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My Poor PuppyNovember 22, 2005 Rhodry and I blew home from horse-sit last night around 6:30. I barely had time to stow gear before rushing off to chorus rehearsal at 7. Left Rhodry tied outside. Spatter of raindrops on windshield en route to high school, where chorus rehearses. Uh-oh. Came home two hours later to pouring-down buckets and one wet Malamutt. Forwent (??) our evening walk because Rhodry doesn't like getting his paws wet and I wanted to get a couple hours of fact-checking in before I crashed. Bad move. Storm moved through with much boom-boom and lots of rain (Rhodry's feed dish, which doubles as my rain gauge, was 3/4 full of it this morning). Woke up about quarter to 7, said (morning ritual) "Good morning, Rhodry, I'm glad you're my puppy," got out of bed -- couldn't find Rhodry. My apartment may be bigger than any space I've ever had to myself, but it's not that big: two square rooms, each with a long, narrow, and crammed closet, a bathroom, and a staircase leading down to the front door. Nooks and crannies it has not. No place for an 80-pound dog to hide, but where was the dog? I looked in bathroom. No Rhodry. In office/kitchen room: no one there. Flipped light and gazed down staircase; Rhodry occasionally huddles among the boots when thunderstorms roll in. Not this time. Re-searched bedroom. Nada. Returned to office/kitchen, flipped light. Noticed poop in middle of floor, followed by out-of-sorts Malamutt emerging from cramped space under the table that holds hot-plate, microwave, toaster oven, and various editing implements. Not somewhere he's ever gone before, mainly because there's barely enough room, height-wise or width-wise, for a dog his size. I knelt down on the floor and hugged him. Maybe he was expecting to get yelled at for the poop on the floor; maybe he was just distressed that he'd had to go there. Rhodry's a fastidiously clean dog, has been since he was a puppy. I apologized for not taking him for a walk in the rain last night, and thanked him for sh*tting on bare carpet, as opposed to one of the piles of papers that take up about a third of the floor space. (If dogs harbor resentments, Rhodry has good reason to resent the papers, the books, the computer -- all of it. I blessed my own good sense for not keeping any Freud in the house.) He wanted out shortly thereafter, and indeed had more business to do in the woods across the road. Now he's out on his tie, reasonably content, waiting for a get-reacquainted walk around the neighborhood. One of the two dogs we were looking after this weekend is 12, a year older than Rhodry. He seems even older, and has for all the nearly three years we've known him. He's a game old guy, still loves to play with his Jolly Ball, but his German shepherd hips have pretty much given out on him. His hind legs don't work very well, and he has minimal control over what comes out of his hind end. So far, Rhodry's aging remarkably well for a big dog, but I can calculate at least as well as the next literal-arts (I meant to type "liberal-arts" but I like "literal" better) major. He's going to be 11 in less than a month. I see poop on the carpet: Is this the beginning of my Rhodry's decline? Not this time evidently. Or, why attribute to age what can be readily explained by a change in routine, a rainstorm, and my infernal workload? Still, it's only a matter of time. Scratch that only: there's no only about it. Time is the big one.
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