Three Dog Blog

In which Riley and I abandon this blog for another one

2012-02-10T10:29:00.003-06:00

But just for one day! We're the featured duo on "Coffee With a Canine."

Hop over there for a little interview, and to see my favorite picture ever of Riley (it's the last picture on the blog), and Rudee can see one of her hats in action.

Here's the link: http://coffeecanine.blogspot.com/2012/02/laurie-hertzel-riley.html

Coats and sentiment

2012-02-06T08:18:00.007-06:00

Every few weeks, we get a big yellow postcard in the mail from the Epilepsy Foundation, letting us know that they are willing to take away whatever old clothes we'd like to give them. Just leave them in a plastic bag at the curb.

Amazingly, every time, we have something. It's not that we're constantly buying new clothes and so must get rid of the old; it must be that whatever we buy, we buy badly. It's never hard to fill a bag or two with stuff we no longer wear--shoes that pinch my toes, or jeans that have somehow mysteriously morphed into mom jeans while in my dresser, or t-shirts with silly logos, or sweaters that are scratchy or shirts that have grown too stained or too snug.

There's always something.

We got another postcard this week, so on Sunday afternoon, after the Riley walk, before the Super Bowl, I started hunting around. It didn't take very long before I had filled three sacks. And then I decided to tackle the basement closet, the odd little space that Jerry the handyman refers to as "King Tut's Tomb."

This is where our coats live, out of season and out of date. There was plenty that could go: I stuffed my old black winter coat into a sack--it still fits, but I haven't worn it in years and probably never will again. I grabbed an old red zip-up jacket that never quite fit and so I never quite wear.

And then my hand paused. Next on the pole hung an overcoat of my father's, and a cream-colored swing coat that had been my mother's.

I acquired these two coats the January my father died. It had been only a few days since his death, but when I stopped by the house my mother was briskly packing up his clothes for the Salvation Army and his books for my sister's church rummage sale. She wanted to move, immediately, and so she was being ruthless about what must go.

She had set aside some of my father's sweaters and ties for my brothers, and I said I wanted something, too. (My sister had already collected the books, which is what I really wanted--to this day, I only have a few and that's probably a good thing, given the size of our house.) Somehow--I don't remember the moment well--my mother handed me his coat.

It's off-white, with a blue suede collar, made in England and of very high quality. My father was not a large man, but he was certainly larger than I am; still, I put the coat on and it fit, in a way. It made me look quite blocky--it had no waist or belt--but my hands slipped easily into the pockets and if I wore a sweater under it, it would work. "I'll take this," I said.

And somehow--I don't quite remember this moment, either--my mother handed me a second coat. This one had been hers back when she was young, a full-length cream colored wool coat with a swirling, swinging skirt. It had two decorative silver buttons at the throat, but that was all--there were no other buttons, no zipper, no way to close the coat. It was meant to be pretty, not practical, and you held it closed by jamming your hands in the pockets and kind of hunching your shoulders.

She loved the coat, so pretty and swirly, but she wore it so much it began to wear out, and some time in the 1960s or 70s she had it cut down to mid-thigh length so that she could wear it with slacks.

(This is not the coat--this is my father's sister, Iny. But this is very much like my mother's coat.)

I slipped it on. The silk lining was stained, the pockets were ripped, but the swing of the short skirt was luscious. I took that coat too.

I have never worn either one. My father's coat makes me sad; it is so small, and so beautiful, and it reminds me of his trips to England and his admiration for high-quality and expensive things, which, with 10 children, he could seldom afford. I remember years and years ago, when all 10 of us were at home and he was working as a college professor, teaching two sessions of summer school because he needed the money but still getting the entire month of August off. And he used to go to Park Point in August and lie in the sand on a towel and read and read and read in the hot sun.

Sometimes on his way home he'd stop at Bagleys, which was the fine jewelry and china store in town. He'd walk in, sunburned, perhaps trailing grains of sand, wearing his moccasins and a white t-shirt, and, as he always told the story (and he told it more than once), the snooty Bagleys personnel would look down their nose at him and say, "Can I help you?" clearly thinking that he had no money for their fine things. But my mother's birthday is in August, and Guv would look around at the bone china and the Limoges porcelain and the gold jewelry, and he would buy her something.

I think he got as much of a kick out of showing off for the Bagleys clerks as he did presenting the gift later to my mother, who would usually get very upset because of the expense.

I pulled my father's coat off the hanger and stuffed it in the bag. Then I slipped on my mother's coat. My fingers poked through the little tears in the pocket, my nose sniffed a musty smell, but oh how the skirt swung. I swished back and forth, and then I slid it off again. It needs cleaning. The seam at the back of the neck is beginning to pull apart. Those pockets definitely need to be stitched closed. And when would I ever wear it? It's been eight years since my father died, and this coat has been in the closet those whole eight years.

I hung my mother's coat back on its wooden hanger, which I hooked over the wooden pole, and then I closed the door to King Tut's Tomb.

Bit by bit, but not all at once. That's the way to do these things.

STOP ME

2012-01-29T08:11:00.000-06:00

I am starting to poke around on petfinder. Lots of puppies available right now. Including this one:

Gosh, she looks like a tiny Riley, doesn't she?

It is too soon. Way too soon. But the fact that I'm looking is probably a good sign, eh?

And now, two weeks out, we are all doing OK

2012-01-27T08:54:00.003-06:00

I miss Boscoe the most in the mornings. When I come downstairs to get my coffee, I am always surprised to see the kitchen door open. We had locked him in there for so many, many nights.

And as Riley and I return from our morning stroll around Como Lake, I do mental calculations in my head: I need to shower, I need to eat, I need to carry Boscoe out for one last....ah, no, I don't.

But mostly we are doing just fine. Whatever GI tract problems Riley was having seem to be gone; when he goes to that problematic area of the yard where there may or may not be poisonous disgusting dead stuff, we just whistle him into the house.

He has emerged from under tables and behind chairs and is hanging around us more. He lets us pet him again. He has lost that confused and hunted look.

And us--well, yes, we miss Boscoe, very much, but we also are feeling much less stress. That last week of trying to decide, Is it time? How do we do this? And when? has been relieved. I think the weeks up to a dog's death are probably harder than the death itself.

Callous though that may sound.

This morning, Riley and I walked around the lake and saw a coyote hanging out in the middle of the ice. This was, of course, Riley's second walk of the day, and also his second coyote-sighting. He and Doug had walked in the dark of 5:30 a.m. and watched the coyote trot out from a yard and down to the lake.

He was still there at 7, kind of hanging around the hole where people ice-fish, perhaps hoping for some fish guts. We kept him in our sights as we circumnavigated the lake, watching him trot here and there, sit quietly, even curl in a ball for a bit. I thought he was going to take a nap, but as the sun rose and the rays reached the lake, he stood up again and began making his way toward shore.

We miss Boscoe, we are sad, but the world remains a beautiful and fascinating place.

Dogs! Can't live with them, pass the beer nuts

2012-01-24T08:48:00.002-06:00

Whatever the disgusting thing was that Riley ate the day Boscoe died is apparently still in our yard. He was so sick that day, and the next, and then got better ... and then this past weekend he got sick again. (Though, thank goodness, nowhere near as sick as the first time.)

There's a spot in the yard that he keeps going to with great interest, but when Doug and I examine it all we can see are wet leaves and twigs. Here's hoping that he's eaten the last of whatever it was and will not torture himself (and us) again.

On Sunday night, I tried to give him a Pepto Bismol, but you would have thought it was arsenic, the way he backed away from me, eyes wide in what appeared to be terror. I even tried my old Boscoe tricks--wrapping it in bread and slathering it with butter. No way. Riley is waaaaaay too suspicious for that.

He took it and brought it outside and opened it up with his snout and licked off all the butter and left the rest of it in the snow.

I like that he thinks Pepto Bismol is disgusting and terrible and then races out in the yard and eats old dead shrew or whatever it was.

He's better today, which is good. Can you imagine bringing him to the vet? "Um, my other sick dog died? And now this dog is sick?" I fear they'd suspect me of munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Patches riles up Riley

2012-01-22T16:56:00.001-06:00

A little snow, a little Patches, helped us feel a little more lively this weekend. I felt sad on Saturday, the one-week anniversary of Boscoe's death--silly as it sounds, I felt briefly as though I'd lost my way, lost my purpose: caring for that aging dog.

But Patches showed up on Saturday morning, all swagger and squirm, leaping onto Riley right from the doorway, not even letting us get her leash off her. Doug and Mona and I drank too much coffee in the kitchen, watching them from the window and occasionally going out onto the back porch to cheer them on.

I think they had a good time, though when they came in the kitchen to warm up (it was zero degrees Saturday morning), Patches kept going in Riley's spot--under the kitchen table--which made him growl.

But at least it took our minds off of sadness. Later in the day Riley got a good 90-minute walk, and another one this morning, and right now he's lying on the hall rug, exhausted, and if he could talk (if he were awake), he'd say, "When are you guys going back to work?"

A tired dog is a good and happy dog. But a tired dog is ... oh dear. Is he really ten already? Oh my.

Today, Jan. 22, is Riley's 10th anniversary with us. We are so happy to have him. And despite his serious face and his standoffish ways, I think he's happy to have us, too.

Cold Snap

2012-01-20T07:28:00.004-06:00

The sun is not yet up, so it's too dark for me to see the light snow that started falling about an hour ago. It's not supposed to amount to much--a couple of inches, just enough to make the roads slippery, as they like to say on the radio, those fearmongers.

It's been a funny winter. Last year, you might recall, we got nailed with tons of snow--big snowfalls in December, followed by two- and three-inch "nuisance snows" nearly every day after that. Spring was late, and reluctant, and it felt like winter just held on and on. This year, winter is only now beginning, in mid-January.

I was grateful for the warm, dry weather all November and December. It made it so much easier to scoop up Boscoe and carry him outside every morning without first having to put on boots and parka and mittens. Made it easier for him, too, to toddle around the yard without having to navigate deep snow.

But since last Saturday, the weather has turned sharply colder. It snowed the day he died, and then the temperature plunged to ten below zero. This morning it is four above, and it is snowing.

People have been so nice, sending cards and poems and leaving comments here and on Facebook. One amazing person made a donation in Boscoe's name to a shelter on the East Coast that takes in disabled dogs.

So far, Riley has not exactly blossomed in his new role as Senior (Solo) Dog. His first day on the job, of course, he humiliated himself by vomiting all over the house and then pooping in the front hallway. Not his finest hour. (In his defense, he was nervous, and I think he had eaten a dead mouse.)

Since then his stomach has settled down, but he is back to his old standoffish ways--sleeping downstairs and keeping us a room away, though under surveillance.

He lies in his bed in the back corner of the dining room and stares out at me while I read on the couch. Hard to know what he wants; he's never been a dog who likes someone who hovers, and if I go over to pet him he will either tolerate it, or he'll get up and walk away.

If Boscoe was Bill Clinton--jovial, a big eater, a people-lover, working the room tirelessly--Riley, I fear, is Richard Nixon. Shy, wary, standoffish and suspicious. He would wear a suit on the beach. (But without the evil. There is no evil in that dog.)

So I let him lie there and stare, and I pat the couch next to me, and sometimes I can lure him over and sometimes I can't.

The other morning on the frigid walk, he suddenly wheeled around, went into a play bow, grabbed a stick, and started romping. We raced across the park, chasing sticks, getting so warm in the four-degree chill that I ripped off my mittens and stuffed them in my pocket.

We need more of that--more ebullience, and play, and flat-out running. We're due a Patches visit this Saturday. If anyone can shake that dog out of his malaise, she can.

Looking for a new normal

2012-01-16T19:06:00.008-06:00

Not that the old normal was normal. But it was familiar.

And now all those rugs have been rolled up and tossed into the basement until we can figure out what to do with them. The hardwood gleams, revealed again. The red hallway rug where Riley shat the night Boscoe died has been scrubbed and placed on the back porch for the Coit man to come and get. Boscoe's dog dish and its stand are put away; those cans of dogfood and his leftover antibiotics and Metacam have been donated to a shelter. I leave the insulin in the refrigerator for a few more days, his needles in the drawer, just because. But I know I will throw it all out soon.

I get up in the morning and wonder what to do with my time--Doug is out walking Riley, but there is no Boscoe for me to carry outside, no dog beds to move, no baby gates to take down. I stand in the middle of the clean, quiet kitchen and think, "Do I just make coffee? Is that all?"

Last night Doug and I were sitting in the living room and we heard a scrambling noise in the kitchen; it sounded like Boscoe struggling to get up, feet sliding out from under him on the hardwood. We looked at each other, and Doug went into the kitchen to see what it was. We decided it was the tea-maker, making a particularly strange gurgle. We agreed that if Boscoe were to haunt us, it would not be old Boscoe, but young healthy Boscoe.

We agreed that we would not mind if Boscoe were to haunt us.

But it is Riley who is quiet and ghost-like, hiding under tables, staring out at us, tail tucked, back hunched. I wish I knew what he was thinking, what his impressions are of what just happened here. The day Boscoe died, he was upstairs in the bedroom, vomiting like mad. I let him out and he came downstairs quite slowly and sniffed around the living room but he did not approach Boscoe's body, did not sniff it, and I don't know if he understood. Boscoe was in his bed in the same position he always lay in, head on a pillow, and he looked as though he was sleeping. I just don't know what Riley knows.

He is tense, wary, watching. He doesn't lie down and sleep, but curls in his bed and keeps his head up, alert and listening. Is he listening for Boscoe? Am I projecting?

Dr. Heather suggested we get him a DAP collar, which releases soothing pheromones, so I went out today and bought him one. It smells flowery and soapy and when Doug came home from work he said our house smells like a brothel. The pheromones are supposed to last a month, and I figure in a month's time Riley will be adjusted to the new normal.

He has never been an only dog; we got him, as you might recall, as a puppy for Boscoe, after Toby died. He was always Boscoe's dog. Now he has to be his own dog.

It'll be interesting to see how he flowers.

I look at pictures of Boscoe from last summer and fall, and I realize just how swift his decline was. I look at videos of him on YouTube (yes, there are a few), and they make me feel better, because they are videos of him in his prime, not him as an old sick dog, and it helps me remember how gorgeous he was, and how full of life, for 16 of his 16 1/2 years.

And I look at Riley, huddled under the table, and I think, Time for this dog to have a little space and attention. He's been living under Boscoe's shadow for a while now. Let's see where he brings us.

But first, a video that makes me both teary and happy. Boscoe and Riley at the dog park, four years ago. Enjoy:

and one more:

Boscoe T. Smudge: July 4, 1995-January 14, 2012

2012-01-14T21:09:00.008-06:00

God, he had a great face. So expressive. So attentive. Those beige eyebrows that he sometimes waggled, a la Groucho Marx. A big smile. Intelligent brown eyes that always seemed to look deep into me; he always seemed to know exactly what I was thinking, and he always seemed to understand every word I said. He watched our faces when we talked, like anyone taking part in a conversation does.

Even at the very end, when he lifted his head for the last time and looked at me through those cloudy cataracts before laying his head wearily back down, I felt that he knew what I was thinking. "You're wrong," his look said. "You think you're jumping the gun. But it's time. I'm ready, Sweetie. I'm tired."

And when it was all over and they had carried him away and I had stopped crying for a few minutes, I did believe that was true: it was time, and we had made the right call.

I'll spare you the details of the indignities of Boscoe's last days; it's enough to say that he had stopped eating, and Doug and I would be damned if we were going to allow him to starve to death before our eyes. On Friday he had two pieces of Swiss cheese for breakfast, and dinner was a couple of handfuls of rice and ground beef. This morning his breakfast was a fraction of a flour tortilla, with butter.

He turned down pizza, ground beef, deli turkey, spaghetti, boiled egg, milk bones and buttered toast, as well as any number of various kinds of dogfood.

Doug did the hard part: sending the e-mail to the vet, then talking to them on the phone to arrange a time. The wait was excruciating. She was supposed to come at 1:30, but her other appointments ran long, and it was snowing, and in the end the man from the crematorium showed up before she did and we had to tell him that he couldn't take Boscoe away because Boscoe was still alive. So he waited in the kitchen and the vet finally showed up around 3. She carried a bag of poison and needles, and she had a long girlish braid that fell over one shoulder.

For years and years and years--really up until last winter, I think, when he got so very sick, life-changingly so--whenever we came home from work, this was Boscoe's routine: He would leap up. He would look astounded--astounded!--that we had come back. He'd run in to see us and pause at the doorway, and then he'd turn around and race back out of the room. He'd dash here, there, all over the downstairs, until he found a puffy toy. He was absolutely desperate to find a puffy toy. And once he'd located one, he would trot back into the kitchen, the silly fleece toy sticking out of his big, smiling mouth, and then and only then would he welcome us home.

That was Boscoe, always bearing gifts, as if the gift of his presence wasn't enough.

And so when everything was over and the nice enough man from the crematorium was wrapping Boscoe up in a brown fleece blanket with a milkbone design, I got down on my hands and knees and retrieved a dusty puffy toy from underneath Doug's recliner. I tucked it in next to Boscoe. And then the man zipped up the bag. Oh, how I hate that man.

It's funny; you know how much work Boscoe has been this last year. Making his food, and carrying him in and out of the house, and righting him when he fell. Feeding him--first by holding him up with towel; later, offering handsful of food as he lay in his bed. The bed and the floor would be littered with rice or kibble or ground beef when we were done, and Riley, who had been sitting quietly and watching with saucer eyes, would zip in and hoover it up.

Boscoe had developed a certain odor in his last weeks--musky and earthy and unwashed, but not offensive.

I shall miss all of it. I shall miss the smell, so distinctively Boscoe. I shall miss arranging his damned pillows. Scooping up his bony back end, and giving him a little jog in my arms, to settle him. As I walked up the back stairs, carrying him into the house, I never once failed to press my lips against the black fur of his back and whisper how much I loved him.

All that work is done now, and what, oh, what, will I do with all of this time? And what will I do with all of this love?

Meanwhile, Riley is outraged

2012-01-12T08:00:00.001-06:00

We took Boscoe in for another day-long glucose test on Tuesday. I'd been hoping to avoid doing this again--he hates it so much he starts shaking the second we pull into the parking lot, and I really hate to think of him lying in a cage all day, being poked every hour on the hour. But he was feeling so punk and drinking so much water and not eating that I figured I had to. One day of discomfort in exchange for many days of feeling better.

And that is exactly what happened. The vet did the glucose curve and adjusted his insulin, so hopefully he'll eat better and have a little more energy. And he drew blood and sent it out for testing.

Yesterday, he called with results. Boscoe's kidneys are failing. This explains the huge amount of water he's drinking--it's not diabetes related this time, but kidney related. So sad. But not a big surprise. His numbers were a little elevated last fall, and I had been worried that they had gotten worse. Knowing is hard, but it's better to know.

We can't fix his kidneys, but we can do a few things to make him feel better. So yesterday on my way home from work I stopped at Tim and Tom's Speedy Mart and spent $30 on fresh ground beef, Maalox, Tums and Pepcid. I know what you're thinking: Yum! The ground beef-Maalox-Pepcid casserole just like Mom used to make!

Well, it's part of the kidney diet for ailing dogs. I can't remember exactly what all these things do--the Maalox removes some of the phosphorous from his body (I think), and the Pepcid helps his stomach feel better, and the Tums have calcium, and the ground beef, well, that's his nourishment.

And last night I cooked up a pan of ground beef, egg, and bread, and oh my gosh Boscoe devoured about half of it. This morning he gobbled down the rest; I haven't seen him eat this enthusiastically in months.

But... Riley. Poor Riley. He stood off to the side, watching intently, whimpering softly. For months now he's watched as we fed Boscoe lovely smelly canned foods slathered in gravy and chunks of meat. He's watched as Boscoe has grown weaker and we began feeding him by hand, first while he was standing, more recently as he lies in his bed. Boscoe lounges against the pillows like a sultan and we hold out palmfuls of delicacies, which he sometimes deigns to eat and sometimes declines.

And Riley stands quietly off to the side, watching, suffering.

Dogs do have a sense of justice, you know. What you do for one you have to do for the other. And so I have always been careful to give Riley a tiny bit of chicken, a little dollop of canned food on his kibble, a sliver of cheese. But he can clearly see that the treatment is not equitable.

We try to make it up to him in other ways. He gets so many walks--Doug takes him at 5:30 a.m., and I take him again at 7:30 a.m., and the wonderful dog walker comes in the afternoon and takes him again, and I walk him at least around the block and often farther after I get home from work.

On the weekends, we load up our iPods with RTE documentaries and Radiolab shorts and walk him for hours through the neighborhood. We stop halfway at a coffeeshop and get coffee and milkbones.

But walks are not food, and he isn't thinking about those walks when he's watching me hand over warm, greasy blobs of lovely fried hamburger to the reclining Boscoe. No, he is thinking, life isn't fair! And life is supposed to be fair! And I ... want ... hamburger..... TOO.

Boscoe makes him nervous in other ways. This morning Boscoe pivoted in the kitchen and then fell, sitting down in the water dish; Riley did not like that at all. You think I'm gonna drink out of that now? he was clearly asking as he watched in fury. Huh? You think I'm gonna drink out of butt water?

When Boscoe falls, or staggers, or cleverly leans against something (a chair, my legs, the refrigerator) in order to stay upright, like Dean Martin, Riley is watching. When Boscoe has trouble standing up and needs to be hoisted, Riley is watching. When Boscoe has accidents in the kitchen or needs to be carried outside to do his business, Riley is watching.

Sometimes he flees upstairs, and we let him go, thinking he knows best--that he needs to remove himself from a troubling situation.

Still, I worry that we have one stressed-out little dog on our hands. And I'm not sure how to make it up to him, or how to make it easier.

At least they are still good pals. I think that helps. But in the end it might make it even harder.

Learning not just how to let go, but when

2012-01-07T22:38:00.010-06:00

As I write this, Boscoe is in the kitchen, sprawled across his orthopedic dog bed, which is topped with a fleece mat and surrounded by five pillows. The pillows make it sound luxurious, but they serve a purpose; they are tucked between the bed and the wall and keep him from slipping off the side and into the crack. If he does slip, he is stuck until one of us rescues him.

He is gently, lightly drugged with two pink Benadryl, which hopefully will help him sleep the night.

The days of him sleeping upstairs with us have been over for months. In the beginning, of course, he slept on the bed, which he achieved through a merry leap. And then we got a higher bed, and he got older, and every so often he would merrily leap and only make it halfway and then slide back onto the floor, and we would laugh and pick him up and set him on the bed, all 50 pounds of him, and even though we were laughing there was a little stab to the heart, this realization that he was getting on in years.

Briefly, we experimented with extremely expensive pet steps, which he refused to use, and then we all resigned ourselves at the same time to him no longer sleeping with us, but sleeping near us, instead, on the floor. For a few years we lived with his dog bed at the foot of our bed, which, in our very small bedroom, made the room even more crowded and difficult to walk through, but we did not mind because it was Boscoe, beautiful wonderful intelligent gorgeous smiling Boscoe, the dog who has lived in this house as long as we have, the dog who has always wanted nothing more than to be near us, very very near, on our laps, if possible; the dog who we so love.

And then there was the whole hilarious time of him no longer being able to get up the stairs in the usual way because his back legs were starting to deteriorate. But he figured out a solution to that--he would run up the stairs as far as he could and then slowly, with great care and determination, turn around in the middle of a step and go the rest of the way up backwards.

Our vet laughed when we told him this and said he had never seen a dog go up the stairs backwards. But Boscoe is a very very smart dog, a border collie, the smartest of the smart, and he figured out that it was easier on his old joints if he pushed off from his front legs, which were still strong, rather than his back legs, which were not.

And then after a while we began carrying him up the stairs at night, and down the stairs in the morning. But about a year ago that ended, too, and now he sleeps in the kitchen.

He had a light supper about three hours ago--much lighter than I had hoped; his appetite is not good these days and he refused two different kinds of dog food before I gave him the last triangle of leftover quiche, which he ate happily. I am already worrying about what to give him for breakfast.

At 16 1/2, an age he achieved on Jan. 4 (his birthday is July 4), he cannot see well--but he can still see. He cannot hear well--but he can still hear. He cannot walk well--but he can still walk. And lately it seems that he cannot smell well, either; to get him to eat you have to pick up a piece of food and hold it under his nose, and he will turn his head away three or four times, but you must keep following the nose and eventually, if you are lucky, he will suddenly notice that the thing you are holding has a smell, and the smell is good, and he will eat it, and then you pick up another piece of food and do it again.

Boscoe does not seem to mind, much, this diminished state that he is in. He adapts. He cannot stand up easily, and so he has learned to rock, like a Minnesotan getting a stuck car out of a snowdrift. Out in the yard, he pees while walking, because if he pees while standing still he falls over. Right now the back yard is covered in hard gray ice, and so he falls over sometimes anyway, and often he just lies there and waits for one of us to rescue him, perhaps keeping a resigned, weathered eye out for vultures. We get behind him and put our hands under his feeble, bony hips, one hand on each side, and we pull sharply and for a second his back legs are dangling in air, useless, like the legs of a paralyzed person, but then we set him down and hold onto him for a few seconds and he's able to get his balance and walk.

Taking care of him reminds me of when my father was dying, and when Doug's mother was dying. Does that seem disrespectful, to compare one's parent to a dog? But the lessons are so much the same: you see them detach. You watch them compensate. You grow patient, accepting that there is more work, and that it is very slow work, and you just must do it and not try to force it. Boscoe eats one small piece of meat at a time. At night we carry his bed and all of his pillows into the kitchen; it takes three trips, sometimes, and I pad everything carefully. In the morning we carry everything back into the living room, where he spends his afternoons. It's not so different from when my father was ill and we had to feed him slowly, small bits or he would choke, and help him stand, and wheel him through the house so that he could have a change of scenery in the kitchen or the dining room before putting him back to bed in the living room.

This afternoon I went out looking for cheap, stinky canned food that Boscoe might eat. We are done with the diabetic prescription stuff; have been for weeks. We are even done with the high-quality organic grain-free canned foods; he won't eat them anymore. He ate a can of Target brand "Boots and Barkley" food the other night, with gusto; it cost 75 cents and has mysterious ingredients. It might well be pure poison from China, for all I know, but I was happy to see him eat it.

But he doesn't eat any one thing more than two or three times, and I knew that we had maybe one more chance with the "Boots and Barkley" before he would reject it. So I drove to Petco and bought four or five varieties of stew-like canned food, soft food with gravy. On my way home I was listening to a CD that Doug's sister gave me for Christmas, little snippets of recordings from RTE radio over the years. It's great stuff--Yeats, and Eamon de Valera, and Brendan Behan, and each spoken-word piece followed by a piece of music.

So I'm driving down Snelling Avenue with seven cans of dog food in a plastic sack on the seat next to me, and suddenly I hear Bill Clinton's voice, eloquent and emotional, talking about the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, and then Seamus Heaney reads a poem, and then Riverdance begins to play this joyful, whirling tune and you can hear people dancing, stomping their feet, and drums drum drum drumming, and it sounds triumphant and strong and very very Irish. And I realize that I am weeping. Not crying, not sobbing, but driving down Snelling Avenue toward home, toward my old dog, with all this stupid dog food that he almost certainly will not eat, and I am weeping.

Why I am not a professional athlete

2012-01-02T14:04:00.008-06:00

It occurred to me the other day, as Riley and I paused our walk to watch the hockey players at the ice rink, that the only thing that stood between me and a life of athleticism was the proper equipment.

Despite growing up in northern Minnesota, where winters are long and cold and often slippery, I never became a strong skater. But then, I never had my own skates. My older siblings did--dirty white figure skates for the girls, and tough black hockey skates with double blades for my brothers--and when my turn came to teeter around the ice, I was expected to find a pair that mostly fit, and put them on.

The skates lived in the basement-way, tied together by their grimy cotton laces and dangling from hooks where we also hung our jackets and scarves. So there was always a lot of rooting around among wet, wool-smelling outerwear and cold swinging blades before I found a pair that would work.

I always picked the biggest pair available--usually those belonging to my oldest sister, Kristin (pictured above)--but the hard, unyielding leather of the boot still pinched my toes. The pressure made them feel instantly cold. I didn't like the rough red plaid flannel lining of the skate tongues--fabric that promised softness and warmth but did not deliver. I didn't like that my small fingers were not strong enough to pull the thick laces tightly around my ankles, and so the skates buckled and sagged, and so did my feet.

And I did not like, once I pushed myself out of the warming shack onto the rough gray ice, the hockey players. Them I disliked most of all, even though some of them were my brothers. Short and fast, they zipped across the ice, weaving in and out of the other skaters, competently whacking those hard little pucks back and forth as they pumped by. More than once, the thunk-thunk-thunk of the puck against the sticks startled me, causing me to stumble and lurch and stop, and more than once my unexpected stopping disrupted their pattern, and one of them would have to quickly veer around me, or pull up short, and then skate on, glancing over his shoulder with annoyance as he flew past.

I had weak ankles, or so I had been told, and I lived in fear of getting smacked by a puck. My brother had once smacked my ankle with a baseball--I was sitting on the front steps of our house, and he was practicing his control for that afternoon's ballgame, throwing the ball closer and closer to my foot, seeing how close he could get without hitting it, when, of course, he hit it. My ankle swelled up immediately, and I was on crutches for days. He was consumed with guilt and spent a lot of time hanging around and accusing me of faking it, which I understood to be his way of apologizing.

So during my trips to Longview skating rink, I kept to the edges, where the ice was bumpy and ridged. I never learned how to pump my legs and get up a head of steam, never played crack-the-whip, never learned to stop gracefully by touching the serrated toe of a blade to the ice. I glided along stiffly upright, perfectly straight, afraid to bend into the movement, afraid I would fall. To stop, I simply changed direction and allowed myself, by force of momentum, to slide into the snowbank. It seemed much safer, and provided a natural cushion, if necessary.

Bicycling was not much better. I did not learn to ride a bike until I was 12 or 13 because there were no bicycles available. Some of my older brothers had bicycles--those skinny-tired, complicated 10-speeds, far too big for someone as short as me. And anyway, they were always using them. Plus they would have killed me if I had tried to borrow their bike. I don't think any of my older sisters owned bikes, though somehow, perhaps through osmosis, they all knew how to ride them.

I did not, until two things happened: My little brothers wanted bicycles, and Sting-Rays were invented.

Ah, Sting-Rays, with the nice safe low banana seat, and no gear shifts, and brakes where god intended them to be--on the pedals, not the handlebars--and fat bodies and fat tires and fat handlebars that one didn't have to lean over (thus risking falling on one's head) and low to the ground and not all that tippy. They were built for someone just like me, someone short and intimidated and unaccustomed to fast movement or anything requiring balance.

My father took the four of us down to Stewarts' Wheel Goods on Superior Street and allowed us to pick out two bicycles: one for the twins to share, and one for me to share with my little sister.

As I remember it, the boys picked out a blue one, and Heidi and I got a purple one, though it might be that it was the other way around. The blue one was named "Bluebell," and the purple one was named "The Purple Phantom," which gives you an idea how young and fanciful we all were. My father paid for the bikes and then said, "See you at home." One brother and my sister got into the car, the other brother pedaled away, and I was left alone on the sidewalk with a bicycle that I did not know how to ride.

I am not sure what my father was thinking, but he was probably thinking that any American child who has reached the age of 12 or 13 must already know how to ride a bike. He did not stop to think that this particular child was shy and bookish, had no rowdy, bike-riding friends, and was singularly lacking in any kind of physical grace or skills. He just got in the car, backed out of the Stewarts Wheel Goods parking lot, and drove off.

I think what saved me was the fact that the trip home was nearly all uphill--four blocks straight up the steep Duluth hills from Superior Street to Fourth Street, and then ten blocks east, up a slight incline, from 14th Avenue East to 24th.

The secret to learning how to ride a bike--at least, it was for me--is to keep pedaling. Pedaling keeps you moving forward and thus remaining upright.

Downhill--well, downhill is folly, kowabunga-shouting, feet off the pedals, hair flying in the breeze folly, sure to end in a heap of blood and wails at the bottom. But uphill--toiling away, steadily pumping, not shrieking with fun but not wailing in pain--that I could manage. I slung my leg over the support bar of the Purple Phantom, my feet found the wide white plastic pedals, and I slowly wobbled home.

On New Year's Eve

2011-12-31T08:44:00.004-06:00

Our tradition, when we were growing up, was to sit at the dining room table in our pajamas and play bingo on New Year's Eve. My father sat at the head of the table, his usual spot for dinner, and called out the numbers; it was the only day of the year when he played any kind of game.

Instead of homemade eggnog, which we drank throughout the year--cracking eggs and pouring milk and sugar and vanilla into the blender--my mother served us each a tiny paper cup of thick, yellow store-bought eggnog, and we sipped it delicately, to make it last.

There were bowls of potato chips, and sometimes cardboard tubs of Top the Tater dip.

Toward midnight, we turned on WEBC radio and listened to the countdown. And then, with seconds to go, we rushed out onto the front porch in our pajamas, into the frosty night, and banged on pots and pans and jumped up and down and hollered. Sometimes it was so cold we could barely stand it, our breath making white clouds around our heads, and the banging of the cake pans and cooking pots sounding as sharp as rifle shots in the frigid air.

Down the darkened street, we could hear unseen cars honking their horns, and churches ringing their bells. And then we were immediately whisked off to bed. (The picture above, of my sister Holly and me, is of that very front porch, but not on New Year's Eve. Those ebullient pajama-clad moments were never photographed.)

As I grew older, that tradition went away, and I remember in high school, dateless, of course, sitting alone upstairs watching the movie "Where the Boys Are" on our tiny portable black and white TV and getting so engrossed that I didn't notice when midnight passed.

Later, of course, there were parties, and I remember one party in Duluth at the home of professor friends where I showed up around 10 and all the other guests had already gone home. I was terribly embarrassed--who goes to a party after it's over? (But who leaves a New Year's party before midnight?) My hosts were still up, and we sat at the kitchen table and had a couple of beers and talked. We toasted each other at midnight, and then I slunk home.

Now our tradition is to walk the dogs around Como Lake at midnight. We did this with Toby and Boscoe, and after Toby died we have done it with Boscoe and Riley. We leave a little before 12, and at midnight, from the lake path, you can see fireworks from both downtowns. When he was younger, Riley would buck and plunge into the snow when the fireworks went off, but as he has gotten older, and a little calmer, he just startles and then keeps walking.

Tonight, of course, Boscoe will stay home. It's been many months since he has walked all the way around the lake. And if the winter storm they're predicting blows through, we might stay home too. But if there is no blizzard, and if we are awake, we will slide Riley's little red halter over his head, pull on our mittens, and set out toward the lake. We'll talk about the year past (a hard one, in many ways) and we'll discuss our resolutions (I must stop swearing so much!), and somewhere along the way the sky will fill with fireworks and the ringing of bells, and we will know that it is now the future.

Merry Happy Boxing Day

2011-12-26T11:57:00.002-06:00

Last Christmas I got plenty of exercise while shoveling all that endless snow.

This Christmas, Riley and Patches got a lot of exercise by playing in the warm sunshine in the absolutely snow-free yard.

I loved last winter's snow, but oh there was so much of it and it went on for so long. After two big storms in December, we got little "nuisance snows" of two and three and four inches nearly every day, for months. The streets were narrowed by about 1/3 because of snow shoved to the side by the plows; intersections were impossible to see around, because of the tall mounds; sidewalks were slippery and icy and snowy and if you encountered another dog while walking, you could not just step off the path to make room because there was a wall of snow at either side and so you either endured the barking, or you made a mad scramble up the wall and into the drifts.

This year is so much easier, though eerie--we are just back from walking Riley and it is 46 degrees, sunny, and windy. It is an April day on December 26. The forecast for the next week is for highs above freezing every day.

I am kind of loving this weird warm drought, though it means that I cannot use the new snowshoes I unwrapped yesterday morning.

I can, however, use this, my other present:

Oh, I might not move from this chair for the rest of the winter. It is not just comfy and exactly my size, but it rocks.

(And so does Doug, for buying it for me.)

I hope you all had a festive holiday and did not partake of too many bloody Marys, as it appears that Boscoe did.

Sunday in Bucharest: Churches and fortune-tellers

2011-12-13T07:53:00.004-06:00

On Sunday morning, my last day in Bucharest, my last day in Romania, my last day in Eastern Europe, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to go to church. I wanted to go back down to the Old City, visit a few more museums, get another pretzel. But mostly I wanted to go to church. I am not particularly religious, but Bucharest is peppered with gorgeous old orthodox churches--Ceaucescu had torn some down, and he had built big ugly concrete apartment complexes surrounding others, to hide them, but this has always been a very religious country and even he knew he couldn't obliterate them from the landscape.

And I knew which one I wanted to visit: St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox church down in the Old City. Gabi and I had walked past it on Thanksgiving night, and I had peeked inside and had been blown away by all the gold and icons and extravagant, crazy, over-the-top beauty. Ha. As if I would ever find it again. Ha. Ha. Ha. Even with a map, I can hardly ever find anything. But I was determined.

The last time I'd been in a Russian church was in, well, in Russia, back in 1991, with Ruth Niskanen. I remember old women in carpet slippers and headscarves kneeling on the floor (there are no pews), crossing themselves repeatedly, and kissing every icon within reach of their lips. I remember them chatting away incessantly and coming and going freely, as though they were at a party. I remember the doors in the iconostasis opening and the priest sailing out, gorgeous in his tall hat and gown, swinging his incense shaker and followed by a plume of sweet smoke, and singing boys.

I wanted to see this again. So I packed up my camera, my last remaining 50 lei, my hotel map, and set out in what I vaguely thought might be the direction of the Old City.

Almost immediately, I heard singing.

There were two orthodox churches just a couple of blocks from my hotel. The masses are sung, and both churches had speakers mounted so that the sound carried outside, drawing me in. It was beautiful and haunting.

I went inside both. They were packed. People were coming and going, and a woman in a glassed-in booth was selling narrow brown candles, for people to light in the little shelters outside--one for the living, one for the dead.

("I understand that 'morti' means dead," I had told one of my Romanian friends. "But what does Roman Numeral Seven mean?" And he was kind enough not to laugh.)

In all, I went to four churches on Sunday. I took only one picture inside only one church. It seemed rude to photograph people while they were worshiping, so I put my camera on "no flash," and clicked, just once.

After church--I did not stay for the whole thing, which seemed to go on for hours, but did as I remembered the women in Russia doing, coming and going as I pleased--I turned and walked back up Calea Victoriei to the pretzel place. Ah. Closed on Sundays.

And then back down the street on a mission to find the Old City.

I found many beautiful things along the way.

If I had realized that this gorgeous building was a museum, I would have gone inside. Instead, I just walked past and admired its beauty.

The music hall.

The university. I think.

I didn't understand the significance of this peculiar building until I posted this picture on Facebook. Then one of my Romanian friends added this explanation:

"The bottom of the building is the remains of the former Securitate headquarters (the fearful Directia 5). The National Union of Romanian Architects has its offices on top (glass structure). There's also an underground cafe-bar of which entrance is on the right wing, where you see the petite car. It's like a symbiosis of the bad old times and the freedom of expression."

Securitate was Ceacescu's much-feared and brutal secret police. And so this building shows good springing from bad, new hope from old repression. A creative and fantastic building.

The former royal palace, now an art museum where I spent an hour or so.

And then, ta da! The Old City. I found it!

Those blue stalls you see were selling souvenirs--handmade jewelry (from this woman), fur hats, mittens, candy.

I walked the cobbled streets, bought some jewelry for Christmas presents, stopped at a stand and bravely ordered food, not knowing what it would be. (A hotdog! Street food is the same the world over. Though this was actually a very spicy German-style sausage.)

And so when I got to the kurtos colac ("tunnel bread") stand, I was too full (and running out of money) to buy any. But I watched them make it: They took a long, thin hollow tube of dough, slid it onto a pole, and then rolled it up and down over hot coals.

They rolled the hot bread in crushed nuts which were spread out on a flat tin pan. Then they slid a plastic sack over the finished treat, to keep it warm and clean, I guess. I should have bought some. When will I ever have a chance again to eat Romanian tunnel bread in Romania?

Instead, I gave my last bit of money to the gypsy fortune-teller. He stood at a small red cart, which played music. Three colorful parrots bobbed and nodded on perches. I handed him five lei, and he touched one of the birds with a stick. The bird hopped down, bent its head, and plucked a piece of paper from a box of many folded papers. The man handed it to me: my fortune. (It was very long, and not very interesting.)

I raised my camera and made an inquiring face, to ask if it was ok to take a picture.

Instead, the man picked up his stick again. Two of the birds hopped onto it, and gently, so gently that I didn't realize at first what he was doing, he placed one on my head, and one on my shoulder.

And then he took my camera from me, and snapped a photo.

Ah, dignity. Thy name is not tourist.

On my way back to my hotel, where I was meeting Cristi and Lavi and Adi and Stela for dinner, look what I found:

St. Nicholas! But now there was no need to go back inside.

The whole reason for being there

2011-12-11T15:34:00.005-06:00

There will be fire! Note the hologram flames in sconces on each side of the stage.
Not sure who took this picture---it was tweeted during our talk

The conference was on Saturday, and it was, to me, a small miracle. How did the folks at this little magazine--in existence only a couple of years--manage to pull off something of this magnitude? Fly in four American journalists, find space at a welcoming private university, secure sponsors, and sell out all the seats? All in the matter of just a couple of months? While still putting out a magazine? With a tiny, tiny staff?

I was an editor at a magazine for two years, and while we put on events, too, we never did anything of this magnitude, and we certainly never did anything this quickly.

But here we were, and on Friday afternoon we went to the university to meet the director and check out the space for Saturday's conference.

It was orange. Very, very orange.

The view from the stage

One of the Romanian journalists happened to be wearing an orange sweater. He sat down in the middle of the amphitheater and said, "Do I look like just a floating head?" Truthfully, he kind of did.

Editor Adi, in his infamous orange sweater, at dinner on Friday night.

The orange was impressive, but our favorite feature was the fire--hologram flames that trembled and flickered from sconces at either side of the stage. (They fooled me; I thought they were real.) We must have the flames, we told the PR guy from the college, who was doing the walk-through with us. Please turn them on during our keynote. And he promised he would.

The three other Americans had been working on their keynotes most of the time since getting to Bucharest. Me, I'd been hoofing it around the city, going to museums, befriending feral dogs, eating warm pretzels stuffed with apple ... yum ... and on Saturday morning, the jig was up. Each of us had to deliver a keynote of about 30 minutes in that big auditorium, followed by a Q&A with all four of us.

In the afternoon, we were to break into smaller groups for two-hour workshops on various aspects of writing and reporting narrative nonfiction. And when those workshops were done, we would get a little break, and then we'd do them again.

It was shaping up to be a long, long day. I wasn't too worried about the workshops--I'd taught this topic (short narrative you can do in a day or two) many times before. But the keynote! We were supposed to inspire. I'm not sure I'm the inspiring type.

I had written my talk before leaving Minnesota and since then had edited it repeatedly on paper. I had not brought my computer and couldn't make a fresh printout, so when the time came I stood in front of that sea of orange and read from a script that was so scribbled on, with so many notes and marginalia and things crossed out and things inked in, that I feared I would lose my place. As I spoke, I looked out at 200 faces, and what I saw was this: many heads bent over cell phones, thumbs flying.

I was, briefly, horrified.

Oh my god, I thought. I'm boring them. I didn't prepare well enough! They are all texting their friends about where to meet for lunch! I'm a failure--an international failure!

But as it turns out, they weren't texting; they were tweeting--live-tweeting the keynotes. (You can check out #powerofstory on twitter, though I warn you that many tweets are in Romanian.)

The purpose of the conference was to talk about the power of narrative, and how to report it and write it. The journalists who brought us in, as well as those in attendance, were well-educated, savvy and smart. They were very familiar with Western-style journalism, and some of them had been educated in the United States. They spoke English. Thanks to the Interweb, they read The New Yorker, and the New York Times, and Harper's online. When I mentioned Dan Barry and Susan Orlean and Calvin Trillin in the afternoon workshops, many of them nodded knowingly; they had read them and were very familiar with their work.

They were passionate about bringing this kind of deep reporting and storytelling to their country, where this kind of journalism is rare but beginning to grow. They were tech-savvy, with smart phones and iPads and more adept than me at using the Web and its many tools. This was a far, far cry from my trip to the Soviet Union in 1986, when Russians watched, agape, as Polaroid photos developed right before their eyes.

After the conference we were all pretty wiped out, but it was down to the Old City once more for an end-of-the-conference celebration. The other three Americans were leaving pretty much first thing Sunday morning. But not me. Me, I had one more day.

Bucharest dogs, Romanian peasants

2011-12-10T08:10:00.008-06:00

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant, formerly the Museum of Communism

We had Friday morning free, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go: the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. I checked my hotel map, checked it again, triple-checked the little tiny Google on my little tiny iPod Touch screen, wrote down the address, figured I couldn't get lost.

I set out along Calea Victoriei (and wondered why they had named a street after Queen Victoria--surely her reach didn't extend all the way to Eastern Europe?) (No, I was told later; it's Victory Street, commemorating Romania's war of independence in 1878.)

A block from my hotel, I saw a dog swing out of one of the weedy abandoned yards and trot purposefully up the street ahead of me. This was not entirely alarming; I had seen dogs trotting here and there all over Paris, all over Irish towns. Loose dogs here in St. Paul aren't uncommon.

But the Bucharest dogs are a little different; most of them belong to no one; they are feral.

This is not to say they are necessarily dangerous or wolf-like or are about to take you down; the ones I saw looked like ordinary dogs, though scruffy and skittish. But they are still a problem. Sometimes they gather in packs. (In my four days there I saw one pack of about eight, and it looked quite intimidating.) Sometimes they bite people (about 75 a year). And sometimes, though rarely, they do worse: two people in the last five years have been killed. A woman was mauled, and a Japanese tourist was bitten in the leg. The teeth pierced his femoral artery, and he bled to death.

But this yellow dog looked sweet, if wary. I followed it up Calea Victoriei, past lovely old orthodox churches, modern shops and busy cafes, past a little window where people were lined up to buy hot pretzels (and I made a mental note to stop there on my way back), past abandoned buildings and overgrown yards.

As a country still emerging from communism, Romania faces challenges. The dogs are one challenge. Another is the unclaimed property--gorgeous old houses, commercial buildings, empty lots, all of which were nationalized and seized from their owners. Now that communism has fallen, nobody knows who owns many of the buildings--there is no documentation, no paperwork. Entrepreneurs are afraid to leap in and start refurbishing them, lest the original owners wait until the work is done and then step forward to claim the buildings.

And so a sort of paralysis has seized the city. "Bucharest feels like it's on the verge of coming alive," I had told one of my new Romanian friends. "Yes," she said. "It has felt that way for 10 years."

Feral dog along Kiseleff Boulevard

The dog and I continued up the street. We reached Victory Square, which felt more like a circle--like a giant roundabout, where six major thoroughfares came together in a continuous ballet of traffic and stoplights and crosswalks. I needed to cross over to Kiseleff Boulevard to continue my journey to the museum, and the dog seemed to be heading the same direction. I watched while he joined the throng of people waiting for the light; he waited, too, and then crossed when everyone else crossed. This is how you survive in an unfamiliar environment, whether you are a dog or a human--you watch the natives, and do as they do. (This is how I later got my pretzel.)

This dog had a sore on its stomach and a yellow tag on its ear. I cannot explain the sore, which was almost perfectly round--it looked almost like a burn from a very large cigarette--but the yellow tag I knew: it meant that the dog had been spayed or neutered.

Your correspondent at Victory Square

There have been all kinds of programs to deal with the dog problem, which began when Ceausescu started nationalizing those buildings for his massive projects: people were evicted from their homes and, with nowhere to go, let their pets loose. The abandoned animals bred, and bred again, and now there are an estimated 50,000 feral dogs in Bucharest, and more out in the countryside. I saw them sleeping in doorways, rummaging through garbage, heard them every night fighting outside my hotel.

Some are cared for, in small ways. On my last day in Bucharest I saw a big brown furry dog lounging near a piece of cardboard--his bed?--in the doorway of a jewelry store. A bowl of water and one of food were on the sidewalk nearby. As I raised my camera to take its picture, I saw someone inside the jewelry store also raise a camera. We waved at each other. The much-photographed dog did not move; he must have felt safe there.

Others are not so lucky; that same day I saw two dogs rummaging through garbage down in the Old City. A worker picked up a cobblestone and threw it, and the dogs ran off.

But all of that was still three days away; for now, I was trotting down the wide sidewalk after a skittish yellow dog. I could see the French influence as I walked--the wide sidewalks, the ornate and baroque design on many of the old buildings, and, once I reached the end of Kiseleff Boulevard, oh my gosh, the Arc de Triomphe!

It was built of wood in 1922 and rebuilt of granite in the 1930s and it commemorates the Romanian soldiers who fought in World War I. It is rather adorable, so much like the one in Paris, but only about half the size.

By now the dog had disappeared, and I had passed the museum. I turned back, walked through a park where bundled-up children played and stout women in fur hats sat on benches, reading in the frosty air.

At the museum, I paid my 10 lei admittance and asked about photographs. Sixty lei to take pictures, she said. Sixty lei! That seemed like a lot of money. (It's about $20.) No thanks, I said.

Photograph in the museum of a provincial tree.

I walked into the first room, which was filled with elaborate crosses and gilt icons and a tree covered in painted wooden crosses.

In the next room was a small wooden hut that had been brought in from the countryside.

The hut, the signage told me, was a troita, which means "protector of the road."

"The troita was offered to us by the peasants in Burlu village," it went on to say. "And in its place the museum had a new one built. The people gave it to us with all their heart. The only one who regretted the gift was the village shepherd, who used to find shelter from rain under its roof.

"You will find many troite displayed in the museum, just as if you were to go to the villages; you would find them everywhere, at the crossroads, at border lines, next to houses and fences. We could have placed an electric bulb inside the troita of Burlusi, in order to throw light on the cross, which is a very fine piece of work. Instead, we chose, visitor, to put your patience on trial. Take it as invitation to imagine what it would be like if you entered a village at nightfall. You would set eyes on a troita. Light would be faint. You would have to wait until the eye adapts and begins to 'see.' "

I could see that I was going to love this museum.

I hustled back to the foyer, hauled out my purse. I could think of no better way to spend 60 lei.

A Bucharest Thanksgiving

2011-12-06T08:08:00.006-06:00

We piled into our host's tiny car--me, my luggage, Alex (another American journalist), Alex's luggage, and two Romanian editors--and whizzed out of the Henri Coanda Airport toward the city center.

I craned my neck to get my first glimpse of Bucharest, but it looked much like any trip from any city airport anywhere: trees, buildings, traffic, feral dogs...

We shall get to the dogs in a bit.

They dropped us at our hotel, the Golden Tulip; I dumped my luggage; Alex opted to hang out and rest, and then I climbed back in the car with Adi and Cristian and they took me to their newsroom.

Here I must pause and explain that Adi and Cristian are magazine editors, and the brains and enthusiasm behind the conference. Their newsroom is in an apartment a couple of miles from the hotel, on the sixth floor of a magnificent, slightly decrepit old building. "We can take the elevator," Adi suggested, and I said no, let's walk. They exchanged quick glances. I had said the right thing, apparently; normally, they walk up the stairs and if someone opts for the elevator they have to pay a fine, which goes to their beer fund. Ah, journalists are the same the world over.

Up we went, up up up, and when we got to the fifth floor I heard tremendous barking and a dog flinging itself against an apartment door, and the editors told me that that was the "monster" and in two years they've never actually seen it, but when they hear it they know they have only one more flight of stairs to go.

The apartment where they produce their magazine is spacious. In the front room are their desks with laptops and cell phones--what else do you need, really, these days? Behind them is a balcony that looks out over the rooftops of Bucharest.

There's a sitting room, a big dining room, two spacious bathrooms, and--voila!--a tiny kitchen, where one Romanian editor and one American editor were busily preparing Thanksgiving dinner on the tiniest stove I have ever seen.

It was a miracle of efficiency, Thanksgiving dinner in such a tiny tiny space, and it smelled so good. I would not be missing Thanksgiving after all!

I had brought the cranberries, fresh and only slightly squished after their long journey from Minnesota. I handed them over and then, since the kitchen clearly was not going to hold more than two people and since I am less than useless preparing a feast, announced that I was going for a walk.

Another editor--a young man named Gabi--said he'd go with me, and that was terrific of him because not only would I otherwise have gotten completely, thoroughly and forever lost, but he was able to provide me with a running commentary of context for what I was looking at.

I do not now remember everywhere we walked, just that we walked for two hours and it grew dark and started to rain, and I peppered poor Gabi with dozens, if not hundreds of questions. Why do so many of the old buildings look French? Where was Ceausescu killed? What are those blue sidewalk stalls selling? Underwear? Really? (Not all of them, but some of them.) What's that building? What's that building? What's that building?

We were on busy Magheru Boulevard at University Square and Gabi was telling me about the big earthquake of 1977 that had destroyed so many buildings, when an older man heard us talking, and stopped. He pointed across the square and told me in pretty good English that a lovely church had once stood there. After the earthquake, the apartment building next to it had crumbled, but the church still stood. Ceausecu, never a church lover, ordered the church torn down anyway. The priest objected and was thrown into prison for two years.

The man then kissed his hand at me. "Thank you for visiting my country," he said, gave a beaming smile and a little nod, and walked on.

It was a beautiful night. The rain was really just a gentle mist, and walking kept me warm. We walked past lovely old churches--including the oldest church in Bucharest, dating to the 1500s--through the Old City and its cobblestone streets, past ornate French-inspired structures (Bucharest was once known as "Little Paris," and even has its own small Arc de Triumph), past Communist-era monstrosities, all the way to the People's Palace.

Speaking of Communist-era monstrosities.

We did not go inside, did not even walk right up to it, just gawked at it from across a wide busy road. All I could see was one tiny part of it, looming through the mist; the People's Palace, built by Ceaucescu, is beyond enormous. It is the second-largest building in the world, sprawling over a huge expanse of land--some 30,000 homes and 22 churches were demolished to make way for it, and it goes many meters underground as well.

(This aerial picture is obviously not mine--the Romanian journalists were wonderful hosts, but did not go so far as to rent me a helicopter--but it's from the link above, and I am including it so you can see the whole damn thing.)

And then back through the rainy streets to the newsroom.

The apartment was filling up. Alex had arrived, and Pat, the fourth American journalist, as well as 20 or 25 young Romanian journalists. After a brief bit of excitement when I accidentally locked myself in one of the bathrooms, we filed in for dinner.

Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, carrot salad, stuffing, Peg Meier's drunken cranberries (little did Peg know, back in Minnesota, that she was being talked about on a rainy night in Bucharest), homemade cornbread, three kinds of pie, free-flowing wine--it was a traditional Thanksgiving feast, but with strangers, dozens and dozens of strangers.

You know me and parties. I tried to hide. Went in the foyer and started studying my Bucharest city guide as though it were the most interesting thing in the world. But someone came and gently led me back into the busy, bustling, happy room and we all sat down to eat.

With the wine flowing and the constant chatter it was impossible not to take part. And everyone was so kind, so interesting, so funny, so -- well, so much like journalists, with whom I am supremely comfortable, that the meal whizzed by.

And then we stood, one at a time, and gave thanks. It was lovely, lovely, lovely, with some people thankful for their spouses and partners, and some thankful for good health and good fortune, or the meal and the party, one person thankful that her dog Boscoe was still hanging in there in her absence (I compulsively had checked my e-mail right before dinner), and everyone thankful for friends. A few people teared up. We toasted, and applauded, and cheered. And then, about 9 p.m., after the pumpkin pie, the jet lag suddenly hit (or maybe it was the L-tryptophan in the turkey). Someone got Alex and me back into a car and dropped us off at the hotel, and with many cries of good night, happy thanksgiving, they sped away into the dark.

I brushed my teeth. I fell into bed. I ate my fistful of dried cherries, to help me sleep. And as I drifted off, I could hear, outside my eighth-floor window, barking dogs.

Ah yes. The feral dogs. I still have to tell you about the feral dogs.

An inauspicious beginning

2011-12-04T16:58:00.003-06:00

When I was first asked if I wanted to take part in a narrative conference in Bucharest, I responded glibly: "Will I have to learn Hungarian?"

That would be odd, my friend responded, since they speak Romanian.

Bucharest, Budapest--it was all the same to me. I'd never been to Eastern Europe, outside of a six-hour layover in Belgrade in 1986.

I was, quite frankly, ambivalent. It would be a whirlwind trip--two full days of travel (one on each end), for four days there. Doug had four days off, his longest time off since starting his new job, and I'd be gone the whole time. I'd miss Thanksgiving. I hadn't done much coaching or talking about writing in the last three years, and I felt rusty. And then there was the Boscoe Situation... I hated to leave him, hated to burden Doug with all of the responsibility for six full days.

My friend said she'd like to put my name on the short list. I said OK, figuring it was the best of both worlds--an honor to be short-listed and I'd never make the cut.

And then I made the cut. I swallowed hard, said yes.

Never mind the days leading up to the trip--all the work I had to do in advance at my job, all the work I had to do to prepare for the conference. Fast-forward to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and me at the airport.

Ah yes, the day before Thanksgiving. The busiest travel day of the year, they said. Go early, they said. Give yourself plenty of time. So I went early and gave myself plenty of time, and made it through security in five minutes. That's right, folks; five minutes.

So I had three hours to kill, which I did in the usual airport way: Eating. Wandering. Going to the restroom repeatedly, so that I wouldn't have to go on the plane. Wasting money in the "high-speed Internet" machine (reality: super-slow-speed Internet machine), checking the e-mail that I had checked an hour before.

Finally, plane time. I approached the gate, handed over my boarding pass and passport, and was stopped cold.

"Your passport expires in January," the gate agent said.

"Yes, I know," I said. "I'm only going for four days."

She told me that most EU countries won't let someone in if they have fewer than three months on their passports; for some countries, they require six months.

But I have a return ticket! I said. I'm coming home Monday!

It doesn't matter. The Netherlands, for instance--where I was to change planes--will not allow me in. "What about Romania?" I said.

She started typing and clicking, typing and clicking, peering at the computer screen, trying to find the rules for Romania. I stood there watching her, trying to gauge my feelings. If I was turned away now, would I be disappointed? I was still ambivalent about the trip, but man, I'd come this far, written my speech, prepared my workshop, wasted three hours in the airport. I was ready to go.

Finally she looked up and nodded. You're good, she said. Romania will let you in.

She handed me back my passport, and I scampered down the jetway.

* * *

We shall skip over the flight, which was endless, and the wait in the Amsterdam airport, which was interminable, and the three more hours to Bucharest.

At 1 p.m. Bucharest time on Thanksgiving Day--5 a.m. St. Paul time, but I'd been advised not to do the math--I walked through Bucharest customs. My hosts were waiting for me right outside the door, with big smiles. "Welcome to Romania," they said.

And suddenly I was absolutely thrilled to be there.

(To be continued)

Three pictures from Bucharest

2011-12-02T06:50:00.000-06:00

I'll write about the trip this weekend. For now, apologies for being away so long. And here are three images from my whirlwind trip to Romania last week--two days traveling, and four days there.

The architecture is a blend of pre-communist, communist, and post-communist.

The part of town known as the Old City is starting to come back as a nightlife area of restaurants, cafes, and bars, with street markets and musicians. But much of it is still vacant and crumbling.

A Thanksgiving like no other. I went to dinner knowing just two people--two other American journalists--and ended the evening with about 30 new wonderful friends. Thankful, indeed.

Well, at least one of us is happy

2011-11-20T08:49:00.002-06:00

It had to happen sooner or later, though I was voting for later.

In the morning, there was no snow, just gray heavy clouds, a strong, blustery wind, and a sense of dampness in the air. Doug and Riley and I took our normal Saturday-morning walk--about 3 or 4 miles, with a stop halfway at a coffee shop, where we sat outside at a little wrought-iron table and sipped from steaming paper cups.

It was the kind of weather that makes you walk briskly, and so you stay warm, and the dog is happy, and you feel sort of virtuous because most other people pull back their curtains and look out at the heavy sky and the whipping branches, and stay inside, but not you, no, you are intrepid walkers, with dog, and you trudge down the side of the Como Golf Course, avoiding the goose poop (which the dog tries not to avoid, but to eat), and you talk about how pleasant it is to walk this time of year with clear sidewalks and dry ground and no worries about slipping or sliding on ice.

And then you get home and within the hour it starts to snow. Hard. It started as icy pellets, just as I was finishing my errands and just as Doug was finishing up running the lawn mower over the last of the autumn leaves.

And it snowed and snowed, about three inches, and I was in despair. No more easy walking. No more firm quick tread. We will be mincing around on ice now until April.

I let the boys out in the midst of it all, and Bosoce toddled around OK, didn't fall, but Riley--Riley ran. Zipped. Zoomed. Went into the play bow with such a look of excitement and pleading and happiness on his face that I could not resist, and so I chased him, and he ran, and Boscoe watched and the snow fell and fell, turning their black backs white.

The forecast now is for warmth later in the week; this might not be the Snow that Starts the Winter; it might actually melt. But it's certainly a warning, a reminder: You live in Minnesota. It is almost December. Your world, very soon, will be white, and it will stay white for a very long time.

(Note: The picture is not from this snowfall; it is from last year, when we had feet and feet of snow. I did not take a picture of Riley last night because he was simply moving too fast. In great happiness.)

The dead will always be with us--and so will their stuff.

2011-11-08T08:54:00.002-06:00

We moved everything out of the alcove the other day, so that we could have some bright warm carpeting put down before winter sets in. The alcove is a funny little room off our bedroom--perhaps in the old days it was a sleeping porch, but when we bought the house the windows had been closed up, the walls had been covered with dark paneling, and the room had been turned into a closet.

We ripped out the paneling, installed big windows, and added electric heat. It's our winter porch now, a cozy west-facing place to read in the sunshine when the drifts are high and the wind is howling. But the floor was cold, and it needed carpeting.

So we moved everything out and, in the course of doing so, I decided, as I do every so often, that we have Too Much Stuff.

In the alcove:

A desk, once my dad's, left to me after his death. It's full of stuff, so I must need it, right? But I seldom sit at it (didn't even write my book at it) and we end up piling stuff on top of it. Doug hangs the hangers from his dry-cleaning from its drawer pulls until he can gather them up again and recycle them.

A tall bookcase, loaded with books, but also with candleholders and pretty little boxes and various ceramic or china figurines, all gifts over the years from people, many now dead.The prettiest box is wooden, with a carved rose and a sliding drawer. It was my grandmother's, and when she died it became my father's, and before he died he gave it to me. It's beautiful. There is really nowhere to put it. It sits on top of the bookcase in the alcove where nobody ever sees it, gathering dust.

Two plants, both from a funeral. A low table, with more books and more candles. A comfortable chair that rocks and creaks.

You get the idea.

So after we moved everything out (and cluttered up the rest of the upstairs by stashing it all here and there) my clutter-seeking eye turned to the rest of the house.

And what I saw was overwhelming. Most days you just live with the stuff, you look past it, you know it's there but it's just part of the atmosphere. But when you actually look at it, oh my. It makes me want to weep. I don't have a clue what to do with it--any of it! Every bit of surface area in the house has something on it. Every wall has pictures, every bookcase has stuff, even the floor is covered (with rugs and shoes and dog beds).

From where I sit right now, at the dining room table, this is what I see on the bookcase in front of me:

An unframed print from a friend, propped up against the wall

A small pottery plate, from another friend

A small flowerpot I bought the first time I went to Ireland (it's full of coins)

A Mason jar full of spare change

A pen

A delicate blue vase that belonged to a friend, now dead. In the vase is a dried sprig of seed pods from the golden rain tree that we planted on the occasion of my father's death.

A straw hat. (Doug's.)

A framed photograph of a grinning Boscoe that was in Doug's mother's apartment before she died.

A small ceramic thimble that had been my sister's when she was alive.

Hundreds of books.

Multiply all that by every bookcase in the house (I think there are 13) and every tabletop (five) and every bureau (two) and you have: a lot of stuff. Or, that is, we have a lot of stuff. Do you, too?

Are your lives awash in clutter? Cords from various electronic devices, slippery stacks of magazines, notebooks, rolls of tape, little figurines or sculptures or decorative boxes, framed pictures, earbuds, CDs, too many pens, small glass vases, tacking nails that you found on the floor and were afraid to throw away because they probably go to something, frayed extension cords, odd things from art fairs ...

I cannot blame everything on dead people, though I have a lot of dead people's stuff. And I cannot blame everything on gifts, even though a lot of the small pretty things were gifts. I am not sure who to blame--surely I didn't set out in life to acquire so much stuff. I can't remember the last time I bought anything that wasn't food or clothes or books (or rugs for Boscoe).

And yet--here it all is.

Many many years ago I visited my brother in Seattle and was taken by the way he lived. He was single then, and lived alone in a very small house--practically a shed--behind another house, off the alley. There were rose bushes in the yard, and inside his shed were the bare necessities: a narrow bed. A saggy couch, where he slept during my visit. A desk (possibly homemade; it might have been an old door laid across two sawhorses).

In his bathroom, his few necessities--toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo--were kept inside a plastic carrying case, as though he were ready to pick up and leave at a moment's notice.

He was working on his dissertation, and I think a map of the world was pinned to the wall above his desk. In the kitchen, he had a couple of plates, a couple of glasses, a couple of mugs. He brewed coffee a cup at a time, pouring boiling water through one of those plastic V-shaped coffeemakers that you bring with you when you go camping.

That was about it. The place was tiny and tidy and efficient. I loved it, loved the secret front door off the alley, and the blooming roses. When I stood at the tiny sink and washed my coffee cup and breakfast spoon, I could look out the window at all Seattle. This is a great way to live, I thought.

At one time, I lived that way, too. Owned almost nothing except books and clothes, and I remember one Thanksgiving when I moved from tiny furnished apartment to tiny furnished apartment I moved by myself, carrying my boxes down the snowy street.

How did I manage to acquire so much stuff since then? As I was rushing around madly on Sunday, trying to find things to throw away, my hand grabbed a small china vase that one of my sisters had given me for Christmas years ago. Doug stopped me. "It's small," he said. "It doesn't take up much space." And I set it down again.

Are you, too, awash in clutter? Does it bug you? Do you even notice it? What do you do about it? Or, if not, how do you avoid it?

Surely I am not the only one living practically and quite accidentally on the verge of hoarder-dom.

Our house is a festival of rugs

2011-10-28T05:29:00.002-06:00

One of the features we liked most when we bought our house was its hardwood floors. Lovely oak floors throughout, and (we later discovered, when we remodeled) a gorgeous glowing maple floor in the kitchen.

Over time, we ripped up the beige wall-to-wall carpeting, refinished the floors, and put down area rugs.

And then Boscoe got old. Now our house is a festival of rugs--cheap, mis-matched, most with rubberized non-skid backs, like glorified bathmats.

So now our house looks like this: (top photo) Our normal winter rug. (We swap it out for a lighter one in the summer.) (Note comfy dog bed by the fireplace, which we seldom use now because the sound of the fire snapping freaks out elderly dog.) (Note, also, throw pillows surrounding the bed, to keep him from sliding off the edges.)

Our normal hallway rug. (Note dogfood stand on the radiator shelf. That's for Elderly Dog, so he can eat without falling over.)

The kitchen floor is now concealed in cheap rugs from Marshalls and HomeGoods. (Note corner of fleece dogbed under table. That's for Younger Dog, so he has a place to go and mope.)

The hallway between the kitchen and the front hall now has its own non-skid runner. (Note smallish rug to the right--that one is moved between that spot (between the hall and the living room) and another spot (between the hall and the front porch).

Ugly ancient purple and green basement rug has been hauled upstairs, washed, and is now in the dining room, as a non-skid spot between living room and kitchen. (Note comfy fleece dog pad the background. For either dog and in constant use whenever I am sitting at the computer at the dining room table.)

The front porch now has no fewer than three rugs. A welcome mat for humans (also used by dogs), a little mat by the water dish, to keep Elderly Dog from slipping when he drinks, and a third rug over by the -- what's that? Another dog bed?

Our lovely hardwood floors are pretty much completely concealed these days, but at least Boscoe has to really work at it if he wants to fall over.

Ok, Ok...

2011-10-26T07:52:00.000-06:00

Fifty five doesn't feel any different from fifty four and 364 days.

Except for two important things:

Cupcakes!!!!

And all the very thoughtful comments from you.

Thank you. I'd share the cupcakes with you if I could.

And now, on to seventy...

This one kind of hurts

2011-10-24T19:10:00.002-06:00

I hit 25 without any problem. Breezed through my 30's without worrying about getting old, hit 40 and even 50 without a blink. Midlife crisis? How silly, I thought. How trivial. How self-indulgent.

The only birthday that troubled me was No. 47. That was the age my sister was when she was diagnosed with cancer, and when I hit that age, that one was hard.

And now, suddenly, I am face to face with 55, and it is not fun. It does no good to tell myself that I'm only a minute older, an hour older, a day older. It does no good to point out that I am in good shape, I have all my teeth, my hair isn't gray, my knees don't hurt.

Don't tell me I'm only as old as I feel. Don't tell me that today is the first day of the rest of my life. I stare at 55 and I feel like lying down.

It doesn't seem possible; I look at the girl in that picture and I remember everything about her--what she read, what she wore, how she liked to hide in closets and under tables, to get away from the commotion and chaos of the house. We are the same person. But now that little girl is 55. (And I have to admit, it's been a long time since I sat under a table.)

This morning I woke up early, as always, and lay in the dark thinking. And it occurred to me that I've been working at the Strib for 15 years--and it feels like a flash, a snap of the fingers. And in 15 more years--another flash, another snap--I shall be 70.

That thought was discouraging enough to make me not want to get up at all.

My birthday is tomorrow. Forget the chocolates, forget the cake, forget the whiskey. Send encouragement. This one hurts.

More alarms at night

2011-10-21T20:47:00.001-06:00

Yesterday morning, long before the sun was up, the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang? It was, like, 6:20 a.m. Pitch black outside. Cold and starry. Doug and Riley were just back from their morning constitutional, I hadn't yet fed the boys, and I hadn't quite finished my first cup of coffee. This was not the time of day when one normally receives visitors.

A shortish, plumpish, grayish woman stood on our top step, talking rapidly into a cell phone. "Uh uh," she was saying into the phone. "Huh uh. It's locked."

Riley was going ballistic in the hallway, Doug was poking his head around the doorway out of curiosity, Boscoe was, I don't know, falling over or panting or sleeping or staring off into space, I was getting chilly from the frigid morning air, and the woman continued to talk into her phone. I was not awake enough for any of this. Beyond her, down the street, I could see a car idling, its hazard lights flashing. I guessed that it might be hers, and that it might be the thing that was locked.

She snapped the phone shut and told me that she was our newspaper carrier. Her keys, she said, had somehow gotten locked in her car while she was bringing a newspaper up to a house. I love the use of passive voice in situations like these--nobody's responsible! Those keys just got locked in the car!

She said, "Can your husband help me break into my car?"

I didn't even have to ask Doug to know the answer to that question.

"No," I said. "You'll need to call a locksmith. There's one on Snelling Avenue who is pretty good."

Just then two things happened: I heard a terrific crash from inside the house, and the woman began to argue with me. "I can't afford that," she said. "I don't got any money. Don't you have a long stick thing I can use to, you know?" She pantomimed something, I'm not quite sure what. I figured she was looking for a crowbar, but by then I was only half listening, torn between her dilemma and the curious crash from the dining room.

"Just a second," I said.

"Don't your husband got something I could use?" she said. "To break a window?"

"Don't break a window!" I said. "That'll cost a lot more than a locksmith! Hold on a minute." And I hurried into the dining room. All of the books that I had piled up on the radiator shelf over the course of the summer--and there must have been 60 or 70 of them--had somehow toppled over and fallen to the floor, taking a potted plant with them.

Doug was already sweeping up the dirt. "Nobody touched the shelf," he said. "Nobody was anywhere near it. I don't know what happened."

Boscoe had heaved himself to his feet and staggered over to lick up whatever dirt Doug missed. Dirt is one of his favorite things.

I returned to the front door, where the newspaper carrier was still waiting hopefully for a strong man and a crowbar to help her smash her way into her idling car. "We don't have a crowbar," I said. "Call a locksmith."

"I don't got any money," she said again. "My daughter's a mechanic. She can get me a new window cheap."

I shut the door and almost instantly regretted my callousness. Should I have given her money for a locksmith? I grabbed my wallet: $24. Not enough. I don't got any money either, apparently.

I watched the hazard lights blinking in the dark and wondered what the woman would do. I looked at the pile of books and wondered what had made them fall. I looked at the clock and realized it was time to feed the dogs. I looked at my half-full coffee cup and knew that quiet time was over before it had even begun.

It was one of those increasingly common mornings when I feel like I've already had a full day behind me before I even get to work.

I fed the dogs, let Riley out, carried Boscoe down the back stairs, settled him in the frosty grass, and went back inside. I looked out the front window; the idling car was gone.

There's more than one way to skin a cat

2011-10-19T07:20:00.002-06:00

...or feed a dog.

Boscoe has been eating like a hungry bear for the last two weeks or so, ever since it finally occurred to me (duh!) to buy stinky canned food and add it to his diabetic kibble. I think I was so fixated before on trying to get him to eat the right food--diabetic canned (which he will no longer touch), or foods for a dog with failing kidneys--that I was just making the whole thing too hard.

He seems to crave variety, and so each morning I open a different can and hold it out for him to sniff. If he turns away, I put that one in the fridge and open a different one. But usually he wants whatever I give him. I mix it up with his kibble so that he has to eat the kibble, too, and most evenings now he eats it all and licks the dish clean. (Mornings are still a bit more problematic. Maybe he needs a cup of coffee.)

I am sure that this, too, will change eventually, and I'll be stuck with cans and cans of foods he won't eat. But for now it's working well.

Riley always gets a little dollop, too, to make him happy.

I've been meaning to blog for the last week or so--nothing momentous has happened, but life keeps trucking on, and since last we chatted (because this does feel like a chat, doesn't it?) I have been to Fargo and back (at Concordia College for three days, as part of their writers festival), done a reading at an arts center in Fridley, and, yesterday, delivered a talk to about 100 people, one of whom asked me to autograph her Kindle. A first for me.

I have also been battling the Monster Cold from Hell. I blame Fargo, where everyone was extremely nice, but also seemed to be sick--the young man who introduced me at my Wednesday night reading sounded so bad I worried that he was going to collapse during the introduction.

Last fall, when my book first came out, I was very worried about getting sick and hacking my way through an appearance. Doug bought me a bottle of hand sanitizer, and I washed my hands like an obsessive-compulsive person. My hands grew red and chapped, but I breezed through the winter with no cold, no flu, no problem.

And then I grew less vigilant, and so here I am, breathing rough and shallow, going through Kleenex and DayQuil, sleeping across the hall from husband so as not to contaminate him.

On Friday night, in Fridley, I started coughing at the end of my reading--got one of those persistent tickles in the back of the throat that you know mean endless coughing. I just gritted my teeth and toughed it out and finished the page and then sat in the corner coughing hysterically.

At yesterday's talk, I made it almost to the end and then the same thing happened. I started coughing, sipping water, coughing some more. A sweet 90-year-old woman in the audience shyly handed up a Hall's cough drop and saved the day.

That bottle of hand sanitizer is going to go everywhere with me from now on.

And I wonder why I'm always late for work

2011-10-12T06:51:00.002-06:00

5:40 a.m.: Crawl out of nice, warm, comfortable, soft, cozy bed. Riley and Doug are already up and on their morning walk.

5:45 a.m.: Lug Boscoe out into the yard. Go back in house and get his Tramadol, take insulin out of fridge to warm up.

5:50 a.m.: Give Boscoe his Tramadol and then walk him slowly up the alley to see what magic might occur. Pick him up when he falls over.

6:05 a.m. Get coffee. Watch the sun come up.

6:15: a.m. Doug and Riley return. Sit on porch and read paper, chat, drink coffee.

6:40 a.m.: Start feeding the dogs. Try to guess what Boscoe might eat today.

6:45 a.m. Hold Boscoe up with a towel around his midsection to keep him from collapsing while he eats. Listen to him crunch. Smell the peculiar odor of canned dog food wafting past my nose.

6:55 a.m.: Give Boscoe his insulin and Metacam while Riley stands mournfully off to the side, wondering why his brother's breakfast was so much more festive than his.

7:10 a.m.: Pack lunches. No, not for the dogs. For us! Kiss husband goodbye and he flies out the door toward work.

7:20 a.m.: Walk Boscoe again, because the magic still needs to occur.

7:29 a.m.: Dispose of magic in garbage can.

7:30 a.m. Take Boscoe into the back yard so I can give him his medicated bath. (He has skin infections on his back and his groin.) (Says Doug, "Why are you not bathing my groin?")

7:32 a.m.: Wolf down breakfast in dining room while Boscoe barks in annoyance; he is standing in the back yard covered in medicated shampoo. (It needs to sit for 10 minutes.)

7:45 a.m.: Rinse miserable Boscoe and dry him with big towel. Pick him up when he falls over. Carry him into the house.

8 a.m.: Walk with Riley around the lake. Yes, Riley has already been walked. This one's for me.

8:30 a.m. Lift weights, take a shower, get dressed.

8:55 a.m.: Fly out the door.

9:20 a.m. Slink in to work.

I'm not really late for work; I do a lot of work from home--reading books for review, answering emails, editing, writing reviews and blog posts. But oh for a leisurely morning!

October!

2011-10-03T06:28:00.001-06:00

And now it is October, and I head back to work.

I had a lovely, lovely week off last week. Did nothing of note--took long walks with Riley (and short tottering ones with Boscoe); rode my bike; took a walk with my mother; had some pants hemmed; read a couple of books; planted 75 tulip bulbs (and hope the squirrels leave them unmolested); sat out in the sunshine with a book, sat on the porch with a book, dozed on the porch with a book on my lap; went out to dinner with Doug to celebrate our 13th anniversary and had so much fun we went out to lunch the next day and celebrated it all over again.

Like I said, nothing at all of note, but oh how lovely and relaxing to wake up each morning to an open, empty, unstructured day. Some days went by in a flash. Some days were long and leisurely. I loved every minute of each one.

And now it is October, and I head back to work. But only for two days! I have so much to do today and tomorrow, and then on Wednesday I climb into the car before the sun is up and head off to western Minnesota, to take part in a three-day writers conference at Concordia College. This should be fun--I'll be there with two other writers, a poet and a novelist, and we will speak to classes and have dinner with students and do a reading one evening and teach a master class.

I need to figure out what I'm talking about in the master class. I will do that tonight. But now....as I said....off to work.

Oh, and the photo? The tree right outside our porch window. It will get brighter and brighter in the coming weeks, and then, suddenly, it will be bald. And then it will be, brrr, November.

The quiet man

2011-09-29T07:20:00.003-06:00

This is not the turtle in question, but a different turtle from a couple of years ago.

I've been off work this week, and now that Boscoe no longer appears to be dying, it's been very nice. Lovely golden September days, a little breeze, warm enough to sit outside and read in the yard in the daytime, just a hint of chill at night. Doug and I have been walking Riley around the lake after dinner. One night a man approached us on the path and warned us of two big raccoons just ahead, but, sadly, they had vanished by the time we rounded the curve. Another night we saw a heron standing in the weeds, in the dark, just a silhouette against the moonlit lake.

Yesterday I drove over to my mother's apartment so that we could go for a walk. It was a glorious, glorious day, sun-drenched and warm, one of the last, I think, of the 80-degrees days this season.

As I started to make the turn into her parking lot, I saw a big dark shape in the middle of the driveway. At first I thought someone had dropped a package, but then I realized: It was a turtle. A big snapper, sunning himself right where he could easily get driven over and squished.

I drove around him, parked, and then walked back to see what I could do. He was huge--as big as a salad plate, with prehistoric wrinkly legs and a small head with beady eyes and, I knew, powerful jaws.

Tentatively, I started to pick him up, keeping my hands well away from his mouth, but the turtle jolted violently and suddenly, jerking his head and arms and legs, and I lost my nerve and let go. He had almost certainly come from the little drainage pond opposite my mother's building. The pond has steep sides overgrown in weeds and rushes, and I poked around trying to find a stout stick. If I could get the turtle to clamp his jaws over a stick, I could carry him back to the water. That was my plan, anyway. But there were no big sticks (and no big trees, just bushes and scrub) and the stick I ended up with was skinny and not very strong. The turtle did grab it, when poked, but let it go almost immediately. He wants flesh, I thought. He's holding out for my fingers.

And so I was still poking at him kind of aimlessly when a dark blue minivan pulled into the parking lot. The driver was a smallish older man, with thinning white hair and a pair of glasses that were strapped to his head with a leather band.

He pulled over, hopped out and walked over to us. "Isn't this turtle gorgeous?" I said. "But I'm afraid he's going to get killed here."

The man neither looked at me, nor spoke. He bent down and grabbed the turtle's shell with his short stubby fingers. "Are you going to pick him up?" I said. "I tried that, but --" Here the turtle gave his violent jolt again, and the man dropped him. "Yeah, he did that for me, too," I said. The man neither looked at me, nor spoke. He reached down again and got a firmer grasp on the heavy shell and picked him a few inches off the ground. This time, when the turtle jerked, the man held on.

He lugged him a few feet to the side of the driveway and dropped him, and the turtle landed on his back. I could see his yellow underside, his fat wrinkly legs, like the legs of an ancient scaly baby, thrashing. Together, but silently, the man and I flipped him over.

Now the turtle was facing the wrong way--back toward the parking lot, and doom. "We'll have to turn him around," I said. The man neither looked at me, nor spoke. He started shoving the turtle with his foot, roughly, pushing him around and heading him toward the weeds. When the turtle was sufficiently buried in foliage, the man turned around and hobbled back toward his van. He climbed in, started up the engine, and disappeared into the garage under my mother's building.

He had neither looked at me nor spoken the entire time. I looked at the turtle with worry. The man had not been gentle, and I worried that he was injured. I poked him again with my stick. The turtle moved a step deeper into the weeds. Satisfied, I turned away and walked back up the driveway. My mother was waiting, and now I had a story to tell.

Don't count the old boy out just yet

2011-09-26T09:25:00.003-06:00

Oh, this has been a hard week! And I have dragged you right along with me through all the hardship. But Boscoe is actually doing better now. We will go through all this again some time, I fear. For now, though, he's more alert, eating better, and a little stronger.

I think the problem was what it has always been in the past--his diabetes. A week or ten days ago, we brought him in for blood work, and the reading for his glucose level came back dangerously, dangerously low. The vet advised us to lower his insulin dose dramatically, from 11 units twice a day, to 9 units twice a day.

I now think that that low reading was a mistake. We lowered his insulin, and a few days later Boscoe started dying. He wouldn't eat. He could not get up without our help, and once up he could barely stand. He fell over when he was pooping and got covered with excrement. He drank huge amounts of water and when we carried him outside he would pee for a solid minute, wandering the yard at the same time and splashing his own feet.

The worst was the not-eating. I tempted him with everything I could think of--grilled cheese sandwiches! Turkey burgers! And he would eat a little, but not much.

Finally on Saturday I said THIS IS WRONG. And I made the decision to bump his insulin back up to 11.

This was not an easy decision for me. I did this once before and should not have; a couple of months ago he seemed listless and overly thirsty, and I bumped his insulin up and he got sicker. We brought him in, the vet tested him, and very gently suggested I bump him back down again. I am not a doctor, and I am going blindly here, based on what it seems to me that he needs. But it's always just a guess, and I was so afraid this time of guessing wrong--the symptoms of not enough insulin are pretty similar to the symptoms of too much insulin (listlessness, lack of appetite, weakness), and I didn't want to make a mistake.

This time it was not a mistake. Today he is much better. He will put us through agony and hell again, and some day he will die, but not today. Not this week. Doug and I will have to go through trauma again at some point, but damned if I won't be dragging all of you there with us.

Winding down, but having fun

2011-09-24T15:39:00.003-06:00

This morning I crawled out of bed at 5:15 in order to take Boscoe out for a pee. He had been drinking tons of water yesterday, and I figured he'd need to go out sooner rather than later. I was right; he peed for about 45 seconds straight, while toddling around aimlessly in the dark yard, and then I carried him back in and we both went back to bed.

It's a tough time right now for the Old Codge. Not feeling well, not eating, messing the kitchen in the middle of the night, falling over when I try to walk him or bathe him (and he has required frequent baths). Is he on the way out? It's hard not to think that, but the truth is we've thought this many times over the last year and each time he's rallied.

This time, I'm thinking, he probably needs another insulin adjustment. But it's complicated by the fact that his kidneys are starting to go. For diabetes he needs one diet; for kidney disease, a different one. And right now Boscoe is splitting the difference by refusing either. He won't eat kibble, he won't eat canned food, and he won't eat any of a multitude of doctor-approved-people foods, either: No to eggs. No to ground turkey. No to ground beef. No, even, to that reliable old stand-by, boiled chicken breast.

Yesterday for dinner, in desperation, I made him a grilled turkey with provolone sandwich, and tried to layer in as much kibble as possible; it only worked passably well (the kibble kind of fell out when I flipped the sandwich), and Riley watched, astounded and jealous. He took to darting in to grab whatever crumbs fell to the ground (mostly rejected kibble) and then darting back out again to watch, eyes huge.

This morning I opened up a can of Mary Kitchen Roast Beef Hash, which I fried in butter and laced with a cup of kibble. I used about half the can, and Boscoe ate about half of that, giving me the stink eye that clearly said, "I see this kibble. I know it's in there. And I'm not going to eat it." And he didn't.

On the other hand, he still has joy in his life. He toddles up for scratches. Doug lies down and cuddles with him every evening. Every now and then he surprises all of us by going into the play bow in front of Riley. (Riley kind of panics, and you know he's thinking, "That crazy old man is trying to play with me again!")

The mornings are the worst. I leave dire notes for the dog walker: "Boscoe wouldn't eat, and his back leg is very weak. On the morning walk it collapsed and he kept going in circles." But he rallies as the day goes on, and the dog walker leaves polite replies that make me feel like I am over-reacting: "He did great for me. We had a nice short walk."

This morning we put both boys in the Jeep and drove out to visit Mona and Patches. Riley and Patches raced around the yard for a good hour, and Boscoe joined in as best he could, barking merrily (or frantically, depending on your interpretation), prancing stiff-legged, occasionally falling. When he falls, his back legs slide under him so far that he's sitting on his tailbone, and he doesn't have enough muscle--or, really, any muscle--to get up, so we have to go over and hoist him up and pull his back legs back out and then he's able to stand again and toddle on his way.

If we are not around when he gets stuck, he has figured out that he needs to tip over on his side, which takes the pressure off his legs, and then he can move them and sort of rock and rock and, eventually, get back to his feet. It's painful to watch. But he is constantly adapting to his situation, and he does not seem depressed. (Though sometimes I think I see bewilderment in his eyes; like any oldster, I suspect he is thinking, "How did I get to this point?")

But he does have occasional joy. He had joy today. Between racing around, Riley and Patches took a little break and cuddled with Doug. Boscoe leaned heavily into Mona's legs and she petted him and petted him and petted him. That dog has always loved to be petted.

I am not going to try to look into the future; it does no good, and I am always wrong. I have wept over this dog a dozen times since last winter, and each time I thought he was dying, he has rallied. He may rally again. He will not be able to rally forever; he is, after all, a good three months into his seventeenth year.

Tonight I will feed him whatever he will eat--perhaps that leftover turkey burger that has been in the fridge for a couple of days, perhaps more of the roast beef hash (though it did not agree with his digestive system, I am afraid). And tomorrow I will get up when it is still dark and carry him outside so that he can relieve himself.

And as the day burns on, he will rally and, I hope, find some joy.

The opposite of domestic goddess

2011-09-18T10:58:00.001-06:00

I was chopping up a tomato for my noontime salad the other day when one of my work colleagues said, "Is that from your garden?" and I stopped in mid-chop, suddenly awash in all of those things that I always feel when people ask me about anything domestic: Shame. Guilt. Inadequacy. Failure.

"No," I said. "It's from Target." (What a loser! It's not even from the Farmer's Market! It's from Target!)

I do sometimes grow tomatoes in my yard, but this spring was so cold and wet that I never got around to it. I did plant some cherry tomatoes in a pot, next to a pot of basil, hopeful that a margherita pizza would magically materialize; it produced a few little tomatoes, but not many--perhaps one a day for a couple of weeks before the whole thing turned yellow from neglect.

The basil we used a few leaves at a time (yes, on margherita pizzas) and then last weekend I rashly harvested the rest of it and made pesto.

That is, I googled "pesto recipes," picked the one that looked the least complicated, dug a dusty old half-bag of walnuts from the back of the cupboard where it had been for, um, a long time, and then went out and cut back the pesto plant. I mean, the basil plant.

Isn't it pretty? I dumped the leaves into the food processor, along with the ancient walnuts.

Then I went back on Google to look up the instructions for the Cuisinart because I had totally forgotten how to use it. (Seriously, getting the pieces to lock into place is not easy.)

And then I made the pesto, added perhaps too much olive oil, tasted it, and then stuck it in the freezer, where it will probably stay for a long time until it is covered in ice crystals and we no longer know what it is and we pitch the whole thing out.

I want to have a big garden! I want to harvest things from the dirt, and can them in my steamy kitchen, and look at the rows of blue-glass jars glowing like jewels with their bounty of red and yellow peppers, and luscious tomatoes, and whatever the hell else people put in jars.

I want to stitch my own quilts, too, and have that magical woman's touch that I read about somewhere, possibly in "Little Women," where just moving a few items around in just the right way suddenly makes a damn house a fricking home.

I did go through a time, in my early 20s, when I gardened and canned, and then figured, "Now that I have done this, I never have to do it again." And in my late 20s I made crib-sized quilts for several sisters and friends who were popping out babies at the time (something else I've never done), laboriously stitching everything by hand because I didn't own a sewing machine and didn't want to invest in one, knowing myself well enough to suspect that this was probably a passing phase. (It was.)

One sister wrote me a letter of thanks in which she said that she liked the quilt, used it often, her baby peed on it, she washed it, and it "got all bunchy."

I guess the truth is that I don't really want to do any of those things; I only want to want to do them. In truth, I find the domestic arts to be difficult and unnatural and aggravating; I have no skills in cooking, sewing, decorating or nurturing, and while I would love to blame someone, maybe my mother, I can't, because other people in my family are fabulous gardeners and fabulous cooks and, yes, fabulous quilt-makers, and my own mother, while she hated to sew, knows how to do it very very well and is also the best cook I know.

I did not do well in those mandatory home ec classes in school, either, making the world's simplest skirt (basically a pillow case with an elastic waist, no pockets, no zipper, no waistband, no buttons, no buttonholes), and yet it took me all semester, laboriously picking out crooked seams with that sharp little tool we all had, oh, such picky work, and sweating over the stay-stitching.

The second semester we were required to make an entire dress; I panicked and made a jumper, because I knew there was no way in hell I'd ever be able to set a sleeve. The simple jumper, which I never wore (it was too small) earned me a C because I never got around to doing the top-stitching on the zipper. (I knew that if I attempted it the sewing machine needle would end up embedded, somehow, in the middle of the zipper, and it would break off and possibly the whole machine would go down, and I would end up owing Woodland Junior High School a lot of money. Much easier to just not do the top stitching, take the C I deserved, and skulk on with my life.)

In my mind, I dream of retiring and becoming self-sufficient: Plowing up our wide sideyard and planting vegetables and getting a straw hat and a lovely flat basket for cuttings. (Not sewing my own clothes; even my wildest dreams don't get that wild.)

But when I retire, if that day ever comes, I know what I will really be doing:

I will be doing what I always do in the summertime. Sitting in the backyard with a couple of dogs, something cold to drink, and a good book.

Fortunately, I have a husband who understands.

Thanks, dear. Margherita pizza for dinner?

And yes we are still toddling along

2011-09-08T06:41:00.001-06:00

Last week the wind shifted, the light changed, and now it is fall. It's very dark when I get up at 5:30, but lovely at 7 when Riley and I take our morning walk. The light is golden, and the wildflowers along the edge of the lake are yellow and orange, no longer the pinks and baby blues of spring.

It was a short, odd summer--a cold April and May, a very wet June, and a sultry steamy Delta-like July, too hot to do anything but lie around in front of the fan, sipping on a lemonade and calling languidly for more ice. (Which nobody brought.)

Only August was the lovely summer that we had been hoping for since Memorial Day, bright day after bright day of 80 degrees and low humidity, great for walking, for biking, for packing in all of those things that we were prevented from doing earlier in the season.

And so August went by in a flash, 31 days unspooled quickly, like shaking out a roll of ribbon. Erik came to visit for four days, and then the next weekend I went up the North Shore for three days with my friend Kristi, and then it was State Fair time, and now, as I said, it is fall.

The North Shore trip was so that I could do a book signing at the tiny bookstore in Grand Marais, but Kristi and I turned it into a full weekend of wandering the galleries of the town, and having drinks on the roof of the Gunflint Tavern, and walking in the woods and along the lakeshore, and talking pretty much nonstop.

One morning she did yoga on the beach (free with our hotel room) but me, I am less ambitious, and I sat on our little balcony and drank cup after cup of coffee and read a book and stared out at the glittering lake.

The nights were warm, so warm we didn't need jackets. We sat out on the beach in front of a bonfire and stared up at the stars. It did not feel like the North Shore, which is usually a rugged and woodsy visit for me; it felt like an indulgent getaway on the California coast. Not that I'm complaining.

On Saturday afternoon we stopped at the county art museum, where we wandered through an exhibit of a local artist named Alice Powell. She had an amazing range of style--it looked like an exhibit of four or five quite different artists--but one image in particular captivated me. It was of birch trees along the lake shore, in the autumn--the lake was that gunmetal blue that it becomes in the fall, and the grass was golden brown, and the whole thing so beautifully captured the North Shore during the time of year that we most often visit that I just stood in front of that painting and stared and stared.

I surreptitiously took its picture. Back at our hotel room, I emailed the photo to Doug. "I want this painting," I wrote. "But it seems presumptuous to buy a painting and bring it home and put it on the wall and make you look at it every day if you don't like it too. So I didn't buy it."

The next morning, I got an email in return. It was a photo of Boscoe, and the message said only, "Buy the painting, Sweetie."

But it was too late! The museum didn't open on Sunday until 1 p.m., and Kristi and I were due to pull out of town by 11.

I looked at the photo again. I really wanted that painting. And it occurred to me...

The guy who runs the museum had come to my reading at the bookstore the night before. He seemed like a jolly, friendly guy. I sent him an email. "I want to buy that painting, but we are leaving town this morning," I wrote.

Within minutes, the phone in our hotel room rang. "I can meet you at the museum right after church," he said. "Church gets out at 11:30. I won't even stop to shake the minister's hand."

And so he did. Kristi and I packed up our room, checked out of the hotel, took a little walk along the breakfront, and then dallied at the rocky beach in front of the museum until the door opened and the museum director waved us in.

He wrapped up the painting, I handed over my smoking credit card, and then we hit the road.

I think it looks great on our living room wall, a lovely reminder of a lovely little trip, and of a beautiful place.

I am, without a doubt, the last person you want to have around during a crisis

2011-08-24T07:36:00.001-06:00

Our good friend Erik visited this weekend, from California, and we packed a lot into three days--went to the Walker Art Center, went out to eat, drove down the Mississippi to Frontenac and hiked in the state park. We made a big fry-up of eggs and sausage and hash browns for breakfast and lay around and groaned and then skipped lunch. At night, we sat out in lawn chairs in the grass and talked until the mosquitoes chased us onto the screen porch, where we sat and talked some more.

I took Monday off work to spend the day with him. I hadn't told the dogwalker that I was going to be home, so we decided to go out to lunch and leave her to her work. We sat outside at some place along Grand Avenue and Erik had a glass of wine and then we walked the neighborhood, gaping at the big houses. We got home with an hour to spare before we had to leave for the airport.

At the back door, though, we saw blood--blood on the steps, blood on the sidewalk, a crumpled, blood-stained paper towel tossed in the grass, as though someone had tried to mop things up and then had hastily run off.

Riley met us at the door, zipped out into the yard, looking back over his shoulder in a puzzled way.

We went into the living room. No Boscoe, who is usually sprawled there on his orthopedic dog bed under the ceiling fan. No Boscoe on the front porch, either, his other favorite spot. There was no point in looking upstairs, because he cannot climb the stairs, but we looked anyway.

No Boscoe anywhere at all.

I could feel the panic rise in me. I tried, for the sake of Erik, to appear calm. I grabbed the phone and then realized I did not know the dog walker's cell phone number. It was scrawled on a piece of paper that we had kept tacked to the refrigerator door with a magnet, but when we had the kitchen painted earlier in the summer we took everything down and I now had no idea where that slip of paper might be.

Maybe she called me at work! I started punching in the numbers, realized I could not, in my harried state, remember the number to reach voice mail. Gave up.

Opened the laptop, searched for messages from Mary to see if she had sent me her cell phone number. She had not, or, if she had, I couldn't find it. Found, instead, the number of the woman who runs the dog-walking business, called her, got voice mail, left a shaky-sounding message about Blood! And no Boscoe! and Call me! and then when I started to leave my home number realized that I could not remember it. "Oh, you know where to find me!" I shouted testily and then hung up.

Erik stood off to the side respectfully, not getting in my way, thank God not offering any advice, just watching with a bemused expression. I think he had never seen me completely lose my head before.

Next step: Dashed down the basement stairs, riffled through the pile of refrigerator magnets and old photos that I had heaped on the desk, found, in my second time through, the slip of paper with Mary's cell phone number.

Dashed back upstairs, called her, and she answered on the second ring, sounding cool as a cucumber.

Boscoe is fine, she said cheerfully. He's fine.

He had run down the back stairs, caught a paw nail, and ripped it out. Bled like hell all over the back yard.

"If I'd known you were coming home early, I would have left a note," she said apologetically but still cheerfully. "I figured we'd have it all taken care of before you got off work."

In the end, it was probably a good thing that he ripped off that nail. The vet called me an hour later to tell me that they had stitched it up and bandaged it and it would be fine. But she noticed that he has some kind of skin infection on his shoulder and his belly (and he had been licking a lot, and flaking, but I thought it was just from the heat of summer) and she was putting him on antibiotics for two weeks and sending him home with some kind of medicated shampoo.

So right now, as I write this, he is sprawled in the living room on his orthopedic dog bed under the ceiling fan, looking relaxed. He has a hot-pink bandage on his front left paw. He is full of good breakfast, including chicken that Doug roasted on the grill last night, and four different expensive medications.

He is sleeping soundly, and he is basking in our love.

A delicious mystery, wrapped in an enigma, and sweetened with a ten-dollar bill

2011-08-18T07:33:00.002-06:00

At work on Tuesday I received a mysterious letter. Isn't that a great opening line? But it is even greater for that it is true. At work on Tuesday I received a mysterious letter.

The postmark was blurred. There was no return address. The letter came in a buff-colored envelope, my name printed on the outside in a very lovely hand.

Inside, was a second envelope--a white windowed envelope. Showing through the window was what appeared to be a dollar bill. On the outside of the envelope was written, "for you." And, on the other side, "A literary art project from ATL w/♥ "

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. I opened it, drew out a folded letter, a slip of paper, and the money--which was not a dollar bill at all, but a $10 bill.

The letter read as follows:

"Thank you for opening the envelope. The money is real. We are all parts of each others' stories. Let's create more together. Please join the project! Use the hints. Find me."

And a clue: "a site to see (haiku clue) robotic cranes dance/ in singapore. in taiwan / appears tornadoes!"

There was also a snippet from something--a short story, or a novel. (It turns out to be from a novel by an Atlanta author.) Here it is:

I have spent the better part of two days now trying to figure all this out, trying to piece clues together, trying to find out what it all adds up to. I know a little more than I did on Tuesday when the mail arrived, but only a very little.

I know that these envelopes first started appearing in Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring, and expanded to ten other cities this month. Some were mailed to people, as mine was. Some were scattered around town--tacked to light poles, or tied to park benches, or slipped into books or restaurant menus or left in public bathrooms.

I know that several places have blogged about this, as I did Tuesday and again Wednesday. Creative Loafing, an alt paper in Atlanta, wrote about it, and a few other places. They followed clues (the robotic cranes and the taiwan tornadoes are both ten storeys high--so ten storeys, or perhaps ten stories, seem to be significant). They seemed, like me, enchanted and mystified.

I blogged about it on Tuesday, and then, after poking around a bit, blogged about it again yesterday.

Someone along the way set up a wiki page on the web as a place where people could share clues; I added mine. There are a couple of Facebook pages that appear to be set up by the person (or persons?) who are behind all of this. They are lovely and enigmatic.

Apparently all of this is a quiet, mysterious public art project by someone with a very clever mind (and a stash of $10 bills). The pieces, the pieces...they add up to something, but I am not at all sure what.

It is a puzzle, a literary puzzle, an artistic puzzle.

But it is also more than that. It is a statement of hope, I think, about art and writing bringing people together, enchanting them, rewarding them. At one point, the person (whose facebook page is "narrative urge") said they had hoped that all of the people who found clues would get together, pool their knowledge, become friends, get married, have children. OK, they were being a little silly here, but their point is well taken: they were hoping to help build community.

And certainly they have done that (without the marriage and children). They have sent out fewer than 100 envelopes (mine was No. 56; the Chicago Reader received No. 65 the same day), and yet people all over the Web, all over the country, are poking around, talking about this, thinking about the meaning and power of words on paper.

Even if I can never solve the riddle, I think that alone is a wonderful and lovely thing to stumble into, and I am delighted my name was chosen to receive an envelope.

But truth be told, I would still love to understand the bigger picture, see how these pieces fit together. Are any of you good at puzzles? Will you be as entranced as I am by this? Will you help me solve it?

There's $10 in it for you. And a new community. And a renewed love of art.

A little video to lift your heart

2011-08-02T20:18:00.001-06:00

Yes, it's Riley and Patches. I knew still photos alone wouldn't quite do it for you. I love Riley's audacious tail at the very end.

In which Patches and Riley meet, and Riley, of course, disgraces himself, though not in the way you might think.

2011-07-30T14:13:00.002-06:00

It was a million billion degrees today, with a dewpoint of 1.6 trillion, so we left the ancient border collie in the kitchen with the window AC going and a fan whirring in his general direction; loaded Riley, a goofy squeaky dog toy, and some birthday presents into the back of the Jeep; and sped off for Minnetonka.

Would Riley be civil to the sweet new member of the family? Or would he disgrace himself?

Patches was apprehensive when we first arrived. She wasn't sure if Riley was friend or foe, and so she skulked, tail tucked, for the first five minutes.

Then they sniffed each other, and made friends.

And then Riley dashed down the hill to a secluded, wooded corner of the yard and rolled in something extremely disgusting (our best estimation: deer diarrhea), and won himself two baths. One with dish soap, one with shampoo. Two because the first didn't begin to cut the odor.

Patches was highly amused. She also tried to drink out of the hose.

After that they raced around the yard in fast, big circles for a while. She is about three times faster, and twice as nimble. We don't think she's Spitz after all; she has very definite herding instincts and was very good at cutting Riley off and nipping at his back end (which made him whirl around and growl). They had a great time.

Then we all went inside and had birthday cake, and Patches hid under the curio cabinet, one of the many dens she has already scoped out for herself after less than a week of living there.

Oh my god she has a cute face.

She also likes hanging out under the lilac bush.

After a couple of hours, we left. Riley did not want to admit that he was wiped out, but I wouldn't be lying if I told you that he fell asleep in the Jeep standing up, with his head pressed against my arm.

Boscoe sniffed him when we got home and said, "Whoa! You could use a bath, buddy!" And he could actually use a third bath, but I hate to disturb him. He's sound asleep on his fleece mat.

Maybe later.

Origin of the species

2011-07-28T07:06:00.005-06:00

I know a guy who says that when his first wife left him, she first handed him a border collie puppy. "I know you don't like to be alone," she said.

That is sort of how I acquired my first dog, Toby. My then-boyfriend gave him to me one January, perhaps thinking that the little golden furball would keep me busy, allowing the boyfriend to do the things he wanted to do without interference--which, I am quite certain, involved other girlfriends. (I was never able to verify this, despite intense surveillance and reconnaissance, but a girl knows what a girl knows.)

Still, my friend adored his border collie, and you all know that Toby became the dog of my heart. Once we have them, their origins no longer matter very much. The stories, though, are fun to tell.

My sister-in-law had a little red-gold Finnish Spitz who died last year. You all know how sad that is, and how hard it is to figure out when to get another dog; you just have to wait until the grieving ebbs and the desire begins: that junction, I think, is the right moment but is hard to predict. But it started creeping up on her.

A few months ago, she started looking at Petfinder. Sort of idly, not sure she wanted another dog quite so soon. Then it graduated to going in person to shelter days at petstores. Sometimes she'd see a dog she'd think she could love, but she would go home to think about it, and then the dog would be adopted by someone else.

Time passed.

Last Saturday, she and I talked on the phone. Her perfect dog, she said, would be smallish, so that she can easily pick it up. It would not be a puppy, but it would be young. And it would be female.

And then, lo and behold, later that day, I saw on Facebook that a small, young female dog was available from a shelter about two hours away. She had been hanging out in a bookstore, and the bookstore people loved her but could not keep her. She was 10 months old, or thereabouts, she has been spayed and housebroken, and--as if this could be even more perfect--she's part Finnish Spitz.

Laurie springs into action. A dogless person must have a dog! A personless dog must have a person!

I posted the pictures of Patches on my sister-in-law's Facebook page. And then, a few minutes later, panicking, realizing that she is not all that much of a Facebook addict, I sent her an e-mail with a link.

And then I waited.

On Monday night, I got an email. "Patches has a new home," she wrote, and my heart sank. Damn! Once again, someone swooped in and adopted the perfect dog! But wait--what's this? The message continued: "...much to my cat's disgust. It's going to be a long night."

At last report, things were going OK. Patches is quiet, doesn't bark (so could she really be part Finnish Spitz?), and well-behaved, though she has destroyed a couple of shoes, a pair of sunglasses, and one roll of toilet paper. We're going to meet her on Saturday. Boscoe and Riley have no idea what they're in for.

Hot weather and the men who love it.

2011-07-17T13:14:00.002-06:00

Oh my gosh it's hot out there. Right now it's 93, and getting hotter, but it's the humidity that is really doing us in. Doug says that the dew point is a billion, or maybe a million billion, and that might be about right. (Actually, it's 80, with a heat index of 114. Wow.) The air is so heavy and moist that nothing dries; the sidewalks are still dark from the rain of two nights ago. The doors and windows are swollen, and they stick. My hair looks like damp cotton candy, all fuzzy and fly-awayey.

The dogs do not want to go out in this heat, which is a good thing, because neither do we. Riley got a walk of 1/2 block this morning. Boscoe made it as far as the alley before making it clear he was ready to go home. Just now I took him out again (he had needs) and when I opened the front door and he felt the blast of heat he turned around and tried to run back in the house. Not much makes him run these days, but that wall of hot air did.

Inside, everything is shut up tight, the shades are pulled, we bump around in the dimness, trying not to trip over the fans that whir away--from the ceiling, on the floor, balanced on stands, propped in windows.

This weather makes me think of my father, who loved it hot, the hotter the better. He would lie out in the back yard when the sun blazed white and read for hours without sunscreen, without sunglasses. Sometimes he'd go down to the beach at Park Point where the sun's brilliance was magnified by the glittering water, and read there on a towel in the hard-packed overheated sand.

And it makes me think of his cousin Verne, another Missouri boy. Like my dad, Verne grew up in St. Joe. He moved to California to teach, and came back to St. Joe when he retired. The last couple of times I saw him he was still living in his childhood home, an aging, smallish two-story house with magnificent woodwork and a garden overrun with bright orange daylilies.

He was always glad to see family, and he invited us in for tea. This was Missouri in July, Delta-hot, and muggy, and Verne's house was closed up and airless. Not only was there no air conditioning, but there were no fans that I could see. The drapes were closed, the windows shut, and it was hard to breathe. Nothing stirred the air.

At the first sip of tea I started sweating; it rolled down my face and trickled down the back of my neck, and I looked at Doug and could see he was suffering too. But Verne sipped calmly at the steaming cup, and had a chocolate cookie, and then another chocolate cookie, and talked with great interest about family news, and about his last trip to Ireland, where he had tried without success to find records for the Monahan and Sayles sides of the family, and, because he is old and has outlived nearly everyone he knew, about death and graves and Mt. Olivet Cemetery, where we were headed later that afternoon to visit the graves of my brother, my sister, and my father.

I tried, as we chatted, to memorize his house and its contents, knowing that he would not be there much longer. His manual typewriter, which has needed a new ribbon for about 20 years, and on which he pounded out letters to me and to many other people; the crosses hung on walls at various levels and in odd places, as though he just reached out and pounded a nail wherever was closest: Verne is a lifelong devout Catholic.

The gateleg table that had been his mother's; the ancient computer he had never used and which was hooked up to nothing; the piles of paper and the many, many books, and the VHS tapes (documentaries, mostly), and the framed old black and white photos, some with flat brittle glass from Walgreens, some with heavy curved glass that you could see yourself in.

His doorways all had transoms, and the one between the living room and dining room was fitted with a beautifully carved, lacy wooden detail from which he had hung a brass bell. I have to include a picture, because I can't describe this well--I don't know what it's called. There must be an architectural term.

He was kind and funny and generous, making time for us, taking us to lunch at his favorite spot (not a sweet old diner in town, as we had imagined, but a plastic-chair place "up at the mall"), guiding us to Mt. Olivet Cemetery where we stood and looked at the graves, and then on to Krug Park, where he showed us the tree that we had had planted after my father died.

The tree-buying transaction had been conducted entirely by telephone and the U.S. Mail, and so it was nice to stand there in that blazing Missouri sun and see that healthy Golden Rain Tree, its little plaque that honored Guv swinging from a short shepherd's hook.

That visit was in 2004, and I saw him again two years later when some of my siblings and I met up in Kansas City and made the drive north to St. Joe once again. As we stood in Mt. Olivet, staring at all those graves--not just the three I've mentioned, but those of my grandparents, and Verne's parents and brother and other members of that big tribe of intermarried Germans and Irish--he said, quite sensibly and matter of factly, without any fuss, "I'm ready to join them."

It is a shocking thing, to hear that someone is ready to die. The first impulse is to reach out, grab an arm, say, "No, no, no, we can't do without you." But he just smiled enigmatically.

In the five years since, he has moved out of that airless little house and into an assisted living home, and, just a couple of weeks ago, into their Alzheimer's unit. He likes the Alzheimer's unit, my aunt tells me, because it is locked and secure and he is able to roam as much as he likes, unlike assisted living, where they were always catching him and hauling him back to his room. Verne, like my dad, has always been a walker.

It is not likely that I will visit Verne again. He wouldn't know me, even if I explained that I was Leo's daughter. I have sent him cards and boxes of his favorite chocolate cookies, though I am not sure any of the mail ever arrived; he is not capable of writing back. But I think about him--fairly often, really. He is the last of that generation, and he has secrets and stories and history locked up in his head which we will now never know. A courtly man, a gentle man, polite and charming. A man who, to this day, enjoys a chocolate cookie with his cup of tea on a hot July day.

Summer the way summer was meant to be lived

2011-07-14T08:11:00.001-06:00

We have had a most peculiar summer, with the weather either overly cool and rainy (today) or blazingly hot (temps near 100 predicted for Sunday). I long for a stretch of 82 degree, low humidity days, but I wonder where it is that I think I live. Minnesota doesn't do moderate, not summer, not winter.

On Tuesday, I took a rare day off work--a rare day that wasn't committed to book nonsense, that is--and met up with dear, dear, dear PMiller, famous on this blog, famous in life, a best friend, an old friend. She knows all my secrets and she does not judge me. She is wise and thoughtful but also loves to laugh and hike and doesn't mind the rain or bugs.

She came by my house in mid-morning, won the hearts of the dogs all over again, and then we cruelly left them behind and drove down the Mississippi River to Frontenac State Park for a hike. Now if you've been reading the news, you know that the state government here in Minnesota has shut down. The state museums and historical sites are all closed. You cannot buy a fishing license, or renew your driver's license. Beer distributors are finding out that once their licenses expire they cannot renew them, and so Miller has to pull all of its products off the shelves of all liquor stores. The Minnesota Historical Society has shut down its library, and the Minnesota Historical Society Press might not be able to publish its fall line of books if this goes on much longer. It is madness, all of it.

The state parks, too, are closed. This means you can't park in them, there are no employees, you are not allowed to camp, all the buildings (including bathrooms) are locked, and if you fall off a cliff there will be no ranger around to rescue you. But you can hike. The trails are open. So hike we did.

Pam grew up down near Frontenac; this is her territory, like the North Shore is mine. And it is gorgeous. Sandstone bluffs high along the river; eagles and turkey vultures wheeling on currents of air; prairie grasses and wildflowers grown tall, swaying in the gentle breeze.

It was not a ridiculous weather day. It was chilly and we had spotty rain in the morning, but the skies cleared and we got freckled and a little sunburned in the afternoon. We had the park to ourselves--us, and the animals.

As we rounded one grassy path, I saw movement up ahead, a dozen or so small brown birds with long necks. "What are those birds?" I asked, and then the mother--a turkey!--hurried out of the tall grass behind them. She made a noise, and the baby turkeys all flew, almost straight up, and hid in the leaves of a spreading birch tree. Mama turkey crossed the path, plunged back into the grass, and was gone.

What magic! A dozen wild baby turkeys. But there was more. Pam spotted a fox (I missed it). We both stopped and watched, through brush and grass, as a speckled fawn nursed from its mother, who watched us with big eyes and did not move.

We walked and walked. We saw an immature bald eagle at the top of a tree, all hooked beak and mottled feathers, and a mature eagle gliding and soaring nearby. Pam insisted on calling them "the mother eagle and her baby," but that was one big baby, with sharp-looking talons.

We stopped for a picnic; Pam always packs a feast, and so we had fresh berries and cherries, two kinds of cheese, crusty peasant bread, two ripe tomatoes, an apple. We ate so well we forgot to eat the chocolate she had packed.

Later in the day, we drove down the Mississippi, crossed over into Nelson, Wisconsin, got ice cream (me) and wine (Pam), sat outside, had a mid-afternoon coffee, meandered back to the park for one more walk.

We were never at a loss for words. We solved all the problems of the world that day, as my grandfather would say--we reminisced about our youth; we talked about her grown son and the job market; we wondered how much money we will need to retire (that one we didn't solve); we talked about romance and relationships and friendships and all the people at work who drive us around the bend and all the people at work we respect and admire. (I will leave it to you to decide which is the larger group.)

And then home again, along the empty road, through the quiet farmland and pretty river towns, back to the Cities.

Boscoe had a very good birthday.

2011-07-06T05:25:00.005-06:00

Boscoe on the morning of his 16th birthday.

At this moment, Boscoe is lying at my side, staring wisely into space, awaiting breakfast. Doug and Riley have just left on their daily constitutional. Robins are chirping madly outside the window, the sun is painting long streaks of yellow light on the green grass, the air (believe it or not--this is July) is cool. A rare lovely summer morning.

Boscoe celebrated his 16th birthday on July Fourth with fireworks, flag-waving, sparklers and ice cream. Oh, wait, that was the neighbors celebrating Independence Day. Boscoe celebrated his 16th birthday on July Fourth with a good strong toddle around the block, two meals of diabetic kibble, and an extra treat of dried chicken breast from Trader Joe's. Also, many scratches behind the ears (a spot he can no longer reach with his back legs) and about 45 greetings on Facebook (no, he does not have a page, but I do).

For the last few weeks, he has been sleeping on the enclosed front porch because, as with most oldsters, his sleep is irregular, he is up quite a bit at night, pacing, and (not so much like most oldesters) every now and then he has a little accident in his bed. NOT OFTEN, he says, horrified that I would tell you this. And he's right; not often. But every now and again.

It seems to work well for everyone, having him sleep downstairs now. Doug and Riley and I get a full night's rest, and Boscoe settles nicely into his bed on the porch, the icicle lights giving him a little illumination, a box fan sending a gentle breeze his direction, the windows cracked (but not enough for burglars to climb in). If I get up first, I can let him out instead of waiting for Doug to wake up and carry him down the stairs.

On Boscoe's last night of being 15, though, Doug hauled the old futon down from the spare room, we cleared space on the porch, and I bedded down with Boscoe for the night. He has always been the world's most cuddly dog, from the first day that we brought him home from the farm in Pine City where he was born. Border collies are not known for being physically affectionate, but he was born to cuddle. He used to follow Toby around the house, snuggle up against him, and then, when Toby got up and stalked off, his personal space violated, Boscoe would cheerfully trot after him and snuggle up again. Toby grew to tolerate it, and then, I think, to like it.

And so the night before Boscoe turned 16, we slept together. And while that sounds romantic, in a way, it was not the most restful night I ever had; he has grown bony in his old age, and he shifts around in the night to a diagonal, which meant that I was humped off to one corner of the mattress in a little ball, and halfway through the night I had to get up and turn off those damned icicle lights, and when I got back to the futon there was somehow even less room for me, and I didn't fall back asleep until about 3 a.m. or so, and when I got up at 5:30 I had a crashing headache that took me half the day to get rid of.

But none of that mattered, really. It was great to be near him in the night, hear his quiet, even breathing, scratch that old back of his and whisper to him, even though he can't hear a thing. If he makes it to his 17th birthday, I'll gladly do it again.

Ladies and gentlemen, the kitchen is now green. Green as a grasshopper, green as grass, green as Crème de menthe.

2011-07-03T18:34:00.004-06:00

So this is our kitchen, turned from Chinese Red to Dill Green. It is quite green. Actually, it is very green. I had my doubts at first--came home after work on Friday and the house was still such a wreck, the painter was still here, not done, his buckets and drop cloths and pails full of tools all over the back porch (and the kitchen, and the dining room), the doorknob to the garage service door had suddenly somehow broken, a storm was coming, the air was sticky and close, and it was hot, so hot--98 degrees, the carpeting was dense with dusty footprints and blades of grass and dog hair and spackle dust, the cabinet doors were still piled up in the dining room, as was the kitchen ceiling lamp, and the whole house smelled like dog.

The painter looked harried. Painting around all the cabinetry was meticulous, time-consuming work, and while he was almost done in the kitchen he admitted that he hadn't yet done a thing with the upstairs bedroom, beyond what he had done three days before--pulling all the furniture out, stacking some of it in the upstairs hallway, and slathering big gobs of spackle on the walls.

"That's OK," I said magnanimously. "You can finish that next week."

At this, he looked even more harried. "Yeah, I was meaning to talk to you about that," he said. Turns out he had another job lined up, an emergency job, that would take two weeks, three at the most, and then he'd come back right after that and finish the bedroom. He said he'd put all the furniture back and sweep the floor before he left that night.

He is such a nice guy, so soft-spoken and careful and skilled at his work, he wears such bewildered-looking pop-bottle glasses and seems so shy, what could we say?

We sat on the front porch and had a beer while he finished up, and the sky grew darker and thunder rumbled, and I plucked at my shirt, trying to get some air, and Doug got up to help Joe load up his truck. The TV reported tornadoes in western Minnesota, and hailstones the size of softballs.

So we told Joe not to worry about the bedroom, just to get home before the storm broke, and it wasn't long after he left that the sky opened and the rain came down in torrents and, briefly, the tornado sirens went off.

So I was cranky on Saturday morning when we got up to a house just as messy as it had been all week, the bedroom not finished, the garage doorknob still not working, and the kitchen perhaps overly green.

And company coming for dinner.

It was the company, I think that saved the day--a quietly funny, intelligent guy Doug worked with at his old job. We knew we had to get the house cleaned up before he arrived at 7 p.m., and we did--dusting, shaking, sweeping, vacuuming, cramming the toaster, the cutting boards, the coffee carafe, all of Boscoe's medications into cupboards instead of cluttering up the countertops.

It didn't take all day, but it took a big part of the day. We napped. We showered. And at 7, when Chris showed up (on his bicycle, such an intrepid young man), the house was clean, the coals were lit, the beer was cold, and he walked in and said, "Wow, your kitchen looks great." And it did.

It's only for a week, but oh my

2011-06-29T05:23:00.007-06:00

We are having our kitchen painted. Eleven years of Chinese red will make way to a new era of Dill. (We went back and forth between Dill and Pickle. We are still not sure we chose well, and won't know until the color is on the walls.) At the same time, as long as the painter is here, we asked him to patch and repaint a wall upstairs, in the yellow bedroom.

A tree fell on that side of the house during a storm oh, maybe seven or eight years ago, and the wall has been patched and repainted twice since then but continues to crack.

It's been a long time since we've had any work of this kind done in our house, and I had forgotten how disruptive it is. It's not just the kitchen and the bedroom that are in upheaval. Oh, no. The dining room is a mess; all of the artwork from the kitchen walls, the kitchen ceiling lamp, the dogs' water dish, the block of butcher knives, the breadbox, the paper towels, and other sundry items are all heaped on the table, floor and buffet.

Our sanctuaries, the two porches, are also in use: the front porch table is loaded with the coffee pot, the dog biscuit container, the leashes and mutt mitts (so the dog walker doesn't have to go into the kitchen when she comes), and the tea maker, which we use every evening.

The kitchen table has been dismantled, in order to get it through the doorway, and now lies on its side on the back porch, its severed limbs by its side.

Upstairs, the yellow room is a mess. Its chair is now in our bedroom, and one of its bookcases has been shoved right up against my dresser, which makes it pretty darned hard for me to open the drawer to get fresh underwear, and there is a slippery drop cloth on the floor that makes me slide like a cartoon character every time I set foot through the doorway.

It's been two days, and in that time the painter has patched and spackled the kitchen walls and ceiling, and not one wall of the yellow room, but three. (My, that tree had impact! Or maybe it's the trains that go by several times a day, shaking our little house.)

There is spackle dust everywhere, and bits of spackle crunching underfoot. We sweep and vacuum and swipe the tops of things and sweep again. And it's only been, as I said, two days.

Last night we were sitting on the front porch, amidst all the coffee pots and rubble, and Riley jumped up on the couch next to me to look out the window. His tail.....has it always had that big swath of white? Ah, spackle amongst the speckles. We spent the rest of the evening trying to catch him so we could chip the spackle out of his tail.

It's only for a week....we hope. The painter had promised us that he could do it all in five days. But he is a man who has a great work-life balance, which is one reason he's a self-employed painter, and last night he knocked off early to go play softball. On Monday night he said, looking thoughtfully at the mess, "Your ceiling was in worse shape than I'd thought. If it takes more than five days, would that be so bad?"

I say yes, it would be. Doug says yes. Riley (whirling around to chew on his tail) says yes. Boscoe, toddling along, bumping into things, sweetly and blissfully unaware, did not vote.

And so to prove me wrong Boscoe has a very good day

2011-06-26T05:49:00.000-06:00

At the appointment on Thursday, the vet had suggested we dial back the insulin about 1/2 unit. His glucose numbers were good, except for the first one (the one taken shortly after administer of insulin)--it was too low.

So we did that, and yesterday we seemed to see a difference. He was more alert. He didn't eat his breakfast any more robustly than usual, but he walked better. We took him and Riley out to Doug's sister's house, and he loved being out in her yard, which is much bigger than ours; he toddled around and when Riley went darting past, chasing a Frisbee (ineptly) or just racing in circles (expertly), Boscoe wanted to join in.

He was pretty wiped out by 8 p.m. and went into staggering mode--we've all been there, when we're overtired and somehow can't remember that we simply need to lie down. So we took them home and Boscoe slept like a rock all night. Now it's almost 7 a.m., so I need to get some food (and insulin) into him. Wish me well.

But yesterday was a very good day.

(Riley would like you to know that it was a very good day for him, too. And that he is not really inept with a Frisbee. Just inexperienced.)

The days are long and both bitter and sweet

2011-06-24T20:30:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I took Boscoe in for his glucose curve test. He wasn't actually due for a few weeks, and he wasn't showing any signs of increased diabetes, but he's old, and he was having other problems, and I didn't want to have to bring him in twice. It's not the money; it's the trauma. He starts trembling when my car turns down Front Street, and when I make a left on Dale toward the clinic he knows what's up and he starts shaking so hard his teeth chatter.

So I figure, consolidate the appointments. He's not been sleeping well, and eating is problematic, and his bathroom habits (to put it delicately--he doesn't really use a bathroom) are completely without any schedule, which means, oh, 2 a.m., and every now and then he starts shaking his head violently, as though a fly has flown into his ear canal. So I figured he needed a little fine-tuning.

The Kent Hrbek vet was great, taking time out of a surgery day to meet with us. He got down on the floor with Boscoe and spoke to him sweetly (whether or not Boscoe could hear him was another matter entirely), and looked in his ears, and listened to his heart, and did all those other vet things. And then he told me what I pretty much already knew: There's nothing wrong with Boscoe. No disease, no illness, no infection. His ears are fine. His heart is strong. He's just old. Or, as the vet put it, "Super old. Really, really old."

I left him there for the glucose curve (it takes all day), and in the evening I hoisted him into the car and took him home. And even though I drove slowly, there are a lot of turns between the vet clinic and our house, and Boscoe insists on standing up, which meant that every time I turned a corner, he'd topple over, or slide, and when we were about three blocks from home it became apparent that he had had what you might gracefully call an accident in the back of my Subaru. He's been doing this lately every now and then when he's panicky--when he can't get up, say. Or when a young, strong dog charges him.

At home I heaved him out of the car and set him in the grass, and noted that his accident had taken place on top of an unused Mutt Mitt, which made cleanup easy and convenient. And when I left the garage I saw that Boscoe had run up the back stairs and was on the porch, something he hasn't done in months.

So I was feeling pretty buoyed, but then we went in the house and he wouldn't eat dinner and I had to chase him around for 40 minutes, holding out food, canned food, kibble, stinkier canned food, hot dog shards, pieces of chicken, nearly sobbing at the end, trying to get him to eat so that I could administer his insulin. In the end, he did eat, mostly, and he got his shot about 20 minutes late.

Doug and I talk about this every so often, about how much Boscoe has changed. It's not just physical. He is different in nearly every way. He is less engaged, less attentive than he once was. Every now and then he'll still try to mix it up with Riley, and it's sweet and heartbreaking at the same time; he usually stumbles and has to catch himself, and then Riley will go flying by and Boscoe will try again.

But mostly he is different, ever since that terrible spell last winter when he developed that persistent infection. You probably remember that took nearly two months to clear up, and recovery was longer still, and while he's recovered as much as he's ever going to, he's just not quite the same. Before the infection, he was our Boscoe, older, slower, trotting along, smiling, wanting to be included, meeting us at the back door every evening with a puffy toy in his happy mouth.

Since his illness, he has become an old, tired dog. It's like he's suddenly our slightly demented grandfather--vague, quiet, messy. We're thinking of buying him some suspenders. Maybe a plastic cup for his teeth. Some dominoes, or horseshoes.

I would be lying to you if I said this wasn't depressing.

He takes a lot of time. He needs to be carried out into the yard in the morning, and then carried back in again. Often we have to hand-feed him his breakfast, which can take 20 or 30 minutes--he'll eat a little and then suddenly toddle off, or his back legs collapse, and you have to pick up the dish and start over in another part of the room. After he eats he needs to be walked, slowly, around the block, if he'll go that far, and sometimes on the walks he forgets to do anything--just walks--and so a half-hour later you try again. In the evenings, when we're eating dinner or watching a movie, he wanders around the living room, pacing, panting, staring.

Sometimes I give him a Benadryl, just to get him to lie down and sleep. And then I feel guilty; I am drugging my dog. (Although I could do so much worse; Doug told me about a family in his neighborhood when he was growing up who were driven so nuts by their old, old dog that they kept her in a closet most of the time.)

We cannot go on vacation; we cannot leave town. Who could care for such a dog? Who would do for him what we do every day? And how hard would it be on Boscoe to be left with someone?

I told all of this to the vet, and he was so kind. He understood it all. He noted that Boscoe isn't sick, isn't in any pain, isn't miserable. He copes pretty well with his limitations. "But I've never been as tied to a dog as you are to him," he said. "I know that's hard."

It's helpful hearing someone acknowledge that. It is hard. We don't resent it, and we don't want him to die, and we don't wish that the vet had discovered some terrible fast-moving incurable illness. But it is hard to see him this way, day after day, wandering vaguely around the room, falling over, struggling to stand, refusing his food, wandering off; and it is very hard to know that every morning his care is going to be an hour out of our before-work time, and another hour or so at night.

And Riley gets a little lost in the shuffle. We'll see him sometimes sitting quietly on the edge of the room, toes together, front legs slightly bowed, watching as we deal with Boscoe.

Tonight I took Riley on a nice brisk walk after dinner. We have had a cold and reluctant summer so far, with rain nearly every day for more than a week. Tonight, though, was lovely, and over by the railroad tracks we passed a raspberry bush and I noted that the raspberries are big and plump. They are still white, not red, but we usually are picking them by the fourth of July and even with this strange weather it looks like they're not behind schedule at all; Mother Nature, as usual, knows just what she's doing, and those berries are going to be ready right on time.

Oh those strong and wise old ladies, how we fear them and miss them

2011-06-19T08:48:00.005-06:00

Aunt Barbara, her husband, Uncle Doc, and her sister, Aunt Rose.

Last week, I got a call from a friend of mine who lives Down South. Her voice was hushed and it took me a second or two to figure out that she was trying not to cry. Her aunt had died, her dear venerable old Aunt Mable, 90 years on this Earth, strong, powerful, a force for good in my friend's life, a force for good (and a little fear) in the lives of everyone she knew.

Mable grew up in the Great Depression and went to college at a time when it was unusual for any woman from a poor small town to earn a master's degree, let alone a black woman. But Mable did. Her husband was killed in World War II just nine months after their wedding day, and she never remarried, never had children. She went to Normal School and then the Tuskegee Institute and became an educator, which meant that, in a way, she helped raise every kid in that town.

She was the older sister of my friend's mother, and together those two women kept a sharp eye on my friend, raising her right, teaching her dignity and good manners and the importance of schooling. ("I think I was always a disappointment to my Aunt Mable, because I never got a master's degree," my friend said on the phone, but we both know that's not right; my friend has a great job, a college degree, a happy life, and is the best writer I know. Mable was nothing but proud of her. But Mable being Mable, she was also the kind of person who would look her up and down, press her lips together, and then say something sharp, find something to fix, to make sure my friend didn't get too proud.)

My friend called back the next day to read me the eulogy; she said she wrote it through tears at 3 a.m. and she wanted to know if it was OK. It was more than OK; it was moving and sad and funny, and I teared up halfway through.

I never met Aunt Mable, who lived in Florida, but I have heard dozens and dozens of stories about over the years, and she has always reminded me in many ways of my great aunt Barbara. Both women grew up poor, worked hard, had a few adventures (Barbara ran off to California with a man named Charlie who she might or might not have married, came back, married my Uncle Doc), made something serious out of their lives.

Both women understood the importance of dignity--especially for women. It was their armor. They both wore hats, and carried pocketbooks (never purses), wore elegant suits and sensible heeled shoes. Barbara and Doc had a lilac-colored Cadillac with fins, and they drove out from Los Angeles every autumn to visit us in Duluth and look at the autumn leaves. And for that trip, Barbara brought not sweatpants and capris and sandals, but silk suits with jackets, and big round pearly clip-on earrings, and thick nylon hose.

(I tell this to my friend, who says, "MMMM hmmmm," in recognition; this, too, was Mable.)

Barbara was my grandfather's big sister. She called him "Johnny," and spoke sharply to him and kept him line, even when he was in his 60s, even when he was in his 70s. I would have done anything for her; I looked up to her, pressed against her when she sat in the big chair in the living room, sniffed the inside of her pocketbook, which smelled of old coins and face powder. She loved us kids, but she did not indulge us, much, and it was very clear that she belonged to the world of adult. She was here, really, to see my parents, and we were meant to stay quiet and in the background.

She made being an adult seem serious and important and brisk, and she inspired me; I wanted to make sure I measured up. Tried to tame my hair, quiet my voice, somehow acquire a pocketbook of my own. (The clip-on earrings, which I also experimented with, were impossible; they hurt so much I had to take them off within seconds.)

But she was also on our side. I remember sitting in the back of that lilac Cadillac as Johnny drove us all north to Pigeon River, and somewhere around Split Rock Lighthouse I started getting queasy. In those years I was prone to car-sickness, and I was afraid I was going to be ill. Barbara let me put my head in her lap, and she told Johnny to pull over, but Johnny didn't like to stop. I remember Barbara chuckling, stroking my head: "If you get sick in this car you won't be the first," she said, and Johnny pulled over so I could get out.

Mable went into a nursing home a year or two back, and my friend's mother had the chance to turn the tables and care for her. She visited twice a day, every day, taking her meals with Mable, making sure she ate, and taking home Mable's laundry, which she did not entrust to the staff but did herself, ironing her freshly-washed clothes crisply, with knife-edged pleats. The way Mable wanted it, or, more precisely, the way Mable would have done for her.

It is no wonder my friend was weeping when she talked to me; a powerful anchor is gone from her life. And I am reminded of another friend, who lost his elderly aunt not too long ago. "She knew me before I knew myself," he said.

I'm hoping my Southern friend will write down a few of these Aunt Mable stories for herself, for her family, maybe for me. These strong and brave old ladies are a vanishing breed, and it would be a loss to everyone if we allowed them to be forgotten.

One good turn...

2011-06-15T06:06:00.006-06:00

On Tuesday morning before work, I slipped over to Joan's house to pick a couple more peonies to have at my desk. I opened the back gate, walked up the sidewalk, and --ugh. A dead squirrel, newly expired, lay sprawled in the middle of the walkway.

This was almost certainly the same squirrel that Riley and I had seen on Sunday. He was sitting in the middle of the alley then, staring glassily into space, his jaws working as though he were chewing gum, his lips covered with foam. Riley stared through the fence for a long time but didn't bark, awed, perhaps, in the presence of death.

The squirrel eventually ran to the top of a fence post and stayed there the rest of the afternoon. I suspect some time in the night he found his way to Joan's peonies and died. Not a bad place to die.

So yesterday I decided that when I got home from work I would remove the squirrel. The last thing an abandoned house needs is dead animals rotting away in the yard.

But by the time I got home last night it was 9 p.m. and raining hard, so I waited until this morning. It was still raining, but I had to take Boscoe out anyway. I walked him around the block and then left him chewing sweet grass along the side of the alley, and I opened the gate to Joan's back yard.

The squirrel was soaked, flattened, looking much deader than yesterday. Even in the rain, there were flies and ants. I had a mutt mitt ready--I was going to pick him up the way I clean up after the dogs, with my hand inside the sack so as not to touch anything--but the squirrel looked a lot bigger than I remembered. His eyes were white and filmy and I had this horrible thought that he was going to suddenly get up, Zombie Squirrel, and stalk toward me.

I fled.

Put Boscoe in the yard. Got a shovel, and scrounged around in the garage and found an empty charcoal briquets bag. Nice and big. Nice and sturdy. It would hold a dead squirrel. It would hold a lot of dead squirrels. But fortunately I only had one.

The shovel was something of overkill; a small trowel would have worked better. This was a spade, with a long wooden handle, heavy and awkward for this kind of maneuver. It took some doing, but I was able to sort of shove the squirrel over to the side of Joan's house wall and then push him into the bag. He did not wake up. No Zombie Squirrel. I closed the bag, trotted back down the alley, and dumped him in our trash.

Today is trash day. Here's hoping there isn't a strike. We need this load to go.

The peony thief

2011-06-12T17:37:00.007-06:00

Suddenly, peonies are blooming everywhere. In our yard, our neighbors' yards, yards all along the walking route, next to heavy-headed purple and yellow irises and orange poppies, filling the air with their sweet delicate fragrance.

Some people put them in cages, to keep them tall and high, but I like them when they cascade in disheveled heaps, like the full, crumpled skirt of a discarded ball gown.

The peonies in our yard are a very pale pink--I bought the bush many years ago for a song, because the label had fallen off and nobody knew what kind or color they were.

But all of them, from white to deep magenta, are gorgeous and fragrant. Our mock orange is in bloom right now, too, and so is the deep blue baptisia, and together the three make a vibrant bouquet.

Years ago, when I was a kid in Duluth, our next-door-neighbors, the Grindys, had a row of magenta and white peony bushes that ran straight down one edge of their front yard, from the house to the street. These were beautiful peonies, prize-winning, and Mr. Grindy was proud of them.

On the other side of the row was the yard of the Lemon family. Mary Lemon was my friend, and she persuaded me that the peonies that hung on the Lemon side of the row actually belonged to her family. Those peonies, she said, were theirs and they could do with them what they wanted.

This sounded right to me, in a way--the peonies did encroach on the Lemon yard--but it also sounded somehow wrong. But we were both overcome with avarice--the peonies were so big and so glowing and so fragrant that we needed to possess them. So one June afternoon we sneaked into the yard and picked every bloom off the Lemon half of the bushes.

Our arms were filled with blossoms, heavy, intoxicatingly sweet blossoms that we immediately realized we had no business separating from the bush. We panicked. We needed to conceal our booty. But how? Where? We could not fill vases and set them around the Lemon house; we would be found out.

I had a formal box--a huge cardboard carton with a fitted lid that had contained one of my mother's fancy beaded dresses from her early years with my dad. (I had never seen her wear such a dress, myself, though I had seen glamorous pictures.) I ran into the house, pelted up the stairs, pulled the dress out of the box, stuffed it in the back of the closet, and dragged the box back down the stairs. Mary Lemon and I went around the back of the garage and tried to stuff the peonies into the box.

They would not fit.

In panic, we decided to separate the flowers from the stems. We ended up sitting in the gravel of the driveway, shredding those giant glowing blossoms until they were nothing more than petals. We crammed that box with petals. And then we put the lid on tight.

"You can keep it," Mary Lemon said, and I knew she was not being generous.

It made sense at the time; I remember the deep need to both conceal our crime and to retain possession of our booty. We had to destroy the flowers in order to keep them, and so destroy them we did.

Of course we were found out, and of course we got into trouble, and of course the minute my mother told me that the peonies were Mr. Grindy's, and not the Lemons', I knew she was right. And when I opened the formal box to show her the flowers, I could not explain those withered, dying petals to her. Nor could I explain them to Mr. Grindy, to whom I was made to apologize; his face was disappointed and baffled, and I knew that this year his flowers would win no prizes, and that would be my fault.

The peonies in these pictures are in a glass vase on the table on our porch. They are not from our yard; they are a deeper pink than the ones growing by our chimney. They are from the yard across the alley, the yard of a woman I know only as Joan. She used to have an ancient dog named Bogle, who died; Joan used to walk down the alley in her housecoat in the early mornings carrying a cracked coffee cup, which she would covertly fill with raspberries from the bushes of her next-door-neighbors. The raspberries grow behind their garage, and they could not see her as she scooted back to her house with her little harvest.

She moved out years ago, and her house sits--not empty; it is crammed with stuff (Joan was a bit of a hoarder), but empty of people. Her children, or perhaps her grandchildren, come and mow the lawn every few weeks, and sometimes you see them working over there for an afternoon and then driving off with a car full of stuff. So no, the house is not empty, but no one has lived there for quite some time.

Sometimes, on the morning walks, when Boscoe's legs are particularly trembly, we cut through Joan's yard to make the walk shorter. She has a long row of glowing peony bushes that run the length of her side yard, and right now they are in full bloom.

Yesterday, I slipped over and picked three of them. I chose three that had been beaten down by rain and were lying bent on the grass. But still, there is no denying: Once again, I am a peony thief.

The boys on a rainy Friday

2011-06-10T07:46:00.002-06:00

This morning, on whim--and because he came racing up to me when I opened the back door and then stared at me with a pleading, outraged expression on his pointy little face--I took Riley with me on my morning lake walk. Usually, I walk fast and alone.

I think he enjoyed it, even though it was his second walk of the morning. (Doug took him at 6, I took him at 7:30.) It was drizzling. We saw three great blue herons, one black-crowned night heron, and two soaring egrets glowing white against the dark clouds.

Of course, now I cannot look Boscoe in the eye. His back legs won't allow him to walk around the lake anymore, though he thinks he still wants to.

Last night on the evening walk-around-the-block, something spooked him--I'm not sure what, unless it was Herb, the barky little weiner dog on the corner, who rushed the gate and yipyipyipped at him. Whatever it was, it caused Boscoe to break into a run--a wonky, crooked, panicked run that I could not stop. I tried! I knew he'd pay the price later, and he did. This morning, he could barely walk. That weak back leg kept turning in, and he fell twice on the very short walk.

This did not terrify me the way it did the first four or five times it happened. He's been falling like this occasionally--perhaps once a week--all spring. Yesterday the dog walker left a note saying they had a great walk and Boscoe was strong. Today, I have penned him on the front porch with a soft bed and a bowl of water and a milkbone (since devoured). When she comes today, she won't walk him far.

Still, he is in other ways robust, eating like a bear, sleeping soundly, hobbling up to us during dinner and hoping for scratches and (more likely) scraps. Prince Charles Riley growls softly at him every once in a while, but otherwise all is well in dogland.

The picture at the top is of Boscoe a couple of days ago. He has such a dreamy look on his face. What is he remembering? Our hikes Up North? Dragging Toby around the yard when Boscoe was still just a puppy? Or maybe the time he found a glazed doughnut in the grass?

"I believe in the sudden deep greenness of summer"

2011-06-06T19:41:00.001-06:00

Today I left work a little early to drive to downtown St. Paul. I was to be interviewed for a public-access television show about the book awards; I was the last of the eight winners to do this. When I left work, my car thermometer read 100 degrees and it didn't drop during the 45 minutes it took me to get from one downtown to the other.

One hundred degrees, with high humidity, is not the best weather for my hair. I am not entirely sure how I looked when I was being filmed (I had brought makeup but forgot to try to use it; a comb was useless) but I am guessing my head looked like:

1) a brillo pad
2) a giant puffball mushroom
3) a dandelion gone to seed

I decided that if I look insane on the video you will never hear another word about it. If I look relatively sane, I'll post a link in another month or so.

This weather! Man, this weather. Last week I needed a sweatshirt when I walked at noon. Today I didn't even try to walk, just ate my way through the lunch hour and then went back to work. Everything is deep green, and the leaves are suddenly full-sized, and it is, no matter what the calendar says, full summer, just like that.

On the morning walk, I can tell that at 7 a.m. I am already too late for the action; I need to get out there earlier if I want to see the birds wake up. Today it was sultry and dead silent. One heron stood in the tepid, scummy water. A few geese stood up to their knees in the lake. The branches were still and quiet; if there were birds about, they were conserving their energy. Nobody was moving fast, me included.

I Googled the lovely James Thurber line, "I believe in the sudden deep greenness of summer" to make sure I had it correct and what popped up on Google was this very blog, nearly a year ago to the day. So I guess I like that line and I guess that summer has come this year at about the same time as last.

Boscoe is not happy with the heat, but we keep the shades pulled and fans going in all the rooms. We are watching hockey on TV--the Stanley Cup finals, isn't that odd for June?--and we are willing all that sheet ice to somehow cool us down.

It is hard to remember how recently and fervently I was complaining about the cold.

A fork in the road

2011-06-02T08:34:00.003-06:00

I have started running down to the lake in the mornings. I am not a runner, and I'm not entirely sure what has gotten into me, except that these brisk Mary Poppins breezes, the crisp air, that early morning the-day-holds-all-possibilities feeling, all combine to make me feel, as my dad used to say, "strong and mean."

I don't run far--just to that fire hydrant, or maybe to that tree. I do not run once I get to the lake. Then, I walk. I do not want to miss a thing. (This morning, a pile of sleeping goslings, two gleaming white egrets, and four herons. One of the four, I swear, was a stranger. I have come to recognize the other herons--the one with the badger-like black-and-white striped head; the one with the pinkish throat.)

Last night the Millerites got together at the home of K, who recently lost her husband. We sat on the deck (which her husband had built) in the middle of a lush shade garden (which he had planned, and planted)--hostas and ferns, bleeding hearts and, miraculously, peonies, their fat buds swelling even with no sun.

One of the things we talked about was reinvention--the idea that the first half of your life is spent focusing, figuring out your interests, finding a star and aiming for it. But in the second half of life, often something happens--some traumatic, big, dire thing, happy or, more frequently, it seems, unhappy--that makes a person veer onto another course. Sets them to thinking about all of the things they have, so far, left unexplored. It is, K said, very Jungian (I do not know; I've never attempted to read Jung).

She is nearing that point right now, not ready to make any big changes but certainly considering them. Should she continue on the steady path she has been on, and which has served her so well? Or should she spin off in another direction entirely? The world is a giant place; our brains can do so much more than we let them; she is still young and strong and beautiful; now might be the time.

Even though the crisis that brought her to this point is a terrible, unfathomable one--the death of her husband--I can see where this fork in the road is, or will be, an exciting place. I look at my own life, so zeroed in on writing, and really only one kind of writing: journalism. And I wonder... I could go back to school! Become an ornithologist! An ecologist! A biologist! (Except, sigh, I would have to learn math.)

I see my adult life splitting into natural thirds. I spent 18 years at the Duluth paper. This month I will celebrate my 15th anniversary at the Strib. Maybe in three or four or five more years it will be time to leave there, too, and spend my last 18 working years somewhere else.

Right now, that sounds only vaguely appealing. I love my life. I love my job. I love my house, my city, my husband, my friends, my dogs, my park. It's sobering to think that things will not always be like this. I will not always be living the life I am living now. At some point, veering and pivoting and experimenting and starting anew might sound good. For now, though, I love knowing all the herons at my lake, at least by face and feather, if not by name.

Whirlwind times three

2011-05-22T16:26:00.003-06:00

Whirlwind No. 1: I am writing this while sitting on an uncomfortable wooden hard-back chair in the basement. It is about 2:30 on Sunday afternoon. Boscoe is pacing. Riley is quiet but wary, unnerved by everything, including the sound of the washing machine, which is stuffed with towels and thumping away on the spin cycle. Doug is scanning his iPad for news of the tornado. Outside, wind is whipping the treetops and sirens are wailing.

Whirlwind No. 2: Last Thursday, after the walk, I patted the boys on the head, swung my little tote bag--which was stuffed with a pair of sandals, a change of clothing and (I found out later) toothpaste but no toothbrush--into the back seat of my car, heaved a rolling suitcase packed with copies of NEWS TO ME into the trunk, and hit the road.

I was headed to Duluth, where I was in the running for another book award. The ceremony was that night. I did not expect to win, but I did hope to sell a few books. Wouldn't it be great to roll home an empty suitcase? But mostly it was just an excuse to take a couple of days off work and visit Duluth, the Lakewalk, some friends, and my lake.

It was 68 when I left the Cities, and the temperature rose as I headed north. It topped out at 72 somewhere around Askov and then began to drop, and by the time I cruised into downtown Duluth, it was 52 and the wind was off the lake. I had brought no jacket. I know, I know--amateur. Had I forgotten what it was like to be in Duluth? I walked the Lakewalk as far as Guv's bench, which was not very far, and then I turned and hiked back to the car. Brrrrrrr. Cotton capris and a long-sleeved t-shirt are no match for the wind when it gets that knife edge of chill.

The awards ceremony was at UMD, in the ballroom, and it was a more modest affair than the awards ceremony I had attended last month in St. Paul. No glitz or glitter, no free champagne, but sensible Northlanders in sensible Northland attire. At each end of the room, authors sat at long tables behind piles of their books, hopeful for a sale.

In the middle of the room chairs had been set up for the keynote speech. And along the far wall--pie! Fabulous wonderful pie, provided by the Rustic Inn, one of the best pie-makers along Minnesota's North Shore.

There were little squares of raspberry cream, chocolate, apple-pecan (which looked sticky and hearty) and lemon cream. They filled the table, and young women kept carrying out more on soggy little paper plates. It seemed my duty to help deplete the supply. Because I tend to find something I like and stick with it, I had a piece of raspberry pie, and then I had another.

It was fun chatting up authors, readers, publishers--people I'd met before, or long ago, or not at all but knew from Facebook. One woman looked at my nametag, let out an audible gasp, and said, "I love you!" She meant, of course, that she loved my book, but I will take it either way.

At 6:30 we were all ushered into the central area to listen to the keynote speaker. I was surrounded by empty chairs, but a friend texted me and said she would be there shortly. And then, oh lovely surprise, another friend showed up, just sort of materialized at the end of my row, and so I had two of my peeps with me when it was my turn to find out if I had won a prize.

And then, of course, I did not win, but this was perfectly OK because some really wonderful writers did. I did not sell all the books in my little rolling suitcase, either, and that was a little sadder, but I did sell a few. Well, two. OK? I sold two. And so had to roll the heavy little suitcase back home again.

We listened to the keynote, we clapped heartily for all the winners, we had more pie (and more pie and more pie), and then we went out for drinks.

Yes, that's milk. Not everybody likes beer.

In the morning, I went for a woodsy hike with my friend Ann and her headstrong and curious five-year-old daughter. We saw frogs and turtles, and blooming forget-me-nots, and trilliums not quite ready to bloom--and then I swung by Canal Park to see my Kenspeckle friends, and then finally back on the freeway, headed home.

I was gone a mere 24 hours but such a lovely 24 hours--packed with walking, talking, eating, laughing. I went home two books lighter, and one new toothbrush (thanks, Ann!) heavier.

Whirlwind No. 3: When I got home from the grocery store on Saturday afternoon, there was Sporty!

We had expected him at 4, but he got in early and now, at 2 p.m., here he was, chatting with Doug, petting Riley, scratching Boscoe, dropping his overnight bag in our extra bedroom, filling the house with his stories and happiness. He was here on the first leg of a long complicated business-and-pleasure trip that involved Minneapolis twice, Chicago and New York. We, I am happy to say, were Part One of the pleasure.

I have known Sporty forever. When I lived in Duluth he used to babysit Toby when I was out of town, and he and his roommate and I used to go up the North Shore to the Scenic Cafe for Sunday brunch and French-pressed coffee.

The dogs adore him. So do we.

Like all good Midwesterners, we made him a big meal--grilled pork roast, fingerling potatoes, washed down with plenty of beer and hard cider. We ate on the porch.

And then in the morning, we did it again. (Raspberry pancakes with Wild Country maple syrup, and a whole pound of bacon.)

Boscoe lobbied hard for bacon and might have scored a nibble or two. Riley found a spot under the table where he lay in wait for scraps.

And then, precisely at 2, Sporty was gone--just 24 hours, but how great to see him. Time passes too quickly, days are busy, and we forget, sometimes, to pay attention to our friends. You can look up and years have passed since you have seen each other. I am grateful that he took a day to visit us.

The tornado blew through about thirty minutes later. Our neighborhood was spared, but parts of Minneapolis were badly damaged--not just trees uprooted and powerlines down, but roofs ripped off of buildings and people left homeless, and injured, and two people killed. We were lucky in that all we got was rain--hard, hard rain.

Of eagles, herons, and stopping time

2011-05-19T07:41:00.002-06:00

I got down to the lake this morning in time to watch two great blue herons soar in from wherever it is that they spend the night. Is there a rookery nearby? If there is, I've never seen it.

The first two weeks of May were chilly and rainy and stunted, so now that May is finally May, and the world is a-bloom and a-twitter, I want everything to slow down so that summer doesn't get here too fast. May and October are my favorite months; I love months where things are happening and changing--blooming, burrowing, raising babies, building nests, digging tunnels, laying eggs, getting ready to hibernate, getting ready to fly, turning red and falling from the branch or turning red and blooming in my patio flowerpot.

The lazy indolence of summer and the frozen silence of winter have their beauties, too, but I like the action of spring and fall.

And now spring is zooooooming forward!

At the lake, the warblers and blackbirds and Eastern kingbirds and robins and cardinals and orioles and goldfinches and bluebirds are swooping and chattering and whistling and chirping and trilling and singing. The herons stalk fish. The egrets leap out of trees (seriously! right over my head!) and swoop off over the lake. Turtles line up on logs and sun themselves until I try to take their picture, and then plop! plop! plop! into the water they go.

As I trotted around the lake, taking shoeboxy pictures of appleblossoms and birds (note: shoeboxy meaning that in the old days, when we used film, prints of this kind of picture invariably ended up in a shoebox in the closet instead of a photo album), a dog-walker approached. "Did you see the eagle?" she asked.

Now, you know that I pride myself on seeing eagles. I saw one just three mornings ago--he had taken over the tree that is usually crowded with cormorants. But I had not seen an eagle this morning, and I was eager to.

"Right over there," she said, pointing. "In that last tree on the spit of land." I looked but saw nothing, just a darkish blob that could have been a nest.

"I love seeing eagles," she said. "It puts me in a good frame of mind for the whole day." And she walked on, and I trotted back to the tree to see the eagle, who turned out to be ...

...a heron!

Now, I am sure that she knows the difference between an eagle and a heron, and I assume that, with her dog, she just kept walking after spotting the big form in the tree. And I, the journalist, was left with a moral dilemma: Should I let her continue to think she saw an eagle? Or should I set the record straight? Which is more important--happiness under false pretenses? Or accuracy?

Reader, I let her go.

On the far side of the lake, I watched a heron sashay through the water. Here he is:

In which life is both hectic and beautiful

2011-05-12T07:34:00.000-06:00

I have to do better than one blog post a week, or else you will all go away and never come back, and then where will I be? A storyteller needs someone to tell stories to!

But right now life is hectic. Doug started his new job, and while it will eventually calm down and even become routine, as all jobs do, right now it's very busy. He has to go in an hour earlier than he did his previous job, and he has to drive farther, so he's out of the house very early, which has upset our morning routine. Well, we are figuring out a new routine. He still walks Riley, but not as far, and we still read the papers together on the porch, but not for as long.

His first day on the job he was there 12 hours. His second day, he didn't get home until after 9 p.m. This will not be typical, but it sure made a stressful start to the new world of work.

And I have been busy, too. I worked a short week two weeks ago so I could go to Grand Forks, N.D., that Thursday to deliver a lecture. Last week I had to work another short week so that I could go to Duluth on Thursday to deliver a different lecture. The lectures went fine, and the trips were fun, but crunching all of my work into three days instead of five was hectic and a little stressful.

Next week I am supposed to go to Duluth again on Thursday, and I will, if I can manage it. But man, things need to calm down. Isn't life supposed to calm down? Aren't we supposed to have more leisure time at some point? When, again, are those golden years?

The picture at the top is from Monday night, when I attended the book launch for poet Robert Bly. He is a legend, of course, and 84 now, and this was something I did not want to miss. It was in a church in Minneapolis, and very theatrical--he read poems by poets he's translated, and his own poems, and suddenly launched into a poem by William Butler Yeats. It was great fun. He was accompanied, as he always is, by musicians. The guy on the left played drums, and the guy on the right played sitar.

(I wrote about this for my other blog, the one I do for work. You can read the post here, if you're interested.)

It was an interesting event, but that night I wasn't home until 10 p.m. We need things to settle down, just a little...

Boscoe's still Boscoe, sometimes eating "like a bear," Doug says, and sometimes being finicky and expecting to be hand fed sliced chicken, and I do. Yesterday he ran up the backstairs under his own power--three times! After weeks of me lifting and carrying and him flailing and protesting.

Riley continues to be completely indulged. Doug takes him for long walks every morning (though not as long as they were before he started his new job), and very long walks on the weekends. While I was in Duluth last Saturday, they walked five miles.

The herons are hanging out at the lake, the bleeding hearts and tulips are in full bloom, and yesterday I saw three turtles, hanging out in a row on a log in the lake, soaking in the sun.

More rain, more birds

2011-04-28T08:55:00.000-06:00

Boscoe, as I type this, is huffing and leaping (as much as he can leap) around the living room, going into the play bow, trying to get Riley to get off his butt and play with him. He has slowly and steadily gotten better since we increased his insulin dosage two weeks ago and now, except for his wonky back leg, he is almost back to where he was before he got so sick in February.

He's eating his own food, taking his medication nicely, in a Pill Pocket (no more buttered toast!), and even coming up the back stairs under his own power once in a while.

Doug starts a new job in early May, one with longer hours and more stress, as all new jobs involve, so we'll see how the morning routine changes. In the meantime, he's off this week and next, and it's terrific having him around--the boys get attention, everything feels much more leisurely. That'll change, but we're enjoying it for now.

Today I'm flying off to Grand Forks for two days to do talks at the newspaper and the university and hopefully sell a book or two. It's raining here, though sunny there, I think, and this morning Riley and I walked around the lake in the drizzle and spied on egrets, cormorants, herons, loud, brash Canada geese, and ducks--oh, so many ducks. They are in courting phase right now, and you see them wandering in the oddest places, up hills and amongst trees and far from the water.

When the rain comes down hard, they huddle on the soggy hillside and look just as miserable as everyone else.

Good weather for ducks and herons

2011-04-26T08:00:00.004-06:00

Halfway around the lake this morning in a cold and driving rain, I started wondering if a walk was actually a good idea. (As did Riley. He kept looking up at me with his Really? We're going to keep going, really? look.) Most of the birds from yesterday--the bat-like cormorants, drying their wings in the sun; the trilling blackbirds; the cardinals full of cheer! cheer!--were nowhere to be seen. But I watched an egret fly in, gleaming white against the dark gray sky.

And ducks, of course, were everywhere. Good weather for ducks. Mallards, wood ducks, scaup, a few stray merganzers and loons.

On the far side of the lake, we were protected from the wind, and I slowed just in time to watch one--two--three--four great blue herons lift off from the weeds. Wow! I have not seen that many herons together outside of a rookery. They glided in a big loop with their slow, lazy flapping wings, and then took off in different directions. I had not brought my camera with me, fearing it would be ruined in the cold rain, but a picture of that would have been spectacular. You will have to imagine it. (The picture above is mine, but from a couple of years ago.)

Last night we attended a neighborhood meeting on crime. You remember our break-in from last July. Well, a couple across the alley from us was broken into a few weeks after that. And then, earlier this month, our next door neighbors were broken into. All of these happened in broad daylight, while we were all at work. The folks across the alley had, like us, left a kitchen window open. But our next-door-neighbors had not; the thieves simply smashed out the glass.

So we had a meeting with the cops and our city councilor who, conveniently, is up for re-election and so was pretty responsive to my emails. There were probably 50 people at the meeting, many with a story to tell about car break-ins, garage break-ins, people on their deck in the middle of the night.

The cops listened, and they handed out pamphlets ("What to do before the burglar comes!") and one of them stood with his arms folded across his chest and a look of boredom on his face. They gave us cheery reassuring statistics--three break-ins in a year is not very many! It's worse elsewhere! And your numbers haven't gone up since last year!

But they did not seem to understand until very late in the meeting that we had had three break-ins on one alley. Not region-wide, or neighborhood wide. Three on our alley, between late July and early April.

When they finally realized that, they said they would drive down our alley and take a look. They said they would do more patrols "when possible." They suggested everyone add motion lights (even as we reminded them that these were all daytime break-ins). They urged us to lock our doors and windows ("You'd be surprised how many people don't lock their doors!" and we all tried not to roll our eyes). They said that things like private fenced yards only make things easier for burglars. (Our yard is fenced, but it's hardly private; the picket fence is three feet high.) They suggested we all get to know each other and be on the lookout and call the police if we see "suspicious activity."

They pointed out in a not-so-subtle way that there are worse crimes out there. (They mentioned sex crimes. They mentioned shootings in Frogtown.) An hour later, we all dispersed into the balmy spring evening, drifted toward home, chatting about how frustrating this all was, trying to figure out what we could do beyond what we are already doing, since clearly the police aren't going to do anything.

Before I went to bed, I switched on the motion light, as I do every night. I locked all our doors and windows, as we do every night. I thought about putting out a note, like James Thurber's aunt used to do; she was terrified that burglars were going to blow chloroform under her door, so she used to pile all her valuables outside of her door every night with a note that read, "This is all I have. Please do not use the chloroform, as this is all I have."

We went to bed. Overnight, the rain began.

Saturday night fever

2011-04-20T06:54:00.005-06:00

I knew the book awards were a big deal, but I hadn't realized quite how big a deal. Since the gala is always on a Saturday night, the only way to make deadline and get the news in the Sunday paper is for the awards folks to secretly email me a list of the winners a day in advance. This is how we did it for the last two years--they sent me the winners on Friday, I wrote the story, and then we held onto it until the Sunday paper. And so I never actually attended the gala myself.

This year, of course, my own nomination complicated things. They couldn't send me a list of the winners, because what if I was among them? So the email went to the senior culture editor, and I had to use steely will to not poke around in the computers on Friday afternoon and read it.

And I promise you, I did not. (Well, full disclosure: Around 3 p.m., I did a quick search to see if there was a story slugged BOOKAWARDS, and I wasn't even sure I'd peek at if there was, but there wasn't.)

Peg Meier and Vickie Ford at the book launch for "Through No Fault of My Own," the hilarious childhood diary of Vickie Ford's mother, Coco Irvine.

Saturday was busy. In the early afternoon, I had to introduce another writer at her book launch, and then dash home, change my clothes, wolf down some food, and be at the awards ceremony by 6. From 6 to 8 I stood at a table with the other memoir finalists, on the off chance that people might want to get us to sign books or chat us up. (And they did!) The place was packed. The event was held at a hotel on the riverfront in downtown St. Paul, and it was jam packed with beautiful people in gorgeous glittering black clothes, trailing gauzy scarves, and the occasional sassy and feather-bedecked hat, holding glasses of wine and smiling, smiling, smiling. There were authors everywhere. Poets. Mystery writers. Shy and brilliant authors of children's books.

All of the nominated books were for sale, and people were buying them and then lining up to have them signed; one woman pulled a rolling suitcase along behind her, stuffed with books.

At 7:30 Doug joined me (he had a busy evening of his own, first dropping me off, then dashing home to feed the boys, give Boscoe his injection, get them outside, get them inside, change his clothes, and then dash back downtown again), and we went into the ballroom.

I have to say, there is something rather wonderful about a huge elegant affair, all on account of books, authors and reading. No actors here. No smarmy comedians. No rock stars with spiked hair and tattoos (though there were writers with spiked hair and tattoos). The one great thing that tied all of us together was the written word. There is something really marvelous about this.

In the ballroom, dozens of round tables had been set up, spangled with a centerpiece of golden stars and gilded books, each place set with a decadent array of desserts, and a champagne flute. A string ensemble played in one corner, near the raised dais. And all around the perimeter, bright lights and television cameras; this was being filmed for public access television.

The ceremony lasted two hours. They gave a couple of awards, and the mayor spoke. They gave a couple more awards, and a visiting poet from Ireland got up and read poetry. I was fairly confident that I would not win in the memoir category, and I did not; the woman who did win was extremely deserving. Her book was widely reviewed all over the country and moved people to tears. The memoir award was given early, so after that I could relax and eat my dessert and sip my champagne and look around me. Black-clad waiters circulated with champagne bottles, refilling glasses.

Good thing I didn't sip very much champagne. The Readers Choice Award was the last to be given, the grand finale, so to speak, and if I had indulged on champagne for two hours I could have been extremely drunk by then. As it was, when my name was called it was mispronounced, and for one or two bizarre seconds I wondered, "Who is Laurie HartSell? Which book was that?" while people spun around in their chairs toward me and beaming faces pressed in on me, saying, "Congratulations! Congratulations!" and my slow brain struggled to make sense of what was going on.

And then there I was, up on the stage, blinking into the TV lights, rendered briefly but alarmingly speechless. I had not prepared any remarks, and so for long seconds I just stood there, peering out into the darkened room, wondering who all those dim shadowy characters were, until it finally occurred to me that I was supposed to talk.

This, of course, is for all of you

2011-04-17T15:48:00.000-06:00

My book won the Readers' Choice Award last night at the Minnesota Book Award celebration. I will write more about the whole event in another day or two--it was very chic, with free-flowing champagne and women in glittery gowns, and the mayor gave a speech--but I'm on deadline right now for a couple of things, so I hope you don't mind waiting.

In the meantime, this prize is for YOU. I know that many of you voted for me (and voted and voted), and even if you didn't, the truth is that I would never have written the book if it had not been for you.

So thank you so much, and I'll be back soon with more details and photos...

On a gorgeous spring morning, everything is on the move

2011-04-11T05:49:00.002-06:00

On Friday, on my way to work, there were turkeys in the road. My first turkeys of the season, though I had been hearing reports all around me of flocks here and flocks there. It is almost no longer unusual to encounter wild turkeys in the city, though I think it will always be thrilling to me.

On Sunday morning, early, Doug and the dogs and I walked down to the lake. It was just a little after 7, but the world was a cacaphony of sound. This was one of those weird June days that are occasionally dropped into April, and it was warm and windy and starting to get humid.

Down at the lake, the red-wing blackbirds were trilling. The gulls screeched overhead, riding crazily on billows of air. A duck--female, of course--quacked, loudly and over and over and over and over. You could see her bill widening as she called, and eventually, reclucantly, her green-winged mallard mate slunk over to her side and they glided off, she triumphant, he p-whipped, perhaps.

In the bushes along the lake shore, sparrows called their spring Pheebe Pheebe! And the cardinals called cheer! cheer! cheer!

As the dogs sniffed at the dirt and dead grass looking for something interesting perhaps to eat, or, at least roll in, I heard a throaty warble coming from the water, and my head shot up. "A loon!" Sure enough, we could see that straight neck and needle-like bill far out in the middle of Como Lake. Two of them. Three, four.

It's been three years since loons visited us--they come by in the spring during migration, stopping here for a day or a week when the lakes up north are still frozen. (And how do they know? What a mystery.)

We watched as a muskrat cut through the water and climbed up on one of the last remaining patches of ice, joining two of his buddies. They hunched on the slush and gobbled up--something. But what? Bits of vegetation that had been frozen in the ice and was now melting free? Another mystery.

Oh what a glorious morning. By noon it was in the 70s, with a threatening sky and strong winds. I changed into shorts and a tshirt for the first time since October, and climbed on my bike, pedaled off, and got lost. Over in Reservoir Woods, up and down the hills, through the pines, past the marshy swamps, the spring peepers were so loud that I thought, at first, that my ears were ringing.

Oh what a beautiful day. I emerged from the woods, toiled up Larpenteur Avenue back toward Como Lake and glided on home. By now the strong wind had shifted and the temperature was beginning to drop. By late afternoon we were back to sweatshirts and I ran around the house closing the windows.

But for one spectacular morning, it was summer, and we took full advantage of it...even knowing that in spring you don't have to be frantic; in the spring, there is more to come.

Boscoe update: He had a glucose test on Friday, and his numbers were very high. Way out of whack--perhaps because of all the non-doctor-approved foods I have had to give him, trying to tempt his appetite. So we raised his insulin from 9 units to 11, and in only two days he already looks better. Drinking less. Much less spacey. Still wobbly, still hard to feed, but oh so much better. I can tell, it's going to be a great summer.

And what will she do with the giant picture?

2011-04-06T06:33:00.003-06:00

Tuesday morning dawned chilly, but by the time I walked up the steps of the Universalist Church in southwest Minneapolis just after lunch, the sun had come out and my wool coat was too warm.

I was there for a sad occasion, the funeral of the husband of a dear friend. K is one of the Millerites, a group of five women who worked together at the Duluth paper back in the late 1970s and have reunited here in the Twin Cities. We get together a few times a year for dinner, wine, long talks and lots of laughter.

But for the last five years, the dinners have always included an update on the health of M, K's kind and intelligent husband, who had contracted an extremely rare form of cancer. He was treated successfully at the Mayo Clinic, but they were unable to eradicate the tumor, which had wrapped itself around his spinal cord.

For more than four years, he did well--he continued to work, which required a lot of travel; he remodeled his bathroom; they went to Scotland; he played trombone in three jazz ensembles.

It is also true that for part of those four years he required crutches to walk (he'd sling the trombone into a rucksack, and haul it to rehearsal on his back), and hand controls to drive his car. And it is sadly, poignantly true that he remodeled the bathroom to make it handicapped-accessible, anticipating a future in a wheelchair. None of this even began to slow him down...until right around Christmas, when the tumor came roaring back.

He was 55 when he died, an age that I guess at one time in my life I thought of as a venerable but now think of as, well, the age of many of my friends and, soon enough, myself. His hair was still red, his beard was still full, his eyes were still full of life. Ah, cancer.

What makes a good funeral? Was this a good funeral? It was incredibly sad. It was also happy. There was wonderful music--a brass combo, and a little jazz ensemble, playing the music that M loved and played himself. "Fanfare for the Common Man" made me tear up but I would not let myself weep because I knew if I began to weep it would quickly escalate into sobbing and then bawling and I would not be able to stop. The thing about funerals is, it makes you think of all the other funerals you've been to, and, if you are sentimental, all of the funerals that you might some day have to go to. I think of K as the first of us to become widows, but not the last. She is the one who will blaze that sad, sad trail.

In the front of the church was a giant photograph of M., blown up and placed on an easel. He smiled down at us, eyes happy. You could tell that he was looking with love at whoever took the picture. And you know that that person was K.

In front of the easel, on the floor, lay his trombone in its open case. That trombone just about killed me; it was the riderless horse. The photo did, too; it reminded me of my sister's funeral, and of the problem that we faced later: What do you do with the picture? You cannot throw it away. You do not want to put it on your wall. No, you are doomed and blessed to possess a poster-sized beautiful smiling photo of your dead loved one forever.

My mother waited five or six years and then e-mailed all of us, asking if any of us wanted it. We did not. Neither does she; it's too sad. It's now in the back of one of her closets, and some day, after she is gone, we will have to deal with its disposal.

So I looked at that big, smiling picture of M, and I thought, What will K do with it?

As if that is the biggest of her worries now.

The service was filled with music, and bells, and candles, and poetry. The minister was a strong, wise woman, who talked about how M, the engineer, loved to encounter problems and study them and gather tools and then dive in and figure them out. The one problem he could not solve, she said, was death.

And then his buddies got up to talk, two beefy men holding back their emotions, trying to be jocular, trying not to cry. One spoke, and the other stood silently, a hand on his friend's shoulder the whole time. It was heartbreaking to hear him tell funny stories about their fishing weekends, choking back tears, and they reminded me so much of Doug's fishing buddies that I flashed forward 100 years to Doug's funeral and pictured Chris (telling stories) and Dave (stoically standing by) and I very nearly let my tearing up slide into sobs.

And I looked over at M's tiny mother, who had hobbled in sadly, leaning on her cane, and it reminded me of Doug's mother, so sad at his brother's funeral, and that reminded me of Doug, so sad at his mother's funeral, and the whole afternoon was sunny and music filled and about as sad as it could be.

When it was over, the Millerites went down the basement to have coffee and bars and hug the widow, and I went back to work.

Odds and ends, and not all that odd

2011-04-03T17:11:00.003-06:00

Spring is inching forward, like Boscoe on an evening stroll, shuffle shuffle shuffle pause shuffle shuffle. Excruciatingly slow, but ever forward. And it lifts our hearts. On Saturday, we washed the back porch clean of winter's grit and salt and unfurled a new rug, and on the front porch we tore down the window condoms (sheets of clear plastic film that keep drafts from leaking through our aged windows). Then we hauled our Christmas tree down the alley for Jimmy, fuel for his nightly bonfire. (Yes, we still had our Christmas tree. But we are not slackers; the tree had been propped up in the snow and bedecked with suet and oranges for the birds. When I dragged it away from the house, a giant rabbit sprinted down the yard. I think he had been living there, sheltered by the branches and eating the suet.)

The crocuses on the south side of the house are blooming! And the scilla are poking through the dead leaves, tiny blue buds that will open soon.

Boscoe continues to eat robustly twice a day--Riley's kibble, of course--but he also continues to no longer want his Tramadol, which he takes for the stiffness and severe arthritis in his back legs. So our festival of delicacies continues, more comical than dire, trying to figure out what tidbit we can hide the Tramadol in. Everything works once, never twice.

And so he has had the usual: peanut butter, cheese, chicken, deli turkey; and the unusual: butter, buttered toast, poached egg. (Poached egg actually worked twice.) Tonight we will try turkey hot dogs, suggested by someone who reads this blog. (And a note to those who say it's a simple matter to get a pill in a dog--just make him lift his head, stroke his throat, and slip it between his teeth. To you I say, all dogs but Boscoe. He shakes his head violently, nips hard, and the pill goes flying. He absolutely knows it's coming and he absolutely does not want it.)

I took my first bike ride of the spring yesterday, around the park and past the Conservatory, where a fat red-tail hawk gleamed white in the top of a pine tree, staring down at the tasty and plump little children who were running with their parents to the cars after the spring flower show.

There were puddles and warm sunshine and oh, it was nice.

Now I must get serious and write some speeches; blogs are great places for procrastination, but I have to get to work. I'm delivering a noontime speech on Friday to college students who have won journalism awards; I'm introducing an author at her book launch the following Saturday; and at the end of the month I have to give a talk in Grand Forks. Time to figure out what I'm going to say at at least one of those events.

In which Boscoe allows us a weekend sanity reprieve

2011-03-30T05:45:00.003-06:00

Since my last post, Boscoe has relented. You might think that maybe he's feeling better, but I think he's toying with us, keeping us off-kilter for his own nefarious purposes. In any case, whatever the reason, he decided, on Saturday, to start eating kibble.

Not his own prescription, diabetic-friendly, rock-hard, high-fiber, pale brown kibble which produces tidy small poops that are much like cardboard. No, he'll still have none of that (and don't we have a giant unopened 30-pound bag of that in the basement, oh, yes, we do). But I happened in my careless manner to drop a few nuggets of Riley's Innova onto the kitchen floor during the Saturday morning feeding, and Boscoe dived for it and scarfed it up.

Hmmmm.... Not prescription, certainly, but oh, so much easier than multiple Tupperware containers of delicacies. So I poured a cup or so into his bowl, and Lord have mercy, he ate it.

He ate it again on Saturday night. And ate it again for both feedings on Sunday.

Oh, the joy of kibble. It is easy. It is dry. It is not messy. You put it in a bowl, and the dog eats it. You don't even have to wash the bowl afterward. All weekend, the feedings were fast and simple, just like before.

On Monday morning, he puked, just a little, just a tiny amount, but I decided not to chance it, so it was back to turkey and rice slurry. (Which he ate with gusto.)

This morning I chased him around the house for about 15 minutes trying to get his pain pill into him. He wouldn't take it in his Pill Pocket, nor embedded in chicken, in cheese, in peanut butter, in bread, or in turkey. The pill sits on the kitchen counter even as I type this, uneaten, sticky with remnants of all kinds of foods. If the Tramadols weren't something like $1 apiece I'd throw that one away and start fresh.

In five minutes, I have to feed him. Will he eat? What will he eat? I guess I'll know soon enough.

On the other hand, when I took the garbage out a half-hour ago, he was standing in the yard, staring up the porch steps with what I always think of as despair. I tossed the trash, turned back to the house--and he was on the porch, waiting to be let in. So....won't eat cheese, but will go up the back steps? He's back to driving me crazy.

And I am on my last nerve

2011-03-25T10:42:00.004-06:00

Look at that face. Go ahead, look at it. And then read what I am about to write and tell me that I am evil, I am a bad person, I do not deserve to own a dog, much less this intelligent and gorgeous creature, and you are calling the SPCA.

But the truth is, Boscoe, in his dotage, has become difficult. Difficult, hell. He's almost impossible. He's manipulative. He's demanding. He's mercurial. He's a diva. He is the master, and I am his slave.

He has spent 15 years as a cuddly, adorable, people-loving, tail-wagging, snuggling, farting, furry sweet potato pie, and now, in what might be his last year or two years or, if God really hates me, six or seven years, as a picky, stubborn, demanding tyrant.

The dog who once would eat anything--garbage, Kleenex, goose poop, Doug's shirtpocket--now won't eat anything. Except turkey. (So I buy and cook a bunch of turkey.) Oh, wait, did I say turkey? Hahahaha. No, I will only eat canned chicken, that really slimy, smelly stuff. So I stock up on cans of chicken, and Boscoe won't even sniff it. Just turns his head away in boredom and walks out of the room.

For a while he would eat boiled rice and ground turkey, but now he won't. He preferred chicken breast. Then he wouldn't eat chicken breast. He would, however, deign to eat spaghetti sauce, but only if it had been simmered for an hour, mixed with ground turkey and spices, and was intended for our dinner.

Every morning I sit on the floor and try to hand feed him. I have, at my side, a dozen tupperware containers with various delicacies, in hopes of tempting him to eat enough so that I can safely administer his insulin.

Every night I sit on the floor and try it all over again. It can take a half-hour to get enough food in him so that we can give him his shot. Oh, insulin, you have us over a barrel. He must eat.

Sometimes he takes his pain pill nicely, sometimes he spits it out. He has gotten incredibly adept at picking out the things he will eat and spitting out everything else, down to the last single grain of boiled rice or diabetic kibble. This dog does not need an opposable thumb; he appears to have an opposable tongue.

At the end of a feeding, the floor around us is littered with rice and kibble and shards of various rejected boiled meats. Riley sits three feet away, his eyes as big as saucers. Oh, God, he says. I would eat that. And that. And that.

Last night, when Boscoe turned his nose up at everything--everything!--I did, I screamed. Eat! Eat your dinner, goddamn it, you goddamn dog!

Doug poked his head in the room in alarm. But Boscoe ate his dinner. (Well, he ate all except for the parts that he spat out.)

And then there are the walks. Hahahahhahaaha oh the walks. They are not walks. They are drags. They are tugs. They are fights. They are carries.

His Majesty wants to be lured. He will put the brakes on in the front hallway and only come out onto the porch if I make it abundantly clear that I am packing treats. For a while, tiny liver training treats would suffice, but those were the days. Now he requires shredded boiled chicken.

Hold out the chicken, and he will think about it for a long time and then maybe trot down the porch steps. But then he freezes on the front sidewalk until I hold out more. Wait him out, you say? I can't. I have to get him walked so that I can go to work. And the walk is already late because it took him so long to eat his breakfast.

We walk a step or two, or, if he's feeling benevolent, ten or fifteen steps. He stays behind me, pretending to be old and feeble, and eventually I feel the leash tighten up and I turn and look and he has stopped. He looks at me. I look at him. I reach into my pocket.

The other day, I tried dropping the leash and walking on. I blinked before he did, after more than half a block.

But hold out the boiled chicken, and that boy can trot along at a fine clip. He can walk steadily and swiftly. So is he sick? Is he old? Is he feeble and infirm? Hell if I know. As far as I can tell, he has a robust appetite as long as we give him whatever he wants. And as far as I can tell, he can walk pretty well and fast and long, as long as I feed him chicken the whole time, like some sort of human Pez Dispenser.

Does he require your sympathy and pity? I have no idea.

When we get home, he stands in the yard and stares at the house. For the dog walker, he runs right up the stairs and into the house. For me? Hell no. I try to lure him, I try to pull him with the leash, I beg him. He does not move. I go in the house and shut the door, and he sits down pathetically in the snow and does not move.

Apparently, he wants to be carried. Sometimes. Other times Doug will pull on his boots and mittens and go out into the yard to get him and Boscoe will give him a look of sweeping scorn and trot past him and dash up the stairs and saunter into the house. And then he has the nerve to stop and look meaningfully at the treat jar.

This dog knows that for once in his life he holds all the cards, and he is loving it.

Me, I am on my last nerve. And yet .... and yet .... when all the tussling is over, and he has been walked and fed and injected and indulged, he totters over to where I sit in the living room and he makes it clear he wants to be near me. Doug lifts him into the dog bed, which is next to me on the couch, and Boscoe curls up sweetly, rests his head on my knee, and all is forgiven.

I would do anything for that damned dog. And he makes sure that I do.

Wrong direction

2011-03-23T07:38:00.000-06:00

This was Saturday. Go, tulips, go!

This is today. Go, snow, go--away!

On the other hand, Boscoe was chasing Riley around the yard like a puppy. Hard to be too crabby about the snow when they are so thrilled.

Ridiculously busy, but calming down

2011-03-21T05:54:00.004-06:00

Yes, I've been quiet here but that doesn't mean I'm quiet everywhere. I've spent the last 10 days driving all over the Twin Cities, getting lost and speaking at events, and, at work, doing my own job as well as filling in as the page one editor during a time of incredibly grim but important news. (Japan! Libya! Yemen!)

One more obligation tonight after work, and then things calm down and I can get back to what I do best: yakking away here about my dogs and my park, and napping.

The photo above was taken on Friday night, at the Readers Choice Awards event at the Loft in Minneapolis. The finalists in the Minnesota Book Awards each got five minutes to try to impress the crowd of about 100 people in hopes of winning their votes.

I was not entirely sure how one goes about winning 100 people's votes in five minutes, but after Friday night I think I know; the other finalists (21 of the 32 were able to attend) were amazing. They were funny, sincere, and fascinating, and many of them had great visual aids. (Some of them also went way over their allotted five minutes, but oh well, it was all in the name of entertainment, and they were very entertaining.)

I was the second to speak, and I got up and said that I realized I had just five minutes to sear my book in their brains, and in order to do that I would ask them to think of popular culture references: the TV show "Mad Men" for the first half of the book (office setting, sexist men, lots of cigarette smoking, women being kept down but starting to rise, although none of the women in my office ever wore bullet bras) and the movie "Dr. Zhivago" for the second half (no snow, but Russia). OK, it was funnier than that--at least, people laughed--but it only took about three minutes and then the pressure was off and I could relax and listen to everyone else

And I have to say, I fell in love with just about all of them, and I can tell you without hesitation that even if you don't think of yourself as someone who reads much poetry, you will love the work of Connie Wanek. She's a Duluth poet, modest and brilliant, and she read two short poems that told stories and brought pictures to mind and then sort of flew around inside my head for the rest of the evening.

The picture books guys were great, too, two authors of two very different but such imaginative picture books. "My Heart is Like a Zoo," and "1+1=5"(and after you read the book you will agree that one plus one really does equal five).

Peter Bognanni, who wrote a novel called "The House of Tomorrow," was so funny we all were nearly falling off our chairs. It was a wonderful evening (followed by wine and lemon bars!) and a great reminder, if we needed reminding, of what amazing talented writers we have in Minnesota.

Tonight I'm speaking at one last readers' choice event--me and another memoirist--and then we sit back and wait for the votes to be counted.

On the home front, Boscoe continues to sleep upstairs with us and shows no sign of his previous infection (though I have to admit we are constantly vigilant and every time he staggers to his feet we watch him warily, wondering if he's going to pee; he does not). He can't really manage the back stairs anymore, so we have to carry him out into the yard and back into the house and you should not be surprised if I post here some day that I have completely thrown my back out.

That said, he's eating well, alert, and goes into the play bow with Riley every now and then. Riley, who we nicknamed "Prince Charles" ("Will I ever get to be king??") now carries the title of senior dog, just to make him feel better. Boscoe has been promoted to senior dog emeritus. Everybody's happy.

Running toward spring

2011-03-13T12:31:00.002-06:00

Another cold, gray morning. No sun. Snow four feet deep at the curbs, covered with a hard, slick crust. It snowed two days ago, and most people couldn't be bothered to shovel it off--Surely it will melt soon, they figured; it's March after all--and so it has been walked on, and it has frozen, and it is gray and slippery and bumpy and it is embedded with shoeprints and pawprints.

There is nothing pretty to look at. Our world is drained of color.

In the mornings, Boscoe wants to go down to the lake. During the week, I usually say no--it takes so long, he is so slow, it wears him out and makes me late for work. I fear the day we get down there and he can't get back, but I tend to fear a lot of things that never come to pass and it may be that I'm still channeling Toby's decline (of a mere 10 years ago).

But today is Sunday, and it was too gloomy and cold at just 15 degrees for there to be many people around. We had nowhere we needed to be until 10, and it was only 8:30. OK, I said. Down to the lake we go.

At frozen water's edge, we poked around, slipped on the icy path, sniffed some yellow spots, stood for long minutes and stared out at the gray hard lake, imagining, perhaps, the noisy geese and dabbling ducks who should be here, oh, any month now.

And then we started the long slow walk to the path back home--maybe a quarter of the way around the lake. A woman walked briskly toward us. She wore a big green button on her jacket, and a green hat, and she said, "In another minute or two there are going to be 300 people running right at you." I looked down the path, and sure enough, at the curve of the lake by the pavilion, I could see a long stream of people headed in our direction.

Boscoe and I had chosen the morning of the St. Patrick's Day Fun Run to take our meandering stroll along the lake.

As the footsteps thundered toward us, I managed to pull Boscoe off the path onto a flat spot of snow. I held him there with a treat in front of his nose while the runners pounded by. There really were hundreds of them, most dressed outlandishly for the holiday--tall green, white and orange Dr. Seuss hats, or grass-green shorts worn over sweatpants, or clip-on shamrocks that bobbled as they ran. Just like real Irish people!

After about 50 or 75 or 100 people had gone past, the excitement became too much for Boscoe. He turned around and began trotting along with the runners, back the way we had come. Runners thundered up behind us, parted to pass us, closed back together in front of us. Though I tried to pull Boscoe off to one side, he was trotting along gamely, the closest thing to a run that he can manage, and he was not to be stopped or diverted.

None of the runners complained. In their shamrock glitter and leprechaun hats they were clearly not taking this race very seriously, and having a big shaggy black dog in their midst, only slightly tippy on his feet, was no trouble to anyone.

We made it back to our original path, and with the help of a fragment of a milk bone I was able to lure Boscoe back across the street and up the trail toward our house. He seemed done in from his sprint and ready to go home.

At the top--oh, fortunate timing--we encountered Doug and Riley, back from a brisk walk of their own. Riley raced toward us, and Boscoe dropped into the play bow. They wrestled in the snow for a few happy minutes before we picked up their leashes and walked on.

And now the ice is melting. The sun is not yet out, but the air is warming up above freezing, and this might be the last cold morning for a long, long time.

(Google photos. Didn't have a camera with me.)

It is snowing but I am not in despair

2011-03-09T09:29:00.003-06:00

Yes, it's snowing, but something has shifted in the last couple of days and it suddenly feels like spring. Even though the snowpiles along the street are just as high and frozen as ever; even though it is snowing today and supposed to snow off and on for the next week; even though the sidewalks are icy and the world is monochromatic, it still feels like spring.

It's the sun, higher in the sky and actually warm on my back when I walk. It's the temperature, no longer plummeting below zero, and rising quickly from the overnight lows instead of lingering around nine or six or two. It's the light, earlier in the morning, noticeably later in the evening. If I leave work at the dot of 6, I can drive home without headlights.

And it's the noisy birds, flitting about, chatting arguing, sounding (as in the 15-second video above) as regular and rat-a-tat-tatty as car alarms. Lovely cardinals! Your spring song can wake me any time.

We are a long way from daffodils and tulips, but finally I am certain that we will get there.

Back upstairs

2011-03-06T10:40:00.001-06:00

This weekend we went from this:

to this ("Hmmm.... something's missing..."):

to "Hey, where'd my bed go?"

To which Riley says, "Can you keep it down over there? I'm trying to sleep."

To which Boscoe says, "Ha ha, little man! I'm back and ready to rumble!"

He goes to the vet for a re-check on Tuesday to see if the infection is finally, finally cleared up. It's been almost two months! But I think it is--he's eating better, sleeping well, and except for that wonky back leg of his he's walking pretty well, too. All four of us went for about a 10-block walk yesterday morning and he kept up pretty well, even on the icy stretches.

A little ketchup

2011-03-03T08:57:00.003-06:00

I like doing these catching-up blog posts because then I can use this very cool gif. There is a billboard in Pittsburgh exactly like this, with the emptying and refilling ketchup bottles. Worth a trip to Pennsylvania just to see.

Anyway, this is just to catch us all up on a couple of things deeply important to my life: Boscoe, the cookie moratorium, and whatever else comes to mind.

1.) Boscoe continues to confound and aggravate and amuse. Minute to minute I think he's either dying, or completely healed, or somewhere in between. He staggers, he romps; he turns his nose up at food and then eats almost his entire dinner; he absolutely positively does not want to go for a walk, no way, he won't leave the house, he won't leave the porch, he won't--oh, here he comes, trotting along just fine. Goddamn dog.

2) Last night, as some of you will already have read on Facebook, I went out to dinner with a friend at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. One of those plastic-tables-and-fluorescent-light places that are packed with Chinese people and have amazing food. After dinner, we continued to chat over tea, and I idly picked up my fortune cookie and unwrapped it and broke it in two and read my fortune (something about how kisses would keep me young; nothing wrong with that), and then, still chatting, idly ate the shards.

In other words, four hours from the end of my cookie moratorium, and I blew it.

All my lovely Facebook friends are assuring me that a fortune cookie doesn't count, but I am mad at myself. The point of the moratorium was to make myself aware when I eat cookies, so that I don't just jam them into my mouth without thinking or tasting. Last night I jammed that cookie into my mouth without thinking or tasting. I'm thinking now I must extend the moratorium through the end of the work week. Unless somebody brings cookies to work.

3) This is my busy month--I'm teaching a memoir writing workshop next weekend, leading a discussion at a bookstore (on somebody else's book), and have four or five evening events for my book. Doug is just recovering from a cold that knocked him flat for two days. I am telling myself that I will not get sick. You tell me that, too, and maybe it'll come true.

4) It's snowing.

And the best actor award goes to ...

2011-02-28T10:59:00.002-06:00

Boscoe!

This morning I took both dogs for a walk, because Doug is home sick with a cold. In the yard, Boscoe was playful, trying to mount Riley, collapsing slightly, getting up, mounting again. (He'd eaten half of his breakfast--which is good for him these days--and I guess he was feeling frisky.)

At the gate, I stepped back to swing the door open, and I stepped on his front paw. He screamed and fell to the ground. (Neighbors, that was the ear-piercing sound that shook you from your beds at 7:30 a.m.)

It was an awful, heart-stopping moment. I helped him to his feet and he staggered down the alley, limping heavily, eyeballing me balefully...until I reached into my pocket and pulled out a treat.

He wolfed it down and trotted on, miraculously cured, and a few minutes later tried to race Riley down the sidewalk.

For those of you who are amused by this but are happy that Colin Firth won, this is for you.

Cookie monster

2011-02-25T22:11:00.001-06:00

Normally, I am a reasonable person when it comes to food. I like oatmeal and broccoli, though not together; I always eat breakfast; my lunch is a salad four days out of five; and I can go weeks without any alcohol. I do like chocolate--milk, dark, with nuts, plain--but what woman doesn't? I am only human.

But we all have an Achilles heel, and I find quite unexpectedly in mid-life that mine is cookies. This did not start at Christmas, as you might suppose; it started last fall, with book events. Starting in September, I made it a point to have cookies at every reading--some baked by my old high school friend Sue, who wins blue ribbons in baking at the State Fair, and some baked, less successfully, by me. This was a huge success at readings, though often there were leftovers, which I brought home and ate. Doug can take cookies or leave them. I can take them and very definitely not leave them.

The book clubs that have hosted me all serve cookies--the last such club, just ten days ago, had two kinds: little frosted lemon cookies, and tiny chocolate cookies that they served warm, with molten chocolate centers. Oh my.

It wasn't long before I fell into the habit of eating cookies every day. And not just one cookie, or two; five or six cookies. Maybe seven, depending on the size and how early in the day I started.

If you troll slowly enough through the newsroom, you can always find a cookie somewhere. Currently, we are awash in Girl Scout Cookies, and when I finally broke down and bought a box of Thin Mints from one of the online editors, I tore into it and ate one entire sleeve in about fifteen minutes. ("Oh, yes," a friend said, knowingly. "Thin Mints are one sleeve equals one serving.")

Things came to a head last week when our Food Editor got a carton of Archer Cookies in the mail--six or eight packages of different kinds of cookies, of which I am pretty sure I ate ten. I ate them quickly and without thinking about them or even really enjoying them, the way a person would eat ten peanuts, or ten potato chips, or a handful of popcorn.

And then I had the grace to be appalled. This is so much sugar, I thought. This is really a bad idea.

The only thing I could think to do was to stop, cold turkey. So I did. I swore off cookies. Not being a fool, or a masochist, I swore them off not forever, but for one week. That was Thursday morning, and now it is Friday night, and so I have gone two entire days without cookies, with five to go. It hasn't been too painful yet, but now it is the weekend, and there are cookies in the house, and we shall see how it goes.

Stopping is not as simple as you might think and requires much more fortitude than it should. During my normal midday walk through the Skyways of downtown Minneapolis, I am assailed with constant temptation, as you'll see in the walking tour below. Today I returned to work after my 40-minute walk a little shaken, the smell of fresh-baked cookies permeating my coat and my hair, and realizing that there are so many cookies calling my name from every corner of down town that every single second that I am not eating a cookie is a victory.

Running the cookie gantlet

At the beginning of my walk, I pass the candy store, which has shrink-wrapped yellow smiley-faced cookies filling one of the front windows. Those are somehow easy to ignore, as are the cookies sold in the various coffee shops: Starbucks, Caribou, Dunn Brothers. The first real challenge is the Mrs. Fields stand near Target Center. I know from experience that the taste is mediocre, but they are baked on the premises, and the smell is intoxicating.

And here they are up close. They do look appealing.

After successfully avoiding Mrs. Field's, I go around the corner to find "Best Cookies of the Skyway." The sign below mentions that they are all hand-made from scratch. They, too, smell delicious. I keep walking.

Just feet from the Best Cookies of the Skyway is this sign: "It's Cookie Time!"

No, it's not, I say, and keep going.

For the next leg there are cookies everywhere, but they are prepackaged, or coffee shop cookies, and they are scarcely a temptation. But then I see this sign:

Your chance 4 cookies--you know u want them. Yes, I do. U know I do. But I keep walking.

Truly, this is more Thin Mints than even I could eat, I think.

And then I am back to the beginning, past the yellow smiley faces, my loop complete. I am out of danger. But not forever; not for long.

Wuollet's is coming. Oh lord, kill me now.

The dog walker (updated)

2011-02-23T09:12:00.007-06:00

I leave dire notes for the dog-walker. Hi, Mary. He had a restless night. I'll be curious to see if he feels like walking at all today. You might have to carry him up the back stairs.

She writes back perky and hopeful replies. He greeted me with a waggy tail! He was up for a walk around the block at the usual pace! Yay!!!

Mary is our new dog-walker. Well, new since last fall, when Debbie so callously and heartlessly decided to go back to school and get a job that paid better and had benefits and didn't require her to be outdoors in winter, in summer, in rain, in snow, in 99 degrees, in 20 below. Damn her. The boyz still miss her, and when I walk them in the evenings they always stop at her front sidewalk and stare longingly at her house.

But Mary is great, too. She is wiry and athletic and a little shy, and she pedals her bicycle over to our house from a neighborhood a few miles away. (Although perhaps not now, in fifteen inches of new snow.)

She is gentle and kind with the boys and keeps a good eye on Boscoe. She is married to a veterinarian and is used to dealing with special-needs animals; in their own house, they have a dog who has never had the use of his back legs and so gets around on a little rolling cart, and a diabetic, albino squirrel. The squirrel, she told me, is eleven years old. I'd say that becoming diabetic and somehow falling into Mary's care has probably extended his lifespan five fold over the usual squirrel.

Her notes are brief but they fill me with happiness: The boys were very playful today. It was fun to watch.

And, Boscoe wanted to be petted so I did a lot of that. Riley is cool with everything.

Having her come by three times a week to check on the boys, get them outside, let them stretch their legs, is a huge relief to us. Since Boscoe got old, he does much better in the daytime than early morning (he is still balky on breakfast) or after dark (he doesn't much care for that after-dinner walk). But in mid-afternoon he is cheerful and alert, and Riley is thrilled not to be pent up all day long. Doug and I started bringing our lunches to work to save money for the dog walker, and of course the upside of that is that we're eating better, one of us has lost weight (the other of us continues to eat too many Girl Scout cookies), and I use my lunch break for a brisk walk through the Skyways instead of standing in line at a take-out joint.

Don't you hate it when being sensible proves to be more beneficial than being foolish and reckless? But there you are: middle age.

Here's the note I left for Mary this morning: He walked very well last night. Not very hungry this morning, but he seems OK. Let us know.

I'm already looking forward to her answer when I get home tonight.

Update: And here is her note from today: We too had a great walk today. Some playfulness with Riley. They did not want to come inside!

I think that's about as good as it gets, don't you?

A note on the illustrations: R. Nichols does great dog greeting cards. See his website here.

Am I doing you wrong?

2011-02-21T10:42:00.003-06:00

And now we are back to this.

Last week, we had a nice run of melty days. Much of that huge snowpack that you will remember from my pre-Christmas posts dwindled and ran down the street and into the gutters and disappeared. (Though it didn't really disappear; the ground is still frozen, and so it ran into lakes and streams and rivers, and we will have flooding problems, come spring.)

One morning it was 45 degrees and misty and foggy, and I walked Boscoe down by the lake and our noses were both twitching at all the wonderful muddy boggy smells. But what melts in February is sure also to freeze, and the next morning we hit a thick patch of slick gray ice, and poor Boscoe went down, splayed out, spread eagled on the ground, whimpering, and could not get up. I had to haul up first his front legs, which are stronger and can bear his weight, and then go round and sort of hoist up his back end, and while he trotted along OK after that, later in the day he was clearly hurting. Pulled a muscle, I suspect, and that gimpy left rear leg of his is now almost useless.

So I upped his pain meds just a bit, and have been limiting his walks, and I am completely frustrated because he was getting better in all other regards--eating well, sleeping through the night--and now he is having trouble standing up, and oh, you old dog, can you just please get it all together at one time again? Even just for a while?

Doug is home now from four days gone, and I think we will all move upstairs tonight. Boscoe, as I said, has slept soundly the last two nights, and now if he needs to go outside at 1:40 a.m. (and pray God he does not), Doug can carry him down the stairs. I cannot manage that, myself.

(And oh, was he hopeful, watching Doug pack his duffle bag and haul his boots and gear from the basement. Clearly, he thought we were all going Up North, and how disappointed he was when Doug shut the door and left Boscoe behind.)

All of this makes me wonder if I have done you wrong by showing you, for the last four years, Boscoe through my eyes--his stubbornness, his sweetness, his caustic comments, his friendship with Riley, his need to be petted by strangers, his skill at finding tortillas and glazed doughnuts in snowbanks, his ailments, his repeated miraculous recoveries, his slow, steady aging. Surely if you see him as I do you must love him a bit. And surely watching him decline cannot be easy, especially if you have ever (as I know some of you have) watched a different beloved dog grow old.

And yet there is something wonderful in all of this, too, watching the interaction between the two dogs, watching Boscoe learn so late in life to compensate, and make do. Figuring out how to get along on three legs, using that weak fourth mainly as a crutch but not a full-fledged member of the team. How to haul himself backwards up the stairs, back when he was still going upstairs. How to rub his face along the side of the couch to scratch it, now that he can no longer get his back foot up there. How to back up and get a little running start to get up the porch stairs. How to so carefully lie down, front legs first, back legs naturally following, so as to keep control.

It is a wonderful thing to see, even as it is tinged with sadness, his ability to continue to learn and to figure things out and to get along just fine, really.

He has finished the two-week course of antibiotic pills, those small yellow ones, and has one week to go with the giant green ones. His appetite has returned, though it is different than it used to be, and this morning, in the snow, he went into the play bow and tried to head off Riley, who was sprinting at top speed through the deep white drifts.

If I have made you care about him, that is a good thing, but eventually we all know it will be a painful thing, too. But not now. Not just now.

To which Riley says, "I'm still here, too, you know!"

2011-02-19T10:35:00.004-06:00

And so he is, anxious, sweet, energetic, worried about his brother, clinging close to me and then fleeing upstairs to get away from the drama of the aging border collie.

I am amazed how in tuned Riley is to Boscoe--even to changes in something as subtle as the way he breathes. Boscoe has had a few restless nights, and when he wakes up (almost always at about 1:30 a.m.) I wake up, too, because I am sleeping right next to him and I feel his weight shift, hear his breathing quicken. But before I can move or say a word, Riley is back down the stairs in a flash to see what's going on. And nothing is going on, other than this: Boscoe woke up. And, a floor away, Riley responds.

And so we all get up and toddle to the back door, some of us (Riley) faster than others of us (Boscoe, and, if I've been deeply asleep, me), and Riley zooms down the porch steps, wide awake, ready to race around on the icy snow under the full moon, and Boscoe kind of gathers himself and launches himself down the stairs, understanding that momentum will keep him upright.

And then I, sick with lack of sleep, hair sticking out, wearing fuzzy socks and a polarfleece vest, must go out into the starry dark, my breath coming in clouds, the snow crunching underfoot, and lure them back into the house or they would stay out there for hours. Sometimes, if Boscoe is feeling shaky, I go back inside and take down the leather dogleash from its closet hook and go back out and kind of coax/drag/pull him up the stairs.

Boscoe and I return to our little love nest on the hall floor (doesn't it look cozy? And I have to admit, despite the aches and pains and sacrifices of sleeping on the floor with a dog instead of in my bed with my husband, I love waking up and seeing the branches of our Norfolk island pine over my head; it makes me feel, briefly, as though I am camping) and by then Riley has long since disappeared back up the stairs, leaped onto the bed and curled in a tight ball next to Doug and is already fast asleep.

Two nights ago, we all came in and I hung up the leash and locked the door and then stumbled over to the love nest and noticed something black on my pillow. Two eyes opened, and it was Riley, waiting for me. Boscoe heaved himself onto the foot of the bed and sprawled the length of the futon. And I crawled over the covers, wedged myself between the sheets, and fell asleep, one dog at my feet, one dog at my head, three on a futon for the short rest of the night.

Ahem! I'm still here! And I thought this post was supposed to be about me for a change!

It is, little dog. That's exactly what it's about: love, and loyalty, and family. And that makes it all about you.