Snow, off and on for weeks now, interrupted by rain. So, ice packed down with water on top. Bare branches dropping black seed pods onto icy snow. Black leafs, slick and wet buried in the ice come to the surface and seem gooey with rot, but just the perfect thing for a puppy to pounce on, sniff and then eat up in one gulp. Storms blowing through and we have a new pup named Dot, or Dorothy when I’m trying to scold her.
Dot at eight weeks. She is a Bouceron.
She is eight weeks old, a Bouceron. I was on a list of four shelters from Seattle to Whitehorse for a dog for nine months, I tried for a pup for a local litter but each one was snapped up. I made an inquiry with this breeder in Florida and I got hooked into it. The breed is very old and reputed to be very loyal, trainable, sweet, active, a barker but not a biter. We have had Labs forever and I wanted to try something different, something maybe… a little… well smarter. I’m sorry Lab owners, I love them I do, but they can be lunk heads. I wanted to try my hand at training a dog to actually sit, stay, come, and not talk me out of it with their adorable eyes. I know it’s on me. This dog has good breeding and her dad is a national obedience champ so it really is on me. If she turns out to be a lunk head, you will know who to blame. I’m going to have her balancing my checkbook within a year. That’s what I’m telling Jan anyway.
Dot was not so impressed with the snow at first but now she finds it fascinating. In fact she seems to find everything fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an attentive creature. She likes to stare out at the world. I would give anything to know what she is thinking. It’s as if she is meditating. Then of course she goes into frantic puppy examination, sniffing and nibbling at everything that moves. The first few walks were very very slow, everything had to be licked and examined. Every smell had to be followed, but then she stops for long moments and stares, sometimes at me, sometimes up wind: Processing, processing, like the Terminator: range, density, power supply, category. Then if she has slept and pooped recently she pounces and races around. If not she will sniff some more. Then she will race around. At night she usually has a massive case of running around and licking and bitting and throwing all of her toys in the air: pure exuberance. Then I put her in her crate, she doesn’t whine or bark but falls right asleep. When she wakes up she has to go right outside to pee, and she stares out at the ocean and contemplates things for perhaps thirty seconds… which seems like a long time for a puppy,.. and again I’m wondering what she is thinking.
I have to admit, that having a puppy makes me feel old and young again. Old because I’m slow at jumping up and grabbing her when she is circling the floor by the door, and I know I need to grab her to put her outside. Young because I have had so many puppies in my life that I am flooded with sentimental memories by almost everything about her: her breath and her gait, her goofy expression when she looks up at me and how her ears flop up when she runs.
Sentimentality is a horrible thing in writing. When students ask what it is and how to avoid it, I sometime point to the quote of J.D. Sallinger who said, “Sentimentality is loving something more than God has loved it,” then he went on to describe how a photograph of a cute kitten might not be sentimental but if you add a red bow on the baby cat that is sure to make it sentimental. Many students still look up at me unsatisfied with that answer and in fact may look a bit like the puppy Dot, with their big ears a bit floppy and their eyes confused. Then I try to say, “If you want to have your reader feel kindly toward a character or an animal,you have to show them something on the page why that character or animal is worth feeling kindly towards” If you don’t you are just relying on the sentimental feelings the reader brings with them already to complete your message. Some famous writers dance up close to the line of sentimentality all the time but they get away with it. Steinbeck was famous for it. Think of "Of Mice And Men” I think he gets away with it because he is so heartless at the end, and because he has a fairly unpopular left wing political agenda he is trying to peddle and his readers know it. (Bleeding Heart anyone?) If he were pushing a right wing agenda of the Ubermench and he kills off the mentally defective Lenny then I think he fails disastrously.
Anyway what I’m trying to say about Dot is this: she makes me happy not just because she is ridiculously cute but because she seems to be fully awake in the world and without complex ego needs. Her mind seems attentive and joyous, and I like spending time with her because of that. I recognize that the world is dangerous. Roads have cars, and puppies seem to think that all cars are coming to see them. They want to greet every car. This is concerning, but somehow lovely, and I have to protect her from that. I have to teach her to trust my judgement in this, and a lot of other things. As I have to learn to trust her attentive and wise animal nature, I’m sure she knows and observes much more than I do. In this we will work together. I am fairly certain that Dot will be my last puppy.
I’m continuing with my Ketamine treatments in Seattle. Each one addresses the lessons I learn by having the drug light up so many of the neuro-pathways that lay dormant in my brain, and after each experience I realize how small my depression is, how big the capacity of my dormant brain is to navigate through this tangle of living. Ego, desire, frustration, are only such a small part of the options of response to what is happening around me. I realize this freshly with the treatments and the realization stays with me and the depression withers. I know it sounds like some kind of hippy voodoo but I suppose I just don’t care at this point. I am better. I have more energy and I want to live. I don’t have any strange side effects other than happiness, and energy. I don’t want to join a cult or even want to preach this as a universal solution. In fact I don’t know if it would work for anyone else, but I know it works for me, and it must work for others because it’s getting harder and harder to make an appointment.
Here is another Ketamine Poem;
KETAMINE
My doctor gives me ketamine
To keep me from having all these useless ideas,
Like how to hang myself first thing every morning.
Instead, she wants me to be
More like a mangrove swamp in Florida:
No thoughts at all. No voices telling me to stop
As I wade into the warm water further, and deeper
Until there is no me at all, just
A Roseate Spoonbill flapping in damp air from root
Structure to upper limb, and a Blue heron
Yawping off somewhere else.
She wants me to be aware of no narrative at all,
As the colors fuse into a molten Andalusite crust,
While the white Ibis and the limpkin stare inward,
Toward the Gar, and the Schoolmaster fish,
And the fiddler crab whisking mud,
While everything gets ready
for the next hurricane
by just living: clicking darting out
sucking down, gulping in
or spitting out,
like one big unthinking,
interconnected, breeding thing,
without ego,
or distinct choices to make.
In her office
My skull, becomes an iron pot cooking sugars
With steam attracting
Bees blustering
All around my head
While I’m wading down the brown
Rolly sidewalks
Toward my sister fiddling on her phone
Waiting so she can take me home
where I will lay in her grown daughter’s bed
who is off getting her PhD. in genetics from Oregon State
and I will sleep the rest of the day,
then through the night snoring loudly,
louder than the bees.
So there is a little post card from the world of the latest depression treatment. On Thursday Jan and I will be going to the desert for a month to dry out.and see family. Our neighbor who wants to “co-parent” Dot will be bonding with the little dog for that time. I will miss her mostly she will be a completely different dog by the time we get back in March. But she will be bonded with Susie which will be a good thing too.
What Is Time To A Pig? comes out February 4. I will be giving readings in Seattle, at Third Place Books, and in Portland at Powell’s in early March. There will be more details here as the time gets closer. I hope to see all my friends in those towns. in March so keep your eyes out for those dates and times.
Good luck my friends. Stay warm and dry, I will post from the desert and let you know about news of the Pig book soon.
with only love,
Rain on Snow.
A puppy with big feet plays
with a squeaky toy.
jhs
