The Wrong Dog Blog

Yesterday after I posted, I took Sunny outside and discovered it wasn’t as hot as I thought it was. The rain had cooled things down a bit.

So I took the woofus for birthday WALKIES!!! It was so humid that it felt like we were swimming and when we got back my clothes were as wet as if we had been, but Sunny loved it.

I love the little critter, but his taste is more than a little questionable! It was his birthday, though, not mine.

Today is Sunny’s seventh birthday.

His original family knew his birthdate because they were there, and it was the daughter’s seventh birthday. So they were able to tell me.

Unfortunately it’s too hot and too rainy for WALKIES!!! The best I can do for the little guy is keep him in my air-conditioned bedroom and give him treats.

In a week we start home-buying classes together. Yup, that’s we. Sunny is allowed along, so hopefully I can be less stressed at the class. He’ll love it. WALKIES!!! and humans, two of his favorite things.

Hopefully this time next year we will be in a house of our own and will have room to actually frolic a little, if it’s not too hot to frolic and he hasn’t given up on it because of his age. If not, well, we’ll sit in the air-conditioning again and feed him woofy treats. I’m sure he’ll still like those.

Sorry I have nothing inspired to say. My muse may be on vacation with the rest of the Western world.

Sorry I didn’t post last week. My internet connection went out the day I wanted to post.

Lately the weather has been too hot for WALKIES!!!, so in my free time I have been renewing my acquaintance with Homicide: Life on the Street. The network that ran the show (NBC) was continually fighting with the producers about how depressing it was, but actually I find it less depressing than the usual TV fare. Homicide didn’t cop out until the very end of the series (the final movie). Not all the loose ends were tied up. Not all the cases were closed. Of the murderers who were caught, not all of them were convicted, let alone punished. When at the end of season five, the network forced the producers to have the biggest bad guy of the series shot, they made it an illegal shoot by one of the central cast, and there was instantly another big baddie that stepped into the dead guy’s place. In short, Homicide played it like life plays it, no too-neat, happily-ever-after lies. There’s a lot of comfort in not being lied to, at least for me.

Unfortunately, it’s not a woofus show. Yes, Sunny watches TV, but he’s a very picky viewer and Homicide just isn’t what a woofus wants to kick back and look at when it’s too hot to frolic or after some intense WALKIES!!!

First, Homicide was originally conceived as (and with very few exceptions remainded) a cop show without gun fights and car chases. It’s very dialogue intensive. The woofus cares not for dialogue! Action! Give him COPS, with doors being broken down and people running frantically about. Better still, find some basketball. Football and baseball don’t move fast enough to hold his attention, but basketball Sunny can watch until a commercial comes on. If the commercial is a dog food commercial, then he can watch even through that.

That’s Homicide’s other and more serious failing from a woofy perspective: no dogs. In Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan reported that chimps prefer movies about chimps over movies about humans, so I suppose it should not have surprised me that Sunny prefers shows about dogs. Of course, watching him watch TV, I discovered that shows ostensibly about dogs actually spend less camera time with the dogs than their humans—Sunny’s attention wanders when there isn’t a dog on the screen—so the same is apparently true for humans, too. We watched “The Wolf Within,” a documentary about dogs, several times (unfortunately now lost to the Video Mold Catastrophe), and he loved that. It had mostly dog footage, plus wolf footage, which Sunny found very fascinating. Whenever they had dog or wolf sounds playing, he’d tilt his head, just as he does when he’s trying to figure out what I’m yammering on about. I wished I could ask him if he knew what in particular the sounds were trying to communicate. It was a great hour for the two of us. Sunny also enjoys shows about bears; I remember one documentary about a pair of hand-raised polar bear cubs, and Sunny couldn’t get enough of watching them swim around. I suspect, though, that Sunny doesn’t know that the bears on the screen aren’t dogs. He cannot, after all, smell them, and scale is distorted when it’s just bears and vegetation.

Now that I don’t have Animal Planet, though, and I am only watching shows that I like on DVD or tape, Sunny doesn’t have much use for video. He will sometimes sit next to me while I’m watching, but mostly he tries to distract me from the show, and if he doesn’t succeed, he wanders off to pout. I have tried to turn my Homicide viewing into Sunny-tummy-rub sessions, but it doesn’t seem to be enough for him. Last night, he was being extremely pesty, and wanted me to stop watching the video. “Just let Mommy finish the episode,” I tried to soothe him, but he wasn’t having it. Finally, he got drastic. He knows how Mommy feels about any woofy physical contact with the laptop, but he was so annoyed that he flopped a foot onto the keyboard.

The screen went black, the window minimized, and Gee was cut off mid-speech. The disk popped out of the drive. With typical Sunny luck, his random keystroke had connected with the eject button.

Maybe I should get back to converting those Wishbone tapes to DVD, huh?

I forget how old I was exactly. Eight, I think. I was in elementary school, that’s certain, when I heard that Horace Mann once said, “Be ashamed to die until you have achieved some victory for humanity.” To say I took it to heart would be a mild way of putting it. I did later alter it to be that I had to achieve a victory for everybody, not merely humanity, but that’s what I set out to do.

My original plan was to be a veterinarian for a day job and then be a fiction writer on the side. I was going to show everybody: the kids who harassed me all day, every day (that’s very common for Aspies); the teachers who thought I was a problem (brilliant, but a problem to be pounded into their round hole); and my parents—especially that demon-thing who hostilely admitted to being my mother. I was going to prove that I was a more worthwhile expenditure of time, energy, and resources than any of them by having a much greater positive impact on the world. My veterinary work would make life better for nonhumans, and my writing would change the way people thought for the better. I did want to make the world a better place simply for itself, too—I can’t look at hardly anything in the world today without thinking how terribly awful it is that it isn’t better—but I will grant that “showing them” was as important to me as it is for the villains of so many stories. I wasn’t going to have children not only because I didn’t like them but because they would interfere with my plan to achieve this victory.

The first blow my plan took was my sudden development of allergies to just about everything with fur (dogs excepted). I had already been allergic to everything with feathers. As I left high school, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a day job, the veterinary idea being down for the count. After the first year of college, my finishing college was a question, my ability to handle pre-vet being answered decidedly as no.

I struggled with what to do for a day job and came up with a variety of unsatisfactory answers. I was determined on the fiction front. My poor ability at narrative (especially descriptions) left me looking for alternatives to straight fiction writing. I tried to draw, so that I could do comic books. Then I discovered 3D computer graphics and decided that was it, that was how I was going to do it. I could even have different art styles for different stories.

I don’t want to give the impression I was making a success of the 3D graphics when a certain woofus came along, but I had already started investing a lot of time and a lot of money in it. One of the many reasons I didn’t have biological children was because I didn’t want to invest the time taking care of a child properly would require, and I wasn’t about to do something that important improperly. Pursuing my plans for greatness might not have been very successful, but there was time to pursue them when I had Augusta: as long as I talked to her when I was in the kitchen (her domain) and spent a half hour or so of quality time with her a day, my independent bunny was content. That wasn’t enough for Sunny.

I knew it wouldn’t be enough for him. As with biological children, I wasn’t about to do dog caretaking improperly. Raising a child requires an attempt to meet all that being’s varied needs. Caretaking a dog is the same; the needs are just different. In order to be a healthy and happy woofus, a dog needs not only food and shelter and veterinary care, but exercise, attention, frolicking, a varied environment with mental stimulation, social opportunities with dogs and humans, and treatment for any emotional problems, “behavioral problems” being merely the symptoms of emotional problems going untreated. It’s a tall order, and probably nobody can fill it perfectly any more than a child can be raised perfectly, but I wasn’t going to be satisfied with what society says is an acceptable job of caring for a dog. It’s not Sunny’s fault that he needs those things, and it’s not his fault that he ended up with me as the party responsible for seeing to them. I had to give it my best or not do it.

I thought about it before I took him in. I thought about how it would effect my 3D art work. I thought, however, that it would only be a year and then he’d go back to Faith and her kids, and I’d be free to go back to pursuing victory.

I didn’t think about it before I adopted him. My 3D art hadn’t been touched for most of that year, and all I could think about was a certain bundle of gold fur with chocolate eyes and long eyelashes to die for. In all the thinking about how to convince Faith to let me keep him, not once did I reflect upon what a permanent situation really meant.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t go back to the 3D art. I continued to dabble. I spent thousands on hardware and software, always telling myself, just like any gambler, that eventually I’d have the skill to make the hobby pay for itself. I didn’t neglect Sunny because of it, though. I’m not saying I never neglected Sunny—the year after I was laid off was probably the worst of his life with me—but it was never for the art.

In the past couple years, I’ve had to come to grips with the realization that the art was going so very slowly that unless I could magically afford to do it all the time, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. The realization wasn’t quick and it didn’t come easily and I fought it every step of the way because that left me without any hope of achieving my victory. After all, my day job isn’t the sort of thing that makes the world a better place—more enjoyable for some people, yes, but not better. I had everything riding on the art so that I could tell my stories so that could make the world better.

I realized this past week that I may not have realized I was making that choice when I choose to keep Sunny permanently, but that was what I was doing. I couldn’t in conscience keep him without doing my best by him, and I didn’t have the time and energy left over if I did. (I didn’t have the money either, but I didn’t have that with or without him!) I didn’t realize what I was giving up in doing so, but that didn’t change the fact that I was giving it up.

Many people don’t really think through the caretaking thing before they leap into it, and when they realize what they’ve given up, they often resent it and therefore the being they’ve been caring for. My mother was one of those. It’s not so much that I take greater responsibility for my actions, even if I didn’t think things through, but that I just can’t imagine resenting Sunny. OK, maybe when I’m stuck out in the rain trying to get him to piddle so we can go back inside and to bed, I resent him a little, but really, honestly, even knowing what I do now, if I could go back to August 2002 and tell Faith she could have Sunny back, would I? How could I? The little furry guy had already bonded to me. Clearly I had to him or I would’ve been thinking more clearly about what adopting him meant to the rest of my life rather than just “I CAN’T LOSE SUNNY!” And even if I wanted to undo it, how could I blame Sunny for it? His mere existence created the problem of his care, and he wasn’t responsible for his existence. Even his parents, being woofi themselves, couldn’t be said to be responsible for it.

So I did in the end choose to be mother rather than a victor, even if I did it sideways and unknowingly and across species. All the victory I am likely to ever have will be what happiness I have given Sunny. It’s hard: the world continues to be a very hard and mostly bad place and being a dog caretaker doesn’t have much “showing them” potential. I just have to keep telling myself that the world isn’t a very hard and mostly bad place for Sunny and that I care more what he thinks than all those people who have mistreated me along the way.

Maybe someday, it will be enough.

As I mentioned in my post “A Monkey’s Guide to Spaniel,” there are several ways to indicate “I want Out” in Spaniel. In fact, there are more ways to say “I want Out” in Spaniel than any other single phrase in any human language. It is far and away the most important concept that a woofus needs to convey to a biped, even more crucial than “Gimme what you’re eating!”

Today Sunny used one of the ways the derivation of which is shrouded in mystery. A favorite way of saying “I want Out” when I’m in bed asleep, Sunny lay down on my lower legs and feet. Of course, today it also means “Make the rain stop” because when I do take him Out, he stares at the rain and refuses to go out in it. It has to be all of him on my feet and lower legs; just his head on just one of my feet is a gesture of affection and can take place just after having been Out. I know the bigger gesture is one of his ways to indicate he wants Out because if I pull my feet and legs out from under him, he runs to the door. It’s why he does it that interests me.

I can’t imagine it’s any more comfortable for him than it is for me, but obviously his concern is to achieve a different sort of comfort, so that is beside the point. But what inspires this as a method of communication? Is it just so that he definitely wakes up if I stir and can get in his request before I get sidetracked by something else? Is it intended to make me uncomfortable so that I get up, making it more likely that I will then take him Out? That seems a little sophisticated for woofy mental processes, but woofi are great students of behavior, and they know the details of their caretakers’ habits. For instance, Sunny knows that I only put on shoes when I’m going Out of the house, and he has even figured out that I’m likely to brush my hair and teeth just before leaving as well: he always starts watching me very carefully when I brush my hair and teeth, especially if it’s in the middle of the day. The brushing is even of no interest late at night because he knows I never leave then. So he certainly knows that my standing up precedes my taking him Out, so he might just be trying to achieve my standing up so that he can then actually ask to go Out. I don’t know.

I do wish he’d give it up, though. It is very uncomfortable after a few minutes, but I feel guilty if I pull my feet out just for comfort because he gets all excited and bouncy. My freeing my feet seems to mean “I am taking you Out” in Spaniel, so I don’t want to lie to him when I intend to keep working for a while longer. It’s hard enough to be a woofus with your bathroom breaks at someone else’s whim, without having your monkey tell you fibs.

Well, the rain hasn’t stopped, but the woofus has been cleaning his hind end for several minutes now, which is one of the more common ways to indicate a desire to go Out. I’d better get the little guy there. I just hope he is willing to ignore the rain because it’s bedtime and it’s his last chance until I get up. Of course, he can always lie on my feet and legs to wake me up.

I know that I said this blog is just going to be about the dog, but this one isn’t about hating humans, it’s just about me.

You may or may not remember my trying to come to grips with my long-term lack of skill with my long-term interest in 3D graphics. Not long after I posted that (late March), I came to the conclusion that there’s just no hope of pay-off there, and I should stop throwing good money and time after bad. It hurts to give up what is pretty much my last chance to do anything truly worthwhile with my life, but I need a house for Sunny (the stairs here aren’t getting fewer and he is not getting younger) and some money for retirement for me. I’ve just got to be realistic.

Since then I’ve been doing a lot of kicking of myself for spending as much time and money as I did. I mean, I sank lots of money on that on the assumption that it was more worthwhile than other expenditures because I was going to do something with it. Now I wish I had at least sunk it on DVDs: I’d have a lot fewer videotapes cluttering up the place and if I decided I needed some of the money back I could at any time sell the DVDs, something you can’t do with 3D graphics software that gets obsolete so fast, and even if I didn’t I’d at least be able to enjoy the DVDs. Now, well, I’ve got a lot of stuff I don’t use sitting on my hard drive, a computer that is more than I need for my work that still isn’t paid off, a huge stack of VHS tapes deteriorating every minute, and few DVDs, no retirement fund, no house. Once again, Anne is financially foolish. Even my modest 3D aspirations turned out to be vastly beyond my ability and my pocketbook. Mind you, the kicking myself makes sense, although granted it doesn’t accomplish much, so in that respect it isn’t logical.

But here’s the real thing: every week, I go to all the free sites and download the weekly free model. I download the model for the weekly subscription that I bought for the next year just before I decided how dumb it was. Yesterday I downloaded a thing called a bolladon—I’m not sure whether that’s a real dinosaur or one that’s made up because a 3D artist wanted to create their own. That’s 39MB of my hard drive taken up by just that. I also downloaded a robot mecha that converts into a tank from the same site, again because it was free and for a limited time only. I have most of a medieval village because different parts of it were offered for free at various times. Next week, when I get an alert that there is a new model up for grabs, I’ll go get that, too.

It’s not like I can go back to 3D. I don’t have the time, energy, money, or talent for it; I have too many other things requiring all of what I have of those. It’s nuts to keep trying. And yet I keep stacking up the models on my hard drive, for no known logical reason or purpose. Me, Anne Aspey the Aspie, a raving case of rampant illogic, of which I highly disapprove. I’ve always held that humans say there are things higher than logic only because they aren’t capable of real logic, and here I am taking up important resources for nothing. Sunny is more logical begging for a treat when he isn’t at all hungry: at least he’ll enjoy eating it if he gets it.

Sometimes I wish I could let Sunny make my decisions instead of my making his. I’ve always accepted it on the grounds that I have more logic than he does, but now, I’m no longer certain.

I went to the hospital for some blood work to see what is causing the fatigue, although I am feeling a lot better since I removed the sugar from my diet. I went and bought some groceries, including some cashew butter, since it looks like I may have developed an allergy to peanuts. (Just what I need: another food allergy. And peanuts is a nasty one ’cause peanut oil is in everything.) Then I came home to a completely hysterical woofus.

It was a nice day, though. I had noticed when I forgot my sunglasses and the sun came out and determinedly stayed out. I just hate bright light. I almost never forget my sunglasses, but today I had been more worried about my umbrella. After I had recovered from my first Outing, though, I decided I had better take my woofus for WALKIES!!! He is unquestionably slowing down now that he’s going on seven, but he still loves to get Out as much as possible.

I started putting on my socks again, and the little guy took notice. I put on my shoes, and he got excited. (After all, putting on the socks could’ve just meant my feet were cold.) I picked up his water bottle to fill it, and the hyena yips began. They continued unabated—in fact, increasing in frequency of both number and pitch—until I got the back pack (which really is on its last threads and needs to be replaced) stocked with bags, collected my sunglasses, leashed my woofus, got to the lobby and locked the door, and took everything Outside. Once there, Sunny dropped the yips but not the bouncing. He wanted to be sure we were going off the property and not just for a bathroom break.

In the interim, however, the sky had clouded up and the wind picked up. I hadn’t realized the weather had changed so drastically. I really didn’t think I could ditch the WALKIES!!! but the weather continued to make its case. It smelled and felt like rain. I got caught in a storm a couple weeks ago and had no desire to repeat the experience so soon. Also, Sunny might act unimpressed at the nearness of a drenching, but he would be impressed enough if we didn’t make it back in time. Much to his disappointment, I headed for home. We did pause long enough to say hello to Wolf, the sixteen-year-old Toy Poodle. I hadn’t seen him in so long that I had been afraid to ask his humans how he was, so I couldn’t just rush by. We did start feeling the rain, so I excused us and we dashed for home as fast as my funky foot would permit.

Home again, I set the water in the kitchen going full-blast in the hopes it would cool enough to put it through the water filter. I remember that when years ago, my water heater broke, I knew it right away because I finally got cold water. My kitchen water comes in two temperatures: hot and hot-tapering-eventually-to-just-above-body-temperature. I went to the bedroom to see if Sunny’s bedroom water dish was empty. (I keep a second one in there for when it’s hot and the air conditioner is on and so the bedroom door is closed, but I keep it all the time so that Sunny knows it’s there.) I noticed, out the bedroom window, that there was sun streaming outside. The raindrops we had felt at Wolf’s were the worst of it, and the sun was back. Sunny also noticed. With a couple dashes to the door as I was passing through the hall with the water dish (both ways), he indicated that he knew it was sunny Out there, so it should be Sunny Out There.

I didn’t trust it, though. The rain came out of nowhere before, after all, and the weather report says a 50% chance of rain, so I kept us inside. The result was a decidedly peeved spaniel. Promises of lengthy WALKIES!!! on the morrow are, of course, of no comfort to one who doesn’t speak the language the promises were made in, so Sunny was not forgiving me for the WALKIES!!! tease. He even went to the living room to pout for about half an hour, until his “Must stay by Mommy!” imperative finally overrode his “MAD at Mommy!” one enough to bring him back into the bedroom with me.

It may be over now, though. When I started writing this, he was determinedly being his own woofus, not sitting next to me and making it clear I was a BAD mommy (and in my case, BAD can never mean “Being A Dog,” so it’s not good). But woofy instinct may override all: he’s now lying very close along the entire length of my leg and snoring fairly loudly, tongue sticking out as usual. Sable and I were just “chatting” today about how her dog will never forgive her the next time they move because right now they’ve a dog park so close they can go every day and how that shows who really runs the house. This may not be the same—after all, I did renege on the WALKIES!!! successfully—but who is going to get the last laugh? Undoubtedly Sunny, as mommy guilty drives me to extra long WALKIES!!! tomorrow. His dog house could never be as bad or as effective as the one I put myself in when I let him down.

This post is just to check in and say I haven’t forgotten my blog; I just haven’t the energy for it right now. Two weeks on the no-sugar diet and I no longer suffer the rampaging hunger, but I do not have any increase in energy. I have taken my woofus for WALKIES!!! the past couple days—on Friday we met a delightful Italian greyhound puppy and his humans—but that is about as much as I can accomplish. It’s a good thing it’s a three-day weekend in Japan, although I’m not sure what I’m going to do tomorrow when work resumes.

Well, I suppose I should take my woofus for some WALKIES!!! today before it gets too hot. There won’t be time for any for several days, and the little guy needs some fun in his life.

My friend Sable sent me a link to an article about how dogs use language at MSNBC. I was tickled because I’ve always held that Sunny works very hard at communication; it’s just that it’s nonverbal.

12/15/06

Everyone knows that dogs don’t really speak any human language, although they learn a few words in whatever language their caretaker favors. Sometimes when I’m talking to Sunny, he tilts his head in confusion, and I can imagine him thinking, “You’d almost think she actually means something by those sounds she makes.” In the end, most dogs teach their bipeds their language instead.

Sunny’s language is of course the Spaniel dialect of Dog. Dog is primarily a gestural language, having only one spoken word—”Woof!” or Dog for “DANGER!”—although there are assorted sounds. It is in the gestures that the meaning lies, however. A growl generally means “I am preparing to deal with DANGER!” but if the woofus in question is capering about and wagging his tail, this of course means “I am playing—by pretending that I am preparing to deal with DANGER!” The Spaniel dialect, as far as I can tell from my limited contact with speakers of other dialects of Dog, differs chiefly in the amount of bouncing that is required. Certainly Spaniel also makes heavy use of yipping, but that is not particular to Spaniel: Toy dogs yip. No other dog does quite the amount of wiggling and bouncing that spaniels do. It was originally bred into them so that they could make their way through hedges and heavy brush, they got into the habit of it, and now they find it hard to stop doing it. Sometimes it’s hard on the listener, as not only I but many small dogs of Sunny’s acquaintance can tell you. Bouncing is mostly an emphatic—whatever the spaniel means, they means it with all of their wiggly being and want their audience to know it.

We had not yet worked up to the bouncing stage yet on Wednesday, when I was working and noticed that so was Sunny. On me. He was lying on his window seat next to my bed and staring at me with his expectant look on his face. When done in the absence of my having elicited his attention, it is Spaniel for “I would like your attention, Mommy.”

I considered holding out for “I require your attention, Mommy” (sitting next to me and nudging with nose), “I really do require your attention, Mommy” (sitting next to me and nudging with nose and pawing), or perhaps even “NOW, YOU DAFT MONKEY!” (crying and bouncing next to me—if I didn’t have the laptop, it would be on me). I decided I didn’t have that much energy and I might as well get his request done with.

I put the laptop aside. “What do you want, sweetie? Show Mommy!”

“Show Mommy!” is one of the bits of English with which Sunny is familiar. The problem is the variety of responses. “I want Out,” for instance, can be conveyed in several ways. Classic Dog, of course, goes with the dog leading their underfurred, tailless monkey either to the front door or to the dog’s leash and touching the item with their nose, and Sunny does make use of both these phrases. Sunny, however, will also go to the vent that leads down to the basement and touch that with his nose. The derivation is obscure—possibly it comes from hearing the cats when they get into the basement. All I know is that it consistently means “I want Out” because if I respond by heading for his leash or my coat, he starts the “That’s it!!!” bouncing. There are also some variants that aren’t really responses to “Show Mommy” because they include acquiring my attention as part of the phrase. One of these, used when I’m sitting, is to sit next to me and indulge in overly dedicated hind-end washing; another, used exclusively when I am on my feet somewhere around the apartment, is herding me in the direction of the door, just as a Border Collie would herd a sheep. I often tell him that I’m not a sheep and he’s in grave danger of being stepped on, but even the times when exactly that has happened have not caused this phrase to fall into disuse. Ah, well, I guess life with anyone is a compromise. I really hate to be herded, though.

That day, though, we had gotten to “Show Mommy!” and Sunny’s response was to get up, gesture with his nose to the space between my bed and my bedside box, sit down on the window seat and wag his tail, with that happy expectant look that he gives when he is convinced he has communicated eloquently and a positive response will be immediately forthcoming.

I was flummoxed. What could he want in the space between the bed and the bedside box? Perhaps I had misunderstood. “Show Mommy!”

He repeated his performance, this time sticking his head fairly far down in the space.

Maybe one of his toys had fallen in that space? It does tend to collect small items. I poked through, with Sunny’s quivering nostrils almost in my face. Nothing that might make a spaniel’s heart beat faster.

Hm. Maybe this is a new and exceptionally obscure—not to mention esoteric—way of conveying a desire to go Out.

“Out, Sunny? Do you want Out?”

You know how the dog books recommend that if you don’t want your dog doing something, you should ignore it? That’s precisely what he did with my questions. He was still wagging and looking expectant, without any change to indicate that I was anywhere closer to his meaning.

Well, since whatever it was that he wanted was not in the space between the bed and the beside box, clearly it must be somewhere else. Let’s see if I can get him to lead me to it. I went into the hallway of my apartment, the exact geographic center of the place. I waited until he joined me. “Show Mommy!”

Ah, success! He headed for the kitchen. There, however, the success ended. He stood in the center of the kitchen, only recently made empty by his mommy’s cleaning efforts. There was nothing there to tempt a woofus, there being nothing there at all. “Show Mommy!” I proclaimed one more time.

He went around the shelves and into the pantry. The pantry? I keep tools in the pantry. Also things I want to get rid of but haven’t figured out how yet. And things I want to keep but haven’t figured out how yet. I don’t keep his food in there, and anyway, there was food in his bowl.

Sunny, noticing that he was alone in the pantry, poked his head around the edge of the stuff stacked next to the shelves and looked expectant. I think that was “Coming, Mommy?”

It was enough to make me tear out some of my underfurriness. I sat in the chair by the table.

“What do you want, Sunny?”

He trotted back into the pantry.

Making some grudging and complaining Mommy noises, I followed this time. “There is absolutely nothing—”

I stopped short. He was pointing to the top shelf of a set of small plastic shelves I have in the pantry. On the top of the shelves were some panes of a wire shelving unit—they’re wire squares that get linked together by plastic joiners that allow you to custom shape the shelf by attaching the panes into whatever right angles take your fancy—and on top of the panes, where I had supposed they were out of spaniel sight, were twenty pounches of Sunny’s favorite doggie treats. I had ordered them with his doggie kibble delivery and put them up there when he wasn’t looking because he was constantly dancing around my feet and demanding them when I kept them where he could see them. Having moved them there, I had promptly forgotten them.

I walked over and stood looking at the pouches. Sunny got very still and tense (”By George, I think she’s got it!”). I lifted one up and over to where it was definitely in his field of vision. There at long last, was the bouncing that, in this context, means “YES!!!”

And that’s when it hit me. Back before my stay in the hospital this year, I had kept a pouch of those treats between my bed and the bedside box, where they were readily available for whatever occasion might make treating a woofus desirable, and Sunny had used to ask for them by gesturing to that space. With the treats back, he was using an archaic phrase to ask for them. Still worse, standing in the center of the kitchen would put him in view of the currently open pouch of treats, if I had only opened the cupboard door. He was trying all the possible ways to say, “Gimme a treat, Mommy!”

I gave him one without any command being performed first. After that struggle with monkey obtuseness, he deserved one for free.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re locked in another struggle of interspecies communication. He doesn’t want Out, he doesn’t want food, and he doesn’t want treats—well, except in the general way that he always wants treats. I’ve got to figure out what the pestiness is about if I hope to be allowed to sleep tonight!

In Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Lives, in his discussion of Erasmus, he says, “it is a well-known fact, clearly demonstrated by history . . . that most people who have achieved great things in this world have done so because they wanted to avenge themselves for the way in which, at one time or another in their careers, they had been treated by God or man” (1942 ed., pp. 44–45). He goes on to say, however, “In the case of truly inferior characters, it [the inferiority complex] will provoke them into acts of cruelty and malevolence and inhumanity. In the case of superior characters, it may lead to manifestations of great benevolence, kindliness, and deep compassion for human suffering” (p. 45). (Being human, van Loon is of course focussed on human suffering.)

So from here on out, I’m going to try to keep it about the dog. I don’t know that I’ll succeed. I may end up giving up blogging instead. But I’m going to try to stay silent on my rage against humanity. No one ever hears rage beyond the rageness of it, to its source, anyway.