Bad Dog Day Afternoon, No Biscuit for Me: Part 8

Sorry, I couldn't resist that title.  "Dog Day Afternoon" is a good movie and the title fit, sort of.    (I have been watching old Al Pacino movies lately, pre "Godfather," which is one of my all-time favorite movies.  "Serpico" is on Netflix and holds up well, by the way). 

And my dog time is not the afternoon, as you well know, it's 7:00 a.m. so the afternoon reference is also bogus.

But the non-bogus part of this is that it was a bad morning for me and the dogs.  Every other  Wednesday that I have been at the SPCA walking the dogs has been either good or very good. Sometimes I walk 4 dogs but usually it's 6 or 7, depending on the dogs, the time and the other volunteers.  Today I walked 2 dogs. That's it.  Just 2 dogs and both of them were dogs I have walked previously.

Clover is a smallish female mix, maybe 40 pounds and she has been in prison at SPCA Sonoma for a couple of months and I can't believe she hasn't been adopted. She's calm when walking, knows how to fetch a ball, is personable and loving.  I walked her today and gave her lots of pets and treats. She loves hot dog bites.  

And this is Harry.   

Harry is huge!  Like 100 pounds huge. But beautiful and calm and I am sort of in love with him. Almost all the dogs at the SPCA wear a harness to walk which means we put those harnesses on the dogs when we take them from their cells.  Some are so difficult to harness (see below) and some are easy.  (Some fall in between terrible and easy.)  Harry, even with his size, is easy.  He knows that going out means peeing and pooping (which he won't do in his cell) and a romp around and Harry loves to smell stuff. He also likes treats, dog treats, hot dog bites, anything.  I love this dog. Even as big as he is, he is gentle most of the time and once our jaunt is over and I return him to his cell, he is happy to get more treats. But then, when I close the door and look at him, he has the sincerely sad face that only a lovely dog can have. He breaks my heart every time.

So, Clover and Harry. My pals. So far, great.

But then I ventured into unknown territory. Usually there is a regular employee there who also walks dogs early in the morning and stands with me at the white board and gives me guidance on who I should leash up. This man knows my hesitancy with really large, jumpy dogs.  However, he was not there today so I relied on the notes all dog walkers are required to leave on the computer.  Keep in mind that these are dogs that were not there last week.  The notes said things like "easy to leash" and "jumpy but easy" and "once harnessed he was an angel" and so forth.  I picked three of these unknown dogs and got into their cells and I could not harness one of them.  The smallest was an 8 month old puppy, maybe 30 pounds, but his cell was full of poop and pee (which I usually tolerate just fine) and he jumped and nipped at me and spun around and around and barked for about 3 minutes, at which time I called it quits.  The same thing happened with two other dogs but they were larger, 50-60 pounds, not housetrained so lots of pee and poop on their paws (which, again, is fine if they are willing to be coerced into the harness) and way too jumpy and pushy for me.

In defeat, I signed out and left the shelter. I felt like I had failed the dogs. Not just the dogs, but that I had failed myself. Of course, as we humans do, I conveniently extrapolated that experience into this: What a failure I am. What a joke my life is. I can't even harness a dog. What is the point of anything?

Humans are so good at that, aren't we? Taking one thing that happens and making it the entire point of our existence?  

It took me a while to get past that mind-set. It brings up the entire point of being retired, of course. What's the point? I don't want to play any sort of card here, but the cards are on the table for a reason.  But that's a blog for another day.

Thanks for reading. I wish I could say something like "strange things are afoot at the Circle K" but I am sure those cards are not in the mix.

To be clear, I did not walk the bunny or the cat, nor did I attempt to walk either of them.  Perhaps that would have turned my day around. Perhaps not. Just saying....

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Reading John Irving

 John Irving fans know this: to read him is to commit. His books are long and involved, many subplots, many characters who change over the course of 400-500-600 pages. The reader must be in for the long haul and like it. There's no reading Irving if you don't like his work or are just "meh" about it. Needless to say, I am a fan and I have liked every one of his novels, some of them I have read more than once.

But his latest, "The Last Chairlift" clocks in at close to 900 pages!!!  That's not a commitment, that's a kind of craziness.  Seriously, I took it out of the library, kept it past it's due date, returned it and put it back on my request list to read the second half.  Irving's books aren't quick reads, either. They do not accommodate skimming. Every time you try to skip past a paragraph or two you realize, at paragraph three, that you missed something crucial and need to backtrack.  So you don't skip ahead too much.

But the writing and the plot and the characters! It's been a while since I've read his other novels (he hasn't written one in seven years)  but the characters in this one are so shimmering and almost ethereal and yet completely real and alive.  And beguiling and frustrating and maddening and joyful.  

The story begins in the 1940's, in Colorado, at a real hotel, the Hotel Jerome, now a luxury auberge hotel.  Things happen there, ghosts are present, lives change. The story moves to the East Coast, to New Hampshire (of course, Irving is always going back to his roots) and New York and other locations but the Hotel Jerome appears in the book many times.

A lot of John Irving's novels revolve around political themes (war, injustice, civil rights) and there is always a sexual component to them as well. He champions, in  his novels, the queer and trans world and the struggles of groups outside the "norm," whatever that might be. This novel is no different. The main characters are straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, trans and questioning.  Just like the real world. A lot of the story takes place in the 1980's, when Reagan was President and ignored the AIDS epidemic, and it continues until present day.  In 900 pages there's time to span 80 years!

"The Last Chairlift" is quite a tale and I enjoyed it immensely.  It makes me want to re-read some of his older novels but not quite yet. There are too many new novels out there in the literary world and too little time.  I'll go back and revisit older ones when I am too old to go to the library and pick up new books. But if you like Irving, you will like this book.