One of these weeks, I’m going to take a picture especially for the Weekly Photo Challenge. But for each of the three weeks I’ve participated, I’ve already had the perfect picture:
Isis kisses Rob
When I first took this picture (in November 2008, according to the metadata), I asked my mom if she thought it was too intimate to post on Facebook. She said, “I think so.”
Well, guess what? I’m writing a memoir I plan to have published, so we better get used to sharing intimate moments publicly. I asked Rob if I could post it, he said I could.
I saw more than one ridiculous commercial this morning about an app to help you reward your child for using the potty. One even depicted a fantastical “first flush party.” People do this? (Evidently they do.)
Reminded me of some criticism I’ve gotten for talking too much about peeing in my memoir. Fair criticism, I’ll admit. I’ve found places where I don’t need to mention that I also peed when I let Isis out to pee in the middle of the night. I deleted the scene* when I stop the car after driving exactly one block to make sure that my whining puppy wasn’t trying to tell me she had to pee.
Witness Isis, 8 weeks old, not peeing.
Recently, a writer buddy commented that she is not interested in reading about dogs peeing, just as she is not interested in stories of human potty training, unless something really exceptional happens. While I can’t say that I’m dying to read about the trials and tribulations leading to a fantastical first flush fiesta, I would sort of expect a mommy memoir to touch on some of the associated issues of teaching a child to use the toilet.
Besides, owners of new puppies are sort of obsessed with when our pups are going to pee, aren’t we? You don’t want to miss an opportunity to encourage the peeing to happen in the designated area. Nor do you want to clean pee off the floor, or worse, carpet. You need to figure out what the signs are and watch for them, developing a prophetic pee sense.
I’m sorry, parents of newborns, but you have it easier than parents of new puppies in this arena (oh yeah, I said it), because newborn humans wear diapers, so it doesn’t really matter when they pee. They can pee any damn time they want, and you don’t even have to clean it up right away.
All that other human parenting stuff, yeah, I’m sure that’s all way harder.
* Deleted scene:
The snow stayed on the ground all weekend, and the temperature dropped so the roads were icy by Monday morning. The news people kept saying, “If you don’t have to leave the house, don’t.”
…
I crept along my street, testing my four-wheel drive and anti-lock brakes. Isis howled her favorite song, the one she sang during her first bath and whenever we crated her.
Where are you taking me?
“Silly, you’ve been in this car before. You’re fine.”
At the end of the block, I thought I better make sure her cries didn’t mean she had to go potty. I pulled into a cul-de-sac and got out of the car, my boots sliding on the icy sidewalk.
“Come on, baby.” I scooped her up and set her down on a crunchy patch of snow. “There’s grass under there. You can pee on it.”
Isis just sat there and looked at me.
“Okay, guess you don’t have to go.”
Never accuse me of being so in love with my deathless prose that I’m not willing to leave it on the cutting room floor.
I’ve gotten some feedback recently that I don’t describe people as well as I describe dogs. No huge surprise, since I don’t like people as much as I like dogs. But I would like my readers to be able to “see” the human characters, or at least, that’s what they keep telling me they want from my book.
I decided to use this week’s writing challenge as an exercise to get inside the head of a tertiary character.
I have no pictures of the main human in this piece, but here’s Isis at about the time it took place. Bet you can’t tell which one Isis is in the scene.
Tracey adjusted the pouch of dog treats clipped to the front of her jeans as she waited eagerly for her new pupils to arrive. At five minutes after the scheduled start time, they finally streamed in: yippy little white dogs, a couple of mixed breeds, and two German shepherds. Plus their owners.
“Welcome, welcome.” Tracey’s eyes shined bright behind her blonde bangs. She shook off the momentary nervousness that no one would show. After all, she was a pro, having designed this class to help dogs with behavior problems such as leash aggression, lunging, barking, and growling.
A brown-haired woman in her thirties maneuvered one of the German shepherds into the room, carefully avoiding getting too close to the other dogs.
“What a pretty girl,” Tracey cooed at the black and gold shepherd. Flipping her long straight hair over her shoulders, she reached into her pouch for a cookie to offer in exchange for a sit. Without needing to be told, the bright-eyed shepherd sat and smiled happily at Tracey.
“Do you have a restroom?” the woman asked.
Tracey pointed the way, and the woman looked uncertain.
“Can she come with me?
“Of course,” Tracey said. “Dogs can go anywhere here.”
“She comes with me at home,” the woman confided.
“It’s a sheppy thing,” Tracey said. “I just love sheppies.”
Australian shepherds were her favorite; she had five at home. Notoriously hard to train, they had been her inspiration to get into dog training. She loved helping other dog owners going through the same struggles. She knew they valued hearing stories about her own dogs.
Tracey arranged the people in a circle of chairs positioned about five feet apart. Since she was a positive reinforcement trainer, she told them to give their dogs lots of treats to keep them from barking at each other. After introducing herself, she explained that all dog behavior problems begin at home. “Does this sound familiar to anyone? Your dog free feeds, meaning he eats whenever he wants. The bowl is always full.”
She paused, validated by her students’ guilty expressions. “He can go outside whenever he wants, through a doggie door. There are toys all over the place. He decides when to play, with what, and gets your attention with a nudge or a bark or a whine. Maybe your dog budges you with his nose. ‘Hey, I’m here. Look how cute I am.’ And you play with him.”
Tracey handed out a worksheet she found especially helpful, detailing house rules that each owner should implement if they wanted to improve the dynamic with their dogs. “I know, no one likes being told to keep their dogs off the bed,” she said. “But let me tell you, one of my Aussies was used to being on all the furniture. I didn’t think anything of it, until he started ignoring me in agility class. Once you start taking privileges away, it makes a huge difference in the relationship.”
At their skeptical faces, she added, “I once had a student whose dog bit her husband in bed twice. Twice! Apparently it was more important to her to have her dog in bed than to have a dog who doesn’t bite. If I were sharing a bed with someone, I know I wouldn’t want my dogs biting him.”
She hadn’t meant to reveal her single status to her new students. Not that there was anything wrong with it. Tracey was independent, young, slender, blonde, and pretty; she would have no trouble getting a man if that’s what she cared about. For now, she was happy to concentrate on her career.
Sometimes my work takes me places other people don’t tend to see. Twice in my career, I’ve visited squatters’ cabins in the woods.
I visited this cabin a few months after its owner died. I hiked about twenty minutes from a logging road down to the river, knowing that the cabin had to be torn down, but sort of fantasizing about spending some solitude in the verdant woods. Maybe instead of dismantling the cabin, we could just clear out his stuff and turn it into a caretaker’s cabin.
The mountain man who lived here apparently had a drinking problem and took refuge in the woods. He posted yellow plastic smiley faces to the trees. He hung odd ornaments and stuffed animals, and appeared to have planted or relocated some trees to his liking.
The inside was creepy. The low-ceilinged interior had a wood-burning stove and a sink (although no running water). Two beds were pushed against the corners of the room, blankets piled high. If I didn’t know that the squatter had died, I might have worried that someone was sleeping there. Laundry was still clipped to clotheslines strung from the trees. I suspect the man spent most of his time in one of his lawn chairs or hammock.
Reusable grocery bags were tacked to the exterior walls. Several pairs of boots were strewn on his tarpaulin front porch. Perfectly good boots. None of us could bring ourselves to take his boots.
We were hard-pressed to find any kind of souvenir we wanted to take home. And no one wanted to move in.
The cabin was torn down a few months later. I’m happy I got to see the before and after.
Last Saturday marked the second anniversary of Isis’s death. One the first anniversary, I attended a funeral with Rob and his parents. Naturally this put me in a somber mood, even though I didn’t know the guy. I wrapped Isis’s beaded necklace around my wrist and wore it for two days.
Isis happened to die on February 2, so for the rest of my life, every time someone mentions Groundhog Day (even when referring to the Bill Murray movie), I will make the sad association. Not that I’d be able to forget the date, but this doesn’t help.
Rob, on the other hand, does not connect her death with the date on the calendar. Last year I reminded him of it, but this year, I decided not to mention it to anyone. If Rob and his parents didn’t realize we were approaching the two-year mark, why should I remind them? What purpose would it serve other than to bring them down? Except possibly to make me feel like I wasn’t the only person in the world who remembered.
As the anniversary approached, I wondered if I’d feel shadows of sadness like I did last year, but I didn’t. Saturday was a lovely day: I went to Zumba, a writers happy hour and to a movie with Rob. I even got to some housecleaning I’d been putting off, straightening up the guest room and filing about a year’s worth of paperwork. Plus, the weather was glorious.
Nobody said a single thing to me about it being the anniversary of Isis’s death. I knew my mom was aware of it, and probably my brother and wife were too, since it also happens to be their wedding anniversary. I think not mentioning it was the more considerate thing. How would they even bring it up, since I hadn’t? “Hey, isn’t today the anniversary of your dog’s death?” In the unlikely event I hadn’t remembered, they would have brought up a painful subject unnecessarily.
I’m not sure if Rob’s mom remembered, and she’s perhaps the only person who might be more pained than me to note the anniversary, since she was there when it happened. I don’t want to remind her, because I don’t want her to relive the day if she doesn’t have to.
However, on Sunday, I needed to acknowledge the anniversary out loud. The day was much drearier on the weather front, but Rob and I went out to lunch and took the dogs to the dog park in the rain.When we got home, I said, “You know what yesterday was?”
“Our anniversary?”
Actually, technically our anniversary was Friday, but clearly we’re not big on celebrating that. When I told him what Saturday was, he said, “I wish you hadn’t told me that, but I’m glad you waited a day.”
All in all, February 2 wasn’t too traumatic for me this year, mostly because I’ve spent the past year telling Isis’s story. Years ago, I overcame a broken heart by writing a novel, but memoir is therapeutic on a whole other level. Even after my Isis memoir is complete, I plan to write more.
Last night I revised the prologue to my memoir to include a description of this photo of Isis.
Point No Point Beach, July 2008
Maybe it’s not unique under the larger category of dogs running on beaches, but as I wrote about the photo, I tried to find the words to explain what it means to me, and why I chose it as the photo that decorates the wooden box where we keep her ashes.
About six months after this picture was taken, Isis bit someone, and we never felt safe taking her to public places after that, certainly no place where we let her off leash. I shot, and this is not an exaggeration, about 3,000 photos of Isis during her life. Every single one is absolutely stunning of course, but many of them look alike. Isis chasing a soccer ball, Isis smiling at me as she waits for me to throw the soccer ball, Isis with her squeaky rubber Milk Bones in her mouth. Photos documenting her everyday life.
In this photo, Isis is completely free, operating on instinct, and blissfully happy in the wild, not constrained by the limitations we impose on our domesticated dogs. This moment would never be relived, and that’s why it’s unique. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment for my once-in-a-lifetime dog.
Kari Neumeyer 