I’ll tune my gratitude for an uneventful week in Cedarville. I guess that’s a matter of perspective. For her, it was chock full of birds and squirrels and things to tug on and eat and things to play with and eat and snow to play in and eat.
Cedar
A blog and a dog
Category: March (page 2 of 2)
I remember Carl Olson, our sit-behind-the-desk-and-lob-grenades-of-profundity high school English teacher, dictating the definition of coy to us for our weekly vocabulary, lesson. “The definition of coy is ‘coquettishly shy or bashful.'” I don’t remember anyone asking him to define coquette.
I thought about that definition this morning, watching what’s become Cedar’s standard move for doggie meetups at Sandy Beach. My little coquette.
Good work when you can get it I guess.
P.S. A coydog is technically “a canid hybrid resulting from a mating between a male coyote and a female dog.” If Cedar is a hybrid, I suspect it’s between a Lab and a mouse.
“Their luggage — a blue roller suitcase, a gray suitcase and some backpacks — was scattered near their bodies, along with a green carrying case for a small dog that was barking.”
“They Died by a Bridge in Ukraine. This Is Their Story.” NYT. March 9, 2021
It’s not lost on me that I’m writing a dog blog while others undergo horrific suffering. It’s hard to reconcile. Tania, one of my former students (How could this brilliant soul ever have learned from me?) posted a beautifully moving piece last week about trying to “hold space” for the people of Ukraine. She writes: “All we can really do is be grateful that there is something about life that is so precious and good, that losing it is painful in equal measure.”
Last night I read the heartbreaking story of Tetiana Perebyinis and her two children, Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9, who died by Russian shelling as they attempted to dash across a bridge that might have led them them out of their town of Irpin, on the way to Kyiv.
The Times piece notes, “Their luggage — a blue roller suitcase, a gray suitcase and some backpacks — was scattered near their bodies, along with a green carrying case for a small dog that was barking.” While trying to digest the horror of the scene, my mind protected me by wondering about that surviving dog; was it Cake or Benz (from the article)? I thought about other images of people scrambling to get out of utter ruin, and toting their pets along with them.
Lately, I’ve also been thinking about Ernest Hemingway’s brutal piece, “The Old Man at the Bridge.” A fellow teaching intern shared this piece with me in 1989, and I’ve never forgotten it. Set in the Spanish Civil War, the action centers around the soldier-narrator trying to revive an exhausted old man who needs to make his way over an Ebro River bridge, away from Fascist artillery, towards safety. The man has stayed behind to care for his animals–some pigeons, two goats, and a cat. It’s clear he’s not going to make it. “’I was taking care of animals,’ he said dully, but no longer to me. ‘I was only taking care of animals.'” The clouds are low, so the planes aren’t yet flying. The narrator reveals to us, “That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.”
Those lines have stuck with me since 1989. But reading the piece today, I’m struck by the word “only” in the old man’s final words, as well as the central metaphor of the bridge. It’s as if his only is everything—that deep compassion the only thing of significance at the end. The old man’s preservation of that compassion, that connection to our better selves, is the bridge that seems to hold up and matter to me at least.
The other day my friend Fred asked me if I regretted getting Cedar, whose care makes it difficult to travel to see Katrina, in Seattle. I heard myself saying to Fred, “I feel like Cedar is opening my mind, my body, my spirit to the beauty and wildness of my own back yard, helping me to re-get-to-know so much of my life.”
So Cedar plods on, often highlighting and reinforcing the insignificance of my own daily life in the presence of the horrible grind of suffering, but maybe, too, offering me occasional bridges? Those may be the best places I can find to “hold space” in the way that Tania so beautifully invites.
A few images from the past couple of days.
This weekend, I treated myself to Liz McKenzie, Hank Lentfer, and Richard K. Nelson’s brilliant collaboration The Singing Planet. I hadn’t realized I’d have such a rapt movie date. In hindsight, this was the perfect selection for Cedar the listener.
Hank (who is the father of Katie’s good friend, Linnea, and who has toted the girls to wild places over the curve of the earth in the same skiff he used in the film) collaborated with one of my heroes and friends, Richard “Nels” Nelson, for years capturing wild sounds in Glacier Bay. (Nels once recommended I could do similar work with an iPhone and a salad bowl.)
The film is a 39-minute love poem to the planet. Nels’ rapture about the chorus of birds always starting somewhere at every moment as dawn spreads over the spinning earth is worth the (low) price of admission, as was Hank’s comment after the screening, summoning a David James Duncan image of a starfish regenerating most of its body to suggest how we might use just attentive listening to begin to regenerate our relationship with the wild.
Hank says, “Listen. It’s gorgeous. Fill yourself with the sound,” and I think Cedar took the message to heart. I love how she looks up to the sky for the birds, just before Nels describes raven as a Koyukon Athabaskan diety. Watch (and listen):
What this clip doesn’t show is my movie date bolting when the sound track switched from birds to wolf.
I have to admit hating the term “learning loss” when it’s applied to kids in the pandemic. It’s a deficit model, right? The kids learned something during all their non-classroom time; it just wasn’t what their teachers thought they should learn.
Maybe that’s the story with Cedar, who was spoiled (in the best of ways) by super dog lover Jordan for a full week while I was in Seattle. I met Jordan in the driveway as I arrived home and I swear I heard the words, “Your dog is so well trained.”
Not two minutes later, I was following a BAD GIRL down the street as she disobeyed my various COME commands. This happened several times on Wednesday. Did I lose authority by being gone? Was this Cedar’s way of punishing me for leaving? Or maybe she just advanced into some rebellious stage while doing all that growing and getting her fur so shiny while I was gone.
In any case, I’ll say it: Learning loss, much like shit, happens. So, we’ve spent the better part of the last two days recalling recall, in “intervention” as we might call it in a deficit-based elementary school triage system.
There’s lots not to be happy about here: her testing me, her balking causing me to repeat the command COME, her running past me when she does return. I know I’m supposed to run away to beckon her to come to me when she stalls or runs past me. I know I could put her back on a long lead and practice (that is dumb because she comes every time). I know I’m not supposed to use aversives. (Sorry about that, kid, but you’re pushing me.) I know I *could* fold and start retraining with treats. Bears will soon be emerging, and if I can’t overcome the distraction of dog biscuits or random scents, we might have an issue or two.
For now I’ll try to switch my deficit-based thinking to asset-based thinking. She’s apparently very good at forgetting things. Maybe that will apply to her grudge and her new attitude, too. Meanwhile, it’s time to get curious about what she DID learn while I was gone, other than how to enact the doggy middle finger.
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