...Till Sunbeams Find You

The night I posted my last blog I received an email from Cleo’s grandmother Jan.  She suggested putting Cleo in her crate for the night.  You know those moments when you hear good advice and you think, “Why didn’t I think of that?”  I had one of those.

Cleo has always been fond of her crate and sleeps in it regularly.  A couple months ago, we stopped locking her in at night.  That’s when the trouble began.  Somehow, I just got it in my head that locking her in again would be going backwards.  What a terrific thing to realize that sometimes you have to go backwards in order to go forwards.

The next morning, I got another email from a Bedlington fan suggesting the same solution.  Over the next couple days, four or five responded with similar advice and with encouragement not to give up on the shock collar altogether.  It may have its uses, they warned.  I’ve said it before and I know I will say it again, Bedlington owners are generous, helpful people. 

The funny thing is, though, that while Cleo has had wonderful nights sleeping soundly in her crate, I had a dreadful night that first night.  Yes, I know she is comfortable in her crate.  Yes, I know she spent a good part of every night in there even when she wasn’t locked in.  Yes, I have frequently seen her go into her crate to snooze during the day.  I still felt guilty about locking her in.

During the first night of her return to lockdown, I had a horrible dream that I had taken Cleo to school and for some reason had left her in the car.  I’d arrived at 8 AM and it was now almost 4:30 PM.  To make it worse, the day was sweltering and I knew I had not even left the windows down in the car.  I couldn’t understand how I could possibly do that to my baby girl.  I raced from my office to the lot where my car was parked.  In the way of dreams, it was both drastically farther away than in real life, and it took me forever to get there because I felt like I was walking through wet clay that sucked at my feet and wouldn’t let me move. 

When I finally got to the car, the two doors on the passenger side were open and Cleo was lying curled up on the edge of the back seat.  Someone had seen her in the locked car and had broken in to give her air.  I was so relieved to see her!  I picked her up and she wrapped her arms around my neck as she always does when she’s had a traumatic experience—the vet, the groomer.  Of course, I felt so guilty because she was responding in her usual loving fashion after I’d just abandoned and endangered her. 

Then I noticed that she had little mittens on her front paws.  I knew that she had been bandaged because she’d hurt herself trying to claw her way out of the car.  I recognize the origin of this image.  When I was in high school, I read an article in the New Yorker magazine written by a fellow who grew up in India.  He was blind from birth.  When he was four or five, he and some buddies took a kitten, put it in a box and buried it.  Later, they dug it up to see what had happened to it.  The kitten, now dead, had almost obliterated its paws trying to dig itself out.  The horror of that image has stayed with me for decades.  In my dream, this is what I’d done to my Cleo.  Sure, she was alive, but that was because someone had come to open the car doors after my unspeakable carelessness.

At this point in the dream, three girls came riding up on bicycles.  They were all students of mine.  The one in the front looked at me and said, “That was Cleo in there?  Mrs. Sherry, how could you do that to her?” 

How, indeed?

I was trepidatious about writing last week’s post.  It is never easy to admit that one’s life isn’t as orderly as everyone else’s looks.  I was hesitant about locking Cleo in her crate again.  Unconsciously, I was afraid I had let Cleo down spectacularly.  How reaffirming it was to learn that others had been in my shoes and had found solutions that they were willing to share. 

By Wednesday, we’d had two and a half blissful nights of sleep.  The half night was something of an anomaly.  My husband has an over-active startle response.  It can be delightfully funny, especially when a minor surprise (me standing in the doorway of his studio when he didn’t hear the door open, for example) makes him leap a foot in the air with eyes wide open and mouth agape.  Honestly, I’m not exaggerating.  It’s not so funny when he doesn’t realize that I am in the bathroom at 2:30 in the morning and he walks in, sleepy eyes downcast, to discover me.  Luckily, I had already finished what I’d gone in there to do or who knows what might have happened!

What did happen involved a lot of startled exclaiming that woke Cleo up.  Unbeknownst to us, it also woke up the neighbor dog, Boris, who then demanded to go out.  He must, as always, have charged the fence growling.  We didn’t hear him, but Cleo sure did.  She started to whine desperately and scratch at the crate.  The only other time she has ever whined that desperately to get out of her crate was when she was a tiny little girl.  I ignored her and she piddled all over her crate pad.  Between that memory and the still horribly fresh images of my nightmare, I caved and let her out.  Of course, the fact that she made a beeline for the fence to check for Boris infiltrations let me know that I’d been had!  I’m proud to report, though, that last night she woke up because of late night neighborhood barking, but this time I sat up, fixed her with a stern eye and said, “Cleo, go back to sleep.”  She did!  Absolute bliss!

Until now, I haven’t addressed the other two bad habits which I referred to in my last post: She jumps up and mouths people with such exuberance that it is really an unpleasant greeting.  She never intends to hurt with her teeth, but no one likes a gaping mouth flying at them any more than they like any dangling part of them to be covered with dog spit the moment they walk into the house.  Every now and then, she inadvertently connects a tooth to a finger tip and that hurts! 

The tricky thing is that she now stops with John and me the moment we tell her to.  Tonight at dog training class, she was a little angel with the trainer who praised her for her progress with such warm tones that Cleo and I both blushed a little.  She will not, however, stop with anyone else she encounters, in the house, out on the street, at the dog park.  She leaps and leaps, gently grabbing their hands in her mouth, nipping at the hem of their shirts (this is a new habit, by the way), and is mightily persistent.  I put her in a stand and hold onto her as I’ve been taught, but the minute I let go, she is back at it again.

So here is my plan:

1. Training collar in place (though strength of impulse dialed down a bit), 

2. willing subject at the door, 

3. door bell, 

4. subject enters, 

5. encouragement of canine to cease and desist the jumping and biting, 

6. repeat as necessary.

I’ll let you know how it goes next time.  If I’m as lucky with this one as I was with the last, she should be over it by Wednesday.  And I’ll be recovered from my nightmare by Friday.

Well Honestly, Nobody's Perfect

And so, dear readers, we come to the nitty gritty.

School starts in less than a month—in 24 days to be exact—and there is a lot of distance still to be covered puppy-behavior-wise.  My perfect puppy is, well, far from perfect.  She barks, she mouths and she insists on jumping up.  Oh, and she rattles the blinds at night.

Poor John has not gotten a decent night’s sleep in over a week.  I am gifted with the ability to will myself to sleep.  It’s a rare occasion that I can’t get back to sleep after having been woken up either by the call of nature or the call of the canine.  John, on the other hand, has only the most tenuous hold on Morpheus.  This becomes a problem when Cleo feels the need to do a perimeter check of the backyard fence at 2 AM, 3:22 AM, and 5:30 AM.  The reasons for her waking are varied.  The first is usually raccoons, the second is her bladder, the third is Boris.

The part of Monterey that we live in is right on the border with the town of Pacific Grove.  You wouldn’t know that you had crossed over between PG and Monterey if there weren’t signs.  Really, the only difference is the housing prices.  Four blocks up from us is the dividing line, Devisadero Street.  One side is Monterey, the other PG.  On one side of the road you can buy a three bedroom, two bath house for $500,000.  On the other side of the road, the same house would be $600,000. 

Pacific Grove doesn’t believe in population control, at least when it comes to raccoons and deer.  It’s a problem.  Wildlife doesn’t recognize city boundaries.  I know, I sound heartless when I say I’d like them to be—uh—dealt with.  Raccoons are those adorable bandits in Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Doolittle movies.  It’s the failure to save his raccoon friend that sends Ace Ventura into a monastery.  And deer, well, who could fail to love Bambi?  Deer are so gentle and peaceful with their soft, tender eyes.

Do not be fooled
by their innocent appearance!

Let me just tell you that deer kill more people every year than bears, sharks and mountain lions combined.  While most of these deaths are traffic related, I have heard first person accounts of runners being charged by male deer during rutting season and small leashed dogs being trampled by female deer who don’t like their looks (or their proximity to fawns).  Raccoons, on the other hand, are vicious.  They will attack dogs, cats, and even humans.  Sitting in the vet’s office once, I was told the harrowing story of a man who heard his cat yowling one evening.  He ran outside to see what was going on and discovered a large raccoon pinning the cat with one hand while with the other it calmly drew a sharp claw down the cat’s stomach, eviscerating it.  Throwing stones and even running at the raccoon didn’t persuade it to let the cat go.  The man finally darted up and kicked it in the stomach.  The good news is that he was at the vet’s office to pick his cat up and take him home following weeks of recuperation. 

Raccoons wander freely through people’s backyards around here.  It was only following the tragic death of a two year old boy who ingested raccoon feces while playing in his sandbox that Pacific Grove rounded up all the varmints in the area and transported them to the wilder areas of the state.  That was several years ago and the critters have made a hearty comeback.

You can tell by his eyes--
he's contemplating evil.

So nightly, they use our back fence as a thoroughfare, chatter amongst themselves and generally define the word “nuisance.”  Cleo doesn’t like it.  She doesn’t like it at all.  So she gets out of her bed, goes to the French door in our bedroom and weaves in and out of the floor length, light reducing blinds, making them rattle like castanets.  At this point, I tell her “No!” and “Go back to bed!”  Which she readily does, but John has at least partly woken up. 

The second rising coincides with my own nightly bladder needs.  That works out well.  I let Cleo out, do my thing and let her back in.  The timing is usually perfect.

The third alarm is thanks to Boris.  He is the dog who lives next door.  Boris has a face and a personality only a mother could love.  He and Cleo took an instant dislike to each other.  Good fences may make good neighbors, but no amount of sniffing through the fence, meeting in person or diplomatic summits will keep Boris from charging the fence in full growl every time he goes outside.  Most mornings, he goes outside at 5:30.  Though she has learned not to bark at him when she’s out in the yard, Cleo still hates the idea that he is out there unanswered and unchallenged every morning.  The minute she hears him, she makes a dash for the door.  Rattle, scrape, whine.  “Go back to bed!”  But John is awake.  Once awake, he is composing.  Once composing, he’s got to get up.  As we often don’t go to bed until one or two in the morning, this creates a marked sleep deficit.  Cleo, on the other hand, now curls up into a tight little ball and snoozes until ten.

Realizing that she has trained us better than we have trained her, we have begun limiting her time on our bed.  We used to let her come up once the sun was up, and while that encourages her to sleep peacefully, it makes John claustrophobic.  She wedges herself between us or presses against the back of his knees, tightening the covers until they feel like a mummy’s winding sheet.  She also developed a neat little trick.  Learning that I allowed her on the bed after she went outside to pee, she started asking to go out, but once out the door, she would turn around and immediately want back in and onto the bed.  She is so smart!  This morning she pulled the stunt on me twice.  What can I say?  I was sleepy.  It’s a lame excuse, but the only one I’ve got…

The barking is an entirely different story.  The cause used to be Boris, but as I’ve said, she’s gotten over that pretty much.  Now, it’s every other dog in the neighborhood and anyone passing on the street.  She has two kinds of barks: One says, “I hear you!  Can you hear me?”  The other says: “Someone’s outside!  Alarm!  Alarm!”  It’s possible that I’m wrong about that one.  It could just as easily be, “I hear you passing!  Here I am!  Come admire me!”  She loves (loves) to greet people and be ohed and ahed over. 

Houses in our neighborhood are close together and a dog barking can be extremely annoying.  A couple weeks ago, we were chatting with our favorite neighbor.  He lives two houses over.  As we talked about the goings-on in our lives, he said, “Wow, have you heard that dog barking lately?”  John and I looked at each other and gulped.  “Ah, that could be Cleo,” I said.  “Oh, no, no,” said our neighbor quickly.  “I’m sure it’s not.  I’ve heard Cleo bark and this is a different sound.  Much deeper.”  I think he was just being polite.  I’m told Bedlingtons in general have a deep bark.  I know Cleo’s is surprisingly deep.

We have tried multiple techniques to teach Cleo to stop barking so much.  We have done the Cesar Milan hiss.  We’ve clapped at her.  We have chased her around with a spray bottle.  This worked for a while, then she turned it into a game, bouncing back and forth barking and trying to catch the spray in her teeth.  We tried taking her outside only on a leash, snapping the chain collar when she barked.  That’s fine outside.  How about inside?  Does she live on a leash?

We finally got so desperate that we went to our local Pet Food Express and asked for some suggestions.  The impressively knowledgeable manager ran through many ideas.  He showed us bark collars, but then discouraged their use.  You can’t control them, he said.  You can’t choose when a bark might be appropriate and when it isn’t.  You also can’t train your dog to stop barking on command because the collar reacts every time the dog barks.  Then he took us through the training collars.  He pointed out the citronella collars, the ones that spray a burst of citronella scented liquid into the dog’s face, but told us that the collar he uses on his own two dogs, with great success, was an adjustable strength shock collar.  You can dial the strength of the stimulus or you can use only a tone to warn the dog.  In just a few days, he had trained his dogs not to bark and not to chase his cats.  He swore by the thing.

So we bought one.  The thing is, you have to be willing to use it for it to have any chance of being effective.  When we got home, I unpacked it, charged it, turned it on, put it on Cleo, took it off and left it sitting on a shelf for a couple months.  It was during this time that we tried the other anti-bark techniques.  As the barking ramped up, we decided to give the collar a real try.  We fit it to Cleo and took the plunge: We trimmed the collar to size.  Before putting it on her, I gripped the electrodes with one hand and pushed the Go button.  Have you ever shuffled across a rug in stocking feet then kissed someone?  It’s not pleasant, but it’s not really painful.  That’s what it felt like.

News flash: The collar doesn’t work if it’s too loose.  Go figure; the electrodes actually have to touch the dog.  I can’t stand putting it on her tight enough to work.

Yesterday, Cleo was barking and barking and barking.  Everything set her off.  The neighbor pulls into her driveway.  Bark.  A soldier walks down the street talking on his cell phone.  Bark.  A dog five streets over yaps.  Bark.  In desperation, I put the collar on and tightened it until it signaled that it was on properly.  The thing is, when I had it on too loose, I had to turn the strength of the shock up to 6 before she noticed that something was happening at all.  I didn’t realize that now that it was on right, I needed to turn the impulse down.  She barked.  I said “Hush!”  She continued to bark.  I pushed Go.

Cleo jumped straight up into the air, squeaked in surprise and dashed over to me.  In a second she was on my lap, leaning in to me, her head pressed under my chin. 

It’s likely I’ll never use the collar again.  Let her bark…

Allowing Ourselves to Reach

Elizabethan Stage @ OSF

Last week, a friend and I spent the week in Ashland, Oregon attending a workshop for teachers put on by the world renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  We spent nearly fifty hours attending classes and performances. It was an extraordinary experience on so many levels.  Both of us came away with a greater appreciation for our school, our colleagues, and the lives that we live.

Besides us, there were eighteen other participants divided between theatre teachers and English teachers.  Two women attended the first day of workshops, then disappeared, reemerging only for the five theatrical performances the group experienced.  On the other end of the spectrum was the first year teacher whose birthday-present request of her parents was half the workshop fee while she paid for the other half out of her own pocket.  A more joyful, committed and engaged classmate would be hard to find, in spite of the fact that she battled a migraine on the last day. 

The workshop facilitators were unfailingly patient and generous, far more patient than I would have been in their shoes.  Their murmured yet enthusiastic encouragements of “Excellent!  Good!” often made me laugh, but I have vowed to adopt both their words and their attitudes.  After all, if they could stay so upbeat in the face of some surprising ignorance from adults who purportedly teach this stuff, then I can certainly remain so with adolescents.  That is definitely not to say that all the participants were uninformed about theatre, Shakespeare or teaching practices.  The majority, in fact, were not only very knowledgeable, they were funny, insightful and deeply inspiring. 

Several told stories of teaching in districts so desperately underfunded that the only way to have the most basic supplies in their classrooms was to purchase them from their personal funds.  They spoke of administrators so rigid that all teachers were required to teach the same subject matter within the same window of time with no room to follow student interest or to explore thoughts or ideas that arose during discussion, and with no acknowledgement of the fact that a class of advanced students would inevitably move at a different pace than a class of English language learners.  They described the non-stop grading that accompanies teaching loads of two hundred forty students.  They talked of reaching out to engage the boy who showed so much promise, but who was being actively courted by a gang; the girl who lived in her car and who wondered what relevance Hamlet could possibly have for her; the kids who arrived at school hungry every day for whom the concept of homework was a joke—how do you do homework when home is not a safe place to be?

The fact is, of course, that Shakespeare has profound relevancy today even, or perhaps especially, for students suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”  Hamlet may not live in his car, but he is a very young man who is completely alone in the world.  His father has just died.  His mother has no time for or interest in him; she is too besotted with her new husband.  His girlfriend blabs all his secrets to her father who turns around and reports them to Hamlet’s new stepfather.  And to top it all off, in order to prove that he is a “real man,” he is expected to commit murder.  He might as well live in his car.  At the very least, he would understand that young girl’s sense of isolation, meaninglessness and complete absence of any kind of security.

My friend and I kept reflecting on our own students, so eager to learn, so thirsty for the next idea, the next discussion.  How can one fail to appreciate the freedom and flexibility we are afforded to design our own curricula and set our own pace.  Last year during the popular uprisings in the Middle East, the ninth grade history teacher simply dropped his planned curriculum in order to focus on the history being made at the moment.  His students will never forget that.  How could he have done that if he had been required to stay within a fixed timeframe or to teach only what would “be on the test”?

At the end of the week, we drove the seven hours home.  We were literally minutes away from my friend’s apartment when my cell phone rang.  It was a colleague calling to tell me that she had just received a call from one of our students, a young woman in considerable distress.  Her home life had deteriorated rapidly over the weeks since summer vacation began and she felt under attack there.  She was, she said, hiding in some bushes and had to get away.  What should she do?  My colleague was calling to tell me what actions she had taken to help the student feel safe.

Welcome home.  Yes, welcome to the 24/7/365 anxiety over the health and well-being of a couple hundred teenagers.  But far more important, welcome home to a team of loving, dedicated human beings for whom teaching is so much more than imparting knowledge.  Teaching means dedicating oneself to the lives and safety of the children in our care, whether it is July or February.  No one can do that alone; it does take a village.  It takes a global village of every human being, ready to support, guide and care about every child and adolescent in every corner of the world.

My village has the added benefit of containing many remarkable human beings and one extraordinary dog.  My husband, though somewhat anxious about the prospect, was a wonderful daddy to Cleo during the week I was away.  But, oh!  What a thing it is to be greeted by an exuberant Bedlington Terrier.  With her arms wrapped around my neck, Cleo spread liberal amounts of puppy saliva over my face.  Finally, afraid of suffocating (her tongue kept plugging up my nose and I was understandably afraid to breath through my mouth), I peeled her off of me and we chased each other around the house before settling down to some good snuggling.

Just because billions of human beings do it every year doesn’t mean that growing up is an easy thing to do.  Growing up is hard; growing up well is even harder.  Training a dog, spending a week without your mom, being separated from your true love, learning to read and understand Shakespeare—none of these things is easy, but they are all worth doing for the richness they can bring to our lives. 

One morning when we were all bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, one of the workshop facilitators told us about Dr. Jerry Turner, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival who transformed the company from semi-professional to  world quality.  She asked him, she told us, why people should still perform and attend Shakespeare’s plays when they can be such a challenge to understand.  This was his reply:  “We need things to reach for.  If we don’t have things to reach for our lives get filled with things that are meaningless—that are momentarily distracting but lack exalting possibilities.”  May we all dare to be exalted.

Maybe Queen Elizabeth wore those collars
because she couldn't help licking her stitches, either.

Lessons I Learned From My Dog: Part 2

Even beauty queens
like to dig.

Humans make friendship far more complicated than it really needs to be.

My husband loves another woman.  Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those awful true confessions that you find on the magazine racks near grocery store checkouts.  No, I recognize that I am ridiculously fortunate to be loved, respected and admired by someone for whom I feel all those same emotions even more than I did the day we married.  But he does love his writing partner as a friend, and together they have created a dynamic and compelling series for the small screen which neither of them could have accomplished alone.  Yet periodically they suffer from a failure to communicate and one or the other of them is left with the feeling that their fur was brushed in the wrong direction.  John spends several hours brooding about it all (and so does his partner, most likely), some terse emails or texts are exchanged, and ultimately they talk it out. 

Oftentimes, I think that communication gaps happen when old personal baggage obscures the present moment.  Many years ago, I read that we expect in others the behaviors we exhibit ourselves, whether or not we like or even acknowledge those behaviors.  This is a concept that can be pretty hard to stomach.  It’s uncomfortable to accept that when I anticipate rudeness or dismissiveness from others, it’s because I tend towards rudeness and dismissiveness myself.  Often, though, when I look closely, I see that there is more truth to the adage than one might imagine. On the other hand, you can’t deny that our experiences shape our expectations.

Ram Dass, the wonderful psychologist, teacher and popularizer of Eastern thought, used to talk about the ways in which we filter our observations.  You could walk down a street, he would say, looking for a bookstore.  When you got to the end of the street, a stranger might ask you if there was a donut shop on that street.  You would have no idea whatsoever; you weren’t looking for a donut shop.   Honestly, there might be a baker’s dozen of them for all you know.

Kilroy was here.

Aren’t our filters created by our past experiences?  In my tween years, I ran afoul of my class’s Queen Bee.  Tired of sharing popularity, she embarked on a propaganda campaign designed to turn me into the sixth grade’s be-cootied outcast.  With an efficiency and brutality that would have done justice to the Gestapo, she created a mini-Reich in which no girl felt safe unless she played along with the Fuhrer.  The boys, somehow exempt from the threat, were befuddled by the whole thing.  The girls, subtle in their cruelty, simply acted as if I had ceased to exist.  Aside from occasionally hiding my belongings inside the music teacher’s grand piano, they refused to acknowledge my presence in the world.  One day, for some reason I can no longer recall, one of my former friends and I found ourselves alone on the playground.  We stood facing each other.  I suddenly realized that she looked absolutely miserable.  “Why are you guys being so mean to me?” I asked her.

“We have to be,” she whispered.  “If I’m nice to you, she’ll turn everyone against me, too.”  Suddenly, she looked hopeful.  “I can be your friend away from school, though.  I just can’t talk to you here.”

It’s possible that the years have altered my memory of my response.  Though the words I remember speaking might have been colored by too many movies, I know that the message I recall is the one I delivered at the time: “I can’t have a sometime friend.  You are either my friend, or you are not.”

As unbelievably lame as it sounds, even to me, I still have difficulty trusting groups of women.  I expect to feel abject humiliation as they band together, leaving me on the outside.  For this reason, I tend to lay back when first meeting groups of people.  I keep my thoughts to myself and present a façade of confidence and unflappability.  Of course, what this usually gets read as is snobbishness and judgementalism.  Oy!  And, yes, I realize that shyness, like worry, is an inherited trait and at times I encourage myself to overcome my genes rather than my experiences.  Somehow it makes me feel a bit better to couch it this way—genetics rather than a forty-year-old scar.

When my niece was in sixth grade, she had her own Queen Bee experience.  A new student joined her class and quickly culled a court from the previously harmonious group using the ancient techniques of mockery and meanness.  After months of suffering during which she tried indirectly to counteract the Queen Bee’s effects, my niece reached breaking point on the playground during recess. 

By the way, those of you who think that most learning takes place in the classroom need to do some hard pondering of your own school days.  What are your strongest recollections?  The classroom lessons?  Or the schoolyard interactions?  Don’t you go back to the boy you kissed on the jungle gym?  To the joyous competition of who could climb highest on the peg board?  To the wind on your face as the swing flew you up to the clouds?  For every memory of the classroom, I bet there are five of the playground.  For me, that ratio doesn’t change until I get to graduate school, but that’s a contemplation for another time.

Anyway, so during recess, my niece reached her breaking point as she watched the Queen Bee torture a confused and defenseless boy.  My niece marched up to the girl, pointed her finger in her face and shouted, “You have got to stop being so mean!  You cannot treat people this way!”  Then she spun on her heel and marched away.  Okay, she may have marred the effect a little bit by bursting into tears as she spun (a girl after my own heart).  I’d love to tell you that the class rallied after this showdown and everyone ended up the best of friends, but this blog is intended to be nonfiction.

Naps are SO important.

And what does this have to do with my dog?  We humans make friendship so complicated.  For Cleo, it is all so simple.  Every being in the world is her friend, for now or for a lifetime.  It doesn’t matter how many legs; whether they talk, meow, caw or bark; whether they come bearing gifts or arrive empty handed; whether they be barely within sight or immediately to hand.  This morning on our walk, we noticed two women coming from the other end of the street.  Though she’d never met them before, Cleo was so excited to become friends that I finally had her sit down next to me so that she wouldn’t strangle herself in her eagerness to become acquainted.  At times, she’ll bark at a distant dog as if to say, “Hello!  Here I am!”  On the beach yesterday, her mantra became “Touch noses.  Chase me!  That was fun!”

A couple of weeks ago, Cleo gave me heart failure when she bounded off our front deck and out into the street to greet two passersby.  She cavorted and jumped up on them as they cooed over her.  I ran after her.  “Sorry about that,” I said to the couple.  “She’s never met a stranger!”  The woman laughed, but the man looked at me in horror.  “Really?” he exclaimed.  “What do you do, keep her locked in the house all the time?”  What experiences was he filtering through?

There is such a pureness and simplicity about the way Cleo engages with the world.  Her attitude is unflagging: “I think you are wonderful and I know you will enjoy me, too.”  From time to time she becomes over-exuberant with our cats and they soft paw her on the nose (or sometimes double paw her—left, right, bam, bam).  She is never offended or psychologically scarred—she just gives them a little more room.  She is unselfconsciously who she is, and her delight is in the creatures around her.

There is a profound lesson in that.

Friends come in all
shapes and sizes.

Freedom's Just Another Word

There is a sense of freedom that comes with the summer months.  When I was young, summer seemed to stretch on forever in a delicious amalgam of warm days, humid nights, fireflies, staying up till the wee hours, sleeping late and consuming piles of books as I lay on the back porch or rocked in the hammock. To this day, when I think of A Tale of Two Cities, I can feel vinyl sticking to my sweaty legs and smell the faintly dusty aroma of the cushions on my mother’s patio furniture.  Lord of the Rings evokes the knobbly imprint of hammock knots.  In the days when there were three channels to watch on television, you could count on a good movie late at night.  I don’t know why that’s not the case anymore. I always experienced such a joyous sense of liberation as I walked out of the last exam of the school year and into the embrace of Sherlock Holmes on the late, late show.

I haven’t experienced that feeling of liberation for ages, but I still anticipate it each spring as the school year winds down.  Summer in Monterey, California, of course, is a completely different season than summer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.  Mark Twain once wrote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”  A hundred miles to the south, Monterey has a climate mighty similar to that of the city of the Golden Gate.  The downside is that a June day is more likely to be 59 degrees with pea soup fog than 85 and sunny.  The upside is that we sleep with a comforter all year ‘round and the fall is three months of Indian Summer. 

But even though I no longer experience the tingling liberation that accompanies the last exam, even though I never leave home without a jacket, summer nonetheless brings a sense of freedom.  This has nothing, I assure you, to do with any teacher clichés.  A friend once told me that when she began student teaching, her teacher-trainer said to her, “There are three great reasons to be a teacher: June, July and August.”  I mean, really!  If that’s the best you can do, you’re just a walking argument for forced retirement.  This is not to say that I’m so noble or above the fray that I don’t celebrate a vacation from grading papers or the daily dose of teenage angst.  I willingly admit that’s part of the freedom.  Periodically, I need a break from listening. 

I love teenagers, though.  Our head of school likes to tell parents that while he would willingly go back to the days when his sons were four or five, the dean of students loves teenagers and has little to no interest in tots.  It’s true; I just don’t get them.  I mean, the concept of Blues Clues is incredibly cool, but a blue paw print can carry a conversation only so far.

The freedom of summer now has more to do with a looseness of time and place.  Maybe I’ll decide, when I wake up in the morning, that I won’t go in to school today.  I don’t, but I could.  Even more important than that, I can stay up late and sleep in.  If it is only possible that I can stay up till 2 AM and get up at 9 AM, I am a contented critter.  Push that to 10 AM and I’m delirious.  The long hours of sunlight give the sense of more time in the day.  Pick up a pleasure book at 6 PM and it feels hedonistic—you could be getting more work done; after all, the sun is still fairly high in the sky.  Want to do some puppy training at midnight?  Why not?!  We’re both awake and full of energy.

Cleo definitely enjoys the summer schedule.  She loves the snuggle potential of the more relaxed mornings.  She has embraced the summer routine: sleep until 7:30 or 8 (there has to be some light coming through the bedroom blinds), climb out of crate, stretch all four limbs thoroughly, shake out (being sure to rattle collar loudly), walk to Mama’s side of the bed and place paws on edge (push mattress if she hasn’t woken up due to rattle—see above), get lifted onto bed, position self at center of bed between Mom and Dad, curl into tight ball, go back to sleep for as long as possible (when Mom and Dad get up, curl tighter and squeeze eyes closed and they will let you sleep longer).  Eventually, she gets up, we walk to a park or the beach, and she comes home finally ready for breakfast.

She also loves the greater freedom at school.  With no students on campus, Cleo can be off leash more and can come with me almost everywhere I go.  Usually when we arrive at school, she waits politely in the back seat of the car while I gather my bags and attach the leash before giving her permission to jump out.  The other day, I gave her the “Okay” to get out without putting the leash on first.  She cocked her head and looked at me with an “Are you sure?” kind of expression.  Then she hopped out and trotted beside me to the door of the library.  As I unlocked the door, she began to walk away toward the Quad and the lawn.  There was a twinkle of adolescent rebellion in her eye.  She climbed the steps to the Quad, then looked back over her shoulder at me.  “Go ahead,” I said, and went inside.  I unlocked my office and dropped my bags at the desk, then went back to the library door to see what Cleo was up to.  She was sitting right by the door, gazing anxiously up at the window.  I opened it and she came in on the double. 

After checking that all her toys were where she had left them, she strolled out of the office to roam the library.  Doug was working on the computers upstairs and I heard a surprised, “Well, hi there!” come from his direction. 

“Everything okay up there?” I called out.  “She’s not bothering you, is she?”

“She’s great,” he assured me.  “I was crawling under my desk looking for a cable and she snuck up behind me and started licking my ear.”

There are lots of ways to share your sunshine.

Other folks bring their dogs to campus during the summer, so Cleo has made friends with Cowboy and Georgia (and now makes a beeline for their office whenever we pass it) and has grown less intimidated by Fiona who feels it is her job to herd the wild rabbits and to pee on top of Cleo’s pee whenever she can, even if she has just recently emptied her bladder. 

Cleo keeps a vigilant eye
on outdoor goings on.

One of Cleo’s favorite activities is to race back and forth across the Quad, aiming for at least four laps to each one of mine.  She bounces, ears flapping, from breezeway to lawn and back again, making brief detours to investigate an interesting smell now and then. 

If we’re the only ones in the library, she carries her squeaky monkey (a gift from a parent) just outside the office door and entertains herself happily.  Occasionally, she tours the floor to ceiling windows that comprise the library’s outer walls.  She effects a perimeter check for arriving gardeners, passing colleagues or unruly gophers.  When she’s sleepy, she climbs onto the chair in my office, observing the falcons that fly over the canyon until her eyes close.

It’s a good life, but I’m not envious of her as I answer emails, write new student welcome letters or revise informational materials.  I’m enjoying the freedom summer still brings, but it is only made sweeter by the responsibility that preceded it and that will surely follow.  Is it true that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose?  At the moment, Cleo and I--we miss our students.

To see Cleo in action, click Cleo at the Beach or Cleo Loves Digging.

Travel Expands the Mind, They Say.

It’s been quiet around school these last couple of weeks and Cleo has been a bit lonely.  She’s used to having a couple hundred people on campus.  There are always students on the grass beyond her window or folks passing to and fro outside our office door.  Since Commencement, though, the lawn is empty and the traffic in the library has dwindled to nearly nothing.  On the other hand, she has very much enjoyed having full run of the library, exploring the stacks, unearthing the occasional long forgotten, dried out highlighter, climbing the stairs to the third floor Mac lab to poke her nose through the railing for a bird’s eye view of the librarian’s desk.  No matter where she is, the moment she hears the clack of the library door opening, she rushes to greet the newcomer like a prisoner in a Siberian gulag.  She is especially happy when Carol, our librarian, sorts back issues of magazines or shelves books because she can follow her around from one floor to another and back again.

This past week was particularly difficult for Cleo because I was out of town for three days and her social calendar was reduced even further.  My husband did his best to keep her entertained, taking her to the beach every morning, playing ball in the backyard, giving her extended snuggles before bedtime.  He told me that a friend of ours came over to the house and Cleo practically drowned her in spit, so effusive and unrelenting was her greeting.  It occurred to me that Cleo’s sense of family is unusually large.  Yes, my husband and I are very much at the center, but concentric rings define Cleo’s family with our late-teen son and our cats, our twenty-something daughter and her boyfriend, our favorite neighbors and my husband’s writing partner, the teacher of our obedience class, a few dogs, and a couple dozen individuals at school all comprising members of her extended family.  And it’s clear from the way she relates to all of these folks that she sees them not as friends, which is how she sees just about anyone else she meets regardless of species, but as relatives.

Bradshaw's new book.

In his really wonderful new book Dog Sense, biologist John Bradshaw explains the recent research that proves that dogs aren’t really pack-oriented, but rather family-oriented.   Dogs are descended from the grey wolf, but began their separation about ten thousand years ago.   The wolves who became domesticated were those who could not only bear, but actually enjoy being in the presence and company of humankind.  It is from these that today’s dogs are descended.  Today’s wolves, on the extreme other hand, come from ancestors that were so anti-human, so reclusive and wild, that they were able to survive the concerted eradication efforts of generations upon generations of frightened anti-wolf human beings. 

Wolf research didn’t really come into its own until wolves had become so rare that one of the few places they could be studied was in zoos.  Unfortunately, through a complete lack of understanding of how wolves operate, zoos would gather individuals from many different areas, then throw them together thinking they would form a pack.  As biologists studied the zoo groups, they noted that the wolves constantly fought to maintain a hierarchy.  They dubbed the top wolf or wolves the “Alpha,” the bottom wolf or wolves the “Omega” and theorized that dominant behavior kept the Alphas on top and submissive behavior kept the Omegas alive.

What the zoo biologists failed to understand, however, is that in the wild, packs are actually made up exclusively of a single family and fights for status are completely unheard of.  The so-called Alphas are, in fact, the parents of all of the other wolves in the pack, and so are given deference automatically. The only time wolves actually fight for “dominance” is when one family encounters a member or members of another.

A particularly lovely point Bradshaw makes is that through the thousands of years of human-dog companionship, dogs have shown that they are highly unusual among non-human animals in their ability to form family bonds with a variety of species.  When we humans refer to ourselves as our dog’s mom or dad (or grandmother), we’re not being fanciful, we’re being accurate, certainly as far as our dogs identify us.  As if we needed another reason to love them!

So Cleo does see my husband and me, a few dogs, our two cats, our own kids, some students and adults at school, and a few other folks as her family.  Which got me to thinking this past week.  My puppy’s family is so much larger than my own.

As I mentioned, I was out of town for three days last week.  In fact, I traveled thirty hours round trip in order to be in Bethesda, Maryland for forty hours.  Granted, the way the flights were originally set up, I should have traveled about half that amount of time, but the journey home turned into a twenty-one hour saga thanks to late planes, missed connections and San Francisco fog.  Had I known, before setting out, that my return trip would be so fraught, would I still have gone?  In a heartbeat.

The purpose of my cross-country junket was my only niece’s graduation from middle school.  For months before I went, my husband enjoyed saying to me, with only slightly exaggerated disbelief, “You’re flying three thousand miles for a junior high graduation?!”  Yes.  Yes, that is correct.  Even counting every member of my extended family, it is not as large as Cleo’s, though, granted, that could be because my sense of family is more narrow than hers.  Still, my family of origin now consists of my two sisters and me, so any chance to celebrate a milestone with them is an opportunity not to be missed.

My sisters are less than two years apart in age.  As they were growing up, especially in their tween or early teen years, this led to some friction.  One of my favorite stories about them is The Story of the Note.  My sisters shared a room (which is odd since I, the youngest by several years, had a room to myself).  They slept in matching canopy beds.  This kind of bed has a post at each corner to elevate the canopy, and a newel that fits into each post to hold the canopy in place.  The hollow in the post, into which the newel would fit, provided a perfect “mail box” for my sisters who, when they were refusing to speak to each other, would leave little messages in each other’s bed post.  One day, my middle sister left my oldest sister this note:  “Dear Kathy, I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate you.  Love, Jan.”

My sister, Jan, meets Cleo.

As we grew up, we drifted geographically apart, Kathy moving to Colorado, Jan staying on the East Coast but migrating south from our Pennsylvania hometown to Washington, DC, me ending up in Monterey, California.  Our parents’ deaths left us with no central gathering place for holidays, so the three of us were together at weddings and rare special events.  It was more common to meet by twos at one home or another.  I have always loved my sisters; they’re my sisters, after all.  What a delight to be reminded of how much I like them as well.  The forty hours we were together were filled with lots of talking, laughter, easy enjoyment of each other, passions in common, obsessions in common, neuroses in common (always easier to bear when shared).  We celebrated successes, mourned losses, and comingled kvetchings. 

And my lovely niece, full of joy and grace?  One has to guard against the temptation, with an only niece, to overindulge a sense of her perfection.  There is no doubt that she is beautiful, oh-so-smart, hardworking, dedicated, that she is a deeply good person.  But how would I have known that everyone from the head of school to her eighth grade teachers to her kindergarten teacher think she is all those things, too, if I hadn’t flown three thousand miles for a junior high graduation?

Cleo’s extended family is a gift.  But when the family you have is choice, it doesn’t matter if it’s small.

Baby Steps and New Beginnings

Last week saw both Commencement and Graduation: Commencement at my school, Graduation for Cleo and me from beginner’s class.  The last couple months of a school year are always particularly intense and usually culminate for me in an everything’s-done-and-I-finally-have-some-down-time illness of one kind or another.  If I could just remind myself that the end of the school year only opens the door for the press of preparation for the next one, I might remember that I don’t have time to be sick and save myself the boredom of being stuck in bed.  But I’m at least upright now and neither Cleo, quietly chewing on a toy nearby, nor my computer is likely to be disturbed by a little coughing.

Cleo at School

I had never been to a dog training graduation before last Monday.  Honestly, I’ve never done formal dog training before Cleo.  It’s the goal of her becoming a certified therapy dog that prompted me to seek the counsel of a professional.  I had no idea it would be so much fun.  It reminds me a lot of acting—lots of criticism and correction, brief moments of praise.  I spent the first twenty-five plus years of my working life as a professional actor, so I feel right at home in this environment.  Of course, Cleo is so bright and excited about learning that she adores the classes.  She struts around the training track like the blue blood that she is, kicking out her legs like the perfect show dog.  Given the fact that all of her siblings who show, which is most of them, have earned their championship points, strutting around the Del Monte Kennel Club classroom at the Monterey County Fairgrounds should come naturally to her.  I’m the one who has to work at it.

Three weeks ago, at the class the week before graduation, Cleo was amazing.  She is the youngest dog in the class, barely six months old when we started, and she is full of energy and curiosity.  Sometimes this causes an attention span deficit, but at that last class, she embodied the words “concentration” and “focus.”  About three-quarters of the way through the class, we were practicing the down stay.  One of the student teams, an Italian Greyhound and his man, had struggled with “down” for the entire two months of the course.  The IG simply has an aversion to putting his elbows on the floor.  Cleo has no such qualms.  Usually when we are practicing the five minute down stay, she sacks out on her side and takes a nap.  That dog can sleep anywhere.  It’s a gift.  She always lays herself out in the same way: flat on her side, back straight, tail gently curved, all four legs sticking out bolt straight in front of her, a canine model of a rectangle.  One time as we practiced, the fellow next to us, the dad of a Golden Retriever, looked over at Cleo and said, “Oh look.  Your dog got run over by a steam-roller.” 

Anyway, it being the final class before graduation, the teacher wanted to make a last ditch, all-out effort to help the IG get over his phobia and take a load off.  Really, it was a pitiful thing to see him stretched out in a crouch, front legs trembling as he tried to do what his dad wanted, while desperately fighting against elbow contamination.  For at least ten minutes we were in that down stay.  Not once, not once, did Cleo squirm or try to get up.  She didn’t even lie down on her side.  She simply attentively stayed.  Meanwhile, the team next to us, an Australian Shepherd and her woman, quickly became bored.  The woman started chatting with anyone within range.  The Aussie got up to wander around.  A tug on the leash brought the woman’s attention, at least temporarily, back to her dog.  It didn’t last and the Aussie was up again.  Cleo gazed for a time at the wandering dog, then looked back to me with a smug expression.  You’d never catch her wandering around like that.  She all but rolled her eyes.  By this point, the Aussie’s mom was completely turned around with her back to her dog.  The Aussie had decided this was a good time to visit Cleo.  She loomed over the puppy.  Cleo looked up at her calmly.  When the Aussie leaned down to touch noses, Cleo pushed her away as if to say, “You are gonna be in so much trouble!”  Just at that moment, the trainer looked up from the IG and snapped, “Get that dog away from that Bedlington!”  I’m only mildly embarrassed to report that Cleo and I both snickered a little bit.  It’s hard to be gracious when your dog is perfect. 

Based on that last class, I was feeling pretty confident going into the graduation ceremonies.  We arrived at class five minutes early.  Everyone else had arrived twenty minutes early.  The testing was already underway.  Everything was different.  Humans and dogs were clustered in chairs on the opposite side of the room from our usual training area.  A small ring had been set up and one team of our classmates was going through the paces: Heal, right turn, about turn, slow, fast, normal pace.  A bolt of nerves shot through me.  I asked a classmate what Cleo and I had missed and she directed me to a registration table.  We signed in and got our number.  We would be going last.  There were fifteen teams ahead of us and Cleo was bouncing out of her skin with the excitement and newness of it all.  I’m sure my discomfort did nothing to help her calm down.  She wanted to greet every dog, jump on every human.  There were kids in the room who had never been present before.  Kids!  Cleo’s favorites!  I debated—should I take her outside to blow off some steam?  But I didn’t know how many teams had already gone.  What if we were called and Cleo missed her chance to graduate?  Every time I thought about going out, it seemed as if it was almost our turn.  At least, I thought, I can walk her around our usual ring so we can practice and calm down a bit.  That used up about twenty minutes.

Cleo sometimes refuses to pee at school.  I realize this seems like something of a digression, but bear with me here.  The peeing thing is not, I promise, because I have made the mistake of taking her out to pee and then dragging her immediately back inside.  We always play after she pees, sometimes for half an hour.  But there will be days she shows no interest in going from the time we leave the house until we get back home.  Then she’ll rush outside and squat like she’s desperate.  Okay, so graduation day was one of those days.  There had been no peeing since 8 AM.  It was now 6:45 PM.  So when Cleo started urgently pacing back and forth on the mat, sniffing the ground, I had a pretty good idea of what was on her mind.  Did I immediately run her outside?  No, I dithered.  And as I stood there dithering, she squatted and peed on the mat.  If you are saying, “Good God, woman, what is the matter with you?” I completely agree with you.  I can only reply, “I have no idea.”  I just don’t know what comes over me in situations like this, when I feel stupid and out of my element.  It’s as if my autonomy and good sense simply desert me.  At school, I make tough decisions left and right.  I have no trouble being assertive.  But put me in a world where I am ignorant of the customs, expectations, mores, and I’m a dithering basket case.  But I’m also a huge believer in Beginner’s Mind.  The humbling moments are good for us.  Like the moment the trainer stopped in mid conversation to shout across the room, “Mom!  I knew she was going to do that!  How come you didn’t?”  Um, I did?  I was just being too stupid to do anything about it?

Our turn finally came.  We were complemented on our healing.  Stand for inspection went about as could be expected—one jump up and several attempts to taste the hand of the judge.  Our finish was lovely, a tidy turn around and perfectly square sit.  We joined five other teams for the group exercises: sit stay and down stay.  We’ve got this one nailed, I thought to myself.  By the third time I had to make Cleo lie down again and the second time I had to stop her from visiting the German Shepherd next to us, I was a tad less confident.  To add insult to injury, the German Shepherd had the same smug look on his face that Cleo had worn just the week before.  I didn’t dare look at the Shepherd’s dad.  We scored 140 out of 160 points.  We didn’t even place in the top four.  What would Cleo’s siblings think about that performance? 

One of my colleagues, Pam, is a very experienced dog trainer.  She attends the advanced class with the same teacher, and the next day she asked how we had done.  I told her the whole gory story.  She laughed and said, “Let me tell you about my weekend.”  On Saturday, she and her Corgi Lizzie (whose name has been changed to protect the four-legged) had gone somewhere near Fresno to compete in a dog trial.  Her Corgi, she reminded me, actually holds a title in these trials.  They entered the ring with style and Lizzie sat attentively at her mom’s heels.  They got the go ahead, and Pam said brightly, “Lizzie, heel!”  Pam stepped out smartly only to realize, three steps later, that she was on her own.  She looked back.  Lizzie gazed up at her.  “You’re allowed one extra command,” Pam told me, “so I said firmly, ‘Lizzie, heel!’”  Pam ended up walking the entire course by herself, her Corgi obstinately watching her the entire way.  “I think it was just too hot for her,” Pam said, shrugging.  I felt a lot better.

And so, Graduation week culminated in Commencement.  As I’ve said, the last couple months of the school year are intense in my position.  This year, for many reasons, was particularly challenging.  One of those reasons was the down-to-the-wire nail biter question of whether one of our seniors would be able to graduate or not.  Emily is the last person a casual observer would peg for depression.  She is beautiful, talented, unfailingly cheerful and wittier than a person her age has any right to be. She took up residence in my heart the first month of her freshman year and has had squatters’ rights there ever since.  Last November, everything started to fall apart.  For no reason that she can pinpoint, she spiraled into depression and couldn’t find her way out.  She tried to keep her misery hidden, but finally the mask slipped, fell and shattered.  She could barely get out of bed let alone focus on homework or completing projects for her classes. 

The compassion of my colleagues can’t be overstated.  They supported Emily, extended deadlines, waited, extended the deadlines again.  Emily’s family rallied around her.  She plunged herself into counseling, accepted the idea of medication with a willingness I don’t often see.  She forthrightly said, “If it has even a chance of helping me feel better, I’ll try it.”  Over and over I told her that the school would give her time, that she could walk through Commencement with her class, but finish her requirements over the summer, receiving her diploma once she had gotten everything in, no harm, no foul.  And each time she told me, “No, I want to graduate on time.  I’m kinda done with high school.” 

When you are deeply depressed, it’s far easier to think about working than to actually get the work done.  It’s hard to concentrate, heck, it’s hard to get out of bed some days.  And motivation?  Never heard of it.  Emily’s teachers finally gave her until 1 PM the day before Commencement; they had to have time to read and evaluate the work she handed in.  She submitted the last piece of the last project with three minutes to spare. 

Our Commencement is held outside in the Quad formed by classrooms, the library and the theatre.  It overlooks wooded hills and a canyon through which peregrine falcons and vultures glide daily.  Late in the afternoon before Commencement, I was putting name labels on the audience seats so families would know which seats were theirs.  The Academic Dean sauntered from his office to find me.  “Emily’s cleared.  She can graduate,” he told me.  “Then I’ll go ahead and release her diploma,” I said, turning to tape a nametag to the seatback in front of me so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.  At that moment, a gust of wind whipped through Quad and one nametag, way on the opposite side of the Quad, ripped from its seatback and fluttered to the ground.  I ran over to pick it up before it could blow away.  Even before I turned it over, I knew what it would say.  It bore Emily’s last name.  I held it up for my colleague to see.  “Our little butterfly,” he said, “has flown away.”

And so she has.  She was radiant on Commencement day in the cap and gown she’d been too busy to pick up and iron because she’d been writing papers.  She hasn’t found her way completely out of the hole of depression, but she is getting better.  And whatever happens next, there is time for exploration and learning about life.  There is time for college later, when she’s ready.  She didn’t graduate at the top of her class, but that doesn’t make her any less special and it certainly doesn’t shake her place in my heart.

As for Cleo and me, we graduated, too.  And on Monday, we start the Intermediate Class.