When the Unwee was a short, grumpy, persistently bald being she spoke a language of her own, UnWeeity. UnWeeity was utterly indecipherable to adults, but, being a mere 3.5 years her senior, I lived on a level much closer to hers and was, therefore, exposed more directly to her mutterings.

The UnWee had a pink blanket that went everywhere she went. I should know what sort of material from which this blanket was made, but all I really know is that it was a baby blanket, it was pink, and it was fuzzy. When the fuzz wore off, as the fuzz on constant companions is apt to do, it was clearly woven. And into the pattern on the blanket, which faded until it was nearly unrecognizable over the course of its lifespan, were darker threads which composed images of elephants. The name if the blanket exists only in UnWeeity, which, sadly, none of us remember. It was one of those cute baby-talk words which leaked out of my memory one day when I was cramming too much information about something else onto my internal hard-drive. All I can remember now is that it was her word for elephant.

Wherever we went she carried it in one arm, often firm affixed in the hand with the suckable thumb, and in the crook of her other elbow she carried her favorite stuffed bear. Like the blanket, the bear gradually lost most of his fluff, but more significantly–because he was always carried in the crook of her arm–the stuffing in his midsection migrated to the farther realms until his butt was as hard as a rock and his head was firmly, firmly stuffed, but he automatically folded in half where his structural integrity had migrated away. The bear had a plastic face, a hard butt, and some sort of internal noise mechanism that growled whenever we bumped him.

In UnWeeity, the word for ‘bump’ was ‘boop’.

So the bear’s name was Boopsie Growler.

Like the Velveteen Rabbit and all other toys, Boopsie Growler was gradually abandoned and his curmudgeonly soul was set free to wander in the ether until gradually it came to pass that somewhere in Indiana, not all that far from Indianapolis, a puppy of dubious background was born. Much of this puppy’s outlook on life was formed by a small group of loving children, toddlers unquestionably, who pulled his ears, crawled over his body and probably took naps crammed up tight against his belly: but they lost him, and then he was lost altogether and he wandered and wandered, looking for his children, until he was taken in by a family that loved him, but could not keep him in the apartment where he lived and so they gave him to an animal rescue group who advertised his likeness on Pet Finders.

As it happened, Nancy and I had recently become dogless after Murphy moved on with her woman, and no one greeted us in the hall when we came home. It’s a small thing, but one you notice, once it’s gone. And so we trolled the Internet, looking for The Perfect Dog.  

Nancy wanted a Golden Retriever.

I wanted a dog small enough that I could easily handle it.

So we were searching far and wide for a thirty pound Golden Retriever.

They are harder to find than you might think.

But we found an ad on Pet Finders for a thirty pound dog allegedly a mix perhaps of yellow lap and Golden Retriever, and since this wonderdog was only about a four hour drive from our house, we filed our application and set up and appointment to go see him.

He immediately ran up to me and emptied the entire contents of his bladder on my right knee.

He was a little bigger than advertised, but not unreasonably so. (He weighs 50 pounds, now.) He looks a lot like a very small Gold Retriever which, two or three months ago, had been inexplicably shaved.

We paid his adoption fee and  brought him home.

We took him to obedience class, which the three of us together flunked.

We suffered the joys of a 2.5 year old lab mix contained inside a house with a small back yard.

And then we discovered the dog park.

The first time I took him he disappeared in three acres and ran like the wind for 45 minutes. He was so tired when I brought him home that he slept the entire ride home, we took him outside and he slept in the grass between us, and when one of us would call him to be petted, he would thrash his tail, wave his feet, whine and fall asleep again.

So I took him back to the park. He met other dogs. He ran with other dogs. He played with other dogs.

And every time another dog bumped him, he growled.

Still does.

So every time I take him to the park, I wander down to where the other dog-owning people are gathered, and I wait until the dogs start running and I heard that familiar growl, and I say, loudly enough for all to hear, “When I was a kid, my sister had a stuffed bear that growled every time we bumped it–he’s just an old Boopsie Growler.”

I half-expect a pink blanket with gray elephants walking across it to show up on my doorstep.   

This is the head of a letter opener. The actual bird is about an inch long. Some poor slave from an undeveloped country was probably paid $.15/hr. to paint this, which I bought at my favorite bookstore (Lowry’s Books in Three Rivers) for not much of anything. Several years ago, actually.  Long enough ago that Tom may no longer carry them. I shot this photograph with my new macro lens. Gloat, gloat.

It is the day after Christmas, gray, cold and windy. Both dogs are huddled in lumps on their respective couches. The cat is wadded up in a ball between my feet. Nancy went to work. I promised to steam clean the carpets, which I will do fairly soon. As they are apt to do, my personal possessions have fanned outward and are now occupying more space than originally allotted. It is that awkward time of year when everyone has two calendars handy, one for the waning year, one for the waxing.

Annie’s sweatshirt came today. It’s pink. I was going to put it on her and take a picture of her, but she determined this was not an adventure she wanted to have at this exact point in time. It’s hard for me to tell how much hair she is supposed to have, but I am fairly sure there are exposed areas of Annie that are not part of the original design. When she sits, poised like a masthead in the front seat, she shivers. On the other hand, when she dashes outside to bark at the neighbor dogs there is no real evidence of freezing behavior and she’s considerably more exposed, so it may be she’s trying to con us. At this rate she’s going to have more clothes than I do.

The Artists Gallery downtown is open through Saturday this year, so those of you who failed to dash down and buy fine artisan Christmas gifts could still make it. I need to run through my photos and find something worthy of entry in the Carnegie show next month.

Nancy and I had a nice, laid back, healing season this year. Life is good.

And the New Year is coming…

I was willing to die in ignorance as long as it was quick. However, now that it appears the apocalypse has once again been miscalculated or delayed…

What is this?

It is not a good photograph. I am still learning macro photography with a 18-200mm zoom lens.

I can help, just a little. It really is not bejeweled. I found it carefully preserve for the Next Time I Need It in my jewelry box (one of three) which I have decided to repurpose because…I almost never wear jewelry (much less three boxes of it.)  I photographed it (amid the dust and stray hairs) on an angle and in order to keep it there, I pierced the hole in the shaft with the cut emerald earring (the ONLY cut emerald earring) I am saving for Whenever I Find the Other One (which will probably not be soon since I lost it in the carpeting of my house in Jackson, which I sold in 1999.)(The carpeting AND the house.)(At the same time.)(Together, really.)

I think it looks important. Like a watch part, although if it were a watch part, the watch itself might be seven or eight inches in diameter. 

I cannot throw it away until I know what it is and what the likelihood that I will need it again might be.

I have jars of this stuff.

Nancy, the dogs, the cat and I are huddled down inside, braving the blizzard. Well. The dogs have been out. We have about an inch of snow, which is an inch of snow WAAAY too much for Annie. Does not like snow. No, no, no. Makes her feet cold. The only thing she can do in snow is fast running, which she does very, very fast, ending in a full-bodied slam through the dog door.

I fear for this dog’s future.

Riley walks up to the dog door, sticks his nose in, stands there a minute, contemplating his options, and then very carefully steps inside. Annie hits the door from halfway across the lawn at about thirty miles per hour.

The winds also hit the dog, which creates a draft that runs from the dog door directly across the Conservatory and up my spine. This is one of several reasons I can cite whenever prodded for moving the dog’s access to the house to the back room. I want to close the storm door.

So eventually we will be having the other dog door installed and this one closed off.

And Annie will go outside.

Bark, “Eek! Snow!”

Throw herself bodily through the dog door of habit and fracture her skull.

Remind you a little of that horrible ad they ran a few years ago, “Whatever happened to that cute little puppy…?”

“Whatever happened to that cute little black dog you guys used to have?”

“Oh, we still have her: she jammed her head through in the storm door a while back, so now we just feed her out there.” 

I can hear the dog police coming as I type.

Nancy is still recovering from her hip surgery, which means that Nancy rested, right after her hip surgery, and has gradually struggled to get back to her pre-surgical self. All of us who live with her applaud that because Nancy is the house cook. However what it also means is that from time to time Nancy takes on projects which used merely to exhaust her and which now knock her flat and cause her to worry about her overall health and endurance.

And occasionally it causes her to ask us all to come with her.

So we all loaded into the car, Riley in the back, Cheryl, Annie and Nancy in the front, Annie was unceremoniously booted to the back, and we went to Sam’s Club, Nancy’s work, Walmart,the Dog store, the gas station and back to Walmart to get Nancy, and then finally home.

Annie wore her thundershirt because, although she rarely gets anxious in the car, she does get cold and Cheryl does not currently own a medium-sized dog terrified of thunderstorms. “I wonder,” Cheryl mused, “if it would keep her warm?” And the thundershirt was nice, but as Cheryl sat in the car in the parking lot of Sam’s Club, waiting for Nancy to buy our food, she determined that a.) one of the reasons Annie gets cold in forty-degree weather while Riley gasps like a spit-roasting husky in the back seat is because she has very short hair and 2.) another reason she seems cold is her very short hair is falling out. Again. The photograph somewhat exaggerates the problem, due to the flash, but you can see Annie is not evenly-haired.

So Cheryl wrapped her neck in turtle fur.

Which is, it appears, thicker than dog fur.

Annie wore her turtle fur quite proudly.

Beside her she could hear Cheryl muttering about ‘never liked dolls’ and ‘now I have to dress my dog’. Occasionally something about ‘her food costs more than mine’. Annie eats special don’t-dig-your-neck-in-bed’ food, but nobody ever gives her enough for the day so she needs to go begging. She eats Cheryl’s spare apple and yogurt chunks from her breakfast, cookies, crackers, pop corn…really anything Cheryl might think to eat is good enough for Annie.

It’s a shame Cheryl never breaks out in itchiness that makes her dig her neck with her back feet. Or makes her hair fall out.

Cheryl says we are waiting for the end of the world or our next obedience class, whichever comes first.

Cheryl says December 21st is the third End of Times scheduled for 2012 alone.

Cheryl says our food is more expensive than hers, and we’re still losing hair. And she says if this keeps up much longer she’s going to have to switch our description from a black dog to a pink one.

(Cheryl laughs at people who put clothes on their dogs. We’ve seen her. So now we get into the front seat of the car and shake until the heater kicks on. Cheryl says we do this ‘on purpose’.)

Yesterday we went to have our nails trimmed. Cheryl owns a pair of guillotine nail cutters (she owns several: she has a pair for the cat, as well.) Every time she picks them up, she remembers The Original Dog, who would howl like a Baskerville Hound whenever she so much as saw them. So we put on our leashes and harnesses and our pink shirt and we went to the groomers.

The groomer recently moved.

She moved across the street, but more significantly, she moved from a tiny suite with carpeting to one of the restored historical buildings in town with tin punch ceilings and creaky hardwood floors. We were SO happy to go to the groomers we pulled Cheryl along the hardwood floor because she couldn’t keep up with us and we greeted the woman behind the desk and everything was FINE until she tried to hang Riley from the grooming table.

And then, all of a sudden, we were on hardwood floors and we couldn’t walk and Riley was busy trying to save himself from the handbuzzers and we had to go down on our elbows and shake.

“Run, Annie, I’m telling you–run!” Riley advised when he dashed back to Cheryl for safety and then someone picked us up and put us on a table that moves.   

It took two groomers to trim our nails.

And then they had to carry us out of the building because we couldn’t walk.

We never looked at Cheryl. We could guess at the expression on her face.

In the car she said, very quietly, “You TOWED me across that floor, and then you ‘couldn’t walk’ back????” 

Cheryl is so sarcastic.

A small miracle has occurred. Nancy brought me my morning granola and yogurt and a small tooth-lined hole appeared under my desk to demand chunks of my apple. Riley will accept apple chunks, if he happens to be in the neighborhood and if he’s hungry and if you were in a mood to pass them down: Annie will eat–demand her fair share of–anything I eat.

To get Riley to eat his breakfast, I often hand-feed him exactly three pellets at a time until he’s managed to pick up his momentum enough to self-feed. To feed Annie I trip over her three times on the way to the laundry room, fill her bowl and set it on the floor. She can gobble a cup of dog food in 30 seconds flat. In fact, part of the hand-feeding process for Riley is that he is never ‘emotionally ready’ to eat until Annie has finished her food and is scouring the room for his.

He can’t eat her food because it’s too rich and he’s on a low-fat diet. She can’t eat his food because she’s allergic to grain and sheds all of the hair on her chest, belly and behind her ears, and then she starts digging. She can’t dig because she sleeps with us and we can’t sleep through her digging.

And, of course, she tears herself up and looks awful.  

Yesterday Annie had a playdate with Folsom (and Valentine. Valentine is a very nice dog, he just is more reserved.) You would think I would have pictures, wouldn’t you? I took the big camera, the little camera, the movie camera and my cell phone. I was too busy watching the dogs play to take any photographs. We had three ‘discussions’ in an hour and Annie started all three of them. She got nipped in the nose for her efforts and she still started another fight. One of the things we will be working on in our next class is confidence, and I think confidence is a big issue for Annie: as I watched her, she would play with Folsom, have a lovely time, and then he would do some dog thing, invisible to my untrained eye, and she would get scared and attack and once she attacked Folsom, Folsom came back.

(Screw this, said Valentine, I’m outta here.)

Folsom is a few months older than Annie and he has limited play experience with other dogs, so he pretty much did whatever Annie did. Annie’s idea of a good time is to run along beside her brother (Riley) and hang from his ears. When he’s done with that he tells her, and she’s learned to back off. However, it looks like she’s going to have to learn how to play with other dogs dog-by-dog.

Anyway, Folsom’s (human) mom, Tiffany, passed her finals with excellent grades and so we celebrated and watched our dogs play and pulled them apart when misunderstandings developed.

I didn’t take Riley to the play date. I didn’t take Annie to Riley’s play date at the park.

My dogs have separate social lives.

Today Riley went to work with Nancy and Annie is home with me. Well, actually she’s out in the back yard barking at something. There are just so many things I need to be alerted to out there, she can barely get in her morning nap. Here she comes again, tags a jangling.

I need a beer box. I remember them: nice boxes. Sturdy. I would like to convert one into a light box. Hopefully  without having to first drink a case of beer. (My existing light box is probably too small for the projects I had in mind. Necklaces, for instance. Its about 14′X14′. Maybe not that.)

I should measure it, since neither my eye nor my memory is all that accurate.

Oh, yes: and I  need to read a book by the end of the day for book group tomorrow.   

And there it is: my first unedited, as-is photo from my self-made light box.

The first, for those of you who are fascinated by all minutia, is a $1 shelf ornament I bought from Pier 1 Imports probably 10-15 years ago. It’s about three inches long. It is a tribute to a lifetime habit of pointless shopping which came to a slow and reluctant end when I met Nancy. (She instituted an odious law: for each object that comes into the house, one must also leave. What would you give up to own a painted wooden fish? Much less, three.) 

CFL stands for ‘compact fluorescent lamp’.

The important information, when buying bulbs, is to buy the ones that say “daylight”.

Should anyone feel compelled to make their own light box you can, of course, ask for advise. Or you could just type ‘make your own photo light box” in the subject line of Yahoo! and swiftly learn all that I know and easily far more.

Dogs are barking: need to go restore neighborhood peace. 

I was desperate. I had a dog I couldn’t control and all I did, from the time I got up to the time I went to bed, was chase Annie, yell at Annie, scream hysterically at Annie. If I let her outside, she barked, if I brought her in she peed on the carpet, chased the cat and harassed Riley. If I put her in her crate she yipped, and echoing my mother benchmark for stress, I couldn’t even go to the bathroom by myself. I called a dog trainer. I described my problem.

It seemed clear to me from her tone that either someone like me should never have been allowed to have a dog, or I should have known better than to get the dog I got. She disapproved of the whole situation. She was also busy for the next two weeks, but she would call me back. She never did.

There are certain little paths that my mind seems determined to wander down, and I wandered down the following:  Do a lot of people call you up and say, ‘you know, my dog always comes when I call, she never barks, she has perfect house manners–can I bring her in so you can untrain her just a bit? Because really–this is just boring…’

Yesterday Annie and I went to interview another trainer–someone who actually likes Annie–and we are signed up for a new class. The goal of our class is to teach us–Nancy and me–to better read and understand our dog. Someone to whom we can actually say, ‘truthfully, I am woefully dog-stupid and by the time I see what’s coming, it’s already here’. She assures me she can train my dog to behave: or better yet, teach ME how to train my dog to behave. And it will be a small class, so Annie won’t have 11 other dogs to fixate on. We’re looking forward to it.

Having resolved that issue, I turned immediately to my art project, the light box. I have friends who make jewelry and they need to be able to photograph their jewelry, in their own studios, on their own schedule. They are perfectly willing to pay professionals to take shots, and I am  perfectly willing to let them: I am more interested in figuring out how someone with a decent camera, some tape, a cardboard box and some tissue paper could make a piece of jewelry, shoot it, and sell it the next day.

A fifth grader could make a light box.

The lighting, however, is proving more troublesome. (Of course it is: photography is light.)

Right now the jury is still out, but it’s a toss-up whether the box I spent two hours creating is going to work as well, if not better, than the $4 foldable laundry hamper I bought at Walmart. So far both are deeply indebted to my fledgling experimentations with Photoshop Elements.

I bought “fresh, energizing light”–I think I should have bought “strong, vibrant light”. These are the box-side descriptions of GE ‘energy smart’ CFL light bulbs.

It’s possible it would help if I knew what CFL stands for.

“Lamp may shatter and cause injury if broken.” Really. Valuable box-side information. Nowhere does it expand on the idea of CFL. Nancy would know.

Annie went to work with Nancy today. Riley and I are going eventually to the dog park. Right now my non-barking dog is outside, barking. He is not the only  dog barking–apparently something is going on in the neighborhood. Baying hounds abound.

So I guess I will put on another pair of socks, load the dog in the car and visit the hardware store for stronger lights. And then on to the dog park, where we will run and sniff and property-mark and take a dump and generally ignore most people and most other dogs because that is why we go to the dog park: it’s all about the nose. When Annie goes with us we have to constantly bail her out of social problems, but she’s not coming, so we’ll be free to just dog around at our leisure.

Cheryl will probably talk to other people, but that’s just boring, so we ignore her.

Yup. It’s a good day. 

Last week or so there was charming video on the web about a New York City policeman who saw a barefoot homeless man, went to a store, and bought the man a pair of boots.

A day or so later  news stories abounded: the homeless man was seen again later and once again he was barefoot.  What he was not was homeless. He lived on the street ‘by choice’.

And there, in a nutshell, is the American tailchase about poverty and homelessness. The underlying assumption is that none of them are ‘really’ poor or homeless, and if they are, it’s by choice.

When asked where his new shoes were, the recipient of this unrequested gifting replied that they were ‘expensive’ and he would be afraid to wear them in public because ‘they’ might kill him to take his shoes.

So he doesn’t appreciate the shoes, and he’s living on the street because he wants to.

Stupid cop, anyway.

Having worked on the fringe of the public welfare system, I knew the second story was coming when I saw the first one. They go together like bread and butter. Someone somewhere had to prove that a simple act of kindness cannot stand on its own.

We need to give up our beloved notion of the ‘deserving poor’. 

For one, it masks our deep and suspicious belief in the ‘undeserving poor’, those cheats, liars, connivers, drug-addicted, alcohol-addicted malcontents who would intentionally cheat us of our God-given right to practice our kindness on those who truly elevate us to the level of saints, rather than fools.

We need to give up to notion that gifting someone else with something grants us the right to determine how, when, where and why that something will be used. If you give it, let it go. It’s not yours any more. If you need to control how it used, them perhaps it is time to ask yourself why you gave it away at all.

For two, it is a horrible reflection on all of us that we truly believe that kindness is judged not by the content of our own hearts, but by the content of the hearts of those to whom we have been kind.

I have never met the barefoot homeless man in New York. I know nothing about him. Perhaps he is wiser than I am, a man of uncommon balance of spirit and heart. Perhaps he has connected with some spiritual awareness beyond my ability to comprehend. 

Perhaps he is a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps, for whatever reason, he makes really bad decisions for himself (like going barefoot in New York City in December.) Perhaps he will continue to make bad decisions for himself; perhaps there is nothing we can give him that will change the decision-making process in his brain.

It was still very nice of the cop to buy him a pair of shoes. He saw a man with no shoes. He gave him shoes.

Whether or not the man is homeless, whether or not the man ever wears the shoes, whether or he takes them around the next corner and sells them for drugs…it was still a nice thing to do.

Let us give him that.

It’s awful.

There’s no other word for it–just ‘awful’.

Yesterday Nancy brought us new toys. Very nice toys, not like the junk she usually brings us.

We took one outside and buried it, but then Cheryl got all funny and took the other one away from us. But we just thought, patience…

This morning we had the second toy three feet from the door when both Nancy and Cheryl started yelling at us and we dropped it and ran.

But we came back…

…and we grabbed the toy…

and Cheryl actually stood up and chased us!

We dropped the toy and ran for our lives.

And she took the toy away.

We can’t bury our best toy. We can’t even reach our best toy. All we can do is sneak around the Conservatory so they don’t see us, whimper, and try to figure out how to get our toy,which is way up high in the air with no steps up to it.

This is the worst day of our lives.