May 2, 2013
-
It’s Spring
Another beautiful, sunny spring morning in the land of green grass and flowing rivers. At long last the trees are bursting into leaf, the flowering trees are blooming…all of this is right on time, of course, but the past few years have allowed us to hope for early seasons and this particular spring held on to the erratic chill of winter (it seemed) too long. Nancy mowed the lawn last night on her refurbished hip. Proud, proud, proud.
Last night Nancy and I took Annie to her (second stint) of intermediate obedience. There were four dogs present in the class and none were eaten. In fact for the most part Annie paid attention to her lessons and behaved well. Okay, so the Great Dane puppy came gambolling up behind her and nose-goosed her and Annie considered removing her face, and the lab puppy got too close and Annie offered to teach him a short course in social manners–otherwise she was pretty good. And since we are repeating the class, we’re nearly the class stars.
She really is less reactive around other dogs than she was in the first class. Even dogs we meet by accident in the store.
We did use a trick. We used the Gentle Leader. Annie hates the Gentle Leader. She spent a lot of time cuddling up against my leg in what appeared to be demonstrations of deep affection and which were in fact were prolonged attempts to rub off the Gentle Leader. At one point she threw herself on the ground and began digging at it with all four feet like a human two year-old throwing a tantrum. I don’t expect we’ll use it often: it was mostly to get her through meeting four new dogs in close quarters. (Well, actually she’s met Blue before, and one dog missed the first class, so two new dogs.)
Nancy struggled last night with the same problems I’ve had in the class: it’s harder to train us than it is the dog. Old habits are deeply ingrained into both of us by now. And when my dog growls and starts lunging toward someone else’s precious pet, my instincts are NOT to say sweetly, “Now Annie, look at this cute toy over here…” My instincts are to jerk the leash and drag her away from a dog fight. Nancy is hardwired to say, “Good Girl!” when Annie has completed a task (when she is actually supposed to ‘release’ the dog first.) So we both go around and around, repeating the same old mistake when we’ve been gently reminded by our trainer just minutes before to do something else entirely…
In the middle of all of this, the owner of the black dog is young and has a timid dog, so aggression is not foremost on her mind, and Nancy and I were distracted by the trainer or something else going on, and I became aware that Annie was stalking the black dog on a loose leash. Instead of panicking, I sat there and watched, at the ready: she sniffed him, he sniffed her, and I said, “good girl!” and she came back to us. We ARE making progress.
We were just practicing ‘sit’. Our trainer uses a hand signal, and whenever I use it, she’s always correcting me. I didn’t think about it much–I’ve just always had a lazy ‘sit’ hand signal. I was trying to show Nancy this morning the ‘proper’ sit hand signal and it finally came home to me: I can’t roll my thumb to a 45 degree angle from my hand and arch it with my fingers laid out flat. Hand won’t do it.
* * *
I am working on a piece I found on my hard-drive. I love the beginning. Unfortunately that’s all there is to the piece: the beginning. It just…stopped. It was one of those moment when a moody description of a state of mind wrote itself on my page, but I either did not know or was unwilling to admit where the story was going from there. Sometimes writing fiction is remarkably like psychotherapy.* Sometimes I can pick these pieces up later and weave them into something else, and sometimes they just lie there, dead-ended and wasted. We’ll see. I have pieces I have worked on, abandoned, worked on again months or years later… And I have pieces I wrote all in one burst of ambition and have never touched since. But working with them again helps me remember what drove me to abandon my short story career that was flourishing a few years ago.
They were all exploring essentially the same theme; and I have at this point an arbitrary count of 26 and every one of them are either about women or dogs. (So I titled the working copy Women and Dogs.) Another element of each story is the sense of being out-of-sync. To the point that while the writing still impresses me and I am awed by the work…taken altogether, there is something sad about them. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not what my reading audience (whoever those people may be) expects from me. (As if tailoring my writing for an imaginary audience would be at all useful, at this point in my life.)
Also there is that messy truth vs fiction mess that every writer (I assume) struggles with. I gave myself permission to use my life as the raw ingredients of realistic stories, and permission as well to elaborate, lie, embroider…expand… There is an observation made in one of my stories that I wrote in 2008 that stops me every time I read it. I think, that has to be true because I would never make that up, it’s just not me and at the same time…I have NO memory of the reality of that. (And then I wonder, just how much of my life have I forgotten?)
*My favorite example of this is a piece published in Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs about doing the dishes. I have rarely fought so hard with a piece of writing as I did with that one. It was extremely personal and embarrassing to admit, and I remember at one point throwing something at the wall because of the tension I was fighting. the piece itself is funny and light-hearted, but it was excruciating to write.
