The Olive Slide Show

It's all about convergence. Or so I keep hearing. Anyway, I have created an Olive slide show. So far it's rather short, but I hope to add to it. Here is the link.

Olive continues to improve. She not continually frightened outside. Although she is still reluctant to go, she has a pretty good time once she is actually outside. She has discovered there are lots of interesting smells in Brooklyn, like garbage and abandoned mattresses and food wrappers and chicken bones. She has found some squirrels and pigeons and rats to chase. Today she met some cats who live at a pet store nearby. She enjoyed that; she lived with cats in her former home.

We've been spending a lot of time in a little park nearby. I am outside much more than I used to be before Olive arrived. It is interesting to see the life of this very well-used park. There are usually some homeless people sleeping, toddlers in strollers with their nannies or mothers, slightly older kids with scooters or bikes, soccer players, office workers, other people walking dogs, people doing tai chi, etc. But the proportion of each population changes throughout the day.

We Are Having a Huge Thunderstorm!

It might as well be North Carolina. Olive is cowering in her crate. It seems to comfort her. Makes me think we gave up Garth's crate use too hurriedly. It's a great place to hide when the world seems too much with you.

Maybe this will end the horrible heat wave. Let us hope. This was Olive being brave before the thunderstorm. She is brave in general, though there is a lot to be frightened of.

An End to the Interdognum (maybe)

This is Olive.

She is a blur in this picture and so far, a mystery to me. She arrived home with us yesterday, after a long hot trip from Cape Cod. She is 2.5 years old. Her person decided she wasn't cut out for the show life, though a perfectly nice dog otherwise.

She is not sure what to think about us. Brooklyn is hot and strange and noisy and smelly. Smelly is okay -- she's enjoying that part. The noise of trucks and sirens and slamming doors, not so much. Reasonably self-possessed in the apartment (although clearly wondering what strange twist of fate brought her here), she is terrified on the street. Shaking, tail down, looking around nervously.

Of course, it is only the first day. She might very well be all right. But it's a lot for a little dog to get used to at once. New people, new place, a heat wave. Oh, and last night we had a thunderstorm. She loved that, too.

I haven't written about the process that led up to this, getting a dog barely a year after losing Garth. Perhaps it seems insensitive, or callous. Maybe it is. I don't miss him any less; in some ways this makes me sadder. This long Monday I have spent with Olive in some ways reminds me of the very last day I spent with Garth, when he was terribly ill and in pain and I could not help him. Olive is sad and I cannot fix that; she misses her old life, and who can blame her? She shakes in the street and won't walk and I pick her up and carry her, as I used to do with Garth in those last pathetic days, though obviously for a different reason. In every hopeful new beginning (and I use hopeful in both senses here) you can glimpse, more clearly than later on, the end.

In view of all that, a person might reasonably ask, Why? Why get another dog? Why go through all this again? I can only that you can't go through life saying no to everything. Sometimes you just have to do stupid crazy things, take a risk, say yes. To risk failure, even disaster, and looking stupid and wasting time and all the rest of it. I would never jump out of a plane, or climb up my building. But I am crazy just the same.