A Different Kind of Summer

Different in What Way(s)?

 

Somehow a new blog post hasn’t been coming together for me this past week. I started one around the theme of “Falling Down on the Job” (since I was having so much trouble accomplishing the job of writing a post), but though I cranked out several sections, wandering around among local and personal job-related topics, what I got down into a file seemed uninspired. 

 

My heart wasn’t in it, I guess. As is true for my puppy, Sunny Juliet, my attention has been rather scattered of late. Other than my bookstore and my reading, I focus pretty exclusively on Sunny Juliet and my flowers. 

 

“Who will we meet today?” the Artist used to ask sometimes in the morning at the start of a summer day. Our Northport summer last year was about the busiest we’d ever seen, with books and paintings practically flying out the door, and in the course of any business day we would have countless conversations, some with old friends, but many also with people we’d never met before. Long, interesting talks sometimes took place only in the Artist’s studio, others stayed in my bookstore, and still others spilled back and forth between our separate spaces. Right next door to each other all day, however, we might only have five minutes together on some days while at work. The separateness of our days gave us a lot to share in the evenings, relaxing during supper on the front porch or taking a slow county cruise out for ice cream -- though sometimes we were too tired to talk much, and that was all right, too. 

 

This year is very different. There are still conversations during the day, out in the world, but the puppy and I have a pretty nonverbal relationship. Sunny Juliet can be vocal, of course, when she has a point to make, but my admonition to her to “Use your words!” only reminds her that she is supposed to nose the bell hanging from the doorknob, not bark, to let me know she needs to go outside. And in general my chatter to her is unremarkable. Telling her over and over that she’s a good girl and that I love her is not exactly small talk, but it’s certainly repetitious, while my stories about her “daddy” or her predecessors (Peasy and Sarah and Nikki) can’t mean much to her at all. Obviously, I’m really talking to myself….

But she always listens.

Book Stuff

My front porch book at present is Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. The book has been a bestseller since its first market edition in 1880, but if it opened a lot of minds, it certainly failed to change policies. Everyone on the political spectrum, it seems, finds something to love and/or something to hate and fear in George’s ideas. Fascinating reading, nonetheless. I’m almost ready to say I don’t want to discuss economics at all, even narrow questions like affordable housing, with anyone who hasn’t first read Progress and Poverty. 

 

…When we speak of labor creating wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. …In producing wealth, labor, with the aid of natural forces, but works up, into the forms desired, pre-existing matter, and, to produce wealth, must, therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces – that is to say, to land. The land is the source of all wealth. 

 

And thus George traces economic depressions back to material progress, because it is progress that increases the value of land, which in turns leads to land speculation. Land is withheld from production, forcing prices for available land up, checking production, finally throwing people out of work, when demand for goods must fall because though people still desire to buy, they have not the ability to pay.

 

In the bathroom (doesn’t everyone have at least one book in the bathroom?) I have In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus, an edition with a lengthy and entertaining introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon (author of, among other things, The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery prize winner, in the year 1922) and delightful illustrations by same. Any book with van Loon illustrations is a book I will pick up and begin to read – wouldn’t it have been wonderful to receive illustrated letters from him? -- and it’s about time I got around to reading Erasmus, anyway.

 

I’ve been reading Empire of the Summer Moon off and on at bedtime for what seems like forever because, I must confess, I have set it aside numerous times for something else. My latest detour (Friday night) was a 1953 nonfiction book by Robert Gibbings, a wood engraver as well as a writer, whose books display both talents. The most well known is probably Lovely is the Lee (I say that because it is the Gibbings title I most often see among used volumes), but the one that came into my hands this past week is called Coming Down the Seine, and obviously, were my own Artist still with me, this is a book we would have been reading aloud to each other. The Seine! Magic memories!

 

These were tranquil days in the boat. There were mornings when, casting off at dawn, I drifted through long cool shadows, watching the sunlight on the trees creep down to meet the water, hearing no sound but the tremolo of the aspens, seeing no one but a chance sportsman and his dog. There were noons with cooling breezes when the forest rang with bird song and the river was a sheet of moving glass. There were nights when, looking skywards, the passing clouds seemed like new continents and islands marked on the inside of a mighty globe.

 

Neither is everything description. There are digressions into history and observations on what an artist must know.

 

I incline to think that one of the earliest and most important lessons to be learnt by any art student is the recognition of those qualities most suited to his particular medium, or alternatively of the medium most suited to the qualities he wishes to express. 

 

As a wood engraver, Gibbings finds little he can use in the “lavender haze above the water … typical of many dawns.”  Precise lines and contrast of light and dark are what an engraver needs. He tells of refusing a commission once for a stone carving because the subject “could only have been carried out in bronze.” 

 

Gibbings, an Irishman, author of many river books, is buried on the banks of the Thames, another river David had a chance to explore years ago. All in all, I can’t help feeling it not quite fair that we never had a chance to enjoy this book together, but such is life.

 

The library has been presenting their summer author series this month, and I’ve gotten to the second and third events. Betsy Emerson talked about her book, Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, and the next week Karen Mulvahill interviewed Gregory Nobles, author of The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. The fourth and final event in the library series will be next Tuesday, with Soon-Young Yoon and her book of memoir essays, Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the U.N. Quite the stellar line-up this season! And it looks as if I may get around to a book launch come September, so stay tuned for exciting developments on that front. 

 

About Jobs

 

Here’s a question unrelated to anything in the rest of this post, a leftover from the post I’m not publishing. Have you ever quit or walked out on a job? If so, why? What to you makes the difference between a good employer and working conditions and something unbearable?

 

The Artist Remembered in Arizona

 

Before I left to start back to Michigan at the beginning of May, one of the owners of Source of Coffee, our hangout in Willcox, Arizona, asked if I would bring in one of the Artist’s hats so they could have something to remember him by. This past week the coffee house posted a photograph of the resultant memorial, the work of hatmakers Josh and Theresa – and I need to get a more complete reference for Josh and Theresa’s business. Must add to that to my to-do list.... But I love, love, love that our friends in Willcox are thinking of David and remembering him with love!

Dana in background; presumably Theresa in foreground

 

Wherever They Are to Be Found

 

“We’re always buying books,” the Artist used to tell people who wondered what we did all winter. We felt it as a big loss when all three bookstores in Benson closed (one because of death, one due to retirement, and one when the owner moved out of the area). The only independent bookstore I know of in Cochise County now is down in Bisbee, and getting to Bisbee always seemed to take a lot of planning, so much so that we hadn’t been there since spring of 2021. And why would I go without my husband, who loved to read the New York Times at the library in Bisbee (only library in the county to carry it) and to enjoy a generous bowl of pho at the little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant? 

at Bisbee library

Awaiting lunch in Bisbee

As for where to find used books, there are still thrift shops and little shops run by various Friends of the Library groups in Cochise County. The Friendly Bookstore in Willcox even has an outdoor 10-cent book table, which the Artist and I have perused for years on a regular basis. (That reminds me of someone who came in my bookstore in Northport to ask where my 10-cent books were. Nowhere, sorry! I am working for a living, not on salary or pension!) Books on the table remain outdoors night and day, in all kinds of weather, enduring baking sun and punishing dust, and in the event of rain (a rare occurrence), soaked volumes are hauled off to the waste transfer station down the road and the table refilled with a “new” lot of used books. But on my own in recent weeks, I haven’t been doing much book shopping. It isn’t the same by myself, we have plenty already in the cabin, and I can borrow books from the library. 

 

The other day, however, a shady parking spot was available across the street (shade for puppy), so I stopped, and a glance through the 10-cent books turned up a little paperback I figured had to be worth gambling a thin dime. Author Stephen Levine’s book, Meetings at the Edge, had a subtitle that began Dialogues with the Grieving and the Dying…. Now, I do not think (or feel that) “the Universe” put that book out there for me to find. On the other hand, the subtitle did speak to my situation. 

 

Each chapter begins with someone calling “the Dying Project,” a free telephone consultation service provided by Stephen and his wife Ondrea (1979-82) for the “terminally ill and those working closely with a death.” Some callers had cancer, while others had family members who had received a terminal diagnosis or were already near death. One woman’s daughter had been murdered. There were occasional professionals who worked with dying patients and had a crisis of their own at the same time.

 

A family member wrote to me recently that “when we open ourselves to love, we open ourselves to pain,” and reading that it occurred to me that the briefest way I can describe the lessons in Meetings at the Edge is that the author gradually brings his callers to see that they – and that is, we, all human beings-- must be open to pain and loss and even to death in order to be fully open to love and to be truly alive, because if we fight against what is, we cannot be fully alive in the world as it is.

 

Disclosure: I am not a Buddhist. (In fact, I am so not-Zen!) And this book is saturated with Zen metaphysics. But just as I find the way people treat other people much more important than anything they say they believe, so as I read this book I set the metaphysics to one side and focus on the practice, which is not a turning away from or attempting to cover over grief but a sitting with it, acknowledging it, with all its pain, in order to get beyond pain to a core of – Levine calls it “undifferentiated,” “eternal,” or “universal,” -- I’ll call it undying love.

 

In my last post, I quoted myself as follows: “There is no shortcut to a long relationship.” Similarly, there is no shortcut through grief. There is no spiritual pain pill, no bromide, no set of magic words to clear away the clouds of bereavement once and for all. 

 

I have written about the deep gratitude I feel for my years with the Artist, for our rich life together, along with gratitude I have for the support and love of family and friends, attentive neighbors, and even a very demanding puppy that gets me out of bed one morning after another. And all that is true and real, and the sun is shining here in Arizona (even as it snows again in Michigan), and I realize I am a very fortunate woman in many, many ways . But if anyone thinks my heart is not often heavy, that my throat does not ache and that my eyes don’t fill with tears as I drive down the highway, then I have painted a very, very misleading picture. 

 

How to wrap up this post? Perhaps I won’t even try. It is early yet in my journey….

 

Summer morning light, northern Michigan

We Really “Go to Town!”

A rare cloudy day in southeast Arizona

And it’s a rare day that we don’t go to town -- “town” for us, Willcox, only fourteen official miles from our winter ghost town digs in Dos Cabezas, though I think of it as fifteen miles, since we don’t do a lot on the outskirts. Well, other than stop at “the ponds,”  as we call them (Twin Lakes is the official name), to look for sandhill cranes or take the unpaved back road in to look for horses or stop at the animal shelter, where I hope to be volunteering when my background check is completed. 

 

Sometimes we even take a much longer detour, just for the pleasure of the wilder scenery closer to the mountains. 

But either way, the 14-15 miles to town are never boring. Every day, every hour of the day, the scene is different, light and clouds making magic in the sky. It occurs to me that perhaps the clouds are so captivating here in the West not only because the sky is wide and uninterrupted by either forests or skyscrapers but also because the clouds look so soft, in contrast to the dry desert full of prickly plants and the sharp rocks of the mountains. 

Hawks are a daily sight on the way to town, as are cattle. We don’t see horses every time (although I look for them every single time), and it’s exciting to sight a deer or coyote or javelina. The little deer below stood stock-still in the middle of the highway after its companion bounded across, and we stopped, also, gazing into its eyes before it wisely moved off the road. 

Another day, after a good night’s rain, we saw a young javelina drinking rainwater from the indentations of the rumble strip on the edge of the highway. 

 

The outskirts of Willcox are not, I’m happy to tell you, miles of malls and fast food joints. In fact, I usually refer to the area outside the city limits on the Dos Cabezas side affectionately as “man’s world.” There are well drilling businesses, body shops, sand and gravel and fertilizer dealers, stock watering tanks for sale, etc. To me, all this says that Willcox is a real place, where people work real jobs. One has a very different impression coming into town from one of the expressway exits (though only one of those has a couple of fast food outlets), and I feel sorry for and a bit impatient with people who think they have “seen Willcox” because they’ve stopped for gas just off the expressway. My particular favorite stop before we cross the railroad tracks from the Dos Cabezas side is the feed store. The eastmost expressway exit would bring you into town past the Willcox Livestock Auction, though, and that’s wonderful, also.

 

There are two feed stores and two grocery stores, two drugstores (one in the larger grocery store) and two barber shops, and a couple of thrift shops. There are maybe three banks, plus a credit union, although the bank I use (because it’s also in Traverse City,  Michigan) no longer has an open lobby but only an ATM. (For service from live human beings, it’s necessary to drive north to Safford in Graham County.) There are a couple of bars, but we haven’t been in either of them. Several wine-tasting rooms, but again, we have not imbibed. We have been to the Rex Allen Museum, and I recommend it highly! Naturally, there are motels, restaurants, and gas stations, as well as RV parks, but since we are not simply passing through but living here, more important to us are the laundromat, the library, and the post office.

"Cowboy starch" a regional specialty

There are a couple of large, well-stocked hardware stores and a little local hospital with ambulance or, if necessary, helicopter service to Tucson.

 

Last year there was an important addition to the town (and to our town visits) in the form of a new coffee house. On sunny, warm days we enjoy sitting out on the wide front porch, and when the wind turns cools it’s cozy inside. People meet to play chess, and there are shelves of books (to which we have contributed), where “Take one, leave one” is the policy. There is a little fish tank and, at present, a Christmas tree. Some very elaborate coffee drinks are available, though I get no fancier than a latte (just the flavor of coffee, thanks, no syrup added) or a double espresso, and there are cupcakes, “apple bites," and what I can’t help calling (in my mind, if nowhere else) pain au chocolat. –which reminds me that there is also a new bakery in town, and I need to try that soon!

Willcox has a movie theatre, and we’ve seen some great shows there in past years. Right now I’m watching the marquee on a daily basis, eager for an evening show that would let us out into the magic of holiday lights strung on the trees of Railroad Park.

In short, the town of Willcox is a lot like Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery in the fictional Lake Woebegone: if they don’t have what you want, you probably didn’t need it in the first place. Because believe me, I've left out quite a bit.

 

Books Read Since Last Listed

 

164. King, Thomas. A Matter of Malice: A DreadfulWater Mystery (fiction)

165. Thody, Philip & Howard Read. Introducing Sartre (nonfiction)

166. Samuels, Solomon K. A Life in Three Acts: My Journey From Wartime Burma to America (nonfiction)

167. Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday (nonfiction)

168. Taylor, Rosemary. Ghost Town Bonanza (fiction)

 

To write an autobiography, it helps to have had an interesting life. Whatever the events of your life, however, telling your story in an interesting, readable manner is essential, and while bogus autobiographies and memoirs appear from time to time, the best are the stories honestly told by writers modest about their successes and not afraid to reveal their weaknesses. 

Is it more than coincidence that a good friend’s husband, Solomon K. Samuels, and a famous 20^th-century author, Stefan Zweig, both saw their lives as divided into three parts? Samuels calls his book A Life in Three Acts, and Zweig’s working title for the story of his life, published posthumously, was Three Lives. In both cases, I thought it would take me a long time to get through these life stories, but in both cases, again, I sped through the chapters, thoroughly engrossed. There are personal achievements, as well as the horrors of war, in both books. The resolutions are very different. But both books are well worth reading, and I recommend them highly.

 

 

Peasy Tales (Briefly)

 

The dog without a tail, the dog with issues, our little Peasy, continues to enjoy life in Cochise County, Arizona, with his seasonally retired human folks and his neighborhood pack friends. 

My World, So Tiny and Limitless

Bird of Paradise in bloom and giant agave in Benson, AZ

The other day we drove over to Benson to visit the Friends of the Library bookstore, one of our favorite destinations, and I came home with half a dozen or more used books new to me – a bit excessive, perhaps, as we will be returning to Michigan within the month, and it seemed all the more hoggish as the Artist, on that trip, uncharacteristically contented himself with three magazines. But one of the books I bought was as much for him as for me (The Psychology of Everyday Things, and he said, yes, he’d heard about it, and it did sound fascinating, and he would like to read it), and another was for a friend, and a third something I know I’ll re-donate as soon as I read it, so all in all I did not feel sinfully greedy or guilty. 

 

Benson is only 52 miles from Dos Cabezas (unfortunately, there is no way to get there by back roads, and we have to take I-10 from Willcox), and it is still in Cochise County. Our parking lot picnic after shopping for books was an apple and cheese stick apiece and a shared bottle of cold water from the car cooler, following which we drove back to Willcox and shared a brownie along with our usual drinks at the coffee house. Not a huge adventure, no new places, no exploring off the trail, and many of our days are like that, passed within a small, familiar world we know very well. But don’t let mileage fool you --.

Before even paying for my day’s selections, I had read the first page of one of the books I’d found, and I couldn’t wait to dig in further. “Couldn’t” wait – but had to. Peasy needed his regular afternoon run when we got home, and a start had to be made on our supper -- both my responsibilities. Once the dog had had his exercise and a beautiful pasta salad was cooling in the fridge, however, I sat myself down with a cold beer and Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, the story of an American couple who move to the celebrated town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, where the husband, the book’s author, soon finds himself working (“anarchistically,” he says!) for none other than bookseller Richard Booth (d. 2019), the eccentric man who remade the little Welsh town into a literary heaven on earth. 

The town we found that first day was filled with stores stuffed to the rafters with old books, massive ancient shelf breakers like a Pilgrim's Progress the weight and color of a manhole cover, a heavy bit of allegory indeed; and a slim and beautiful copy of Eve's Diary -- a curiously innocent work, lush with languid Beardsley-like drawings on every page, almost unrecognizable as being by Mark Twain, of all people -- we spent hundreds of pounds just shipping them all back home.

- Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“This alone was worth the drive to Benson!” I tell the Artist happily, as I emerge from the Welsh countryside and back into my seasonal southern Arizona life. 

 

Hay is a town of 1500 inhabitants, and at the time Paul Collins and his wife moved there with their toddler son from San Francisco, Hay boasted 40 bookshops! The boast now has shrunk to “over 20,” still more than a decent number (apparently several former bookshops are now antique shops), and there is a huge annual book festival, too. Reading of Hay, I recalled the summer I tried to persuade young Paul Stebleton (he is my son’s age, so, young to me), bookseller-owner of Traverse City’s Landmark Books (formerly Book-o-rama), to move his shop to Northport so the two of us could be pioneers in founding a northern Michigan version of Hay-on-Wye. He demurred – and is now in beautiful digs in the old state hospital in Traverse City – but it was a pleasant fantasy for me while I entertained it.

 

Back to the present – that is, the very recent past: After our pasta salad supper, I read a little further in my book and then set it aside to read aloud an article on Van Gogh from the new issue of New York Review of Books, trading my solo Welsh armchair travels for an armchair trip to France with the Artist. We paused once to return to Cochise County, Arizona, to make popcorn, and we then had Peasy’s full attention as we humans continued exploring Van Gogh’s world, rewarding little Pea’s good manners with the occasional popped kernel. For now, the three of us are still together, and it was a happy evening for me.

 

Much earlier in the day, shortly after sunrise, Peasy and I had fortuitously encountered friends out on the range, where Therese and I caught up on news and laid plans for the following day while our dogs enjoyed each other company, Peasy and Molly in their usual rambunctious way (Molly loves to chase Pea, and he loves being chased by her), old Buddy more sedately. That was a lovely interlude, too.

At day’s end the Artist and I watched, on the recommendation of both my sisters, the first few episodes of “The Kominsky Method,” which we loved. (Alan Arkin! It doesn’t matter to me how old he gets: to me, he is always sexy and appealing.) The show is set in Los Angeles but felt, to me, not so much like travel to an exotic place (my mother was born in L.A., but I’ve never been to California)  as being in the familiar country we now inhabit daily, that of the declining years of life. Not in a terrible way, either, for the most part. After all, the “small world” feeling of doing ordinary things together is very sweet, as we had experienced in Benson, in Willcox, in Dos Cabezas. We don’t have to be in Wales or France to be happy. (Good thing, too, eh? We still work at least half the year. We are not checking out yet!) And before we went to sleep we visited Peru! Yes, as I read aloud from Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, the Artist and I were two young Argentine doctors, hitch-hiking around South America!

 

This happiness thing – it comes and goes. Reading aloud to David, watching him share popcorn with my dog, I was perfectly content in my little world. Such a tiny world! Just the two of us in the car that afternoon without the dog, too, and then sitting in the coffee house together. My time outdoors with Therese and our dogs. A geographically and socially restricted world it is of partner, neighbors, dogs, birds, and cows, but it feels quite expansive, since there are also letters from faraway friends and books and movies to transport me over miles and across oceans.

 

The truth is, I wake almost every morning (and usually during the night, as well) to free-floating feelings of angst and dread, and it takes coffee and writing to put my world back into perspective and fill me with gratitude for the life I have had and the life I still have, and this return to perspective I have to accomplish over and over. (Like housework, like showering, it's never done!) But it works, so I will do it again tomorrow.

 

What Can I Call This Potluck of a Post?

Intriguing window treatment, no?

Bisbee, AZ

It post is a miscellany, but I'll back and start with our 2021 trip to Bisbee, which is where my eye was drawn to that Kafka book set against a brown paper-covered display window. Some of you might remember a time when I warned against going to Bisbee on a Monday. Lesson learned. So this year we prudently waited until Tuesday to make the trek -- and found the town was closed up just as tight! The high point of the trip was being allowed to sit on the outdoor gallery of the public library (library itself closed; pickup only) to try to read a New York Times (available nowhere else in the county) in the wind. 

There are always interesting sights to see while walking around Bisbee, however, so the long drive was not a complete loss. There was that Kafka book in the window, after all. Not many posters advertising events, but a utility pole studded with staples caught my eye. And I don't remember this attractive building from other visits to Bisbee.

Now home of a recording studio, we were told

The amazing part of this thin-on-plot story is that we didn’t acquire a single book the whole day. Library, FOL bookstore, and Meridian Books (down the Rabbit Hole), all highlights of former trips to the county seat, were each and every one closed and locked. But yes, we do have plenty to read as it is. 

 

Reading -- and a Book Review

 

In general, I’m not one to observe a lot of official days and weeks and months, but I’ve made more of an effort for Black History, Women’s History, and National Poetry Month this year – really, don’t you think history should be inclusive every month of the year and that poetry should be part of our daily lives? Anyway, be that as it may, think what you will, I’ve been reading Thomas Lynch, Jim Harrison (always), Judy Juanita (below), Marge Piercy, and Anne Sexton the past couple of weeks, and it’s Judy Juanita I want to write about today. 

 

When a young friend asked me once, “What were the Sixties really like?” I told her it depends on who you were, how old you were, and where in the world and country you happened to be. Virgin Soul, Judy Juanita’s semi-autobiographical novel, published in 2013, was my first introduction to her writing, when an ARC from the publicist found its way to me at Dog Ears Books. Like her fictional protagonist, Juanita found herself “where it’s at” during her junior year of college. She had joined the Black Panther Party in 1967, and when Huey Newton was jailed he appointed her editor-in-chief of the Panthers’ newspaper, which began as a strike journal, resulting in the first Black Studies program in the United States. Since then Juanita has published a number of plays, poems, and essays, and now a new book of her poetry, Manhattan, My Ass, You’re in Oakland. 

 

The title is a preview of the poems in the book: Here is a poet who pulls no punches. Whether her subject is love, sex, or friendships, violence against women or racial injustice, her distinctive voice tells the story in a way you’ve never heard it before and might not have the nerve yourself to repeat. She has the nerve, though. Her voice is clear and unhesitating, her command of a variety of poetic forms sure, as she uses those forms in her own new ways. Juanita has performed her poetry on occasion, and though I’ve never seen her in person or heard her with my ears, I hear her voice in my mind when I read her work. I’m not alone, either. Kirkus Reviews has called her poetry “unsettling, important, and unforgettable.”

 

Manhattan, My Ass, You’re in Oakland

by Judy Juanita

EquiDistance Press

Paper, 101pp

$9.95

 

Horse and Dog Stuff

WJRA lineup

It isn't only books that take me to exciting places, though, and the Artist and I don’t have to drive all the way to Bisbee to have a good time. This past weekend was once again WJRA – Willcox Junior Rodeo Association meeting out at Quail Park. As we were leaving, after a very satisfying couple of hours watching and admiring and walking around with my camera (see my completely incomplete visual story here), I said with a happy sigh, “There’s nothing about it that I don’t like!” My happiness of the day included a very dusty little dog that reminded me of a smaller and much older and wiser version of Peasy. “Wouldn’t this be the perfect life for Mr. Pea?” I asked earnestly. 

old dog at rodeo

For now, however, we are making the most of our silly little snuggle-bug, whose "pack time" personality could never have been guessed by the skittish, fearful performance he put on in that cold, bare cell at the pound. 

silly boy at home

Peasy Tales: His First Rodeo

It wasn’t my first rodeo. That happened way back when in South Dakota when I was still in utero. Naturally, I didn’t see much, however, so junior rodeo events here in Willcox, Arizona, have been a big part of my winter enjoyment since 2015. It's a big part of the culture of southeast Arizona, where ranch life is still real, and the high school sports teams are the Cowboys and the Cowgirls for good reason.

 

Of course, we can’t know for absolutely certain that our new little rescue dog has never been to a rodeo before, but it seems like a pretty safe bet. How would he react? With his extreme shyness, I wasn’t sure he’d be getting out of the car at all, what with crowds of people and running horses and bawling calves and all kinds of noise and hubbub -- and especially a gaggle of little children pretending to be puppies and romping up and down the noisy metal ramp to the grandstand and generally having a wonderful time. So much going on! While he was in the car, though, two people came up to the window, and he didn’t freak out, which is big progress, for him. 

 

So much going on!

Rodeo time is happy time!

So, when the noisy “puppy” brigade cleared out, and things got calmer at our end of the grandstand, I decided to try Peasy on his leash by the rail. Ringside! And he did pretty darn well for his first rodeo! He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but he sat when I asked him to sit, and he didn’t have anything like a meltdown, just remained wide-eyed and mesmerized.

A doggie-nosed window

Front seat view

 

Sorry I don’t have pictures of Peasy by the rail, watching the action. Because I hadn’t been able to handle dog and camera and get pictures of dog all at the same time, I thought we might go back for a second day on Sunday and I could enlist David as photographer, but that will have to wait for the next rodeo, because Sunday turned out to be a different kind of day for our pack....

However – and Lynn is gonna love this! -- a dog trainer I met earlier in yesterday at the feed store, a woman who had three Aussies with her in the store, came out to where she had parked next to us, looked at Peasy, and said, “Oh, yeah, he’s an Aussie, for sure!” I’d told her we’d been going back and forth and that opinions had been divided between Aussie and border collie. (Other dog people have been just as sure that he’s border collie.) Well, the border collie is part of the Aussie’s heritage, so – whatever! He is all dog, there’s no doubt about that!

 

Having Peasy do as well as he did in new situations on Saturday helped me to feel more optimistic about his future, whatever it turns out to be. He is such a sweet, funny, cute little guy -- but he also has so much to learn that sometimes I feel overwhelmed. He and I might get signed up for some professional lessons sometime soon. I think he's worth it.

Rodeo time is family time.

Overnight we had a monster of a storm, winds so strong they sounded like they wanted to tear the roof off the cabin. Along came – what was it? Rain? Hail? Sleet? In the morning there was new snow on the ground, and my first thought was that it must have been a cold morning for cowboy church out at Quail Park. That’s the first Sunday morning event of every weekend junior rodeo, though we seldom arrive before noon ourselves. Peasy and I got outside for my walk and his first run and romp of the day and then came back indoors, where I sewed his bear back together for him and made Valentine muffins for David, and the three of us lay around the shanty, cozy inside while the mountain winds blew, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds again.