January 18, 2013

  • Transitions

    I'm back.

    I took a few days off, not to overtly grieve, as such, but just to adapt to Babycakes no longer being here. He was my nearly constant writing companion for almost twenty years. And while I miss him--I miss his habits, like digging his nails in and climbing my body to get to my left shoulder (never the right shoulder, always the left)--I have been preparing for this time for a long time now. If I regret anything, it is that I began to pull away from him, at least emotionally, as it became clearer and clearer to me that our time together was coming to an end. Maybe with loss I just always find something to regret.

    As I write this, there are noises coming from the living room. Chewing noises. Something is being thoroughly mauled in the next room. I glance at Nancy, and she says, "Bone." She gave Annie a bone this morning. She gave Riley a bone as well, but he took his outside and stashed it somewhere. This is classic Annie/Riley behavior. Annie got a bone, Annie is devouring the bone. Riley got a bone, Riley took it outside somewhere where Annie cannot get it. He is now napping on the floor between Nancy and me.

    When I picked out Annie to adopt, Nancy was at work. I asked Scott's advice, but I'm not sure I listened all that closely. My reasons for adopting her were murky and lightly battered in guilt. In retrospect, I adopted Annie because she was a particular breed mix, she was black, and she was in the dog pound. I was bent on saving something, having so spectacularly failed with Noomi. (I know, I know. Shit happens. It was nobody's fault. I'm just trying to be honest.)

    As a measure of comparison, I adopted Riley because he cuddled up against me and leaned against my leg.

    This morning, almost five months later, I happened to be standing the kitchen where I was making coffee when Annie came racing in, tail a wagging, and I leaned over and snuggled her and she let me. Accepting affection from humans--particularly when it involves touching, holding, and, worst of all, hugging--has been a hard lesson for Annie. She loves affection, but she clearly had never been taught to receive it. I don't know what to do here, she would worry, and then she would dance away to a safer distance...

    She was work. Constant, unrelenting work. She wasn't house-broken. She came with a horrible name someone clearly made up with the best of intentions and a tone-deaf ear to sound (Sievol, which is 'love is' spelled backwards, or, to the human ear, 's evil.) She had just been spayed, she was in heat, she had three kind of parasitic worms, she wasn't supposed to run or play hard. She chewed everything she could wrap her mouth around. Sometimes she just went frantic and tore around the house like little black tornado. She tormented the cat, she hung from Riley's ears, she ran every time you extended a hand to her, she was terrified of canes, sticks, brooms and even wooden spoons. She had absolutely no sense of personal boundaries. She's still a devout crotch sniffer. I have stepped on this dog, tripped over this dog, muttered 'go...go...go...' to this dog: I have even stood in an empty room and screamed, 'Get OUT of my way!" like a madwoman.

    She was terrified of the car, so a trip to the dog park involved a 20 minute discussion about   how to get from the garage doorway to the front seat (six feet.) At the park, she misbehaved so badly I had to quit taking her to avoid having Riley banned from the park as well.

    As she became more comfortable living here, she took up barking. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. I've spent three months racing outside to shake a can of pennies at her. I tried using a squirt bottle but she knows the bottle, and she knows the sound of me coming through the back door. It does not appear that I will ever teach her not to bark: it appears I have taught her to come when I call her, even when she can't see me, even if I just scream her name. In fact, Riley now comes when I scream, "Annie!" Both dogs bark outside: both dogs now come inside when I yell at them. The result is skewed and accidental, but hell, it works.

    We spent our first obedience class standing in the middle of the circle while all of the good dogs circled around us (vaguely reminiscent of my own grade school experiences.) They practiced 'sit' while we practiced, 'look at me.' She was terrified of the polished floor between the doorway and the class. She wanted to eat the other dogs.  "She doesn't know her name," the trainer said, looking at me like I didn't deserve to own a dog. She knew her name: she didn't know how to focus with twelve dogs and 17 people all on the same mat.

    At odd moments, these past few months, I have asked myself, "Why did you have to have this dog? What the hell were you thinking?"

    "We love her," Nancy would remind me. "She's going to be a good dog some day."

    A trainer contacted me. "I can help you," she said, so we joined her class.

    It has been a good class and we have learned good things from it. First and foremost I have learned that while Annie sits and gazed affectionately at me, waiting for me to do something, the other dogs in the class bark and lunge and whine and roll around on the floor and my dog does what I tell her to do. We have made progress.

    After five months of work, she does not come and sit affectionately between my knees and lean against me: she does show up at the same time every morning for our morning cuddle.  "It's time, it's time," she sings, and then she disappears somewhere under my chair and literally rolls over while I scratch the base of her tail. "This is good, this is good, good, good--too much," and off she goes.

    I am learning new commands now. First and foremost: Crate me. I started crating her just to give myself a break: now I find myself crating her right around the same time every day. "This annoys her--if I do this long enough she'll put me in my crate, give me peanut butter, and I can take my nap."

    Sometimes I will be really into my writing or photograph sorting or whatever, and I will feel this little bump. A little black nose just bumped me. (Murphy trained me to recognize  nose-bumps. Riley doesn't nose-bump: he body-bumps, very lightly.)

    Hi. I'm here. Just checking in.

    And it has occurred to me here lately that I really like this dog. She's funny. She's sweet. I don't know that I ever disliked her: I may have found it hard to really bond with a dog that couldn't cuddle. And not all dogs do, I know that: but apparently if they want to be my dog, they have to learn. She still panics: what to do, what to do... But we are establishing rituals together. Okay, I know this one: she grabs me and hugs me and I wiggle and she lets me go.

    She's calming down. She's learning work-arounds. She gets a little closer to being a very nice dog every day.