Many a snack dog has been denigrated under the pen name Haredawg and its variations. I’m not going to recant, but I’m granting amnesty to one snack dog. To be fair he doesn’t know he is a snack dog, he thinks he’s a mastiff, and he does have a beagle somewhere in his woodpile and beagles are mid-size economy dogs. Ok, not really, but they aren’t snack dogs, they are working dogs.
Doc Watson, hey I didn’t name him, is something like fourteen years old and a dachshund/beagle mix. I’m babysitting him for the weekend. I think both my sister and I thought we were doing the other a favor. She has a dog sitter for the other two back in Tennessee. I think she thinks I really needed a dog for a few days and I think that without a traveling companion her drive gets too melancholy for lack of a better descriptor. We are both a little bit right.
It’s difficult sometimes to extend kindness, there’s always a small implication of insult in there. It’s different if you pull someone who’s being swept away by the current out of an icy river; give them dry clothes, a blanket and a cup of coffee. That’s someone in need of kindness. The small insult in other sorts of kindness is that the other person can’t manage on their own.
Some people you have to fool into accepting help, like offer them a job that you tell them you are incapable of and pay them and tell them they might as well stay for dinner.
All that said, I’m glad to have Doc, though he has peed on my floor twice. The attic steps are steep and unfamiliar to him. Um, he might have rolled or slid down them this morning, I don’t know, it was dark. No barking or whimpering. He’s glad to have company. He’s one of three hospice dogs my sister has. I was under the impression when I first heard that a few years back that the dogs themselves were terminal. My sister explained otherwise though didn’t start that explanation off with a “no …” or a laugh.
Her old boss at the hospice she works for, or rather out of, transferred across country and asked her to take them. He must know as well as anybody that she has a real hard time saying no. The Clumber (a great wooly dog that would never be mistaken as a snack though might be mistaken as a Dr. Doolittle push-me-pull-you --- his butt and his head are the same shape and covered in wool) actually worked hospice. He was one of those critters that make people feel better. Blind and stubborn as he might be in dotage, it’s a passive stubbornness, when he needs to lay down he just does and nothing shy of a forklift his going to get him up. Oh, his name is Waylon Jennings.
The other one is a dogs dog, a golden lab, the sort of dog every kid imagines when he starts telling his parents how he’ll never ask for another thing, ever, and he will walk the dog, feed him, clean up his messes and do any other damn thing his parents want if he can just have a dog; a golden lab. Conway Twitty. He has bad hips and starts barking at two in the morning to either pee or because it’s barking time. Conway would never make the attic steps, hard enough to get him up the first flight of stairs.
Besides what my sister and I may or may not have needed, I think Doc needed some one on one time. The two big dogs get to the water and the food first. Doc has a mighty bark, the only times I’ve heard him bark has been out of the sight of humans. He seems fine with my company, which isn’t all that weird, it’s a rare dog that doesn’t trust me (I almost typed like, I’m careful not to anthromorphize dogs too much, though with my own I had entire sets of agendas and mythologies surrounding their intents and motivations. I assume folks knew it was hyperbole.). Trust, however, is obvious. It’s an instinctual thing. You either know it when you see it or you’ve had a lot of dogs bark you into a corner.
I’ll try to get a picture of him. My back is a bit tense, so I haven’t quite gotten on the floor yet (might have something to do with 1) there is talcum powder on the floor absorbing some pee and 2) guilty about the roll and or slide this morning, I carried him up both flights of stairs. There’s a lot of dog packed into that little dog suit.). A picture from above is going to look like all pictures from above of small dogs. Like they are all ears and nose with a cartoon body below. The fish eye effect that makes most phone-at-arms-distance-self-photos look weird makes little dogs look weirder.
I’ve been playing with talk to text on my phone, speaking of bad things smart phones do. It’s actually not as bad as autocorrect, so I tried some ten and twenty dollar words and some words that I don’t pronounce very well. You can make talk to text go all funny auto correct but you have to work at it. Saying the punctuation works a good ninety percent of the time, the other ten percent I’m sure has to do with me not pausing long enough.
I don’t know. There are other things going on. The other things make me sound crazy. Doc makes me sound wholesome and boring. One day I really will be wholesome and boring without trying too hard. It’s not a day I dread.
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