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.