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Thanks

Gail

A Home for Thanksgiving

 

What happens now?

  A home in time for Thanksgiving. That’s what he was thinking about, wishing for. It was only a week away and still no family to share with. He was cold, homeless, flea-ridden, and mangey. But still, he had hope.  Because it’s his nature to be hopeful, and he had a plan.    

 The morning was cold. Traffic had slowed to a crawl outside DeBerry, Texas. Cars were honking as he ran circles on FM 79.  Confused, desperate, and determined, he ran his circles. Then a car stopped by the side of the road.  Outstretched hands, a kind face, a warm car. Gratefully he settled onto the warm floorboard.      

 G emailed this picture to me. What do I do? she wanted to know.  The SPCA, I said. Take him to the SPCA when you get to Shreveport. Just don’t bring him home, I was thinking. We already had one senior greyhound, a gentleman of a dog living with us. When he passed on to the Rainbow Bridge, we were going to take up the giant-sized dog beds from the floor of every room in the house and put away the elevated food bowls. We planned to enjoy our “childless” years: no nails to trim or 40 lb bags of dogfood to haul in, and no more expensive semiannual visits to the vet for teeth cleaning. And someday when the house felt too empty, we would bring another quiet greyhound from the race track to live with us at the Hasty Street Retirement Home for Greyhounds.  On one thing we agreed: no puppy.    

But the only shelter in Shreveport was full and wouldn’t take him. G could see fleas crawling through his hair, and he was one very stinky pup. So she took him to the nearest vet clinic. No, she told the vet, no vaccinations. I’m not keeping him.  Just give him a bath, get rid of the fleas and make him comfortable. She also had them treat his mange.  Because she was staying at a hotel, she had to leave him at the clinic overnight . They wanted a copy of her driver’s license…in case she didn’t come back to get him.   

But she did.  And there he was to greet me when I came home from work. I was so not prepared. Yes, all puppies are adorable. But I was floored. He’s 100 times cuter in person than he is in pictures! My heart didn’t stand a chance.  Then we discovered he was deaf. Not a problem, I said. We’ll use sign language. The greyhounds obeyed signs, as well as verbal commands. How hard can it be, right?  

While we looked for him a home, I was secretly pleased when every lead didn’t pan out. I wanted him to have the best family possible. He was a special-needs puppy after all. Not just anyone could be trusted to provide the kind of home a deaf catahoula could thrive in.         

Yep, Mister is a catahoula leopard hound. The vet in Louisiana thought he was a merle border collie. But extensive research online convinced us he is a catahoula.  The webbing between his toes sealed the deal. That and other catahoula owners’ instant recognition of his breed. So we loaded him in the car with Beau when we headed to Lake Livingston for the long Thanksgiving weekend. We stopped in Huntsville to buy a puppy bed and puppy food bowls. Over the holiday, Mister learned to sit and where to go potty.  He met family and friends. We began to get a clear and realistic picture of just how challenging a deaf catahoula would be to raise.      

Although we continued to look for someone who could provide him a good home, by Thanksgiving Day, Mister knew in his little, hopeful, puppy heart that he had found it.      

One Ringy Dingy…

Ernestine

Remember, Ernestine? – a character created by Lily Tomlin on Laugh In? No? You must be too young, and you missed it. She was a wise-cracking, snorting when she laughed switchboard operator. “We don’t care, we don’t have to….we’re the phone company.”

Well, sometimes when I call G, I’ll ask, “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?” And I love it, because she almost always laughs.

Passion play with pixals.

brass greyhound on the mantle

 This is my new obsession. I’ve been playing with my iPhone camera and some of the apps, but it’s beyond playing now. I’m addicted. Especially since I found an app that allows me to select a “lens” and type of film before I snap the shot. And if I want to tweak it some more? There’s an app for that!

I have my iPhone on me everywhere I go, on the look out for the next photo.  I miss so many good shots because I’m driving..but I catch some. (Drive-By Shooting series in the works) And I’m slapping ’em up on Flickr every day.

Shadow Play

October shadows

As I was leaving the house to pick up a XXL Chalupa, tacos and, of course, a couple of hot apple empanadas from Taco Bell, the pattern on our driveway of the leaves from the lacebark elm caught my eye. I thought it would be kind of cool to take a snapshot of the shadows now and then again later when the branches are bare. 

That’s the kind of thing I’ve been doing for play for some time now, especially since my old iPhone died and was replaced with the iPhone4. I’ve purchased six photography apps.  I take a picture, drop it into one of my new apps, run it through a few possible special effects, tweak it here a bit and there a bit, and then post it to Facebook or Flickr. Some people are doing incredible things with just an iPhone camera. I have so much to learn. 

one more shadow shot before I go

 

The Play’s the Thing!

Here’s something about me you don’t know. No, not even you…….Are you ready?

I’ve daydreamed about being an actor. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be someone I’m not for a little while. To become a person so totally unlike me that I would have to rearrange my psyche to fit myself inside her skin.  My speech might be accented. I might change the way I walk so as to match her purpose and direction in life.  Looking from my new place in the universe, I might see it all differently.

Which leads me to wonder: if I become someone else, does that someone else become me as well? There’s a stable core that I identify as “me,” of course. But I wouldn’t be the same me I was before I was “her,” would I?

I’ve actually done a little acting. I played a middle-aged, nearly homeless, alcoholic woman with borderline diabetes. I even had to audition for the part! My audience? Medical students at UT Southwestern. They crowded into the room in small groups to interview me.

And I had a story to tell. Problems with my job, with the cold, with paying the rent. If they asked the right questions, I told them what the nurse at the health fair said about my “blood sugar.” If they listened well, they came up with the correct diagnosis, and they passed the interview part of their exam.

Afterwards, I was told that the students came out of the room shaking their heads, murmuring concern about the plight of this poor woman. So I must have been convincing.

Which leads to more questions: Did I do a good acting job because I was able to wiggle my way under the skin of this “character”?  Or was she already there, waiting for a chance to speak? Did I leave her behind? Or did she follow? She might have a story to tell. Will you listen?

Play: The Greyhound Way

Windy loved her toys

The ideal greyhound personality? Focused: eyes on the rabbit – no A.D.D. dogs on the track please. Strong prey drive: that rabbit must die, and I’m just the dog for the job. Congenial: must play well with others. Injure the other athletes or nip the handlers and you’re out of the gene pool. Playful? Not part of the job description.  

Play – an idea our retired greyhounds are attracted to – in theory anyway. Execution, however, eludes them.  Beau quickly caught on to the concept: enthusiastic bow into the let’s play position, grin on his face.  And then…nothing. More bowing, maybe a soft, “auf!” It seems he wants to play, but doesn’t have a clue.  

Six years later, in spite of countless demonstrations and attempts to engage him, the most we can get from him is a bounce or two about the living room in a crouched position. At least it doesn’t freak him out anymore when we gently toss a stuffed toy in his direction. He may even grab that cow and toss it into the air a time or two before giving up on the enterprise.  

Beau & leopard on loan from Dogee

When Beau first retired and came to reside at the Hasty Street Retirement Home for Greyhounds, Windy was still with us and in the prime of her golden years. Her favorite game – well, her only game –  was fetch.  Never bothering to greet us on our arrival, she grabbed a stuffed animal and headed out the doggy door, confident that we would follow and toss the camel, the monkey, or the banana for her…over and over again.  

Beau watched from the sidelines. Choosing the smallest, softest toy, I would toss it in his direction.  OMG! He was under attack! He retreated back into the house.  

Ever since Windy went ahead to wait for us at the Rainbow Bridge, we’ve missed coming home to a backyard full of stuffed toys. On the other hand, Beau Bob is an excellent greeter, leaning against our legs for loving, and sniffing us over to learn about our day. And some days, we come home to find that a toy’s been pulled from the basket and left lying on the floor.  And we don’t mind.  

I did it again.

I forgot to post yesterday.  We packed up Beau Bob and left the lake around noon.  I could have posted by iPhone as G drove us home, but I didn’t think about it.

As soon as we got back to Dallas, I set to work editing a journal article for an accounting professor in Hong Kong. He got my name from a Chinese professor I helped here at UT Dallas.  Editing journal articles is always scarier to me than helping Ph.D. students with their dissertations.  I don’t know why. There is a lot on the line for the author in either case. 

Sometimes I get a bigger kick out of rewriting something for someone else than I do writing my own stuff. Maybe because it’s easier, or because I like helping people. It’s deeply satisfying to take their thoughts and fiddle with the words a bit until the paper I hand back to them clearly expresses their ideas.

The grammar part is fun too, but it ain’t easy. I require a collection of books on grammar, The MLA Handbook, and I’ve read Strunk and White numerous times. And, I’m here to tell you, not all authorities agree on where to place that comma, or if you even need one. Last night, it was the Chicago Style Manual, accessed through the universities website, that cleared up some formatting questions for me.  I even searched the web to find a paper the author cited because the title didn’t look right to me. It wasn’t.

Do you see where I’m going with this? I worked until late last night to get that paper on its way to Hong Kong. (Thank you G, for keeping me in popcorn and Coke Zero until I got the job done.)

And that is my excuse for failing once again, during NaBloPoMo, to post to my blog. But here’s how I look at it: even if I post only every other day, that’s a whole lot more writing getting done than I was doing before.

All comments correcting the grammar, punctuation, or general language usage in this post will be carefully considered and rigorously researched for accuracy. Should I fail to prove you wrong, you will receive a public and gracious word of thanks. What I’m really thinking about you will turn up in a future post about nit-picking, legalistic grammarians. No. Really. Go ahead. I want to know if I used the wrong verb tense or whatever.

Yesterday

Yesterday was the first day of October and the start of a new NaBloPoMo…and I missed it. I’m out of town with no Internet connection. So I took these pics with the intent of posting them from my iPhone (as I am doing now). I forgot.
Even though I’ve already blown it, I’m going to participate anyway ’cause I’m signed up.

Beau bob

sunflower field in Fairfield

Wispers Cabaret

I think we’re in Fairfield. Stopped to give Beau Bob a potty break.

10 years

…that’s how long I’ve known the woman who parks her shoes by our sofa.