get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see the dew bespangling herb and tree
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Leap!

January 24th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days | Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

This is one of my favorite photos of  Pundit– of the joy, focus, fierce athleticism, and fearlessness with which he flings himself out over the water in pursuit of whatever we threw.  I love the way his front legs cross as he flies.  

My dog trainer, Kevin Behan ’s, theory of dogs is all about energy, about getting your dog’s energy to flow to you and through you so that you are a conduit of its energy rather than a dampener of its energy, because if you are a dampener of its energy the dog will want to avoid you, especially at moments of high intensity or stress.  Although in the photo Pundit’s energy is flowing straight from us after something we have thrown, at the right moment a camera could just have easily captured that energy coming back to us at full speed and with the same full-on joy with which he leaves.  I used Kevin Behan’s book to train Pundit as a puppy, starting with his recommended teaching of fetch with two balls, and once Pundit caught on, we never looked back.  All of his energy for his whole life has been channelled into fetching and returning the ball and this has, as Kevin promised it would, made him an amazingly happy, stable, and outgoing dog, even though I am a lazy dog trainer and because we never had much trouble with Pundit I never bothered to teach him regular training things like heel. 

Although Pundit would use his last ounce of energy to jump into the water any day, his days of such fantastic leaps are over; he is 12 years old now, and arthritis in his front legs leaves him barely able to walk some mornings.  And we have a new dog, Cholula, who is young and beautiful and strong, but who is the opposite of Pundit in so many ways; inhibited where he is uninhibited, high strung and nervous outside, where Pundit is perpetually open and relaxed.  Pundit has insisted on becoming my training partner for Cholula, eating half the hot dog pieces she gets on walks so she doesn’t attack other dogs, learning to bark on command while Cholula still just wrinkles her forehead and paws the ground.  He is an old dog learning new tricks, while she is a young dog who is slow to shed her limitations.   It’s so much better to be Pundit than Cholula!  I hope it is not too late for my new dog, or myself, to learn from his spirit.

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Fish tank

January 18th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

In our fish tank now, we have the four linia perugae we started with, the first five babies, adolescent now in size, and three new babies.  Alarmed at the pace at which the linia perugae are multiplying, I looked online for some predators of fry, and we now have seven black skirt tetras.  Whether or not they’ll eat newly hatched fry, I don’t know.  They aren’t bothering the three babies in the tank, but they were a week or so old before the tetras joined the community.  In addition to the tetras, we have six glo fish my kids picked out, two red, two orange, and two yellow.  I added six gold barbs (also picked by the children), and one Chinese algae fish, and our tank is a full community.  The fish are still getting used to each other, but their innate personalities have emerged.   The silver tetras, shaped like flat diamonds, with dramatic black fins above and below, police the tank, swimming back and forth in formation, nipping here and there, occasionally shoaling, which I love (I increased the school to  7 in the hopes they would do more).  The linia perugae remain the puppies of the community, friendly to all, swimming here there and everywhere and always flocking over to the glass when they see me.  The glo fish swim up towards the top of the tank, never in any particular formation, although the two yellow ones in chase each other around.  The barbs cluster together, first on one side of the tank, then behind the big castle, then in the center.  And the Chinese algae eater hides in one of the two castles between algae collecting forages towards the center of the tank, its body twisting and flicking up and down as it sucks on the stones or castle or glass.  The fish tank has a castle on either side, both of which have foliage around them; the big one has  a bunch of green that floats above it, while the little one has a different green plant growing in front of it, where the babies like to rest.  And I just planted a lovely silver and white plant in the center of the tank to distract from the heater behind it. 

My father had two fish tanks when I was little; a salt water tank and a fresh water tank.  He spent hours on them.  I never helped, although I dreamt of the fish sometimes, alarming dreams where the fish grew big and leapt from their tanks and crowded towards me.  I didn’t think I was interested in fish tanks until we got one at the request of my daughter.  A fascination lay dormant in me until I started one of these little worlds, so artificial and yet full of the essentials of the natural world; birth and death, competition, community.  As a parent, you impart what you impart when your kids are young, and it’s easy to think that you see while they are young what sticks and what does not.  But here I am, still discovering the influences of my father.   

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New

January 2nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

We got a fish tank for my daughter’s birthday and put it in our dining room.
A friend gave us four fish: linia parugiae, unassuming, silver-gray fish
that endeared themselves to me by immediately swimming to the glass of the tank when I approached, just as the dogs rouse themselves from the couches and walk over to me when I come downstairs.

Our dinner hour has become their dinner hour: they bunch together in the middle of the glass pane closest to our table as we sit and eat, eyes goggling, fins swiveling, willing us to come and let loose their flakes. Almost immediately, within days, we became companionable, these linia perugae, native to streams of the Dominican Republic, and I.

A couple of weeks later, my eye caught an extra flash of something in the tank as I sat next to them at the table, and I looked again, harder.
It was another one, a tiny sliver of a thing, smaller than a baby’s fingernail, transparent but fully there, swimming up against the safety of some seaweed. I looked harder and found three more. The fish had had babies. Where there had been four, we now had eight.

How can it be that these tinier than tiny fish, released from their mama’s belly into an environment approximate to their natural habitat only in that the temperature is kept at a tropical 75 degrees and there are stones below and water all around, swim, fully alive, ignored by their parent yet able to swim and find food and grow?

I imagine these tiny fish in streams in the Dominican Republic, and tiny fish like these in streams all over the world, the life in the water revealed in the tank in our dining room, in the babies who, now bigger, swim over to us with their parents in the evenings, expecting their food.

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