The Goose that Got Away

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Recently, I had a dream.

Before you groan and run away, yes, there have been times in my life I’ve been guilty of over-sharing when it comes to dreams.  But this one has a point, I promise – so stay with me.

A baby goose grew from my hip and started demanding food.

It was a greedy little critter, and soon became unwieldy attached to my hip.  So I tried to detach it and accidentally separated the poor beast from one of its legs!

It didn’t seem to mind, it just wanted food.  Lots of it.  Now.

I took the goose to the local supermarket, but somehow, they had run out of sardines.  We began to get desperate.

I stood, holding my flailing goose, by a rocky, surging coastline.  How am I going to catch fish in there? I wondered, but before I could answer, the goose wrestled free and dove in.

No!! But he hasn’t learned to swim!  He’s too weak to fish!  He’s disabled!  He’ll be crushed on the rocks!  I screamed, silently, watching for any sign of a resurging goose.

Then, on the crest of a massive wave, I saw my goose.  Head held high, swimming with the glee of a bird wild and free…

Coming back to reality is always frightening after one of those dreams.  What does it all mean? you ask, not really wanting an answer.

The truth is, I’ve been keeping a little pet project all to myself.  I thought if I don’t tell you, then it’s not real.  I can back out anytime.  It can die a hungry death and no one need be wiser.

Except my pet has started growing up!  It’s become greedy and snatching and uncontrollable.  I’m afraid you’ll start to notice my strange behavior – unexplained absences, slurred comments and an oddly non-existent life outside of blogging.

So it’s come to that point in a parent’s life when, even if I don’t think he’s ready to go public, he has other ideas.  He might be missing a leg or a whisker, but the time has come to share my work in progress with some friends…

Say Hello to Pepi.

Some of you might remember me telling you about the day I realized Pepi was the Best Man in My Life.  How I had a second chance to honour his being before he says goodbye.

Pepi never was one to have his picture taken.  Quite aside from the fact that he would never sit still long enough, he hates the camera.  And for a long time I was too allergic to budgeting poor to own one.

Instead, his story will soon come to life in a series of illustrated verse.  Above is the illustrator’s first sketch – I don’t know about you, but I think she’s done a mighty fine job.

Pepi’s not so sure.

Now when he hears his name, he’s suspicious it’s a rival dog that lives in the computer.  His fears are confirmed by the barks of Youtube Pepi look-alikes that get played on repeat!

Anyway, the point here is – I’ve been keeping this quiet in case it all goes to pot.  But now that the illustrator is weaving her magic, it is taking up hours of my day – finding reference material, reviewing sketches, researching Kindle formatting (argh), tweaking verse…and the list goes on.

This, unfortunately, leaves less room for chit-chat in the virtual social-sphere.  I’m doing my best to keep up with you all, but let’s just say, I’ve bitten off more than I can comfortably chew in learning curves this year!

At least now you’ll know it’s not because I’m sleeping on the job 😉

Do you have any wild dreams you’d like to share?  Maybe a goose that got away?  How did you handle it?

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Credit for images not mine is as follows:

Dogs, Children and Toy Envy

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This topic was prompted by the angry outburst of a young woman who declared she was not that different to the dogs she trains.  I was impressed by the passion of her statement; one that some would consider an insult to their own intelligence.

It’s a question I am usually hesitant to voice on account of my family’s screw-faced disdain for four-legged things.  But since blogging has given me an emboldened sense of self-confidence, I thought I’d ask it here.

How different, really, are dogs from us?  Can they legitimately be called a child substitute?

A couple of years ago I happened upon a documentary that gave me all the ammunition I would ever need in defending my pooch spoiling ways.

On account of the incredible smarts of a dog in Austria, The Secret Life of the Dog puts a canine’s intellectual capacity on par with a child aged two or three.

This was proven, not only by the undeniable size of the dog’s vocabulary, but by it’s remarkable skills of toy recognition.  (It’s amazing what a bit of positive reinforcement can do.)

While the skeptics among us are busy squabbling over the science, let me just say I’ve personally witnessed two types of sentient being in no doubt whatsoever of the validity of this claim.

You guessed it.  Dogs and children.

The Christmas before Pepi’s brain broke, we went camping.  Best Christmas ever.

Next to us was a cute family of four, also trying to escape their relatives.

On Christmas afternoon, the little four year old girl wandered over for a bit of Christmas present show and tell.  The books went by without a whimper.  But then she made the mistake of bringing out the sparkling unicorn.

It might have been bigger than Pepi, but as far as he was concerned, that toy was, “Mine, all mine!”

The more she snatched it out of reach, the more incensed he became until, alas, poor Pepi had to be locked away in the tent and reprimanded.

Upon my return, her pronouncement that Pepi was a “naughty boy!” was disproportionate to the size and status of a little scrap of dog.  It smacked, just a tad, of triumph over rival.

Then there was the time my Neephs came to visit.

“He’s got soooooo many toys!” declared my three year old niece, and then the kids closed in and counted…one…two…three…SIX toys!

“Such a nice big bed!!” she squealed.  “I wish I had a bed like that!”

She would have climbed in with him, were it not for the self-protective yelp that Pepi gave.  The yelp of one’s belongings under siege.

To everyone’s credit, most of the kids I know are very good with Pepi – and likewise, he with them.  But there is something about the way they interact.

Some illuminating, though slightly worrying experiments on foxes in Siberia, show the way we have bred dogs to be frozen at an infantile stage of life.

Were it not for this, our dear little pups would be far more aggressive, cynical and, funnily enough, a lot less cute looking.

Which brings me to the conclusion of this little tale.

There are two resounding complaints I hear from a different brand of silver fox:

(1) That they don’t see their grown-up children enough.

(2) That their children didn’t turn out quite the way they hoped they would.

So here we have it, the real reason why people have dogs:

They never grow up or leave home.  They rarely disappoint.  And most of all, they love us cutely and unquestioningly for their entire life 🙂

It makes me wonder if this is also an unconscious reason behind the cosseting or curtailing of our teens.  Who is it that really isn’t ready to let go?

Of course, Dr Peter Rowley-Conwy also raises the question of parasitic relationships, but I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

The moral of the story is, who could ask for a better child substitute? In the words of Dr Morten Kringelbach “What we get in return is probably sometimes much greater than what we put in”.

Do you have a similar story to tell about children and dogs? Or is this just anthropomorphism dressed in expert clothing? Please do share…

Finding the Path to Peace

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This week I’ve met some beautiful people, all of who – in their own way – are grappling with the question of time, regret, living in the moment.  I’m touched by their journeys, especially The Mezz and The Nomad, who echo some of mine.

It’s like we’re always fighting with ourselves, wondering why, in the two or twenty years that passed, we are still here.  But lessons in acceptance sometimes come from the most unlikely places.

Pepi was never one to live outside the moment.  Up until he was fifteen, both he and I were fully convinced of his invincibility.  In this Alter fantasy, he was Bolt, and I his helpless human sidekick.

(See – that’s me in the background – just trying to keep up!)

There was a time when fifty throws of the ball in the park was puppy’s play for him.  He’d bolt on and off the bed, the couch, the front porch step at something close to warp – and if you dared to squeak that squeaky toy…

The only time he sat still was when I ate, and then there were those eyes…

Slowly as his superpowers waned, there always seemed to be a good excuse.

When he lost sight of the ball it was…Aw, well, he does have cataracts.

When he grabbed the ball and ran for home at throw number eight…It must be his arthritis.

When he left a puddle on the kitchen floor…well, that one was harder to excuse.

The day his brain broke we were not prepared.

I had taken him with me for a dinner visit.  Pepi had paced the unfamiliar house the whole night until we left.  It must be he’s excited, I thought.

When we got home he was hyper.  He tried to jump up on the couch, but missed and hit his head.  And then, before my eyes, it all unraveled.

His back legs went limp.  His eyes rolled wild.  He tried to walk and kept on banging into things.

We were both shrieking – he from terror, and me in a futile attempt to stop him injuring himself.  It was like he’d had a stroke.

When we went to see the vet, I didn’t expect them to tell me the only thing they could prescribe was rest.

Idiopathic Vestibular Disease is an alarming, sudden onset loss of balance in older dogs with no known cause.  Though the symptoms can be indicative of other underlying issues, such as brain tumors, luckily for Pepi, this was not the case.  Remarkably, his symptoms mostly subsided after three full days of rest.

But he never has been quite the same.

It was like that moment when Bolt realized it was all a scam.  He never did have superpowers.  It was just an elaborate story people told him so they could entertain themselves.

Any wonder that depression, dementia and hand feeding followed.

Until that point, I had probably spent most of his adult life wishing he would calm the F down.  Now I wished he would just be the way he was before.

I could have put us both out of our misery then, but hadn’t his whole life been working its way to this point?

How could I deny him the part where’s he earned his right to be a pampered pooch?

He’s not the same dog, it’s true.  He’s a Superdog that just retired.

He rarely speaks these days.  He knows his limits.  Sometimes he forgets things.

One day recently he was left home alone for an unusually long time.  When I got back, he was fed.  We played a little game with squeaky toy.  He ate his chew.  After that, he went to sleep in front of the TV, as he likes to do.

Half way through The Good Wife, he woke up with a start.  I caught him staring at me like he’d seen a ghost.  It was clear he couldn’t remember me coming home.  Or the game.  Or being fed.  Or the chew.  He wanted the whole thing, all over again.

I could have said no, but he would have gone to bed all angry.

So I gave him supper, and he slept.  So happily.

The passing of time into old age seems like a cruel joke – but only if we fight it.  Now that we’ve accepted his mortality, it’s a whole new world of discovery on the path to peace.

Have you ever been confronted with the unexpected passing of time?  How have you coped?  If you’ve written or read a post about it, feel free to leave a link in the comments so we can share…

The Best Man in My Life

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What a rollercoaster ride this blogging business is!  Having dived in headfirst last week, I got to Monday and suddenly realized a few things:

–       I have to do this every week

–       I have no idea what to say to the thousand (Twitter) voices in my head

–       I need to get out of bed earlier!

Then I saw Coleen Patrick’s new blog and nearly had a tear.  Leaning into the Leap is a beautiful and inspiring lesson about the things we don’t want to do (or think we can’t), and the lessons we can learn from dogs.  It was so simple, and so profound, that I simply had to share it – here, on Twitter – everywhere.

On an entirely different note, it’s the little things that keep us going, right?  The biggest buzz for a newbie is getting a Like on your page within half on hour of putting it out there!

Ellayourbella was my first Like!  I’ve seen her around a few times now, and have no idea how she finds us newbie’s, but the best surprise of all was her blog.  An uncensored, wicked-funny romp through “My Discarded Men” – with some solid advice for single women (and men) on the dating scene (did I mention Uncensored?).

Anyway, for very different reasons, this blog is dedicated to Coleen and Ella – for keeping me going 🙂

Relationships are funny things.  The superficial ones you always know you have to work at and so, in an odd way, you don’t take them for granted.  But then there are those other ones that stick around, so long a forgotten limb – until they’re (nearly) gone.

You’d think sixteen years might make me pay attention.  But next thing I’m sitting in the therapist’s chair and she states, as if it’s nothing, “Well, he’s probably the most consistent relationship in your life up until now!”

And that was the moment that I woke up to the fact that the best man in my life was of the fur persuasion!

Meet Pepi

I met Pepi when I was eighteen years old.  As is usually the case with these things, it wasn’t like I went looking for him.  It was my flatmate at the time who wanted a man pup – but when I saw his brother, it was love at first sight.

I didn’t realize then that he was probably too young to be brought home, so little surprise now that he has a Mommy complex.

But who could blame me?  The morning after the first night – he loved me more, not less!  Before long, he was the only one with a toe fetish that was impossible to resist 🙂

When I think about it now, he has always had a lot going for him on the man stakes:

–       easy to clean up after

–       relentlessly positive and chirpy

–       fiercely loyal and protective of his girl

–       able to be physically controlled restrained in volatile situations of his own making

And that’s not all.

He always notices my sense of style!  The day I shaved off all my hair, he was particularly incensed.  Whether it was because he didn’t like it, or didn’t recognize me, either way his outrage was well founded, showing he’s a man of taste.

But best of all he loves me most in my daggiest of states (Aussie slang for ‘unfashionable, untidy and dirty’).  Okay, that is probably self-serving on his part, as it means (luckily for the rest of the world) that I’m not leaving home.  Still, it’s nice to be loved for who you are.

Which brings me to the present and the reason for my visit to the Doc.  I can’t leave home anymore.  The last time I did, after four days away, he had started on his own Advanced Vetcare Directive of Nil by Mouth.

The time before that, when I left him for a day with a friend at a retirement village, he cried so hard all day the neighbours worried he’d be next.

It turns out sweet sixteen is not so sweet for the little fella, especially when I’m not around.

I’m left with two choices.  One is – forever.  The other is – ‘inconvenient’, but it is a second chance.

It requires medication for his mind, pain relief for his bones, a walk every day before breakfast, home cooked meals and treats and Me – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think about the times I lived alone with him, huddled in front of a bar heater in the gloomy Melbourne winter, watching Xena while he gnawed my shoe.  He was there.  He was always there.  And once he’s gone, he’s gone.  At least now he has no doubt that he’s the Best Man in My Life.

What about you?  Do you have loved ones of the fur persuasion?  Do they know they’re loved?  What would you do if you had a second chance?