In Which We Provide a Better Life, and Are Given One In Turn

Today I walked by a pet store, the kind that sells actual pets, as opposed to just pet supplies. This particular pet store is a fancy-pants Upper East Side store, so they come with a high price tag and all sorts of guarantees that the dogs are not from puppy mills but are, in fact, well bred and highly socialized pups from reputable breeders. I spent a lot of time staring at one display in particular that featured a small Havanese and a small Chihuahua puppy, who were having some fun bouncing around each other as they ate their kibble. 

When I first got Rosie, she was approximately a year old, and she definitely still had a lot of puppy in her, but she had also already had a year of life that was largely unknown to me.  Maddy came with still greater mysteries, being of an even less determinate age, but undoubtedly at least two years old.  And Maddy also has physical mysteries of her past—a piece of her ear that is missing, and a little red scar on the top of her nose that has since disappeared—evidence of a life in which she felt the need to scrap and wrangle for her life.

In Which Our Companions Are Ourselves

Once when I was waiting for Rosie in the vet's office, I found a book that claimed to tell you, the presumably female reader, what a man's dog's breed says about him.  I joked later that this intrigued me so that I could give my girlfriend some key advice, but obviously I was just curious as to what the verdict on me was, so I flipped to the section on Beagles.

In Which Things That Go Bump In the Night

When I was little, I used to get terrible nightmares, week in and week out sometimes.  I don't remember a lot of the specifics of these nightmares, mostly they were security related and involved terrible home-invasion fears.  I definitely used to picture somebody having snuck into my apartment and positioned himself in the shadows of my room, just waiting… waiting… for the perfect moment… to STRIKE!  What they were after, I'm not sure.  I can definitely remember specific things that used to prompt weeks of nightmares for me.  There was the time my brother and his friend Jason literally forced me to watch Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (they held me in place and would punch me if I closed my eyes) and there was the time I saw a trailer for a movie called Dr. Giggles, about a murderous, clownish doctor.  The story that frightened me the most was a scary story that a friend of mine told me once. 

You can read a few different versions of the story here, but I will summarize it as best I can.  Basically, a girl is left alone with her dog for protection.  She wakes up in the night to a dripping sound and tries to turn a faucet off more tightly, returning to bed and reaching down in the dark to have the dog lick her hand for reassurance.  She wakes up again to dripping and tightens another faucet, &c., this repeats a couple times.  When she wakes up in the morning she finds a bloody note by the closet that says "HUMANS CAN LICK TOO" and finds the dog hanging inside the closet with its throat slit (its blood was the dripping noise).

In Which Enthusiasm Is First Restrained and Then Granted Sweet Freedom

Last night, I went to a friend's house for dinner and general hanging out.  This friend has a roommate with a yellow lab puppy (ten months old, I think) whose name is Ollie.  Next to twenty-three pound Rosie, and particularly ten pound Maddy, Ollie feels like a giant dog to me.  He is also very much a puppy, full of puppy energy and playfulness.  I have very rarely seen him without some slobbery, chewed-on object in his mouth that he will plop into someone's lap.  He also has a fairly high dose of puppy neediness, and he is constantly in search of attention and affection wherever he can get.  All of these things, in combination with his relatively large size in a relatively small living space, combine to make Ollie a kind of tornado of a dog—always bounding over people, onto people, and into whatever they're doing.  Last night, Ollie was not as insistent as he has been in the past, but we still found him crawling his way over everyone while we were trying to concentrate on a rousing game of Mario Tennis. 

Nonetheless, at one point in the evening I still found myself pulling this fifty plus pound dog into my lap and covering him with belly rubs and smooches while I cooed compliments at him.  I realized as I was doing this that nobody else there was nearly as engaged with the dog as I was, and I suddenly felt a little self-conscious about it (as is constantly my wont).  While continuing to shower Ollie with love and attention, I turned to my friends and said, "I have been living with two of the cutest dogs in the world for the last three weeks and it has made me CRAZY."

In Which Animals With Prominent Facial Appendages Provide Great Promise for Self-Improvement

Tonight's is going to be a short post, I think, although I suppose I'll see how it shakes out once I'm finished.  As you can tell by the late hour at which I am posting, it has been a long day—one that began with a severe lack of sleep, was distinguished by a great blockage in writing, and punctuated by a severe lack of blockage in my digestive system.  Having already gone into too much detail, let me just say that I have come out the other end of this day feeling relatively satisfied with the result. 

Not to change the subject, but I love walruses.  Next to this paragraph is the taxidermic walrus from the American Museum of Natural History, here in New York City.  I used to go the Natural History Museum all the time when I was little, mostly because I really, really, REALLY loved dinosaurs.  I loved dinosaurs so much that I knew everything there was to know about them, but I still dragged my parents to the museum just so I could repeat all the things I knew, and discuss which dinosaur was my favorite (Brontosaurus, of course, because he was a gentle giant, and YES, I am aware that they have since decided Brontosauri do not exist except as a juvenile Apatosaurus). Anyway, the only thing that I loved almost as much as the dinosaurs, and always made sure to see when I went to the museum, was Mr. Walrus over there.