May 8, 2013
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Dogs and Old Photos
Wednesday. Beautiful morning, sunny, cool, leafy green. Yesterday I worried that the six-inch forest was not going to provide much shade for us this summer: today each individual leaf is bigger. You might think I had never gone through a spring before.
Today I am somewhat encouraged. Tonight is Snorty’s obedience class. We have worked with her. We’ve worked on ‘sit’, ‘down’, ‘stay’ and ‘Annie, come!’ We have worked on Jesus Christ, stop barking! until I can walk to the back door and shake a treat bag without say a word and she comes running. (Yes, we give her treats for barking. I expect any day now she’ll figure that out, and whenever she wants a treat, she’ll run out into the back yard and start barking. So far she stops to run into the house and get a treat.) Last night we were able to eat a calm, relaxed meal (with an open treat bag on the table) by calling her whenever she starts barking and giving her a treat. I am following the ‘re-set’ theory: that coming to get a treat resets her mind from high excitement to calming peace. The trick is to keep her from ever escalating to high drama, which is when she runs from window to window, barking at wind changes and cars backfiring on the highway a mile away.
It doesn’t help that the dog next door is neurotic (and a barker,) or that the noisy, hysterical kick dog still lives down the street, or the two chows lives on the other side of the fence where they chuff aloofly. But slowly we are learning. Nancy has a whole speech she gives whenever Annie starts to get hysterical. “It’s okay. We’ve got it. You don’t need to worry your little head about that…”
I read on the Internet that:
1. Salt poured on a piddle place will pull the urine out of the carpet and kill the smell. I’ll let you know, although right now I’m ready to salt the dining room. I figure about a foot of the stuff, left for a week or so, would give some idea of how well it works. Much less than that I might just as well throw over my shoulder.
2. Vicks applied to my toes will kill nail fungus. Interesting idea. There is a prescription med which, when applied every day for 265 days at exactly the same time every day will maybe, with luck, kill nail fungus…or you could apply Vicks Vaporub for two weeks and it will maybe with luck, kill nail fungus… As it happens I have a particularly happy fungus growing under one nail. Actually it spreads slowly from nail to nail, but this particular nail is actually sore because the fungus is such a healthy little colony. So what the hell? I have applied Vicks to it. It may not be cured, but it doesn’t hurt as much. I am hopeful that it will calm it down to the point where I can cut it. Should you ever need to know more, I will eventually report my findings.
3. South Carolina just elected a congressman who, while Governor, told everyone he was hiking the Appalachian trail while in fact, he had flown off to South America to have an affair. Fidelity is apparently not an issue in South Carolina, and while I’m not sure it’s all that important to me…he left the entire state in limbo while lying about where he was and taking off to chase tail.
4. The Kardashians can make news by changing their wigs, wearing flowered dresses, gaining weight. Breathing in, breathing out…
Not on the Internet (until now) the little black dog is balled up on the couch and chuffing, now and then. In the distance someone’s dog is barking. This annoys her, because for the past few days her people have not allowed her to bark. Ruff. Riley is outside. I assume he is balled up in the dog-shaped hole that has appeared out there. I started out with one gold dog who almost never dug, and wound up with multi-colored prairie dogs creating a colony in my back yard.
I got the oil changed in the car yesterday. $27 and they replaced a rear brake light (or as my mechanic said, “One of your rear brake lights was out, so we broke the other one.”) And I had the salvageable photographs from the packet entitled ‘Byron Flinn’ (someone else must have written that: my great uncle’s name was ‘Flynn’) digitized. I like this one:
I do not have a clue who these seven children are.
Nor do I know who this baby is (but I love the buggy.)
This is my Grandfather, J. Harold Peck. I recognize him. He is younger than he was when I knew him (of course) but there’s little doubt in my mind who he is. The woman is very likely my Grandmother Lucille (Gwinn) Peck. I find myself staring at this photograph. I remember when I was a kid she used to comment that when she was younger she looked a great deal like my younger sister and she was always ‘going’ to show us a photograph of her when she was younger. She never did. She really did not like photographs of herself nor did she like having her picture taken. (A trait the same sister has since decided to share with her.)
I had 8 prints digitized (many of the negatives were either damaged or severely over-exposed.) I have no idea when these shots were taken, or if they were all taken at the same time. My grandparents were married the evening my grandmother graduated from high school (he was 5 or 6 years older than she. I think.) In my mind this photograph of the two of them was taken that night–but I don’t know that. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is a great deal it doesn’t tell you.
This is the same woman with my aunt, who is 17 years younger than my father, so the photograph is probably +/- 20 years older than the one above it.
Her name was Lena Lucille.
