Fast forward to the past

I know that my reflections on the uncertainties of life are not particularly unique, but even so it was serendipitous to read tonight about Heinrich von Kleist: "A typical intelectual product of the late eighteenth century, Kleist had started from certain unquestioned assumptions: that life can be planned, that its random element can be eliminated, that happiness can be achieved and assured if we go about it the right way, that man is educable and society perfectible, that the world is rationally ordered and that all things in principle can, and in due course will, be completely understood and explained." America was founded on Enlightenment principles (remember that "Pursuit of happiness" clause, among others), and seems yet to retain many of those beliefs, as in many ways my family did, and perhaps still does. But Kleist must have been rocked to his core at some stage, for the text continues: "His creative writing expressed the state of mind that follows upon the loss of every article of this faith." (From David Luke and Nigel Reeves' introduction to their translation of some of his short stories. )

A series of unfortunate events

This morning Peter and I dropped the car off for the AC to be recharged. When we swung by the house to pick up Robyn on the way to the train station, I went in for one last good-bye with the kids. And found Michael, unclad, slightly scalded, and scuttling up the stairs figleafing himself with his hands. He'd sloshed boiling hot ramen noodle soup over himself. Elizabeth, who was draped over the stair banister, had bashed her forehead on the overhanging ceiling. But Josie, bless her, wasn't adding to the fray by barking. Peter stopped in on them, shortly afterwards, helped clean up, comforted the demoralized Michael, and found a palatable breakfast for Elizabeth.

Yesterday also had its challenges though, to be fair, Puppy Kindergarten in evening was another great session. Only problem was, we missed half of it. It rained torrentially and dramatically yesterday--peals of thunder, crashing lightning, hail in places--and flooding on the parkway. We didn't know about that last bit. Besides, I'm from Houston, so an hour-long drenching rain doesn't seem like much. But it was enough to fill the river and overflow onto the parkway. So we were stuck on rush-hour filled back roads for 45 minutes and missed the early part of the class.

On the bright side, Josie barked only once in the car, upon which Elizabeth offered her a bone and she chewed it happily for the next hour. Sarah also noted that Josie is much improved this week, in fact she may have been the most improved in the class, since she sat calmly much of the time when Sarah was walking us through another technique or changing the collar on one of the students, while the other pups roamed, sniffed each others glands, or wound their leashes around their owners' legs. We learned how to get her to heel, saw the uses of a long-line leash, and heard about how to use a clicker to teach her to come. Along the way, we're having to redefine the way we talk to Josie. For example, only one word to mean one thing. To ask her to heel, we can't also say, "Let's go," "Follow," "Hep," "Come," or anything else. Just "Heel." "Come" means "Be with me and I'll give you a treat."

We were happy to see the other puppies again, too, and noted how much they'd grown, even the Lhasa-poo, Timber. There's also Nod, the fawn-colored greyhound; Jackson, the Portuguese water dog; Duke, who looks like a Bernese mountain dog, but is really a mix; and Stella, the bulldog-mix. Whoopsie is Sarah's large black lab, very calm around puppies, obsessed about catching frisbees.

On other news, our friend Elli writes from Greece: "I am impressed by your puppy's diligence! Should we send our cat [to kindergarten] ]there too? For better-behaviour lessons, such as "I should not bite my friends just for fun", "I should not be so selfish" etc., etc. Hmmm! She is on my black list because she woke me up terribly early this morning and then went back to bed (she, not I) and slept happily."

Puppy Kindergarten

Last week we attended our first session of Puppy Kindergarten, led by the deeply experienced trainer/author Sarah Hodgson. See her site at www.dogperfect.com. Before we go to our second session this evening, I thought I'd review what we learned last week:

Puppies can't multitask.

Instead of crying, they nip.

German shepherds are bossy.

Josie can hold her own in a growl-fest with a bulldog-mix.

She can also squash a lhasa-poo under one foot and the lhasa-poo will bounce back.

"Lhasa-poo" is an amazingly silly name for a breed.

Puppies can be taught certain words to help them learn what they need: e.g., food, water, outside, mat, under (your legs).

Different kinds of leashes can be used for different kinds of training (Sarah's site has an area with examples of these different leashes.)

Distraction is better than constant correction: When Josie stole a sock yesterday and was cavorting through the house with it, Peter didn't chase her, he offered her one of her chew toys in exchange. And she took it!

Children should not sit on the floor in room where six puppies are romping with each other.

Greyhounds are less aggressive than German shepherds or lhasa-poos.

Josie's German ancestry (the monks get a lot of their breeding stock from Germany) shows in her relatively wide body and generally healthy proportions.

If the children make treat boxes (plastic salad cups with a hole cut in the lid and filled with Cheerios), we can teach Josie to find them wherever they are.

Time Out

Peter and I spent much of the weekend in Rhinebeck at a beautiful wedding. The setting was glorious, overlooking the Hudson and the Catskills, the weather cool but sunny, the love between the bride and groom and among their families palpable, the rabbi's sermon personal and beautifully structured, and the music hot. But it took some effort to get into the mood, as on Friday and Saturday we were touched by two deaths near us.

A family friend, learned, quick-witted, Jesuit, who grew up in a fanatically anit-smoking family, died in excruciating pain from esophagial cancer. He was in his 50s.

A woman at church, a one-time student of Peter's, who had been rejoicing over these last few years in a mid-life marriage, learned that her husband, only 43, had died of a heart attach while riding the train.

I've had a life freakishly unmarred by death. Until I was near the end of high school, no one I knew died, and even then it was grandparents. Everyone else who has died in the meantime was somehow marginalized either by old age, or mental illness, or drugs. I don't know how that affected my brother or sister, but it gave me the false sense that you can know the shape of your life and live according to a plan.

That changed in December, when a friend--the friend who taught me how really to live--died with her husband and two young children in an unexplained small plane crash. She was 45, the children 10 and 11. Others in our community have lost friends and family even younger, with less drama. Now it seems as though we may be devastated by the flu soon, probably within the next three years. It's hard to know how to move forward without being in denial.

Pray for the souls of Andrew, Robert, Lillian, Paul, Shawn, Kitanna, and their families and friends.

A romp with ancestors

The other day Michael, Elizabeth, Babushka, and I took Josie over to the cemetery where my father and many other relatives are buried. I know that people overdo this sort of thing, but I was interested to note how as we approached my dad's grave she became excited, and as soon as we got there she started rolling all over the grass contentedly. It was a good visit - we sang "Christ is Risen" together, went around to other aunts' and uncles' graves, and that of my grandmother. Then we fed Josie next to the car in the shade, and drove home. Josie seemed to agree with all of us that cemeteries can be a really nice place to be.

Dog-meet-dog

I think I was in Romania at the time, but I'm told that Josie's first brief encounter with Nezhma, an adult New Skete shepherd, was apparently all about friendly licks. Today, with some time off, I took the kids and J out for a more extended play-date. At first it was the predictable sniffs. Then, a bit of a growl from Nezhma -- Lizzie interpreted this as "You're walkin' on thin ice, buddy." When we got out into the open field, they mostly respected each other's space, but periodically had some spirited chases, ending with classic paws-up submission on J's part. It all ended amicably enough, but without much joyous romping. After all, it would have been uncouth to do anything serious on the first date.

In concert

Time is passing and it's way past time for me to write again. Since the last time that I wrote, Peter has gone to and returned from Romania; Michael and Elizabeth have
been sick twice and I once; my parents have returned from a three-week jaunt in Russia; my brother introduced me to Google Earth; a doctor diagnosed my shoulder problems as acute tendonitis; I ordered "Typen turkischer volksmarchen" from Amazon in Germany; Josie seems to have doubled in size; and another of my valued colleagues has been fired. So, as you can see, I haven't been idle! I am very much looking forward to our upcoming vacation: we will go to my mother-in-law's house on Cape Cod, near the beach, and do nothing for seven days. Except eat.

All the firings at work were making me glad that the tenure system still operates in universities. Now that Peter's book has been accepted by the press, he has begun his tenure application. He's been told for seven years that he would be submitting for tenure. Just before he submitted, however, the administration told him that they were probably going to start separating promotions from tenure, and how did he feel about that? Good thing he went to
Romania; otherwise he might have told them more about his feelings than they
wanted to hear!

So many people are moving on: many of the children's classmates will be moving on to other schools. Our cherished tenant is heading for a new job in Texas, where her family is; Robyn may be moving on to a much-anticipated position with an aid organization; and I spent part of Saturday helping S. with her CV so that she can leave her abusive position and find something more congenial, perhaps in Manhattan.

Elizabeth had a studio class as one of her last piano events--the students all play for one another, but parents or other audience is not allowed. Michael missed his recital because of illness, but did manage to make it to the concert his group played for the Bronxville Chamber of Commerce at the town's sidewalk sale. We took Josie along: she strolled along through the crowds as though she had been doing it all her life and curled up under the cafe table while Michael was playing. She was greeted by so many people that Robyn suggested that we should have opened a "Pet the Pup" booth for a dollar a pop!

Drip...drip...

In the midst of all the newness of discovering the neighborhood, Josie has just started to notice little things. Today I noticed several times that when she's had some water from her bowl, she lifts up her head and watches the remaining droplets drip off her snout, amazed at the ripples on the surface of the water.

Myths and legends

As part of family time tonight, we finished reading Robert Graves' translation of Cupid and Psyche. It was more complex than I'd remembered, in terms of language and human-god relationships, but everyone followed along enthusiastically and with baited breath. They recognized its relationship to various versions of Beauty and the Beast, especially one involving a polar bear. What I hadn't realized until now is that Beauty and the Beast is an offshoot that retains the marriage-with-a-monstrous husband and the search elements, but the Arabic "Cruel Mother-in-Law," with its impossible tasks and the son who can only help his wife indirectly, is clearly an offshoot of the relationship between Venus and Psyche.

Another myth that came under examination today, is that Co., where I work, is a meritocracy. My unit has already lost its director and deputy director, who had built it and the global network that surrounded and supported it virtually from scratch. Now another executive, a talented worker and an excellent manager of her unit, has been canned, with no warning and no explanation, other than that they are elementing her position. Her team is in shock; her clients are in shock; the rest of us are confused and dismayed.

And our new head arrived. I rather expected that she would call us all together, tell us that she knows we've been through a tough time, but that she's here to keep things together and that we'll move ahead from here. Instead she met with a number of people, none of whom I've seen before. She did come by for an introduction, but was so anxious to greet the woman in a neighboring office that she just shook my hand, said Hi, and disappeared. Hope tomorrow is more promising.

Home certainly was. Michael was at a rehearsal for tomorrow's recital, so Liz, R., and I ate dinner and took Josie out for a real neighborhood walk. She's wonderfully unruffled by trotting around in the larger world: alert, interested, but calm. Even when we met a family of small children on trikes, must have been six or seven of them, right next to the sidewalk, she didn't get overly excited. She looked at them, would have been happy to greet them, but was equally willing to head on down the path. And it was the same story with everyone we met. What a pleasure she is (though even more when she has learned to heel).

Absolut Evacuations

The weekend started with a full-building evacuation on Friday evening, a drill which allowed us the choice between waiting 45 minutes for the building to reopen, go to a local bar, or head home early. At home, S. came by soon after we had plugged in an old VHS of The Pink Panther Strikes Again to begin Pizza and Movie night. S. had just been meeting with a new mentor, who confirmed that she has been struggling to work these last two years in an abusive environment, and she needed to wind down and grieve a bit. R. and I closeted ourselves until late in the guestroom with S. and some frozen vodka.

Saturday Sav came over for the first time since he was released from hospital, where he'd been incarcerated for 11 days. He was in fine form, just returned from Princeton where he had been baptizing a friend's baby and had seen many mutual friends. It was the anniversary of the release of Sgt Pepper, and he'd found a lone copy of a cult tribute band's release of a Sgt Pepper song on eBay, and summarized the plot of As You Like It, and so on. We watched Stranger Than Fiction. Lame, lame, and lame. Instead of exploring the interesting implications of a fictional character becoming aware of the voice narrating his life, it was a straightforward, man finds a way to react against his fate, which takes pity on him. He could have looked around to see whether anyone else in his world was in a similar predicament. Or, since some say that characters live again every time a book is read, the author could have offered to re-write his life so that it was delightful but ended in an early death, or give him his same humdrum life that would stretch until old age. Or, she could have renamed her character and set the living man free from association with her text.

Sunday I lay in bed sick, dizzy and utterly enervated. Elizabeth had been feeling poorly with the same thing the night before, but somehow managed to soldier on, making it to church and the rest of the day's events (romping with the dog and R. in the backyard, building train sets, cleaning up room). Faced with his first-ever final exams now that he is in fifth grade, Michael has been reviewing social studies, his poorest subject, steadily, and has been so exultant that he now remembers most of the events, that he is becoming convinced that the tests, rather than impossible, will be ultra easy--an extremist like his mom, as Peter says. Michael's trying for High Honors this semester, and might make it if he stays on an even keel.

Sunday Ruth came over to visit. She's been up in Rochester visiting her sister and caring for her nephews. Josie was pushing boundaries severely, jumping up and having to be corrected. She mouthed my arms as I was correcting her, and had to have her muzzle held then barking and snapping at my hands. Time and time again. I finally held her down on the floor and rolled her onto her back, and after that there she was willing to calm down and get back to business as usual playing with an ice cube.

Monday morning, this morning, Peter called me at work to say that Josie just had her last shots for the year. She's now been given thumbs-up to roam the neighborhood, though we've been advised that she shouldn't eat other dogs feces for another couple of weeks. She probably will, too. It's pouring rain out, otherwise Peter would be walking her right now--we've all been eager to release ourselves to roam the neighborhood with her. We'll all get to stretch our legs!

Stop and Eat the Roses

I'm just back from taking Josie to the vet -- her final vaccinations for this period. That means she can romp and frolic outside our property for the first time -- meet other dogs and neighborhood people. That's going to be a big change. She enjoys our property, though we have to keep her away from the flowers, and we've been finding more and more ways to play with her, such as tying a rope up with a pulley from a tree branch. Great dog fun.

Best vet-visit yet. Calm in the car, calm in my arms (getting to be quite an armload) in the waiting room. She trusts me more and more. Last night I clipped her nails and it was the easiest time yet. She's on the brink of being 16 weeks old, the time they call "adolescent." But she's already had some strong teenage-rebellion moments. Apparently that's going to increase, if she follows the textbooks.

I was away last week, and am going away again for a few days tomorrow. Last time I came back after five days, she was totally different -- got that stripe of white over her forelegs, and grew noticeably. Don't know what to expect this time... She's great.

Returns

Peter just returned from nearly a week in Israel. He came back browner and still a bit dusty from the Mediterranean heat. Josie greeted him ecstatically. She is noticeably more demonstrative with him than with the rest of us (though she is also eager to please Elizabeth as well). When I returned from a week away in England, it was business as usual with her:
happy enough to see me, but no more.

She has changed. She's back to being interested in people again, but still pushing the boundaries of behavior. Barking has gotten worse. She's rebelling more, sometimes racing around the garden like a maniac, sometimes reaching up to nip when she's been corrected (again this is more with Peter and Elizabeth, perhaps because they do more of the alpha-exercises with her). Her coloring is also changing rapidly. While Peter was away, she grew white lines from her elbows up her sides. Her chest developed a white spot that Michael called a thunderbird, but has now grown larger and shapeless. The underside of her tail appears to have a chain of tan going up it, and her rear end is now also tan. Her sides are still mostly smooth and black, although her back is covered with wavy black layers.

She began to go out of control the day Peter left, ignoring all rebukes. I shook her down for barking about three times the first evening, and shook her down another three times for digging on the next day and haven't had much trouble with her since. We've also been working to control her jumping up: catching hold of her legs and keeping her upright just past the point of discomfort (it's beginning to have an effect). She's not much of a hunter, fortunately, though she's tried a couple of times to snap up bumble bees. Somehow the bees didn't seem to notice, and canine and apian escaped unscathed. And even when she catches the cats off-guard, they manage to scramble away from her because she gives up the chase so easily.

That being said, she is becoming territorial. When Elizabeth brought her out the other day and Josie saw me in the garden, before she recognized me, she became alert and guarded: ears up, standing very still, tail notrwagging. Once she heard my voice, she relaxed and wiggled up to me. A day or so later, a bird landed on the yard fence and she became alert and suspicious, and began a short growl and a series of warning barks. The bird, though clueless to the threat, soon flew away and Josie was satisfied.

I suppose it is only a matter of time before she stops accepting anyone who comes into the house, but so far that hasn't been a problem. She has taken Robyn's arrival as our long-term guest in stride. When our friend Chieko came to pick up her son, Frederic, the other night, Josie was absolutely delighted to greet her and be petted by her. It's hard to tell whether she remembers Chieko from having met her weeks ago; Josie did her best to crawl over her. It was late in the evening though, so I held Josie in my arms until she settled down and lay still for stroking. I'm hoping she'll learn that way to be calm with guests.