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Life, Death, and Polymorphous Perversions

February 24th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

Some changes have taken place in our fish tank. First, the glo-fish. At one point, we had six glo-fish, 2 yellow (one of which had lovely exotic flowing fins), 2 red, and 2 orange. All but one yellow one (and not the one with lovely exotic flowing fins) have disappeared over the course of a couple of weeks. They were too big to have been eaten directly by the tetras. The most plausible explanation I found online was that they died and then once dead were picked to disappearance by the other fish.

At any rate, they are gone. There is only one left, and glo-fish are schooling enough fish that it is recommended to keep them in groups of 5 or more. On the one hand, I don’t want to replace the glo-fish–they are genetically engineered, and who needs that in their fish tank; they are more expensive than the other fish we have; and most importantly, are the only fish so far to have died in the tank. If our tank is somehow not suitable for them, let’s enjoy other fish instead.

On the other hand, that one glo-fish is left, stubbornly hanging on. And it doesn’t seem happy. It chases the barbs and the linia perugae, nipping at their tails. It flits from one side of the tank to the other, a longer, while the other fish congregate in relaxed social groups. Maybe it will die soon, I keep thinking; on the other hand, the longer it survives, the more I fear I owe it to the glo-fish to get it some companions. Maybe if it makes it to the weekend we will try once more.

While we have less glofish than we once had, our numbers of linia perugae continue to incresae. First I saw three new babies; now I believe they have been winnowed to two. I hope this is a sign that the tetras are doing their job. A baby now and then is a sweet, fine thing, but my tank is only 20 gallons; there is a limit to how many linia perugae it can happily hold.

These linia perugae are deceptive in their plainness. Our four original linia perugae–we named them Eenie, Meenie, Mini, and Moe–were all females. Eenie and Meenie were virtually indistinguishable, Mini was the smallest, and Moe was the big fat earth goddess fish who kept having babies. Two are now male. Apparently, linia perugae are capable of such magic. And it makes perfect sense. Moe is the quintissential female–even when there weren’t any males to compete for, Eenie and Meenie had no chance to compete with her. But now, now they are dashing males, flashing their silver bellies like knights in armour chasing the golden barb dragons to impress Moe and her mini mi, Mini. One of them in particular has sprouted a most impressively bold, black upper fin, which he flashes and ripples like a card shark showing his hand.

The barbs are happily schooling with the Linia perugae; the two groups have taken each other up, neighborly like, and jostel together along one corner of the tank when they see me approach around the dinner hour.

The tetras are thriving as well, flashing from one side of the tank to the other but sticking to themselves.

And finally, the algae eating fish, or “allergy fish” as my children call it, seems to have settled in. Occasionally it will chase one of the other fish away from its hideout, but mostly it googles with its goggly eyes and keeps the tank clean. I don’t see any algae in there, which makes me worry it might starve, but since it hasn’t starved I hope that the algae eating fish and the algae have established a perfect symbiosis.

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Choosing Cholula

February 21st, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days - (0 Comments)

I took my one-and-two-thirds-year-old boy to the shelter shortly after my family got back from our summer vacation this year. I’d been longing for a second dog ever since my old dog, Ubi had died about a year and a half earlier, but with a four-month old baby, two young girls, and Pundit, I understood that I couldn’t handle another dog. But somehow, with the baby having passed the year-and-a-half point, the point at which life with each of my babies has somehow gotten just a little bit easier, I could imagine that we could bring a new dog into the household. I’d started stalking the Washington, D.C. ASPCA shelter website, looking for a dog that had something of Ubi’s sweet, bright spirit in her eyes (I thought I would get a girl, because Pundit generally likes girls better). The photo that got me to tell my husband that the baby and I were going to look at dogs that weekend was of a dog that looked quite a bit like Ubi—soft black fur and a sweet retriever face, with comically large black ears—basset hound sized ears on a retriever’s head. That dog was 7 months. Her shelter name was Pebbleton. The baby and I went to see Pebbleton.

Pebbleton came into the office where the baby and I were waiting, all gorgeous clowny lopey puppy energy, larger than I’d thought she would be, with a puppy skinniness that reminded me of Ubi when I’d first got her, around the same age. She shoved her puppy nose into the baby and he stepped back and giggled. She poked him again. He stepped back and giggled again. We liked her. She liked us. But I’d also asked to see Cholula, at the time named Mia.

Although I had come in to meet Pebbleton, I’d taken a walk around the cages before they brought Pebbleton to me, and I had noticed Mia. She was sitting calmly in her cage and she caught my gaze and held it, with her round lightish brown eyes. Her gaze had been worldly, mournful, and mature. In a room full of barking dogs, she’d been silent. A sign plastered on her cage said in large letters, Great with kids, dogs, and cats. I had skipped over her photo on the website because she’d been listed as part shepherd/part sharpeii, and I had no interest in getting a sharpeii. But I was drawn to her large, still body, her shapely head (and the sign saying she was good with dogs and kids) and asked to see her as well as Pebbleton.

When they brought Cholula in the room she sat perfectly still in front of us and let my baby approach her and pat her, remaining perfectly calm, perfectly still, perfectly gentle. “Mia!” the baby said enthusiastically. She offered us her paw. The shelter staff said she was three to four years old and that she was very calm in the shelter. We stroked her head and she accepted our strokes without flinching. She wouldn’t need much exercise. The sign had said she was good with dogs and kids. The kids part seemed completely true from her interaction with the baby.

I went home and talked about it with my husband, and thought about it for a day, and although I was drawn to the puppy Pebbleton, I recognized that it was the me I had been when I got Ubi that was meant for Pebbleton—the me that had been childless, dogless, free to spend hours every morning and every evening running and playing with my dog, working off that puppy energy so she could be calm in the house. I was not that me anymore. Often, we could only fit in a quick walk around the block for Pundit in the morning and evening, which was enough for him now that he was an aging statesman, but would have been a disaster when he was a puppy. I wasn’t sure how much more we had to give another dog, even though I wanted another dog.

And so I chose Mia, I chose Cholula, based on her low energy, sign on the door (inaccurate, it turned out, with regard to dogs) saying she was good with babies, dogs, and cats, and based on that gentleness she’d shown my baby, when she let him approach and accepted his energy, rather than projecting hers onto him. I chose Cholula, brought her home, and our troubles began.

Here she is, shortly after she came home with me. Doesn’t she seem like a dog who deserves a nice new home?

Here she is shortly after she came home with me. Wouldn't you want to give this dog a home?

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Our Days Run

February 15th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

On the drive to school, my daughter
Read us a book called “The Lighthouse Children”
About a couple that lives in a lighthouse and takes care of sea gulls
And is happy when the gulls follow them inland
Once they can no longer stay in their lighthouse by the sea.
I was laughing with the girls that we never want the seagulls
To follow us—we are always shooing them away on the beach
when they try to harass us out of our sandwiches.
But as we ran across an asphalt lot to school, the girls
Shrieked with delight at seagulls wheeling in the sky right above us,
Inland, just like in the book.

During my morning walk down Georgia Avenue,
Four workmen were digging at a mixture of hot tar and pebbles
And spreading it on the road.
The tar steamed, the workmen worked.
The road behind them was hastily patched, not smooth
But still, the working was beautiful.

On the way home in late afternoon,
The sky was high blue and cloud swept.
The moon floated up there
I jogged through the Howard campus.
Small groups of students
Huddled in conference as they walked
from one building to another—
Preparing,
The stately buildings supporting their purpose.

Out to walk the dogs
And bring home pizza,
The girls looked up at the
Urban-lit night sky
And saw the lights of three planes steadily arcing by.
A shooting star one called, and the other echoed,
I saw a shooting star!
Their baby brother had a plaid jacket,
A green monster hat
Our old dog’s leash in one hand
And a tiger lunch box from the zoo in the other.
Was that an old woman who was laughing at our brother?
My daughter asked after we’d passed her.
I’d noticed that she was an old woman, an abuela,
Tiny, with a long dress and sunken mouth,
But I hadn’t caught her laughing at the baby.

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Why I called Kevin Behan

February 10th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

So far, the low point with Cholula, the point after which I decided to call Kevin Behan for specific advice, came Thanksgiving weekend. We had been feeling good about Cholula—she’d been settling in, getting along fine with Pundit, and even accepting a new dog—my sister-in-law’s lab, just down for the weekend—into the house without incident. Things had been going so well I was feeling more relaxed than I had since we’d gotten her, and didn’t check that the front gate was closed before I let her out the front door, expecting to put her leash on on the front porch before we left the yard.

The gate was open. At the very moment Cholula leapt out the front door, a woman was walking by on the sidewalk in front of our yard with her two small dogs. Tiny dogs. I’m talking about 5 pound dogs. I will still on the porch when the unearthly beastly screams and the woman’s hysterical screams began. The sidewalk is lower than our yard and from the front porch I actually couldn’t see what was going on—when I got down to the sidewalk, the little white dog was lying on her back wailing as if it was about to die and Cholula, already off the dog, was standing on the sidewalk. I grabbed her and pulled her inside and then ran back out.

By then, neighbors had arrived and were comforting the woman, the woman had picked up her dog and was saying she didn’t have a vet, I called my vet, which was about to close but gave me the info for the after hours vet clinic nearby. The woman tried to put down her dog, who howled and collapsed, unable to walk. I panicked. I offered to drive the woman and her dog to the vet. I offered to pay for anything. I offered to do anything I could. I apologized profusely. As the woman calmed down, she noticed that Cholula had bit the dog’s shoulder, said she didn’t see anything else obviously wrong with her dog, said her dog was very dramatic, and that probably it couldn’t walk because the bite on its shoulder was hurting its leg, and that it would probably feel better in the morning. She also said that this little white dog that Cholula had attacked was actually her nightmare aggressive dog (5 pounds of aggression against other dogs, no match for 70 pound Cholula), and that because it always attacks other dogs, she usually picks it up when they approach other dogs. But that of course, with Cholula descending like a flash from the yard, she hadn’t had time. I kept apologizing, explained that I’d recently gotten Cholula from the shelter, kept offering to do anything she wanted me to do. She decided she wanted to wait and see. I gave her all my information, but she didn’t call me. I called her a couple of days later, and she said she had taken the dog to the vet the next day, the vet had prescribed antibiotics to make sure the bites didn’t get infected, and that the dog was doing fine now. She also said that Cholula had bitten through the skin on both shoulders. She refused to let me pay for anything. She was incredibly reasonable. I felt horrible—still feel horrible about it. My husband was ready to return Cholula to the shelter.

I had already re-read Kevin’s dog training book and read the articles on his website, read the training articles on Neil Sattin’s website (who gives me hope because he found natural dog training when he used the methods to solve his adult dog’s dog-aggression problems), and tried to implement the training methods and suggestions there. I was not ready to return Cholula anywhere—she is so lovely with the kids! So appropriate with friends in the house (as long as they are people)! So beautiful! So good with Pundit! We had bonded. But I decided three things (1) For obvious reasons, I now keep her leash in the house and do not let her into the front yard until the leash is on and I am holding it; (2) I now limit her time outside in the backyard without us—I called it putting her on lockdown, because my interpretation of Kevin Behan’s teachings is that she needed to have less recourse to ways to satisfy her energy needs outside of our training, an (3) to pay for a phone consultation with Kevin. I wanted him to give me a specifically tailored program for me and Cholula. I wanted to explain to him my limitations (little time, little kids, urban living), Cholula’s issues, and have him tell me what to do.

Carvings

February 6th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (1 Comments)

I was out in the cold with the baby.
Driven from the house by his sick sisters,
We’d gone to find something to do.
National Geographic was between exhibits
So we walked down to the White House
Against a cold, damp wind.
Which explains why I ended up at the Renwick
With a two-year old.

On the first floor
Was an exhibit of art
By Japanese Americans interred at camps
After Pearl Harbor.

Delicate paintings of desolate camps
against stark mountains.
How could they have made such beautiful images
Of a camp they had been forced to live in without cause?

Small, polished wooden birds
Painted lifelike from pictures in National Geographic magazines
They’d requested at the camp.
The birds looked as if they would nestle in your hand
Smooth and warm, talismans.

Two large wooden cranes danced together with long, smooth necks
And long, smooth legs and plump bodies that showed the natural roughness of the wood.
There was a long, curved stick with a snake’s head carved into one end
And a snake’s rattle into the other.

There were wooden dressers, a foot or so high, with polished wooden panels
Made from different types of wood scraps collected from around the camp.
Dolls with beautiful clothes, a train, a boat.
The pieces were beautiful, stunningly so.
Many of the things I liked the most were created by farmers
Who, according to the accompanying materials, returned to farming when they were released.

I wish I could have looked harder, stayed longer, seen more
But as I said, I was accompanied by a two year old
Who started to shriek
Until I let him tackle the Renwick’s long, imposing staircase to the second floor.

I went back a week or so later without him,
But the exhibit was gone. I’d caught it right before it left.
That’s my life these days—such findings outside of my daily routine
Are like the flashes of a town seen from a train and then gone again
As the train continues past the usual thin screeds of forest.

But enough about me.
These artists had been forced into internment camps by the U.S. government, forcibly removed from their homes and lives. In some cases families had been separated–
the mother and children sent to one camp, the father to another.
The victims of such injustice
Created beauty while they were interred.
They must have worked on these pieces day after day,
Imagining them, collecting materials, working with what they had
And with what they imagined.

I can have no excuse not to do the same.

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