Floundering with the dogs. Part 3.

I think I won a reverse lottery: my time slot for volunteer dog-walking is before sunrise!  Seriously, 7:00 a.m. means leaving my house by 6:30 and it's dark!  And too early to make coffee, something that my dogs today seemed to intuit. Caffeine-free, not quite alert, rather cold, a bit nervous about this adventure, but there I was at the allotted hour, trying to get a 70 pound ball of white fur into a dog harness when all the dog wanted was to be left alone. 

As reported previously, the dogs at the shelter live in 10 x 10 concrete rooms. The rooms are cleaned regularly and the temperature is fine, but I don't care if dogs have zero aesthetic sense: these boxes are depressing. No art on the walls, no cute bookshelf holding their favorite toys, no soothing music. A bed, two bowls. That's it. Is it any wonder they look at us volunteers as interlopers? Especially us new volunteers, which they (the dogs) understand can be easily intimidated. And intimidated I was.  Look at this dog:  how cute does this guy look?  Keep in mind that he is part Irish Wolfhound.

His name is Gandolf. He has been at the shelter for a while, was "adopted" three weeks ago and then returned to the shelter for reasons that I do not know.  But how bad must he feel?  Loved for a few days and then scorned. It's no wonder he doesn't want me to try and put a harness over his head.  However, once harnessed, he was fine. We walked, he peed a lot, I gave him pieces of cooked chicken I brought with me. We went back to his prison cell and he went back to being depressed.

My next dog was Selene, a tri-pod (what they call a dog who has had a leg amputated.)  Now, one might think a three legged dog would be easy to handle, but one would be mistaken. Selene is beautiful, large and quite energetic and jumpy. While Gandolf was simply disdainful, Selene is quite wily. She hates anyone leaning over her and can spin around 360 degrees faster than you can say "Siberian Husky."  Getting a harness on her took about five minutes of alternatively giving her sliced hot dogs (also brought with me) with one hand and trying one-handed to snap her into her harness.  Once done, we went out to the yard and she raced around like crazy, chased a ball, played tug and acted like the two-year old dog she is. 

Whew.  Now my two hour shift was almost half over and I looked for another dog I could walk and I picked Sunny. The notes I read on Sunny said he was a bit jumpy and somewhat difficult to harness but a sweet-heart and was learning to "Sit" upon command.  OK, into  his room I snuck, after throwing hot dog slices to the far side so I could sneak in without him bolting out the door.  Again, I spent at least 5 minutes with him, never once getting anywhere near putting on the harness because all Sunny did was jump on me. Not forcefully, but just jumping up and down, on his back legs, over and over. He wanted more hot dogs but even the hot dogs couldn't get him to quiet down enough to harness him. I finally admitted failure and left him for someone else to take out.  He looks like such a good dog.... and he probably will be one day. Just not today, at least not for me.  

I still had time on my shift (not that anyone would care if I left early, but a commitment is a commitment.)  I chatted with two other walkers who had been there a while and told them my sad Sunny story. They suggested Marshall, an older dog, who they said was a bit jumpy, but in an older dog way. Fine, off to get Marshall.

Seriously, look at this guy.  He's about 8 years old, weighs about 60 pounds and looks like such a good guy.  It took me another five minutes and tons of hot dog slices to get him harnessed and he was such a puller on the leash!  When we got to the big yard and I could unleash him, he ran like his tail was on fire. He peed on everything and did that digging-marking thing dogs do. He chased the ball (but wouldn't bring it back) and then proceeded to just dig a huge hole. Then more running and more peeing.  Finally, after about 20 minutes he hopped onto a large wooden structure and let me pet him. And that was the best part of my day. Marshall wanted to be petted. He wanted someone to tell him he was a good boy, that he was such a good dog. I petted Marshall for about five minutes and it was clearly the best part of his morning as well. He was as calm as a daisy as we walked back to his cell. He let me take off the harness easily and he got more hot dogs.  

Marshall made me realize that all the labor involved in trying to get the dogs ready to go outside, ready to go the the field or walk around the property is worth it for one reason: the dogs need attention and love. That's it. If we struggle to leash them up, it's ok. It's worth it to see them calm down, look at us like we might be alright because we are petting them. 

Whew!!!  It was an eye-opening morning, a lot of frustrating moments, a lot of self-doubt (can I actually do this?) and some satisfaction as well.  Next Wednesday will be better. I will get better at this. It's all about the dogs, not about me. 

And I haven't even mentioned the cats and guinea pigs and bunnies! We don't walk them, of course, but they are also looking for homes.

Think about it!

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Walking. And talking. And talking, talking, talking......

Call me a grumpy old lady, I don't care.  I'm walking quietly through the regional park, listening to the birds, enjoying the meditative quality of an early morning walk when a screech like a screaming eagle shatters my reverie and sets my teeth on edge. Three people walking together, talking in loud voices that could probably be heard a half mile away, having no respect for the calm, tranquil morning. I don't get this. You are right next to your walking partner, why use your Alpine ski voice?  No one within the half mile circle of your voice cares about your friend Sandro and his chickens.  No one in the park on a beautiful morning wants to hear about your husband's cholesterol count. (Seriously, I heard about both of these things within 90 seconds.) No one in the park even knows Sandro or your husband and if we did, we would want them to vanish off the face of California (they could still stay on the earth, just far away) so you wouldn't scream about them while walking along with your really sad and embarrassed dog. 

The park is for everyone. It isn't just for you and your spandexed friends. Lululemon doesn't care that you are advertising her (?) clothes while you shout out your love for the guy who did your Botox work. Shut the fuck up.  

I had to actually turn around and walk away from these three people, out of the park, back to my car. Walking is lovely. Talking and shouting and ranting loudly is not lovely. Made me want to chug down a shot of cheap whiskey but I didn't because it wasn't even 8:00 in the morning and I never drink before 8:30 a.m. 

Kidding.  But not about the noise. 

Hawks screech.  People should not.  Just saying.

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Miss Marple (Agatha Christie) and her cultural faux pas

 A few months ago my sister gave me an old collection of six novels by Agatha Christie. There is something so lovely about reading Agatha's mystery stories. It's as if you simply do not care one whit about the present day struggles and troubles with society and politics and world events. You are tossed backwards in time, to the 1930-1970's and you are happily taken up with the customs and moral concerns of those eras. Miss Marple spans about 30 years,  so one must be ready for a few modern changes in culture as one reads about her amazing murder-solving abilities.

One readily acknowledges that one's time could be better spent improving one's mind with modern day non-fiction about socioeconomic disparities and the political breakdown of our country but one does not care, at least for about three or four hours. Agatha Christie is a tonic for all of the above.

Currently I am reading a Miss Marple novel. (Yes, I am one of the "ones" mentioned above.) The where, when, how of the novel are not important because they all have a common theme: polite conversation, a mysterious murder, more investigative conversation and Voila! We know who the murder is and how it was done and why, all thanks to the elderly and sometimes doddering Miss Marple.

However, in today's light, these books give us such a rich look into society of that time, especially because Agatha Christie began writing her mysteries in the 1930's but her last book was published 40 years later. That's a huge span of time, of course, running from the Great Depression through WW2, into the Cold War and almost to Watergate!  While Christie doesn't mention a lot about current events in her Miss Marple stories, she does flavor her tales with quick references to daily events. She will mention how novel telephones are in the early novels and then moves on to the same thoughts about television.  But since most of her murder solving work takes place in small villages in Britain, it's easy to ignore the fact that time has marched on. While reading her stories, it's easy to pretend everything is stuck in 1933.

Agatha Christie was certainly not a "politically correct" writer.  She has no problem using pejorative and dismissive words and phrases, not to mention racially loaded terms. I won't repeat them all here, but words like "chink" and "darkie" and  other pejorative terms for different nationalities are widely used by characters in her mysteries. They aren't necessarily used in a malicious manner, just as a term of identification in some way.  But reading them today, it is sometimes a bit of a shock that those phrases exist so easily on the page.

If you haven't read one of the classic Agatha mysteries in a while, please do.  "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" or "The A.B.C. Murders" are good places to start for a Hercule Poirot mystery.  "The Body in the Library" or "The Caribbean Mystery" are good Miss Marple books.  Reading one is like taking a little vacation from reality and that is often just the tonic for what wears us down in everyday life.  Check them out.

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Burning the Bounty

It's not that I don't make mistakes or screw up all the time, but seriously....burning a cake?  A cake that I have made at least a dozen times?  A cake made from the bounty of apples from my daughter's front yard? A cake that was to be served at a dinner for ten people? And I burned it?  Holy cow.  Now what?  It's not like life gave me lemons and I made lemonade (a trite saying that I hate, by the way.)  No, life gave me apples and I burned them.

Back to the cake. I did what any baker would do who didn't have time to bake another cake: I took a knife to the aforementioned burned cake.  Once it cooled enough to handle, I gently flipped it upside down and roughly sawed off a quarter inch from the bottom part of the cake. Then I slowly shaved about an eighth of an inch off of the really dark parts of the side of the cake. There was nothing to be done about the too-brown apple pieces on the top, so those remained. Once the surgery was complete, the cake looked OK.  Unless you had witnessed its sad coming-out-of-the-oven over doneness, you might not have known its major flaw, which was, of course, that it was burned.  I felt a tiny bit bad about the overcooked situation but not bad enough to leave the cake behind. It came to the party with me. 

No one suspected a thing! Once sliced, the cake looked perfect!  And it tasted great, no hint of black edges, no burnt taste and people really liked it. Whew, crisis averted.  Well, not really a crisis, of course. Who would really care if the cake had accidentally fallen into a muddy, wet ditch or had been trampled by a runaway horse or been stolen by a cake thief?  One of those scenarios might have given the baker a great story to tell and that story might have been better than the actual apple cake desert.

Next time I will save the cake for myself and serve the guests an outlandish tale that they will eat up like pudding and be just as satisfied. 

Actually getting to walk a dog! Part 2

 There I was, poised to harness an 80 pound dog when my dog-walking "mentor" gently asked the relevant question: "Do you have treats in your pocket and poop bags as well?"  

Well, gosh, no. I carried neither treats nor poop bags.  What a loser.  No wonder I have not yet been certified to walk a dog. What dog would want to be seen with me?  How alarming to be out, strolling the grounds, and pooping, and having your so-called certified dog-walker not be able to pick up that poop!  

So we begin again. We get poop bags. We get treats. We get a leash. We get a walkie-talkie. Then we try and get a dog.

There are a couple of dozen dogs at this local SPCA  so one would think getting a dog on a leash and taking it for a walk would be easy. Not so much.  As I previously reported, there are a lot of steps between "wanting to walk the dog" and actually "walking the dog."  And seriously, we don't really walk the dog so much as let the dog out of its very sad, tiny concrete room to go out and pee and perhaps poop and maybe get to run around in one of the yards. There isn't a lot of walking involved. There is, however, a lot of struggling and jumping and wrangling involved.

These dogs, most of them, have come from families. And now they are in small rooms, alone. They often have to pee and poop in those rooms, where they have a small bed and a food and water bowl. The dogs hate to be in the small 10 x 10 room so when they see a person sneaking into the room they go crazy. They jump, they wiggle, they jump more. Trying to put a harness (which is what they need to wear to exit the room) on a leaping, over-excited dog is like trying to harness a small tornado. It's very difficult.

After what seems like ten minutes, once the harness is on and you get to leave their prison cell, they are all energy. They just want to get outside, to be let go, to chase a stick or fetch a ball or simply zoom from one side of that yard to the other.  And then they want to be petted. Lots of pets. Lots of love. Then, maybe, they will let you walk them for five minutes before you must take them back to their cell. And leave them.

My training is complete. Next week I will get my shift assignment and will have two hours to walk whatever dogs need walking at that time. As happy as I will be for that allotment, the  dogs will be happier.  After all, I am not in a 100 square foot concrete cell. They are.  All I hope is that I make them feel better, 20 minutes at a time.