Archive for February, 2007

Woofy Displays of Affection

Monday, February 26th, 2007

One of the give-away symptoms of autism is an aversion to being touched. Aversion isn’t really the word. Oh, it’s the textbook word, but it’s doesn’t describe the all-points bulletin that charges through the nervous system on contact. I, and countless others on the autistic spectrum, have been known to reflexively hit when touched. It’s simply self-defense. At this point it probably is conditioned as much as innate, of course—every time a human touches me, I’m reacting as much to all the previous unwelcome contacts as to the current one—but it really is innate and not to be conditioned away. One of the first differences parents of babies on the autistic spectrum notice is that the babies dislike being touched. We maintain that, with various degrees of surliness, forever afterward. When discussing with someone a hypothetical instruction manual on interacting with Aspies, I proposed that the title should be Don’t Touch Me! A Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome for Neurotypicals.

It’s different with nonhumans, though; my understanding that it usually is for the autistic. Maybe it’s because nonhumans are a little more reticent when it comes to physical contact: you’ve got to get down to their level and hold out a hand to be sniffed before pats are even considered. Humans want you to shake hands before you’ve even heard their name, and meeting a human is already such a full-on assault that I almost never take in their name when I do hear it. Maybe it’s the hands themselves, though: they grasp and hold on, unlike the nonhumans I’ve had contact with. At any rate, I like physical contact with nonhumans, and I don’t mean just the furry ones. Not that I have much contact with the scaled and the feathered, but I am just as pleased to as with furry nonhumans that I’m not allergic to. (Unfortunately, I am allergic to most of them; I think dogs are an exception because I got shots for them when I was young.)

Sunny has his own definite preferences regarding physical contact, too. Mommy is to keep her monkey paws off the feet. If Mommy gets pushy about the feet—for instance, for the purpose of trimming footy hair—Sunny goes into hyper lick mode. He’s had some very bright ideas, that woofus, and he has figured out that licking hands interferes sufficiently with whatever he doesn’t want done and has no adverse consequences, unlike snapping. When it does come time to trim the feet, I average about one foot before the licking has increased to the point where I might trim his tongue instead and I have to wait more than a day between attempts before we get down to the point that the licking isn’t instant. Sunny’s feet look very odd for the few days that I’m attending to the fur, but he’s a dog. Unlike rabbits, he doesn’t care how he looks.

The other thing he doesn’t like is monkey kisses. I do understand that lip-mashing is an oddity in the entire animal kingdom, but for Sunny, it’s too odd to be borne. I know it’s not my breath; I brush and floss to my hygienist’s approval and I don’t smoke or drink coffee or tea, so it can’t be bad enough for a dog to be offended. If I get my face close to his, he turns his head the other way. I have tried to substitute merely putting my face next to his with no kisses, but he works so hard at avoiding that that he has developed the nickname Sir Butt-in-Face. I don’t know if going to the length of doggie kisses would help, but there is just no way I’m going to try licking Sunny.

I doubt that’s what he is trying to get me to do, anyway. Not that he does not plainly believe in ucky-wet doggie kisses: he dispenses them freely. Dogs, cats, humans . . . everyone but me. A neighbor’s toy poodle persisted in giving my nose a thorough cleaning every time we met, and Sunny returned the favor with members of Chocco’s family, but at home, Sunny only licks my hands, mostly when he wants me to not do something. There is only one time I can count on a doggie kiss, and under the circumstances, I can’t enjoy it.

Despite many attempts by my mother to the contrary, I have never been a morning person. Not that I’m a night owl, but mornings are decidely an unwelcome event in my universe. They’re bright (always, compared to the darkness that preceded them). They’re cold. They’re damp. They’re the start of another round of the “Survive Humanity” game (if only they’d just let me lose once and for all and leave me alone thereafter!). All in all, I would be just as glad if some way around mornings could be found. Of course anyone out there with a dog knows the problem here: dogs are morning people. There may be a contrary canine out there somewhere, but I’ve never heard of a dog who wasn’t just busting with as much joy as their age would allow at the arrival of a new day. Of course there are many reasons for this, among them that dogs tend to see life as one big enjoyable team sport, but for most dogs there is another, very basic motivator. Their monkeys let them Out in the morning, and Out is where their bathroom is.

Certainly this is part of Sunny’s joy in mornings. I have to give the little guy that he never has resorted to waking me up (although he has done that to the people who have looked after him one of the few times I’ve been away). He sits and watches me, waiting for me to open my eyes. I have woken many mornings to a face furrowed with woofy concentration that instantly dissolves into glee. Mommy is awake and therefore morning is here! Now he just has to get her out of bed.

The Rise and Shine Ritual begins with the Morning Boogie. It has gotten more abbreviated as he has moved into middle age, but it is not dispensed with and some mornings it’s just as fervorous as in his youth. This dance, closely related to the Snow Spaniel Tango, starts with wiggling and ends with wagging in the upside-down position (a.k.a. snow angels, although of course there isn’t any snow inside). In the middle there is a great deal of face-tobogganing; that is, putting the side of one’s face on the ground, picking up speed with one’s hindquarters, and then sliding along the ground with one’s face as the leading edge (of course only to be done on soft surfaces, like snow or a comforter). Having worked off the excess of one’s woofy joy, it is time to get down to the serious business of monkey-rousting. Time-honored techniques for this include head-butting along the monkey’s body, pawing at same, face-tobogganing along the monkey’s body so that said body gets whalloped (sometimes in the face) by one’s hindquarters at the climax of the move, whimpering at a loud level, hyena yips, and, of course, ucky-wet doggie kisses.

Ucky-wet doggie kisses are Sunny’s last-ditch effort to roust his lazy monkey. It’s the only time he’s willing to go that length, and there’s a noticeable pause before each one, as if he’s calculating whether it’s really necessary. I try not to hold out for them. Of course, as I’ve said, I love the doggie kisses, but clearly Sunny does not. I dropped “Paw” from his list of commands for treats just because I noticed the same sort of hesitation before he did it and did it very briefly. If unwanted contact is unacceptably close to blackmail when the prize is a doggie treat, a different sort of unwanted contact for a bladder emptied in a Mommy-acceptable fashion, is . . . sludgemail, perhaps. It’s especially so coming from me, after all my insistence that no one touch me. Not that I am foolish enough to think Sunny feels the same way toward me about the doggie kisses—he’s a woofus, not an Aspie—but clearly he is doing something he doesn’t want to do to get something he really needs. He’s got to not like that, regardless in what manner and to what degree he does. Granted, sometimes we get to the point of doggie kisses just because I really don’t want to get up or he really wants me to. The irony of course is that the doggie kisses work even better because I know Sunny doesn’t want to do them: a zap in the conscience is often enough to get even the most sluglike of monkeys going in the morning!

The good news is that the putting-face-near-but-not-kissing seems to be gaining in acceptance. He still tends to orient himself toward me with his butt forward, but when he does get his head close we can have a little snuggle that’s nice for both of us. I’ll keep up the good oral hygiene, though, just in case Sunny thinks perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to start kissing Mommy.

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Poor woofus!

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

After a long day of woofy boredom during various busy Mommy activities, Sunny and I were having a late-evening round of frolicking with an Object of Woofiness I keep trying to throw away: a stale bagel, now rock hard, that Sunny stole from a neighbor’s bunny. I keep putting it in the garbage and he keeps fishing it out.

The game, which I call “Fight and Fetch,” was developed by Sunny himself. I’ll describe it in detail at a later date, but obviously fetching is part of the game. The fetching part comes in, however, when Sunny has been defeated at the fight part; that is, when I am in sole possession of the Object of Woofiness. That being so, Sunny frequently anticipates the fetch by charging off the instant I have the Object, before I’ve raised my arm to throw it.

Tonight he did exactly that: leaped off the bed and charged into the middle of the apartment and began looking for the bagel he was confident I had thrown. I never don’t throw because the kids in his previous family had done that to him so much that he wouldn’t play fetch with them; he just sat when they waved sticks in the air. So I threw while he turned this way and that, looking for the bagel. Suddenly he yelped in pain.

Poor woofus! I had beaned my baby with a bad bagel!

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The First Day

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

My alarm woke me up at 8 AM. My chest and arm muscles burned; all the others were stiff. I felt wiped out and inclined to be in a sour mood. True, I was officially on vacation, but this was, as so many of mine turn out to be, a working vacation. I had a long list of things to get done that day, and the first one was the fleas.

I phoned the animal hospital and got their answering service. They’d be open at 8:30, I was told. That was all they could tell me.

Sunny wanted Out, so I took him there. There was another struggle with the collar, but I had learned a lot the night before: I was down to fifteen minutes. I shortly wished it had taken longer: when we got Outside, I discovered that his kids were on their way to school and were accompanied by their mother. Sunny cried with glee on seeing his pack, but Faith surprised me. I thought the whole idea was that Sunny would still be their dog and therefore retain his bond to them, but Faith told the children to say hello but not pat Sunny and walk on by. Both Sunny and I looked after them with more than a little confusion.

Well, that could certainly wait, and the fleas (I was finding it hard to say or think the word without emphasis) could not. I got myself and my stuff together. Then I called the now-open hospital. They did have the modern topical flea repellants; they insisted it was all I needed to deflea the entire house. That wasn’t what I had heard, but at that moment it didn’t matter; what I needed was to get the fleas off the dog. While I had them on the phone I also accomplished the second item on my to-do list: I made an appointment for him to see the vet on Thursday for a complete physical.

To my surprise, Sunny let me put on his collar. He didn’t seem eager about it—in fact he seemed a little uncertain about whether it was a good idea—but he had already learned the word “walkies” and was eager for them. We headed Out to the animal hospital.

The trip took a fairly long time; things look so much different in daylight than they do at night. I got my first requests to pat Sunny, and I had to reluctantly hold him back and explain that he was fighting off fleas. One little blonde girl, as much out of Disney as Sunny, was unimpressed, but her grandfather held her back and was explaining what fleas were as we walked on.

I suppose I should’ve thought that it would be undesirable to take a flea-infested dog with me through the streets and to the vet, but I couldn’t leave him home alone yet and I wanted to deal with the fleas as soon as possible. I had to grant no one said anything to me about it, but I did wonder later how many fleas we may have scattered in our path, especially after I got the flea medicine and put it on the little guy in a park on the way home. The package promised that the fleas would stop biting within the hour and that they’d be dead within twenty-four. It sounded good to me, and I’m sure Sunny would’ve been thrilled and much more cooperative about the dosing if he had known.

We got back, and I picked up the phone again to make an appointment to get Sunny shaved. He looked just fine, but the instant anyone touched him, they discovered that most of his hair was matted. There was just a thin layer covering the mess, like dirt swept under a rug. I didn’t anticipate any difficulties: there was a groomer’s less than a block away.

The groomer asked what breed my dog was.

“Cocker spaniel.”

“Oh, I don’t do spaniels. I don’t know the spaniel cuts.”

“I’m not looking for a cocker cut; I don’t like it, anyway, but that’s beside the point right now. This dog is badly matted and just needs the whole mess shaved off as soon as possible.”

“There’s a woman in Othertown—Dog Coiffure—she does a wonderful job with spaniels. They look, oh, so lovely!”

“I don’t have a car. And as I said, there’s no way to do any cut on this dog. He must be shaved.”

“I can’t do spaniels.”

“He just needs a shave! If you can shave a poodle, you can shave a spaniel!”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to call someone else.”

Click.

I sat for a moment and stared at the receiver in my hand. I was used to being more logical than those around me, but this was a new level of irrationality for someone sane enough to run a business for many years. I didn’t get it.

Later I learned from a co-worker whose sister was a dog groomer somewhere far outside town that many local groomers wouldn’t handle cocker spaniels because of their reputation for biting and her sister knew that that groomer in particular was one of them. I would’ve gladly muzzled Sunny for the local groomer for the sake of getting that mess off of him if she’d told me the real reason, but no, she had to tell a story that was obviously off the wall. The worst part was that forever afterward, whenever I met a fellow dog guardian in the neighborhood and they asked me where I got Sunny groomed, they always seemed deeply offended that I didn’t use the neighborhood groomer. I told them that if they could persuade her to do a cocker spaniel, great! Let me know.

That day, though, I turned with a sigh to the phone book to look for other groomers. I soon discovered there were very few within town and none of them were available that week. One of them told me that it was ridiculous; no one would groom Sunny within the week, and that his health was at stake didn’t phase her. I later heard from a pet-supply shop owner that that groomer was known for shaving the entire dog, even in the dead of winter, if she found even one tiny mat while grooming, and would, on the arrival of the dog’s caretakers, treat them to a lecture on what terrible care they took of their dog. Jimmy, the shop owner, told me he had sold several dog coats to irate guardians seeking to protect their dogs from our severe winter weather.

Finally I gave up and asked a co-worker if she could drive me to Dog Coiffure. May had told me that she was a dog person who currently had a cat, and so she would be glad to help me in the cause of dog care. She agreed that Friday morning would be fine. The woman at Dog Coiffure was very kind and understood exactly what I was talking about. She told me that he would look like a golden beagle when I got him back. I confirmed the time with May and turned to my next problem.

I was going to need to do something about training. I knew nothing about training dogs and knew only that I was not willing to get violent with a creature who seemed as eager to please as Sunny. He nearly died of joy whenever I said, “Good boy!” Later, as the phrase inspired increasingly less joy, I came to understand that the severe joy was the product of fear: he didn’t know anything about me. For all he knew, I intended to turn him into dinner and a stole. Knowing that sooner wouldn’t have changed my mind any, though. Punishment has a poor track record as a method of behavior modification; a serious study of it leads to the conclusion that it’s more about revenge than instruction. Revenge most certainly was not the point, even if it were conceivable for revenge to make sense with a dog. Which it isn’t.

First I called a number on a website recommended by a friend. The site belonged to someone apparently well known in the dog-training community; I had never heard of him before. I was astonished to get the man himself answering the phone, given his resume on the website, but it was only a matter of moments before he had me buying his top-level dog training program, which was $200.

I hung up feeling a little dazed, and then doubt started to creep in. I had called and said that my specific concern was separation anxiety and he had me buying his top-level program, which covered all kinds of canine behavior difficulties? Didn’t that seem like hitting a finishing nail with nuclear warhead? Aspies are easily fooled by humans; and humans enjoy playing their end. They get money, objects, effort, and amusement out of Aspies in no position to see through poorly controlled nonverbals, even when it occurs to an Aspie that a human might be lying. Because Aspies don’t lie themselves, such a realization often happens too late for the Aspie to use whatever skill they’ve got on nonverbals anyway. I debated with myself. I remembered all the times I’d been strung along by humans and then told that it was my own fault because only an idiot would’ve been taken in by whatever the current lie had been. Of course, not knowing when something is a lie also means the reverse: unless there are hard facts involved, I usually don’t know when something is not a lie either. And as I didn’t know anything about dog training, even if the program is over-kill, mightn’t it be useful? The $200 would certainly be useful, though, what with medical and grooming bills. And that guy had been trying to see what he could get out of me, hadn’t he? I may not be able to tell quite a few tones of voice apart, but I have the Aspie IQ and I have been a lifelong unwilling student of the worst in human behavior, and that guy’s behavior felt entirely wrong. Annoyed at yet another human con, I called back and cancelled my order. No, I wasn’t interested in anything of his. Maybe one of his products would’ve helped, but the sheer speed with which he hustled me to the most expensive product made him suspect, and I told him so.

I considered other alternatives. A woman from a cocker rescue whom I had met on the internet had recommended a book, The Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson, which dealt with human-dog relations as a clash of disparate cultures and had a truly positive approach to dog training. I had always had good results approaching bunny-Aspie relations as occurring across a cultural divide; the concept had long been part of the rabbit-care community. I invested my seventeen bucks with high hopes that it would deal with problems that came up with Sunny, but without any on the separation-anxiety issue. That I had to address right away, before the book would arrive. I’d have to do some more searching on the internet for that.

I suddenly realized something. Sunny had not pestered me for quite some time. He had been pretty much at me ever since his arrival: crying for his family, trying to get intimate with my limbs whenever I tried to touch him, yipping and digging at fleas while insisting on sleeping with me. He had barked at the bunny when she came out that morning, and although ceasing at my first furious “BAD!” (which I reserve for the greatest of sins, such as things that might give an elderly bunny a heart attack), he had whimpered in distress every time he saw her. She was less than pleased with his presence and inclined to be indignant about my refusal to pat her, but I figured it was better to have her merely upset than infested and therefore also upset. With the groomer hassle to the bargain, I had serious doubts about the whole dog thing. Once I realized the absentness of him, however, I looked next to me on the couch, and there he was, curled up, sleeping—really sleeping, not the disturbed doze that was the best the fleas had permitted him before. He had the very tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth, something I would soon discover was as usual a part of sleeping for him as sleeping next to someone. It seemed to me that I had never seen anything quite as cute, and bunnies, mind you, are cute.

I was ashamed of myself. Here was this poor little creature who had not had a decent sleep in who knew how long; who had been struggling with a parasitic illness for, again, who knew how long; who had lost everything he knew; and who found himself with a stranger he didn’t know if he could trust. And I was moping about sore muscles, lack of sleep for one night, and a heavier than usual dose of human contact. I at least owed the furry guy a chance to show me who he was when he didn’t feel sick and terrified before I started doubting our ability to get along. Nobody is easy to live with under those conditions.

Being careful not to disturb him, I curled around him on the couch and had a nap myself. Later it became clear that I probably could’ve taken a lot less care: I was awake a couple of hours later, but Sunny slept for eighteen hours straight.

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The First Night

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

I was going to leave Sunny’s background with me with the account I gave in Arrival of the Wrong Dog, but one of the few people who has read my attempt to put Sunny’s and my history together as a book was pretty insistent that I tell at least about Sunny’s first week with me. (The book was titled, of course, The Wrong Dog for Me: A Love Story, although I know that publishers change author titles just to prove to the author who really owns the book.) The first week will take a little while; this entry will only cover his first night with me. Please bear with me, those of you who do not find the tale so fascinating!

To set the stage, my landlord had agreed to allow Sunny on a probationary basis. He could stay so long as he didn’t annoy the other tenants or do damage to the apartment while I was away at work. At the time I worked forty hours a week outside my home, and dreamed without hope of finding some way to telecommute instead. I had researched and assembled a vast array of dog information and support possibilities, the information sites of the internet being an Aspie’s playground. I went to the local pet store where I usually bought rabbit supplies (at the time, I still had my adored but elderly rabbit) and instead bought some dog items: a collar, a faux fur–covered rubber bone, a large stuffed Rotweiler, and a Kong. All of these items were to be massive flops with Sunny, who turned out to be very particular about toys and very disapproving of collars. The flea collar I had given Faith, Sunny’s previous mom, at her request, had not lasted long; Sunny had immediately ditched it somewhere. Faith had said she had a leash and food for him, so I didn’t bother with those.

On Sunday, September 23, 2001, at about 7:20 P.M., Faith, her daughter, and her older son knocked on my door. With them they had Sunny, a leash, and a large bag of dog food. Sunny happily came into my apartment and started looking around; as a fellow cocker fancier we met later said to me, curiousity killed the cocker, not the cat. Sunny didn’t notice when his former pack members turned and left; of course they were trying not to call attention to their exit. I heard Faith say to the kids as they walked down the steps to the first floor that this was better for Sunny because he’d get more attention.

I closed the door, shaking a little as I did so, and took a deep breath.

I was a woofus mommy.

It took Sunny longer than I expected to exhaust the possibilities of my apartment. The door to the bedroom—that being an honorary title at the time because I actually slept on my couch—was closed. Having a neurology that finds organization of objects difficult and a mother whose idea of housecleaning was to make her children do it while standing over them and telling them how wonderful her life had been before she had had kids, I am and always have been a lousy housekeeper. I had put the clutter in the bedroom, and the kitchen was blocked off by baby gates to keep Augusta, the elderly bunny, away from all the yummy electrical cords in the living room. All Sunny had to explore was my small living room and the bathroom, both of which had been woofus-proofed for his arrival. He made a thorough job of it, though, and took a few minutes to whiffle at the edge of the baby gate and stare through it. Augusta, who had probably recognized the arrival of a predator as soon as Sunny walked through the door, was not in evidence. Having hiding places is important to a prey animal, if only for the mental health of domestic ones, and I had provided her with a couple from very soon after her own arrival.

Sunny did another brisk tour of the apartment, and I suspected that he was looking for his humans. Sure enough, he went quickly back to the door, looked at me, looked at the door, looked at me, and wagged his tail. My Spaniel was by no means as fluent as it would become, but it was clearly an extremely polite request for me to open the door. That’s the way Sunny always asks for things: look at the thing, look at me, look at the thing, look at me, and wag his tail.

“No, I’m sorry, Sunny.”

Sunny thinks the best of everyone. He assumed that I did not understand what he wanted. He pushed the door with his nose, then me, then the door, and then wagged his tail.

“No.”

I am all but certain he decided that I was one of the most dense beings he had ever met. He clearly didn’t hold it against me, but there was still that door to be dealt with. He gave it a couple of positively gentle scratches, to underscore his point, and turned back to me with a wagging tail.

I’m not sure when he figured out that I got it, but I wasn’t going to do it. I do know that even then I wished I’d had a video camera so that I could show every person thinking of giving up a dog what it means to the dog. He panicked. He cried. He dug at the floor by the door. He positively shrieked when he heard, through the open window, the voices of his family members outside the building. All my assurances were for naught; I was a stranger, and I wasn’t letting him rejoin his pack.

His only distraction was an unpleasant one, for both of us. Faith had obviously understated the flea situation. He must’ve gotten the fleas immediately after I had agreed to take him, nine days before, or I must’ve been too focused on his face to notice them. I originally suspected the former because, at a distance of three feet, I could see even on his face the tiny black dots moving among his pale fur, going up and down like whales surfacing and diving again. He clearly was underweight, however, and if that had anything to do with supporting that massive infestation, it would take a while to occur. At any rate, the fleas were very busy; Sunny would yelp at regular intervals and dig at himself. Then he would return to pacing and crying.

Sometime after midnight it occurred to me that he might have needs outside other than looking for his family. I’d have to put on his collar and leash.

It probably would be fairly simple for me today. I am wise to the woofy tricks: rolling, dodging one’s furry head under the biped’s arm, ucky-wet doggie kisses at inopportune moments. That night it took forty minutes for me to wrestle that collar onto Sunny. Faith had said she had never been able to get a collar on him, and I could see why. I promised him, though, that it would only be while we were Out. Inside, he could be a naked woofus once again. Attaching the leash was much less of a struggle. It was a fairly thin, faded red cord about four feet long. Sunny kept trying to chew at it, as he had clearly done before that night because it was knotted back together again at one point. I made a mental note to buy him a new leash, both thicker and longer.

As we left for our first walk together, I realized that I had forgotten the painfully obvious: I didn’t have any plastic bags. With a sigh, I headed for the neighborhood convenience store. The plastic bags would be obscenely overpriced, but it was only this once. I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave Sunny alone and that it probably was a particularly scary notion for him, but again, I didn’t see an option as I tied him up outside.

I went into the convenience store and discovered I could see the little guy from inside it. As I headed for the shelf with the bags, I knew precisely when he couldn’t see me, though, because he started crying loudly.

“Is your dog all right?” the clerk inquired. He was a small thin man with sandy hair and a moustache. Having never been in the convenience store anywhere near that hour, I had never seen him before.

“Yeah, he’ll be OK as soon as I get back. It’s his first night with me, so he’s a little nervous.”

“Oh, congratulations! It’s OK if you’d rather bring him in; I’m not supposed to let you, but it’s only us and him.”

“Thanks, I would, but he’s got a bad case of fleas. We’re going to walk out to see if we can find the small-animal hospital. A friend takes her dogs there, so I thought I’d take him to see them.”

“They won’t be open this time of night.”

“No, but I don’t even know where it is. I figured I’d go find it so it’ll be easier to find tomorrow. If nothing else, it’ll wear him out a bit, and maybe he’ll be able to sleep, in spite of his fleas and being upset about losing his family.”

“Aw, poor dog. Is this your first one?”

“Well, sort of. I haven’t had one for twenty years, since I was a kid.”

“Then you probably don’t know the details on bag technique. See here, like this.” He turned the bag inside out. “This protects your hand, and you turn it right side out with the stuff inside. No muss, no fuss.”

My thoughts had not gotten so far as the actual use of the bags, so I profusely thanked him.

He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of things soon. Dogs are great. A lot of work, but they’re worth it. You’ll see. Good luck!”

Yeah, there are some very cool humans. I never saw that clerk again, but his attitude toward me and Sunny helped even more than the useful information he gave. Perhaps it was just the first instance of a phenomenon I was later to note: with very few exceptions, humans are nicer to you when they see you have a dog with you. Unfortunately, as I discovered just as quickly, those very few exceptions are vicious even beyond the human norm.

Those observations, however, would have to wait for a time when we were walking among humans. That night, there was no visible animal of any kind. I wasn’t worried, although perhaps I should’ve been. My town is generally pretty quiet and peaceful; most attacks—whether sexual, financial, or just generally hostile in nature—occur on the university’s campus, and we were putting more and more town between us and that. We were walking mostly through residential neighborhoods.

There’s probably a faster way to get to the animal hospital, but I knew the section of town it was in and the direction to go on the street, although I was not sure how far along it the hospital was. I am not good with complicated directions, even when my brain is alert; I once went the long way around a different small town because the roads met at odd angles and I knew only one way to reach a particular street. That night I kept walking straight until I hit the hospital’s street and then turned to walk along that street.

We were not making good time. My unenergetic state was not the primary reason, however. Faith and the kids had seldom walked Sunny off the property—probably because of the collar difficulty—so he was fascinated by this large new world and wanted to sniff every square inch of it. I tried to be patient; I knew even then that dogs experience the world as a collection of smells rather than one of sights, so refusing to let him smell things as we went along would be much like expecting a human wearing blinders to follow me through unfamiliar terrain. I was very tired, though, and was not pleased to see how energetic he was. At least, I reminded myself, he wasn’t crying. Maybe that line from The Once and Future King was correct: when in despair, learn something. Sunny was clearly engrossed in learning what the world outside our building’s yard was like. To this day, WALKIES!!! (that’s obviously how he thinks it, so that’s how I write it) remain his very favorite thing. He’d rather have WALKIES!!! than DEAD ANIMAL.

We did eventually find the hospital. I had nurtured a tiny hope that, being called a hospital, it might have night hours, but it was clearly deserted of all human life. Ah, well, I thought, at least I do know where it is, and that’s going to make it much easier to find tomorrow, which is a very good thing. If at all possible, I visit new places before I actually have to go there because finding them is such a complicated business, and what with the sleep deprivation, it was going to be even more complicated than usual.

I took Sunny back by a slightly different route and we got home about four in the morning. Once we reached the landing outside my door, I took off his collar and left it attached to the leash. The walk had taken the edge off of his energy, and he seemed willing to lie down and consider the concept of sleep.

In general, I have no objection to quadrupeds sleeping with me or on me. In Sunny’s case, things were different: (a) the couch was no wider than a twin bed and I am a fat person; and (b) he was crawling with blood-sucking insects. Sunny did not as of yet have any bond to me, so I didn’t think he’d object to sleeping by himself. I made him a nice doggie bed of a large pillow on the floor near my head. He was persuaded to sit on it (he did know the command “Sit!”), I demonstrated the meaning of “Lie down” by sliding one arm under his forelegs and pressing down with the other hand on his shoulders, and he lay there staring at me. I turned out the light and lay down myself.

I expected to hear some stirring about, so I ignored the rustling. I was startled, however, to find him climbing up on the couch with me. He had to be kidding! Just where did he think was room enough on this couch for a dog on the small end of medium size? And yee gads, I’d be crawling with fleas by morning! I evicted him.

It didn’t take me long to fall asleep. It didn’t seem that I was asleep very long, though, before I was wakened by a loud “Thump!” in front of the couch and Sunny climbing up onto it. He must’ve gotten on the couch after I was asleep and fallen off. I was about to order him off again, but well, if he had been on the couch with me for any length of time—and assumably he must’ve been or I wouldn’t be aware of messed-with circulation to my lower legs—the fleas were a lost cause anyway. When he got tired of falling off the couch, he would stop trying to sleep with me. I lay back down and went back to sleep.

He never did get tired of falling off the couch, at least not to the point of ceasing to get on it. After several weeks, I got concerned that he might hurt himself with all his tumbles in the night. I tried many things, but eventually ended up back in the bedroom with a full-size bed, with plenty of room for a fat Aspie and a cocker spaniel.

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Outings in the Dead of Night

Friday, February 16th, 2007


I’m sorry I’ve been quiet all this week, but my life has been very busy, unfortunately not with my woofus, who is understandably a little sulky at present. I will be back with more Sunny background soon, but this little tale will hopefully keep you from feeling forgotten until then.

One night at the end of last winter, at 1:46 A.M., I was awakened by a woofus, with a stuffed giraffe in his mouth, running about on the bed and whimpering pitifully. The stuffed giraffe (with rope legs) was the then–Object of Woofiness, which means it was his favorite play item. When anyone comes to the door, he brings the Object to them; I guess in an invitation to play because that’s how he tells me he wants to. I was confused by his running about and whimpering, especially with the giraffe, because I could see no reason he should be upset. The day before we had had a good game of Fight and Fetch (the Sunny-developed rules of which I will explain at a later date), so he shouldn’t have been desperate for frolics. I had taken him out at 11 P.M., so there seemed no cause for franticness on that score.

I asked him to show me. “Show Mommy!” is one of his few commands, and he knows it means to show me what he wants. Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of responses, not all of which are immediately obvious, but I do know most of the gestures in the Spaniel lexicon, and that time Sunny provided one I’d seen before. He pointed out the window with his nose. I said “Out?” and he went into a display of woofy glee, so I took that as a yes.

Muttering to myself, I got up, put on some real clothes, and got my coat. I have always treated Sunny’s rare middle-of-the-night requests to go Out with great respect, and I feel it has been repaid with no house-breaking accidents. Once he had an attack of diarrhea and was waking me up every two hours, but not once did the little guy lose control and make a mess inside. We were both as happy as we could be under the circumstances, so I wasn’t about to refuse him when he was this distraught.

Sunny could on no account be persuaded to leave the giraffe, however. My attempt to remove it from his mouth caused a cascade of whimpers. I didn’t have a lot of energy, so I took the little furball, and his giraffe, outside.

He ran out and put the giraffe in a small heap of remaining snow. He ran about a little. He sniffed the air. He picked up the giraffe and headed back inside.

I guess the giraffe needed to go Out. We had, after all, not taken it out at 11 P.M.

The next morning at 5:45, when he began another whimpery dance all over the bed, once again with the giraffe in his mouth, I played possum. Not that he can’t tell I’m not asleep, but the way to get a dog to stop doing something is to ignore it. He spent about forty-five minutes pawing at me before giving up. When I did get up and take him Out, I lived with the whimpers when I repossessed the giraffe.

Sunny plays the dumb blonde when it suits his purposes, but he isn’t one really. He still tries to take his Object of Woofiness for Outs, but at least he doesn’t try it in the wee hours of the morning.

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The Arrival of the Wrong Dog

Sunday, February 11th, 2007


Sunny came to be my dog because, like so many dogs, his family was no longer able to keep him.

Sunny’s family were fellow-tenants in the building I’ve lived in for the past thirteen and a half years (only eight years at that time). They were moving to the building next door, which had a different landlord, one who would not allow dogs. Sunny’s then-mom had tried desperately to find a new home for him; I happened to be present when she got the phone call that her last option other than the shelter had fallen through.

As I have said before, I didn’t really want a dog. Not, mind you, that I don’t like dogs. I like dogs better than I like humans; I’ve met very few I didn’t like. Also dogs tend to like me. The fact remains, however, that dogs are a huge amount of work if you really intend to take care of them properly. I suspect everyone is, if you really intend to take care of them properly.

For me, the biggest adjustment would be that most dogs, and clearly Sunny was among this number, are determinedly social beings. Except for squirrels, Sunny liked everybody he met: humans, especially young ones; dogs; cats; rabbits; ferrets. Keeping the sort of social schedule he desired would mean that I would have to go Out a lot. One of my biggest priorities in life is to not go Out if at all possible. My apartment may be a cluttered dump, but it’s quiet, as climate-controlled as I can afford, and unpopulated by humans, particularly those disciples of noise and disorder known as children. Not only would I be subjected to the chaos of Out, but I would have to interact with humans because of course all the beings Sunny had liked so far were usually associated with, or were, humans. At the time, I didn’t yet know I was an Aspie, but I did know, down to the very core of my bones, that I wasn’t human.

I know some of you out there are going to object to my opinion that Aspies are a separate species from humans, but experts on autistic spectrum conditions often speak of those on the spectrum as being possessed of an extraterrestrial brain in a human body. Our brains are actually wired differently than human ones, so it’s not a matter of biochemistry that can be altered with medication. Also biologists can tell you that the definition of species—a group of living beings that can interbreed with reproductively competent offspring as a result—is an inadequate approximation of what actually goes on in the living world around us. Consider, as an example, a juvenile male songbird, rescued from some physical harm and raised in captivity without an opportunity to learn to sing correctly from an adult male of his species. Females of his human-defined species will not recognize him as one of theirs. In practice, species is about behavior as well as physical characteristics.

In the case of interacting with humans, the issue is Aspies’ social behavior. We have difficulty decoding human body language, facial expression, and tones of voice, precisely because they are foreign and noninstinctive to us. We struggle with detangling, let alone at conversational speed, the actual meanings in our interactions with humans. Naturally our difficulty with human nonverbals means that we have different ones, which humans call inappropriate affect—the inappropriate merely because it doesn’t coincide with what humans do in the same circumstances. In the inevitable disputes over What Actually Was Said, Aspies always hold the short end of the stick: the third-party arbitrators, being overwhelmingly human themselves, always agree with the human interpretation of the interaction in question. The humans frequently make things worse by telling other humans how dishonest, arrogant, and in various ways awful we are, leaving us struggling against an impression that is almost impossible to undo because humans just don’t believe us. Humans make a habit of lying and in fact are known to do it just for fun, while Aspies are known for telling the truth, but we just don’t have the nonverbals that humans use to tell other humans they’re not lying—hence we must be. When Aspies understandably do their level best to limit these confusing and distressing interactions to the bare minimum required to survive, humans decide that the Aspies think they’re too good to associate with humans or that they are in some other way defective.

In short, interacting with humans is difficult, exhausting, and hazardous for Aspies, so I avoid it as if each human will give me a different plague. If I took in Sunny the Socialite, I was left with two choices: either I had to fail to respect his needs, which was morally abhorrent, or I had to expose myself to an even greater amount of stress from humans, which was emotionally abhorrent. Abandoning him to his fate, though, was emotionally and morally abhorrent. He was a delightful nonhuman, as accepting as a being could possibly be expected to be, and to send him off to an uncertain future, completely at the nonmercy of humans, was not to be thought. The probably deciding vote in his favor was that he was supposed to be with me temporarily, only for the year that his family would be living in the building next door. With more lead time to search for an apartment, his family would be sure to get a dog-friendly place the next year, and Sunny could return to their care. One can put up with almost anything if it’s only going to be for a known, limited time.

Of course several of my friends foresaw what the result of that would be; one even warned me to take Sunny only on a permanent basis. Granted that one of the ways in which I was not human was a disinclination to form bonds, I failed to consider that Sunny was nonhuman and historically I had formed very powerful bonds to nonhumans. At the end of the year I was distraught at the notion of losing the Wrong Dog. Fortunately for me, and I’d like to think for Sunny too, his previous mom was a human who could take a large view of things. When I finally confessed my desire to keep Sunny, she said that as far as she was concerned, Sunny was my dog because we obviously were tightly bonded. Maybe she understood because bonding to dogs is something humans and Aspies (at least the ones who like dogs) have in common. All I know is that she could’ve made me very miserable by insisting on Sunny’s return when in fact she had already insisted to the family’s children that she wasn’t going to. Humans can be fabulous if you can deal with them individually. (There is nothing more dangerous than humans in clumps. They’ll actually do things merely for the purpose of proving to other humans that they’re clumped!)

Even though I very well might not have taken Sunny in on a permanent basis from the very start, it was a huge relief when he became officially my woofus. I went home and cried on him, not the first and not the last monkey behavior he found befuddling but proceeded to accept with good grace.

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Another thing Sunny doesn’t like . . .

Thursday, February 8th, 2007


I was planning to give some background information first, but this was just too cute not to tell right away.

I don’t have a lot of photos of Sunny. The only camera I have is a twenty-year-old 35mm; a nice camera for its kind, and I have taken some great pictures with it (the best one I’ve ever seen of York Minster, for instance), but I had it packed away. I couldn’t find it for about a decade, and only recently rediscovered it. The few pictures I have of Sunny are therefore all taken by other people, on their cameras.

The cutest thing that Sunny does, in my personal opinion, is sleep with the tip of his tongue sticking out. That’s what he was doing when I first fell in love with him, and I have always wanted a picture of it. I found it very frustrating that I didn’t have a camera to snap it with because it’s not the sort of thing that is going to happen when we have a camera-bearing visitor. Sunny is then too excited about having a visitor (Mommy almost never has visitors!) to be doing anything like sleeping.

I was sitting on the bed doing work (I telecommute) when I happened to glance over at Sunny. It was the perfect picture of the sleeping tongue: he was lying on his side, facing me, with his head on my pillow and my pajama top (I never put my pajamas away because Sunny likes to sleep on them), his forepaws folded over cutely, his tongue sticking out just that little bit, giving him a groove over his upper lip that makes it look like he has a little black mustache. I reached for the camera.

Unfortunately, I made some noise doing so, and he started to wake up. “It’s all right, sweetie!” I reassured him. “Go back to sleep.”

He did so, but he shifted a little first, turning his head so it was more into the pillow. It was no longer the Perfect Shot–I wasn’t sure whether the tongue would be distinguishable from the pink of my pajama top–but I figured it was good enough to catch while I waited for the Perfect Shot to someday spontaneously reappear. I snapped.

I’m not sure whether it was the blinding flash or the sound the camera makes as it advances the film, but Sunny woke up. He lifted his head and looked at me groggily, with the tip of his tongue still hanging out. He seemed to be wondering what monkey madness I was up to now.

Well, of course, that was too cute for words, so I had to try to make it a picture. I snapped again.

Sunny grunted. Slowly and with many grumbly woofy noises, he turned over so that his head was still on the pillow and the pajama top, but now his head and body were facing away from me.

Maybe later he’d work up the energy to figure out what strange notion I’d gotten into my head. For now, whatever I was up to, he’d just had enough of it!

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Meet the Odd Couple

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007


The Woofus

    Name: Sunny (but answers to anything that begins with “Sun,” “sweet,” “woof,” or “doodle” [as in "doodlebug"])

    Age: 6 years

    Breed: English Cocker Spaniel (Most likely. Both his vets don’t think he’s an American Cocker [one mentioned that he didn't have the "design flaws" of that breed]. His first groomer kept English Cockers, and she thought he was one. Everyone who meets him and has experience with American Cockers comments that he doesn’t look like the cocker spaniels they know.)

    Likes

    • DEAD ANIMALS (as food)

    • LIVE ANIMALS (as playmates—all of them except for members of the VSC. See “Dislikes”)

    • soft doggie treats (He’ll take most treats, but first he’ll play hard to get in the hope that you have a soft one or perhaps even some DEAD ANIMAL.)

    • anything stinky, especially if it will stick to his fur

    • sticks that meet his connoisseurial standards: not too green, not too dry

    • stuffed toys, especially dirty, half-torn-up ones

    • mornings

    • tummy rubs

    • butt scritches

    • Mommy (probably because she is, as far as he can tell, the source of most of those things)

    Dislikes

    • anything associated with hygiene, with the sole exception of having his ears and head brushed

    • getting wet, even when not associated with hygiene

    • members of the Vast Squirrel Conspiracy (If Mommy doesn’t wake up to the danger and let Sunny hunt them all down, they will take over the world!)

    • having his feet touched

    • ucky-dry monkey kisses

    • all those silver objects that Mommy likes to play with, making her ignore Important Things

    Hobbies: WALKIES!!!, frolicking, finding new things to add to his list of likes, rolling in various media (some stinky, some not), ripping apart stuffed dog toys, using the Power of Cuteness to get whatever is at the top of his priority list at the moment, other general BAD (Being A Dog) behavior.

The Aspie

    Name: Anne Aspey (aka Mommy)

    Age: 41

    Likes

    • Soy Delicious Chocolate Obsession Frozen Dessert (unfortunately unshareable with woofi)

    • clean doggie fur

    • solitude (woofi always welcome, however)

    • most nonhumans

    • a few select humans (aka friends) who do understand that Anne is an Aspie

    • a reasonable (as defined by Anne) amount of socializing with friends

    • ucky-wet doggie kisses

    • grunty, snuffly woofy noises

    • Sunny (probably because of his Power of Cuteness, but quite possibly because of general woofiness)

    Dislikes

    • socializing with new humans or known humans who mistakenly insist that Anne is one herself

    • oversocializing with friends

    • physical contact with anyone but nonhumans to whom she is not allergic

    • being lied to and being assumed to be as much of a liar as humans generally are

    • food preparation (Her food allergies make this difficult.)

    • extremes in environmental temperature

    • mornings

    • bright light

    • noise

    Hobbies: Reading (preferably a book in a series she knows she likes), playing with computers, writing e-mail to friends, watching and rewatching videos, avoiding her dislikes and trying to avoid discovering new ones, other general Aspie behavior.

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The Right Dog and the Wrong Dog

Monday, February 5th, 2007

When you decide to get a dog, everyone urges you not to rush into it. Study. Learn about the breeds to decide which one has the right temperment for you and your lifestyle. (Apparently mutts are either for those who like to live dangerously or those who can’t make up their minds about who they are.) Once you’ve decided on a breed, study the breeders, meet the parents of the litter, get the parents’ medical histories. If you’re going for something rare, such as a Bernese Mountain Dog, be prepared to have yourself, your life, and your financial standing scrutinized by the breeder and perhaps to share ownership with the breeder. Last but not least, give all the puppies a good going over and take careful note of which ones meet your eyes and for how long and how they interact with the other puppies to see which ones are not alpha dogs. After all, you must be sure that in the end, you go home with the Right Dog for You.

After all, what would become of you if you ended up with the Wrong Dog?

(I shall pause here for a few moments while those readers who have fainted at the mere notion revive themselves and steel their nerves to continue.)

I did none of that preparation.

I wasn’t looking for a dog. I didn’t really want one. Sunny was offered on a take-him-or-leave-him, as-was basis, with no medical history of his own, let alone of his parents, no breeder information—I’m still, five years later, unsure of Sunny’s exact breed. I was just preferable, to his previous family and to me, than the pound. As for being the Right Dog, all the indicators pointed the other direction. For a middle-aged woman with Asperger’s syndrome, who therefore craves solitude and quiet in just about all things that could possibly be unquiet, the high-energy, playful, socially outgoing little creature could hardly be a good match.

I took him in anyway. And he was—and is—decidely the Wrong Dog.

This is our life.

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