DOGS
The Other Dog
He appeared, out of the blue, on a perfectly balmy, cloudless, late summer day. I returned from yoga class to find him, standing on the porch, tail awag, greeting me as though we were old friends. He was a small dog, white, with brown markings, and seemed sweet and friendly.
My husband George emerged from the barn: “That dog showed up a few hours ago at the kitchen door,” he told me. “I let Augie out to chase him away but they played instead and he’s just been hanging around. I’ve never seen him before, have you?”
Bird
My father, binoculars raised, stance that of a pointer, would say, “Look girls, a blackcap chickadee!” My sisters and I would dutifully peer into the thicket, but the woods around our log cabin in the Quebec countryside were dense, and chickadees are seemly an invisible bird. Frustrated by our inability to spot the teeming nature all around us, he eventually gave in and built a birdhouse, which attracted the same three types of birds, the noisy, bossy blue jays, the aforementioned chickadees, and sparrows. We lost interest instantly. But my mother kept a wary watch on the daily fluttering. She hated birds. Much to my father’s annoyance. She never explained the reasons for such enmity towards them. (She also hated Maya Angelou which leads me to believe it was just her being willfully irrational).
Dog Tales
What Her Body Remembers
Her memories of being young are infected with regret and disappointment; it seemed her sails were always either luffing or gale driven. She is happier being old but her body, which is coming up on eighty and probably even older when you figure in the cigarettes and alcohol not to mention all the crazy fucking things she did, that part of her, her housing, as she has come to think of it, is capable of its own memories. For example, the simplicity of desiring and being desired and, in service of that kind of wild, how often she took risks and never ended up dead or even hurt. The chance she is taking now is pathetic by comparison, but it occupies her mind as she drives because she has to think about something. The fact is that she had to sneak into the car before her dogs realized, her dogs who know the minute she reaches for her cane, or puts her shoes on, or does something about her hair, that she is leaving, and would have been through the dog door and waiting by the car before she had even reached the porch.
Bear
On your way to a table on the upper floor of New York’s fabled Russian Tea Room, you’ll pause—if not naturally, the maître’d will, with a practiced drama, pause you—to take stock of a nine-foot-tall acrylic bear filled with live fish, juggling plastic balls while revolving on a pedestal. Backdropped by a life-size tree “blooming” with Fabergé eggs, this Ursus, symbol of Russia, is so kitsch that it actually becomes über-kitsch, throwing off some legitimate, if kinky, grandeur.
The few times I have encountered this bear, I always think of the renowned Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko—not just because he was Russian and attention-commanding but because, on the day I had occasion to meet him in the mid-1990’s, it was the one time in my life I encountered an actual bear.
You Look Like Your Dog Just Died
On Friday, September 18th, my darling Beau — Beau Heinie Beau, Hein-Pooch, Beau-linsky, Bitty Hom, Poo Chem, Poochadeen Mateen, Mon Peauché, more recently and who knows why, Pumpala (Pum Pum Pum) — a nearly sixteen-year-old black-and-tan miniature dachshund, left me for good, at 10:30 am. I have repeated the insane nicknames above so often they seem like actual words to me, and only when I try to spell them do I realize how far over the edge I have gone.
Beau had been a very old dog for a very long time. Years ago almost all the tan in his black-and-tan coat turned white -- we matched in this way. His eyes were cloudy with cataracts; a vet told me in 2018 he probably couldn't see much of anything anymore, though you couldn't tell by the way he got around the house and yard. How well he could hear was open to debate since he had never paid any attention to verbal commands. (This recently inspired my daughter Jane to claim that Beau was 'not a good dog.' Oh, Jane. You infidel.
Always in the Ribbons
Anyone who knows me, knows I’m horse-mad. So instinctively do I understand them, I have often thought I am one. I was in love with horses even before Charlie, my mother’s boyfriend, signed me up for English riding lessons when I was seven. He was also horse mad but, having been born a cripple with one leg two inches shorter than the other, he had never been on one. Indulging me was like indulging himself and he would bring me along to the long-defunct Atlantic City race course where he’d tip the grooms to let me feed carrots to the horses. He also taught me about bloodlines and conformation along with the differences between an Exacta, a Trifecta, and a straight wager.
Crazy Cat Lady
My husband and I had just moved into the first apartment we’d ever owned—a somewhat dismal first-floor unit in a Queens co-op building, when the super asked if the small black cat lurking outside was mine. After a moment of panic spent locating my own small black cat, I said no.
Eventually, it became clear that the cat lived behind my apartment with an ever-growing bunch of pals. At first it was cute—my neighbor and I both fed them but if we got too close they’d freak out and sprint away. Soon, the kittens started showing up. Seven became eleven. Something had to be done.