AS A LIFELONG CAT PERSON, I am most comfortable when my beast of the moment is snoozing on the nearby chair or prowling the house and yard for snacks, or just sitting nearby, staring into the middle distance. Whenever I catch her at that (and my cats, over the sixty-some years I’ve had them, almost always were female), she doesn’t even acknowledge my gaze by meeting my eye but busily commences grooming, often comically sitting on her haunches and bending into positions that cause my back to ache merely through looking. A few swipes of tongue over fur and then she glances my way, asking, “And what’s the big deal, Sparky?”
We fare well together, these cats and I. I make no big deal of this pet preference, having long believed it speaks for itself. Evidently, however, it hasn’t spoken to my daughter.
“I’ve had enough of it,” I declared. “I’ve played Charon to too many of our four-legged friends.” Undermining my cause a little, I fear, because my daughter interprets any flowery language to mean that I’m out of my mind (or more so than usual) and not to be taken seriously. Seeing her skeptical moue, I reiterated: “No more dogs!”
Keep in mind that we live in a fairly rural area on a fifty-acre farm. There’s room enough if you try to ignore the small state highway flowing about a dozen yards from our front porch. Dogs are as much a part of the landscape as chickens and cows (and there are chickens and cows a-plenty). Dogs barking are another area feature, although I’m hardly one to complain: our roosters (we have three!) raise their own annoying racket, although I’m hoping for a pot of coq au vin in the near future.
No more dogs. And I meant it. And then I saw a Facebook photo posted by a friend who lives over the hill behind our farm. A litter of pups, the half-dozen that remained from an already picked-over litter of nine. The friend’s chocolate Lab had a fling with a heeler and, like so many canine one-night-stands, got her in the family way. I showed the photo to Lily. “You might be interested in one of these,” I muttered. She looked at me in disbelief.
All puppies are adorable. I know this; they’re meant to be so, or we’d immediately drown the damn things. But these ...
Plus there was the moral advantage of buying local. Moral? How about financial! Sure, we tossed the humans connected to the critters a few bucks for the convenience of it, but it was nothing like the fee that soaks you when buying from shop or shelter.
Okay, there was also the moral disadvantage that this wouldn’t strictly be a rescue animal, but I figured that by narrowing my philosophical eyelids, I could blur the contours of this transaction.
The transaction took place. Lily picked the smallest, shyest pup of the remaining litter. It was Memorial Day, 2023. We had some friends over that afternoon for a cookout. Lily cradled the pup, now called Clio, in her lap, occasionally letting her stagger on the lawn. People cooed over her, fussed over her, told their own not nearly as exciting dog stories over her. Clio seemed oblivious. In fact, she seemed to be mentally damaged or something, and I wondered if there were any kind of a return guarantee.
I stopped worrying the following day. This puppy came to life. She explored her new quarters, found them acceptable, and showed us the interesting fountains of urine that she could produce whenever anybody came to the door. Clio expanded into the space, you might say, showing us how much of it she required (a lot) even as my cat showed her how much of it she’d be allowed (not much).
For example: I work in an office at the front of the house. I’m seated at a large desk, the center leg of a U of three desks to accommodate a computer, a printer, a flatbed scanner, a document-feed scanner, a police scanner, an espresso machine, papers, papers, books, and more papers. I’m not surprised that she’s learned to recognize the cadences of a phone call that’s finishing; our previous dog did the same. But it does mean that, as I’m saying, “All right ... sure ... you bet ... okay ... nice to hear from you ... goodbye,” Clio positions herself in my office doorway. End of a call means time to go out, does it not? Also, from time to time, as I’m typing, Clio pads in quietly, places her snout underneath my forearm, and unapologetically lifts my arm from the keyboard. It’s efficient, I’ll give her that.
It again signals her need to drag me outdoors, where I will catapult a tennis ball, using a long-handled spoon designed for this purpose, to distant reaches of the yard. She watches my eyes as I size up the targets and dashes off in the direction so indicated, even before I’ve angled the spoon to make the throw. And I do mean dashes, usually arriving at the destination before the ball bounces to earth. And then she gallops back, drops the ball at my feet, and watches my eyes again.
This will go indefinitely, as far as I can tell – I’ve never outlasted her. So I got into the habit of murmuring, “Okay, this is the last one” before making the session’s final throw, and I’d be on my feet and headed inside as she returned. It wasn’t more than two or three sessions before she began beating me to the door.
She knows her own name, of course, but she also has learned the names of the family – and this is where I learned a form of her communication to me. If I ask her, “Where’s Lily” when Lily is, in fact, somewhere nearby but out of sight, Clio will point with her nose in the correct as-the-crow-flies direction. If I’m in my office and my wife is at the other end of the house in the kitchen, I can say to Clio, “Get Susan!” and she’ll bound through the two intermediary rooms and around the corner into the kitchen, where she’ll make a fuss that Susan refuses to understand as a summons. Oh, well.
If we’re outside and she’s forgotten to bring a projectile, I’ll say, “Go get a stick” and she’ll root around the yard for an acceptable length and width. We’ve also got phrases like “Want to go upstairs?” and “Get your dinner bowl” understood, and I must emphasize that I deliver them with as little signaling of tone of voice or gesture as possible. But I know she’s far more aware of such nuance than I can perceive. Still, the challenge of teaching her English amuses me, and I look forward to when we’ll be able to work on subject-verb agreement, the need to complete dependent clauses, the proper meaning of “nonplussed,” and the odiousness of “irregardless” and the use of “impact” as a verb.
Meanwhile, my cat regards it all with a smug, thinly veiled contempt. Of course, that’s how she regards all of my activities except feeding her and napping. It’s nice that a dog can provide a little welcome relief from all that attitude.
No comments:
Post a Comment