The Cat Person’s Dog Blog

This seems an appropriate day to tell Dinah’s 4th of July story. Dinah has always been a very brave animal–warning away all the dangerous deer and bunnies in our yard, doing battle with a hand-held orbital floor sander (while we were taking a break from forcing it to work on our floor, she slipped into the living room, grabbed it in her teeth, and repeatedly smashed it against the floor until she subdued it), protecting us from postal carriers and UPS and FedEx delivery folks, barking anytime she noticed there was excess oxygen. She was fearless–afraid of nothing.

Two years ago on July 4 we decided we’d slip out for a quick dinner at our favorite shrimp place. First Child was at a fireworks-watching party, Second Child was at sleep-away camp for the week, and we were all alone for the night. It was a beautiful evening and we knew we’d be back soon, so we left Dinah in the yard, of which roughly an acre is enclosed by invisible fencing. This is her paradise–a huge, grassy expanse with a covered porch, both sunny and shady places, squirrels and chipmunks to bully, and an elevated deck from which she loves to survey her kingdom.

The fencing is also her protection–though we have a very large back yard, the house is 200+ years old, and as is often the case with old houses, it sits very close to the road (the road being considerably wider than it was in 1790), and the road is a heavily traveled state highway, especially busy in the summer as it leads to a popular state beach about 3 miles south of here.

As it happened, though, it was such a lovely evening that we decided to leave the car downtown (downtown, you understand, is all of 2 blocks long where I live) and walk down to the beach to see a bit of the fireworks display that the town sponsors–they shoot the rockets from an offshore barge and we (and scores of other people) know just which beach to visit for the best viewing. We got home at about 10, relaxed, full of shrimp and with sandy feet.

Our surprise at not being met at the end of the path (the edge of her invisibly fenced territory) by Dinah when we got home quickly turned to concern, then to fear, then to horror. Dinah was gone. Not on or under the porch, not snoozing by the cedar tree, not surveying her kingdom from the deck. Not responding to our calls, nor to the rattle of the biscuit box.

Gone.

The pack leader got in the car and drove all over the neighborhood, looking and calling. First Child, when he returned from his own fireworks viewing, joined in the hunt. So did the local police, who cruised through our part of town looking for her, too. At 2 a.m., sick with dread, we went to bed, but not to sleep. I kept wondering how we’d tell Second Child that her dog had run away and been hit by a car.

At 7 we were up and making Lost Dog signs on the computer. We figured we could start calling neighbors at around 8 a.m., and made a list of folks to call. We called the pound, but no one was there yet. I was heartsick. How could she be gone? She had never challenged the invisible fence–had someone taken her? And she was completely clueless about roads, and ours was so busy.

At 7:40, the phone rang. “I hate to call so early,” a woman said, “But I think I have your dog. She’s with me and she’s fine.” Dinah was okay (fine, even)!. And found. The Pack Leader had his car keys out before I was even off the phone. No more than 10 minutes later Dinah bounded into the house. I was just limp with relief, and I think she was, too. I sat down in the kitchen floor (still in my bathrobe) and Dinah threw herself down, put her head in my lap, and simply howled. And I burst into tears and said furiously to my husband, “Someday she’ll REALLY be gone or she’ll die and break my heart because I love this dog and IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT.”

“Yup,” he said, and smiled. My dog person gene had suddenly activated.

Later in the afternoon I made a loaf of homemade bread and took it up to the house where Dinah had been found, about a mile up the road from us, but on the same street and–mercifully–the same side of the road. Slowly we began to piece together what we had suspected the night before. People in the neighborhood were also putting on their own fireworks shows. And Dinah got scared, and, panicking, ran across her fence line, then, not wanting to get zapped again by running back through it, ran away from the yard through the woods. As the crow flies (or the terrified airedale scampers), she could have reached her rescuer’s house without ever going near the road. The woman who found her said she’d gone out early to put her trashcans out for collection, and found Dinah sitting in her garage. Dinah was tired and dirty and scared, but she let the woman pet her and check her collar tags, including the one with our name and phone number on it. When the Pack Leader pulled up in their driveway, she was sitting on the porch enjoying being petted by the woman’s two small kids, but when she saw the PL she bolted for his car and hopped in over him as soon as he opened the door to get out. “Home, Dad,” she said.

Ever since that night, though, she’s been terrified of fireworks, and of thunder. So tonight while the kids are roasting marshmallows, we’ll slip her one with a Benadryl tablet inside (vet’s suggestion), and as the bombs are bursting in air, Dinah will be under the Pack Leader’s desk, her head tucked between his knees, waiting for the ruckus to subside. And I’ll be up the street babysitting Tris, the dog of friends of ours who will be away this evening, protecting her from the scary fireworks and keeping her from pulling the baseboard heaters off their walls, her personal fear response. In the next town over, my friend Sandi will be calming her noise-phobic dog Jordie, who has been known to eat through the drywall when it storms.

It’s a tough job. But a dog person’s gotta do it.

It’s only an orchard if two trees count as an orchard, and I say they do. And it’s my blog, so I make the rules.

Busy weekend coming up, so I’ll say only that I hope to grab enough time to pick the remaining sour cherries from the–yes–orchard. Before the catbirds get them.

Oh, and that while I was up on the ladder picking cherries yesterday, I looked down just in time to see a thief making off with a few ripe fruits:

Happy weekend.

Blog surfing the other day took me to a wonderful site, Les Petits Bonhers de Miss T, having mostly to do with beautiful sewing and embroidery projects. For many of these she provides instructions and charts. And, it’s not like I’m looking for stuff to do, but I may have to dig out the old embroidery needles and some black and tan floss for these babies:

Being partial to airedales, I think one more stitch under the noses and a few black stitches along the back would turn them into wonderful ‘dales. Searching Miss T’s site, though, will turn up all kinds of wonderful things–scotty dogs, reindeer, teapots, even a few rather decorative toilets.

Besides, Miss T fits perfectly into the cat person/dog person theme–my French is a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure the note she has written over the cross stitch chart says that she’s 100 times more cat person than dog person. As I know all too well, those can easily become the proverbial famous last words . . . look out, Miss T (and thanks for the kind permission to link to your blog).

It has come to my attention that today is officially Take Your Dog to Work Day.

As a freelance writer, I work mostly from my desk in our home office. Or the picnic table in the back yard. Because of that, the dogs (and cats) are just about always at work with me. Unlike the guinea pigs, who, lazy buggers that they are, only want to hang around the water cooler.

Here, for instance, is Crispin, hard at work in his role as office support staff.

The pleading and frightened look on his face is there because I’ve just told him to come up with a business plan that will clean up the mess on the printer table (I’m not even going to show him the desk–he’d just go on strike). Don’t anyone tip him off to the fact that he’s only going to be paid in kibble.

We bug the dogs now and then because they aren’t making any money. Why can’t they be models whose pictures end up on biscuit boxes? Why don’t they win silver bowls and big checks in the dog shows (okay, maybe that one is because the closest we ever get to a dog show is to watch them on tv once in a while)? Why can’t they rescue children who have fallen into wells, perform search and rescue missions after an earthquake, work as companions for people with disabilities, or have their own tv shows?

I mean, all they do, pretty much, is to lay around here waiting for meals. And, okay, the cats keep the evil spirits away. Yeah, Dinah and Crispin do jump up to see where we’re going even if it’s just to the bathroom or to the fridge for more iced tea, and they do race out the door ahead of us and fan out along the path in our terribly danger-infested suburban back yard and watch us all the way down the walk to see that we’ve made it safely to our cars without being–oh, mauled by chipmunks, say, or hit by falling acorns.

But most of the time they just hang around here under my desk, or wait for crumbs to fall from the kitchen table, or run in crazy happy circles greeting kids when they get home from school or grown ups when we return from long hard expeditions to the grocery store, or give us adoring looks when we do even stupid things or just sidle up and give us little nose-touches to let us know they’re on the . . . oh, wait . . . job.

Never mind. Maybe it’s really Take Your People to Work day. Keep up the good work, dogs.

The pack leader and I headed up to the Farmington (Connecticut) antiques show today, as we do most years at about this time. There were lots of people there with their dogs (including a seriously handsome and well-behaved pair of schnauzers and an adorable boxer puppy), and we briefly felt guilty about not bringing Dinah or Crispin, but it was hot hot hot humid humid humid and about the time we broke down and bought overpriced (but medically necessary) Italian ices, we decided they were probably happier at home after all.

Besides the living and breathing dogs, we saw lots of dog collectibles, like these:

and

Clearly I have a weakness for terriers in general and airedales in particular. I get airdales. And who wouldn’t love an airedale on wheels? Actually, it’s probably a good thing they don’t have wheels. I can only imagine the roller derby hell speeding through my kitchen and living room if Dinah and Crispin were that mobile! And of course they’d have to have scary roller derby names, perhaps Dina-Myte and The Crispinator. And we’d have to have our identities changed and go into hiding.

Here’s the thing I don’t get, though. Collectibles. Collecting things. Ask the pack leader, who has filled much of the house with antique fly fishing rods. They’re lovely. They’re (sort of) useful. But would one or two, even 5 or 6, not be enough? Instead of, oh, 4 or 5 hundred? I guess I just don’t have the gene (though I fully appreciate that in lean years–and there have been a number of those), the fly rod trade has served us well.

I know there are people who collect dog stuff, either in general or specific to a breed to which they are partial. I have a pin of an airedale. And I once gave the pack leader an Airedale Pale Ale tee shirt he wears at the gym. But that’s as far as I can take it. Two airedales are in and of themselves a complete collection for me.

What about you–do you collect stuff related to dogs? What do you have, and what are you still looking for?

We interrupt this blog for an important news update:

Mother and 5 babies doing well.

A few posts back, I wrote about how Dinah often seems to know when I’m coming home. She’ll plop herself down by the door to watch for me, not when I’m almost home, but when I’m just setting out for home, even if I’m over 100 miles away. I mentioned Rupert Sheldrake, who does research on this phenomenon.

Now your very own “dogs that know” story can become part of research history. I just read on Boing-Boing that researcher Alex Tsakiris is trolling for stories of other dogs who do this. Visit “Dogs who know” to find out how you can tell your own story of your dog’s connection to you and your travels–and read about other people’s experiences.

We’ve passed through the 10 days that count as spring in New England–those 10 mild and balmy days between weather that still periodically dips into the lower 30s and weather that is suddenly close to 100 degrees. Though it’s hot and we’re all scrambling to get the window units into the few rooms that positively demand air conditioning, it’s also dramatically, lushly beautiful, verdant and alive with trees in full leaf and vines and magnificent flowers–azaleas and iris and that pinky-orange-flowering umbrella-like tree with the peeling bark that we don’t know what it is but we love.

And there are birds. Many, many birds. We are fortunate enough to have a couple of acres of yard that include a stream, a pond, vegetation of all heights and densities, making it a little paradise for the birds. We have water birds–ducks and Canada geese (who somehow DO seem to have gotten the memo requiring them to stay in our neighbor’s yard where we can see them and appreciate their handsome plumage and their impossibly cute and fuzzy goslings, but where we don’t have to deal with their soil enrichments), herons and red-winged blackbirds, hawks and osprey, barn swallows, and all manner of song-birds.

Here’s where it gets interesting, because it isn’t just the human residents here who appreciate the presence of the birds. Nemo, for instance, whom you haven’t met yet, spends hours sitting in the windowsill over our bed, keeping careful track of the comings and goings of a pair of purple finches who inhabit a tangle of leafy vines that crawl up the chimney on that side of the house. She chirps softly at them in a gentle way that means, “If it weren’t for this damned screen between us, you two would be toast.”

When we disturb her voyeuristic activities gentle birdwatching, she rewards us with a fond look that clearly says, “Do you not have anything better to do than bother me?”

We do, of course. Right now we are very busy protecting these:

Protecting them from Dinah and Crispin, who have discovered this wren’s nest just at their eye-level, tucked into the frame of the office window that looks out onto the porch. We were tickled when the wrens began to build their nest their, anticipating the joy of being able to see up-close the building of the charming nest, the tiny nestled eggs, and the hungry young babies as they hatched.

Okay, first we gave them an “F” in nest-building–I’m telling you, they just flung sticks at the windowsill and however they happened to fall was okay with them. Then, at about the same time that we discovered (through quick peeks every few days when the parent wrens were away) these 5 amazing little eggs (about dime-sized), the dogs also discovered them, and it fell to us to keep them from eating the eggs. Fortunately, the pack leader cleverly hit upon an arrangement of boards (left over from a building project)–that, propped at just the right angle, blocks both the dogs’ view of the nest and their access to it, but leaves plenty of room for mama wren (who figured it out quickly) to fly in and out.

Of course, the neighbors may call the planning and zoning commission–our remodeling isn’t exactly something you might see in House Beautiful–but we think it’s a small price to pay for the safety of our new tenants.

When I’m not herding dogs, one of the things I do is study goju ryu karate. Yesterday evening as I was preparing for class, I went to return my freshly washed and dried gi to my gym bag, which I had left, unzipped, in the mudroom next to the washing machine. Here is what I found on the floor next to the bag:

Those of you who also study a martial art may detect, upon very close inspection, a scarcely noticeable bite-shaped hole in what had previously been a perfectly lovely karate belt. A brown belt. For which, not to put too fine a point on it, I worked pretty hard. As it happens, once the belt is properly tied around the waist of–oh, say–me, the bitten space falls precisely at the center of my back.

Curiously, forensic science brought to bear on the damaged item indicates that the bite is not inconsistent with the mouth–and teeth–of a small creature. Perhaps a dog. Perhaps a small airedale. If the jury will admit evidence on the previous behavioral history of–ahem–the smaller of two airedales who happened to be found loitering in the vicinity of the crime scene, one might assume not be able to rule out the possibility that this smaller airedale might be, as they say on TV, a ” person creature of interest” in the investigation into the belt’s destruction. Further investigation is warranted.

In the meantime, please let it also be noted that the business end of the belt itself is also worth examining:

The tip end of the belt is not the only thing missing. See the two stripes of highly official goju ryu electrical tape? This time yesterday there were three stripes, one of them only recently awarded.

I’ve been demoted. By my dog.

Sigh.

Having posted my recollections of A Cat Called Room 8, allow me to recommend a canine-themed book as well. I’ve just finished reading Martha Sherrill’s Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain (Penguin, 2008). Sherrill, a long-time staff writer for the Washington Post, has written a marvelous book about a remarkable man, Morie Sawataishi. Morie is the heart and soul of this book, but it’s just as much about the dogs he loved (and presumably still loves–by the end of the book Morie is 90), the Japanese snow country in which he thrives, the conventions he challenged, the rules he broke to save the akita from extinction as a breed, and the legacy he leaves behind for the dog world.

I won’t give too much away–except to say that Sherrill describes Morie in a respectful, unvarnished way, and that one of the strongest threads weaving through the book concerns the conflicts that often arise between Morie’s communion with the akitas (and with the people who live within their orbit) and his life as a husband and father. His wife Kitako, for instance, almost leaves him when he brings home (in violation of Japanese law at the time) his first akita puppy, since the family, in post-WWII Japan–is just about starving and feeding the pup places even more stress on their food supply.

Morie is a man with a calling. Whether you love akitas or some other breed, Dog Man is a book worth reading.