All Blessings Are Mixed

Sunny Juliet had me at my wits’ end the other day. She can be so naughty! She wants to bite and chew my shoes -- while I am wearing them! -- ditto my blue jeans, ditto table legs and books, if I relax my surveillance for two minutes, and she is a very naughty barker. I’m working hard on the “no barking” business, but it breaks my heart when she barks at some little girl or boy who only wants to be friends with such a cute puppy. And because of what David and I went through with Peasy, I can’t help worrying: Is SJ showing signs of serious temperament problems? 

All moms worry, and dog moms are no exception to the rule. I was cheered and consoled, however, when a friend e-mailed me about what an “asshole” (excuse the term; it’s the one she used) their dog was in his first three years of life (Three years? Lord, preserve me!) When young, he did all the naughty things SJ is doing now. I also looked up “naughty puppy” sites and found that regret is not an uncommon response to the trials of puppy parenthood. 

Of course, in my case, the feelings of being overwhelmed and challenged beyond my limits are exacerbated (exacerbated: one of the Artist’s favorite words) by having lost my beloved life partner, whose generosity and concern for me had helped bring the puppy into my life in the first place. Complicated! What would David think now, if he were here with me and Sunny? Our Sarah was so unbelievably easy that raising and training her did not prepare me for the realities of another, more typical puppy at all!

But no, I do not regret this puppy. Just knowing that Sunny’s “naughtiness” is normal puppy behavior gives me the patience to deal with it lovingly, and we are going to make it, this little pack of two. I don’t know what the road ahead has in store for us, but we will be traveling it together. And please, do not tell me to “take one day at a time”! There is no other way to take life, and don’t think I don’t know it!

Sunny Juliet is a sweet companion and a huge responsibility. She often makes me laugh and sometimes drives me crazy. She eases my loneliness and curtails my freedom.

Everything is a double-edged sword has always been my philosophy of life in a nutshell, which is about all the philosophy people usually want to hear. It’s right there in the words of the marriage ceremony, isn’t it? “For better or for worse.” Or, as Billy Joel put it, “I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times.” Please note that I often had "clever conversation" with the Artist, but we could be just as happy holding hands or looking out the windshield together and saying nothing at all. We didn't have to audition for each other. 

The blessings of life and love carry with them the inevitability of loss and death, and so I thank my lucky stars for my wonderful life and cry over Billy Joel songs while Sunny takes a little nap.

My Beautiful Boy Has Gone to Be with My Beautiful Girl

My beautiful boy

 

He is gone, my beautiful boy, the dog with issues we adopted last December; the dog who quickly fell in love with me and the dog I soon after came to love; the dog who gradually fell in love with David, too, and the dog David eventually couldn’t help loving back. He wasn’t suffering (he loved his life, which made it all the harder for us to end it), but he has gone to join our Sarah, leaving us behind. 

He was good-looking, smart, physically healthy, playful, energetic, and he became -- with us -- affectionate, downright snuggly. In our year together, he learned about manners and obedience and play and love. He seemed grateful. And he was joyful! Once he figured it out, he was thrilled to have a family and a home! But tragically, he could not overcome the impulse to bite, which may have been a result of past mistreatment … or a necessity of dog-eat-dog survival picked up while he was a stray … or some awful genetic kink. We’ll never know. But every so often his Mr. Hyde personality would appear in a terrifying snarl, and he would strike like a cobra. That had pretty much stopped when it was only the three of us together, but….

 

“Maybe if you were younger, you’d have had more patience –” began one otherwise sympathetic recipient of the sad news. 

 

No. We have more patience now than we ever had when we were younger, and little Peasy had the benefit of over a century and a half of combined wisdom acquired by his dog parents. Other than temporary time-outs and occasional sharp words (the latter bursting from us in the fright of the moment rather than carried out as “discipline”), all his training was positive in nature. He got focused training. He had attention, lessons, exercise, play, and home comforts. He learned so much! And, as I say, we loved him, he knew we loved him, and he loved us in return – all of us loving each other more and more with each passing week. 

 

So I don’t fault any of the three of us. We humans were patient and loving and consistent, and he, the dog, was willing and eager. He was not a bad boy. He just couldn’t control the bad feelings when they came on him. Who knows where they originated? It doesn’t matter.

 

When I posted about Peasy on this blog during his year with us, I mentioned that he had “issues,” made reference to the “Mr. Hyde” side of his personality, even his “cobra strikes,” but I never came right out and said anything directly about biting. Except when those lightning-flash incidents occurred, he was sweet and obedient and affectionate, so we hoped he would gradually feel secure and that it would stop happening. But over the summer and fall he bit two friends and one relative, despite our precautions. He snapped at me but only drew blood once, while David he bit seriously three times, and the last time (back in Michigan) struck us as a deal-breaker, because we could give no situational excuse for it. We made arrangements. But the day before his life was scheduled to end, we backed out. Just couldn’t do it....

 

But. Dangerous. Frightening. An untenable situation. And deep, deep heartbreak.

 

Do online searches for “heartbreak +dog,” and almost all the results you’ll see have to do with dogs dying of illness, trauma, or old age. When I finally came upon the term “reactive dog” and the possibility of clicker training, I fell on it eagerly, more optimistic and confident than desperate. This was despite what I’d been told by a woman who provides kennel space and the necessities of life to unadoptable dogs, at least one of them a dog even she can’t touch after having it in her care for years. She warned me flat-out (and this was a long conversation; she wasn’t just giving an uninformed opinion) that I would never be able to trust Peasy not to bite. 

 

“Do you understand? You’ll never be able to trust him.” 

 

I still thought we could do it. How could we not try? We were aware of certain trigger situations and could work on those. But the otherwise unpredictability of other cobra strikes made it impossible to work on general desensitizing of our basically good, sweet dog. He would have to be desensitized to each individual separately, one at a time, and each individual would have to live in our household, and still it would take months, as it had with us. Not feasible.

 

So we kept him away from people. If we were dining outdoors with friends, he was on the porch; if we were on the porch, he was outdoors; when our little great-grandchildren visited for an evening, he spent the evening in my car. That's how we got through our Michigan summer.

 

Actually, we had talked about finding him another home out in Arizona after the very first bad bite, even before we returned to Michigan for the summer, but I was unwilling to “surrender” him to a shelter or a “rescue” organization, giving up any say over what strangers might adopt him, how long it might take for anyone to want him at all (he’d been in the pound in Graham County for almost four months before I came along), and what might happen to him in the meantime and with more strangers. Other people might not be as understanding and patient as we were and might try, as did one young Arizona trainer I tried early on, the tough love, “show-him-who’s-boss” approach, which generally serves to reinforce all the worst fears of a reactive dog. Even if not harshly corrected (or worse, outright abused), he would be traumatized all over again by going from a loving home to another institutional incarceration or to strangers. I couldn’t do that to him then, in Arizona, and I certainly couldn’t do it later, in Michigan, after bonding with him more and more deeply. Not to mention the fact that it would hardly be fair to expose new owners to the risks he posed.

 

We took him to an interview with a special trainer in Michigan, postponing our departure for Arizona for the good of our dog. This highly credentialed, lovely woman was understanding and patient but not exactly encouraging. She did, however, suggest the possibility of anti-anxiety medications, and we jumped on that hope. She and our vet conferred. Peasy started on meds, and he came west with us, after all, back to his Arizona beginnings…. 

little Pea in Cochise County

One situation that had been bad from the beginning was that whenever we dropped something on the floor and reached to get it, he would lunge and bite. With the meds (and time, during which his trust in us increased), that trigger ceased to be one. We could drop things all over the house and pick them up with no inappropriate behavior from Peasy. Not that we ever completely relaxed our guard, but the improvement was noteworthy. And during our evening pack time, he was more relaxed and snuggly all the time. 

But as cuddly and kissy and loving and appreciative as he was with us – more so every day -- he was still nervous with other people. It even seemed, paradoxically, that the more he relaxed and the closer he bonded with us, the more eager he was to “protect” us from other people, seeing them as threats to us. “He loves us too much,” the Artist said sadly, even as he and Peasy were cuddling on the bed. 

 

Because Peasy’s besotted love for us was irresistible, as was his enthusiasm for our most ordinary routines. "Where's your lion? That's right! That’s your lion!” He learned his "lamb" in a single day. He had the most exuberant nature!

 

But it was inevitable that sooner or later another bad bite was going to occur. Luckily for us, the person bitten, fond of us and even (for some weird reason, believe it or not) fond of our crazy dog, did not threaten to sue, but she did talk to me frankly about the danger our dog presented. “What if it had been a child?” 

An exception to his general people-phobia was my hiking and dog-walking partner. He seemed fine with her. -- But who knew when some misperception might set him off?

Friends!!!

We brought him home for the first time on December 10, 2020, and on December 29, 2021, the three of us took our last ride together. He was always happy to go for a ride -- anywhere, just to be with us -- and if we left him for 10 minutes, when we came back to the car, he was a bundle of wiggles and kisses. He jumped eagerly into the back seat every chance he got.

"I'll go anywhere with you!"

I had given him his usual anti-anxiety pill early in the morning and gave him four more after our morning run and then two more in the car, because -- why not? I figured that if he became sleepy or drowsy before we reached the dreaded destination, so much the better. He sat up and looked out the window for about half the trip, then lay down on the seat but never did close his eyes. Every time one of us looked back at him, he was looking at us.

“You want to be with him?” we were asked at the vet clinic. Of course! We did not want our boy to feel abandoned or panicked or fearful. And Peasy's leave-taking went smoothly and peacefully. We held him and stroked him and told him what a good dog he was. And he was a good dog – as good as he could be!

 

“Look at it this way. We gave him the best year of his life,” the Artist said.

 

More than that: we gave him a life!

 

Loving his life

Peasy’s didn’t have the 17 years that Nikki had (14 with us after her early years, shrouded like Peasy’s youth in mystery), and he didn’t have the 13 years Sarah had, in the bookstore and on our travels, from puppyhood to gentle old age. But it was a good, happy, love-filled life. And he certainly wasn’t lined up for any such rosy fate when we found him! Odds were about a million to one of that happening.

 

Oh, my sweet, sweet boy! It hurts me so much that no one outside our home will ever know what a good, darling little boy you got to be with us! Plenty of people thought we were crazy to adopt and keep him at all, given the constraints he put on our social life. And if others believed in the good qualities I’ve described, they’ll think surely we must not have tried hard enough to rehabilitate him. In other words, to some people our dog was a monster, and to others we are the monsters.

 

“I can’t stand sad dog stories!” 

 

So many people have said that to me over the years in my bookstore, and Peasy’s story is a heartbreaker, for sure. But if we’d never brought him into our lives? If he’d continued to languish, unloved, in that concrete-floored cell where we found him? That was no life! With us, he had adventures, running free with me in Arizona and Michigan. He had dog friends in Arizona, and in Michigan and Arizona both he was woven into the fabric of our household, from morning dog-and-dad time on the bed, to dog-and-mom play and running and desert rambles with friends, to evening pack-time with the three of us together.

 

So mine is a sad story and a happy story, and even as my heart has broken over and over, is still breaking, and will ache for a long time to come, I do not regret for one minute bringing little Pea into our lives to love, sharing joy and love and happiness with that goofy little guy. He was a gift life gave us, and we were the gift life gave him. And when his end came, he was not abandoned or traumatized, and he had no reason to be frightened, because we were right there with him. It was the least we could do for our boy, who tried so hard to be the best dog he could be.

It was a rainy morning. Dark clouds on our way up to and through the mountains. Now and then, scraps of rainbows. Several on our way north to Thatcher, and a complete one on our way home without him.  Peasy's rainbow. Let me think that. I miss him so much.

I will always love you, my boy!

Local Color and Stubborn Onions

 

Northport Harbor is so beautiful! 

If anyone ever asks me….

 

Someone did ask me, a few years ago, to what I attributed my success in a world of bookselling dominated by the online behemoth, and my answer was to tell him I am very stubborn. Too stubborn to give up, that is. So last night as I was sauteing onions and musing on how often I am slicing or dicing or sauteing onions, it occurred to me that if I live to be 100 (my mother was just shy of 96 when she died) and am asked the secret of my longevity, I can say, “I’m very stubborn and I've always eaten lots of onions.” 

 

Onions were not part of my bookstore’s success, but Dog Ears Books had its 28^th birthday this past July, putting us now into our 29^th year. Longevity! In a challenging world!

 

Onions are not good for dogs, we are told – toxic, in fact -- but not giving up is essential when working with a challenging rescue dog. More on this in a minute….

 

 

Since the end of September, 

 

I have read these books to add to my 2021 list: 

 

134. Thomas, Dylan. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (fiction). Largely autobiographical fiction, that is, and for some reason I never really entered into it deeply enough to lose myself in the stories. “How was it?” the Artist asked. “Okay.” “Only okay.” Shrug. “Okay.”

 

135. McKenzie, C.B. Burn What Will Burn (fiction). This crime novel set in backwoods Arkansas opens with a body in Piney Creek and gathers complications from then on. The characters and dialogue are vivid, along with touches of local realism (for instance, “snake pit” is not metaphor but simple fact), and yet the story faded from my mind quickly after I finished reading the book. It was, I’d say, very plot-driven, with not a lot of the kind of description that makes a place I don’t know come alive for me. The contrast I’d make is with Damnation Creek, by Ash Davidson. But then, McKenzie’s is more of genre fiction, Davidson’s more literary, as I read them.

 

136. Bragg, Rick. The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People(nonfiction). This story of a “bad” dog who finds a family unwilling to give up on him had me laughing with tears in my eyes. Will he bite? Under certain circumstances, he’ll even bite Rick. But he’s a handsome dog. Rick says, “Looks ain’t his problem.” Oh, my gosh! These are not only real people – they come across the page as real people, and the place as a real place. I could see it all as if I were there.

 

137. Cogan, Priscilla. Winona’s Web (fiction). Most chapters in this “novel of discovery” (as it’s called on the cover) recount sessions the protagonist, a psychotherapist, has with an elderly Native American woman who expects to die soon, although she is not ill and is not planning suicide. The client quickly becomes the therapist, and the therapist of record allows it to happen, for her own sake and the sake of the old woman. Despite the obvious setup, the story is never boring, and I quite enjoyed it, both for the cross-cultural learning and the opening up of the main character’s heart. I suppose, however, that I must add that this is very much a white woman's book, and that cross-cultural learning could also be seen as cultural appropriation -- which is why it has taken me so many years to get around to reading Winona's Web in the first place.

 

138. Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War (fiction). Somehow this book had slipped under my radar completely since it was first published in 1974, although now I find it created quite a stir. The protagonist, an only child and a freshman in a Catholic boys’ high school, has recently lost his mother and does not seem to have a close relationship with his father, although there is no real friction between them, either. My take on this novel is that it’s Lord of the Flies without the isolation of an island or the absence of putative adults: human greed and cruelty and desire for power and status infect some of the teachers as well as the boys in school, which allows a small group of boys to terrify the rest into submission – until Jerry takes it in his head not to go along … and pays the price.

 

139. Zadoorian, Michael. The Narcissism of Small Differences(fiction). Reading this novel for the second or third time, I entered more fully into the lives of a just-turned-40 couple still trying to find themselves before they age out of being cool and “weird.” I need to think more about the title, which comes from an idea of Sigmund Freud’s, that “the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.” Some of the scenes in Zadoorian’s short story collection, Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, come into this longer work with more detail, and there is plenty of ambivalence to go around, both toward the abandoned inner city and toward capitalism in general, but the characters take center stage.

 

And now, about Peasy –

 

-- Because I know that’s really why many of you tune in to Books in Northport in the first place. Recently I posted on Facebook that Peasy is my comfort and my challenge, companion and burden, solution (to some of life’s problems) and problem (on his own, in many ways). All in all, it’s fair to say he is in some ways my salvation and in other ways my nemesis! How can one dog be so many things? Rick Bragg (see book list above) would understand, I know.

 

The first time I saw Peasy in the Graham County, AZ, pound (thinking he was a she, but that’s another story), it was clear that this dog was very skittish. That was the mild way of putting it. He was afraid of people, to put it more bluntly. And once I had him home, it was clear that he knew no commands, had no manners, and had almost zero impulse control. So he has come a very long way in ten months, to become an affectionate, devoted, fun-loving companion to the Artist and me. The trouble comes when other people come onto “our” territory, which he seems to feel responsible for guarding.

 

Will Peasy ever be able to have a normal social life? And will we, given that he is such a part of our life? Such challenges! I yo-yo back and forth between hope and despair. But we are not giving up on this little guy – and I say “we” because the Artist is now squarely on Peasy’s side, the two of them quite bonded at last – and my stubbornly hopeful (or hopefully stubborn) nature got a big shot in the arm reading about clicker training for to curb reactivity by getting the dog to stop and think.

 

Among the reasons I look forward to my annual seasonal retirement in southeast Arizona, this year being able to concentrate on Peasy and work intensively on his social skills is high on the list. It will be good to rejoin the neighborhood pack (my friend Therese and her dogs), which was the groundwork of Peasy’s social life last winter and will be our starting point again in 2021-22. Thank heaven he didn’t exhibit dog-dog aggression! Molly is more than a match for him, anyway! No, it’s people he needs to stop fearing, but I have, once again, hope. So stay tuned, because I fully expect to have happy news to share. I am determined to have happy news to share.

Our beautiful boy!

P.S. The beautiful art adorning the marina in Northport, Michigan, was created by Kat Dakota. 

Birds, Books, Bookstore Table, Dog with Issues

Birds in Books

 

I picked up and began reading a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter, one of my mother’s favorite writers, and wished my mother and I could discuss the author’s life together. After a while it occurred to me that I sent this book to my mother, who read it and returned it to me to re-sell as a used book (my frugal mother!), and still I had not read it before myself. How illuminating to learn that Gene (born ‘Geneva’) Stratton-Porter was not only a popular novelist but also admired for her nature books (I had her Book of Moths once) by writers as famous as Christopher Morley, who likened her work on birds (she also loved and photographed and wrote about moths) to that of the work of another of my naturalist heroes, Jean-Henri Fabre, on insects. High praise! 

 

In reading of her life and the agreement she made with Mark Doubleday to publish all of her work, exclusively, one nonfiction nature book for every novel (the fiction sold better, but Stratton-Porter was insistent on having her nonfiction published, as well, so the agreement was alternate years for each genre), I was surprised and delighted to learn that Mrs. Doubleday, Nellie, was none other than the writer Neltj Blanchan, author of Bird Neighbors; Birds Every Child Should Know; and The American Flower Garden. It is easy for me to imagine wonderful conversations between these two women naturalists and writers. Stratton-Porter was a devoted gardener all her life, especially devoted to wildflowers, from her Indiana childhood to her later years in California. 

 

My mother fulfilled a dream when she and my father visited the Limberlost (though I think my father may have waited in the car while my mother made the tour), and I shall have to make the trip myself one day (she was always a stickler for “I shall”), as a pilgrimage in honor of my mother. It looks like a beautiful place to visit, anyway.

As it happens, I don’t have any of either Stratton-Porter’s or Blanchan’s nature books in stock at the moment, but I do have The Burgess Bird Book for Children, by children’s author Thornton W. Burgess, whose Old Mother West Wind series and other stories featured talking animals were so popular with child readers of the early 20^th century. His Bird Book is told as stories, also, with dialogue between, for example, Peter Rabbit and Jenny Wren – “intended to be at once a story book and an authoritative hand book,” with illustrations by none other than famous naturalist-artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

Never a big Burgess fan myself, I appreciate the Fuertes illustrations more than the Burgess text, but I have had several Burgess fans among my bookstore customers over the years. Chacun à son gout, as my friend Hélène used to say. 

 

 

Quick Bookstore Story

 

And now here, to change the subject, is a little story that is very Leelanau: One of our neighbors came by the bookstore on Monday and said he and his wife were going to pick up sandwiches at the New Bohemian Café and that he’d like to buy me lunch, also. Or I could join them down the street, “but there’s no indoor seating.” No problem, I said. Come on back, and we’ll have lunch at my big table. I moved books to make space, and halfway through our lunch my neighbor slapped his hand on the top of the table and exclaimed, “This is my parents’ old dining room table! You must have found it at Samaritan’s Closet” – a thrift store in Lake Leelanau, as had indeed been the case. “So many birthday parties we had around this table,” he said, and I was for some reason happy to know about the table’s former life and to think of it as progressing from birthdays to books, all here in Leelanau County. 

 

Gotta love these little stories that connect us country people! And the Danish Modern furniture of the 1950s? Yes, I remember!

 

 

Another Quick Bookstore Story

 

This one you won’t believe. I can hardly believe it myself. My first customer of the morning on a rainy Thursday was a man from London, England. His wife is from Traverse City, so they visit every year, and he knows my shop well and goes right to his favorite sections. When he brought his choices to the counter, he said -- he really, really said this! -- “I have to tell you: This is my favorite bookstore.” 

 

I thanked him, so pleased -- thrilled! -- that I didn’t press for more specific information. (Favorite in Michigan? In the U.S.? All-time favorite ever?) Don’t investigate a compliment too closely, I say. Just smile graciously and thank and let the glow warm you for the rest of the day.

 

Recent Books Read (Since Last Post)

 

The first one below was a novel I re-read. Fabulous! Love the Socrates Fortlow character and wish there were more books featuring him.

 

Mosley, Walter. WALKIN’ THE DOG (fiction);

Covington, Kathryn Rankin. THE RIPPLE OF STONES (fiction);

Roth, Michael. TIME BETWEEN SUMMERS (fiction/nonfiction);

Green, John. THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (nonfiction);

Lively, Penelope. TIGER MOON (fiction)

 

 

Peasy Report: A Milestone, a Message, a Sigh

 

The new wading pool wasn’t a milestone, but Peasy loves it. He loved splashing in his dog-friend Molly’s wading pool (bigger than the one he has, the only one I've found so far) after a long run-and-play session in the high desert, so when the weather warmed up (and it will again, I’m sure, despite the current cool spell) I figured he would love a wading pool of his own here in Michigan.

 

The milestone, however, is something different, and what made this particular red-letter event even more special was that it was practically a non-event. Did Peasy even notice? 

 

A little background first --.

 

Peasy, like Sarah, is not nuts about being groomed. To brush him at all, I resort to a soft curry comb made for horses. It won’t do much when he starts shedding and needs his undercoat combed out, but he tolerates the brush and is becoming accustomed to having it used on him, which is more than half the battle.

 

Toenails, though. That’s another story. (Do you know any dog that likes toenails clipped?) My old Nikki was so submissive that she didn’t put up a fuss, but Sarah was a real rebel when it came to her feet, and that was Sarah, the practically perfect dog, who never had anything bad happen to her in her whole life! So what to do with a dog-boy who has had as many rough challenges already as Peasy in his young life? 

 

Well, I am following the wisdom of Patricia McConnell on “reactive dogs” and that of Jean Donaldson, author of The Culture Clash. Rather than resort to a muzzle and a wrestling match (the alternative being outright sedation), I have been slowly and patiently desensitizing Mr. Pea to the clippers. I let him sniff them, I stroke his feet with them, I “clip” the air near his legs, and we’ve been doing that for a couple of weeks. Finally on Thursday morning I decided it was time to try following up the familiar routine with clipping a single nail. 

 

He hardly seemed to notice! Good dog!!! I was so excited! 

 

Working to desensitize a dog to reduce fear in situations the dog has long found frightening is a long, slow process. It takes a lot of patience. It’s time-intensive. But ask yourself: how long do you think you will be living with your dog?  Why not take the time to make both your lives easier and more pleasant? I could say this message comes from Peasy, and if he understood about telling you what makes dogs happy, and if he had even noticed the milestone in his life, I know he would have sent this message.

 

Lest I mislead with partial information, however, I must admit that the dog with issues still has them. The other evening when I retrieved, from under a porch chair, a sock he had stolen and chewed up, he showed me his very scary, snarly, threatening-to-bite face. You wouldn’t want to see it, believe me. I opened the porch door and sent him outside to stay out by himself for ten minutes. We didn’t fight about it-- he just had a time-out. He was then his regular sweet self the rest of the evening. On the other hand, as I say, he had no meltdown over the nail clipper, so I think we are continuing to make progress. I hope so. It isn't always easy-peasy. This dog has issues -- but I believe he has a lot of potential.

 

What Can One Seasonally Retired, “Tiny” Bookseller Possibly Do?

Peasy with some of his things

In one of my favorite children’s books, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a story I continue to re-read with delight and pleasure as old age encroaches on my life, there is a character known as Spiller. [Correction: Spiller appears in the second book of the series, The Borrowers Afield. Sorry about that, but you should read both, anyway.] A hunter who lives in the wild by his wits (rather than staying indoors and “borrowing” what he needs to live from “human beans”), he was just old enough when he lost his parents to recall his mother once calling him a “Dreadful Spiller.” Older now, he quite reasonably chooses not to introduce himself by what he takes to be his first name, Dreadful, though he confides it to Arietty, the main character in the story. 

I mention Spiller and the origin of his name, thinking of Peasy’s many worldly temptations, because Peasy is a Dreadful Chewer! Furthermore, Peasy has an irresistible (so far) penchant for plastic! Not that he limits his sins to plastic items, mind you, but my precious gel roller pens are never safe if he can reach them, even if I’m sitting right next to a writing implement I’ve foolishly set on a footstool rather than in the middle of a high table. I love those pens! You'd better believe I put cell phones and channel changers up out of reach every night!

 

Yet another gel pen destroyed (tip crunched by teeth -- not mine)

Poor little Peasy! His little world is so very, very complicated! There are some things we very much want him to do, and he’s pretty good at those. Then there are other things we don’t mind him doing, plus a few things we absolutely do not want him to do, ever! The clear positive commands he gets -- but how is he to figure out the difference between permissible and forbidden? Why is it okay, he must wonder, to chew some things – the things we give him to chew or let him bring inside from the great outdoors – and not others? I would love to be able to explain to him that the distinction is between items on the floor or offered to him (okay to chew) and items on furniture – the latter our things, not his and not okay to chew, ever!

 

In a recent post, I titled one section “Peasy’s Progress,” and at least one of my friends made the connection I intended, to the famous classic work, John Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress. Laurie thinks Peasy’s Progress needs to be a book, too. It’s a thought. Since we only met Peasy at the Graham County Animal Control facility, where he had been for over three months after being picked up as a stray, the earlier part of his life would have to be invented for his story. Were those months in the pound his Slough of Despond?

 

My new little dog boy is a real challenge! Overall, though, aside from the dreadful chewing, he is a better dog every day, gradually worming his way into the Artist’s heart, as well as mine. Nightly “pack time” is one of the best times of the day for all three of us.

And here’s the thing, you see – the part that inspired my title for today’s post: There are so many troubling aspects of our world today over which we (all of us) have no control that it’s encouraging and immensely satisfying to find something over which we can exercise some agency. An animal is not to be “controlled” like a machine, but working to establish authority over an animal, along with establishing a kind of partnership with it, allows a human to feel effective. It gives a sense of accomplishment. This is something I can do. I can give this dog a better life than he had before I adopted him, and I can give him sufficient boundaries and limits, along with exercise, love and rewards, so that he enhances our life, too. Recently I read something in a magazine about people rearranging, remodeling, and redecorating their houses to find satisfaction in being able to accomplish something, and I thought, That’s how I feel about working with Peasy.

 

A happier dog every day

When it comes to political action, now that the election is past I feel somewhat stymied. I have written several times to the Representative from our home district in Michigan but can’t help feeling at this point that further attempts to communicate with him would merely be banging my head against the wall. (A cowboy would more likely say “pissin’ inta th’ wind,” but that phrase coming from a female doesn’t have the same force, does it?) All of that feels, at the moment, way beyond anything I can do, and I'm not going to write a single word here about the second impeachment --.

 

Instead, what I want to say is that somewhere in the great, very welcome middle ground between dogs and elected officials are all the rest of us ordinary human beings, and there are actions I can take in that realm, however modest. 

Each time I went to the grocery store in November, I routinely added $3 to my total at the cash register to help provide Thanksgiving dinners for local families without the means to shop as I could. Before 2020 came to a close, I wrote checks for annual donations to the ACLU, the Carter Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Growing Hope Locally, Save the Children, and the National Writers Series. The various groups I support range from local to national to global, as I don’t see filling needs or doing good as limited to any certain geographical reach, and each has a different mission, because need takes many different forms.

 

On a more personal level, I have been making more phone calls recently than I do ordinarily, because it is clearer to me all the time how much a phone call means. “You sound good,” I’ll say, and when the other person says, “I always feel good when I talk to you,” I'm glad I called and realize that I can easily call more often. It isn’t like the old days of “long distance,” after all. I have unlimited calling and texting on my cell phone plan.

 

Letters mean a lot, too. (They certainly do to me! An empty mailbox puts hope off until tomorrow, while finding a letter in my mailbox any day makes my day!) My friends Marilyn and Dawn are writing and mailing notes and letters to friends and strangers and encouraging others to do so in these troubled times. I am happy that they are doing so.

Outgoing mail

So I call, and I write, and I hope my little Peasy stories (which is much of what I share with friends and family these days, as well as here on Books in Northport) bring a few smiles. We all need reasons to smile, to laugh, to feel joy. It isn’t sticking our heads in the sand to pause to enjoy life and give thanks for it.

These are things I can do. 

I can call. I can write. I can donate. 

 

I can cook and bake for the Artist and enjoy our time together in our seasonal retirement and work to integrate a very challenging little rescue dog into our family.

Cookies!

Pizza from scratch!

I can write my blog posts, in hopes of sharing with the homebound and/or snowbound our modest winter adventures here in southeast Arizona. 

In general, to be honest with you, I can’t not write. Like breathing, it’s what I do. I will be writing again soon about a few books I've read recently....

 

Anyway, regular readers, however few you may be, please know that my appreciation for you knows no bounds and that when you leave a comment that lets me know some message in a metaphorical bottle I’ve thrown out onto the cold, vast ocean has reached someone somewhere on shore, it’s as good as finding a letter in my mailbox. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!