What women want
January 8, 2012
Our English springer spaniel Moody Blue died three years ago after a long decline. Bet insisted each time I asked that she just wasn’t ready for another dog.
And then last week Roz sent Bet a card in which she mentioned the fun Charlie had had over New Year’s weekend in Lakefield playing with their host’s spaniel, Loki. Apparently the enjoyment was mutual. Bet read this comment aloud to me: “Did you put her up to this?”
You’ll never know what Bet wants by asking her. Sensing the moment, I dropped an email to Blue’s breeder, Karmadi English Springer Spaniels in Maberly. Owner Diane Herns wrote back that she had one remaining female puppy because of an unexpected allergy in her intended family. Barby would be ready to go this weekend.
Looking for another Moody Blue, I asked if she had an older dog.
She told me that Time, a fine yearling, is part her breeding stock, but could go out to a home between whelping sessions. She suggested we come to have a look.
Bet’s response to this reflected her passionate ambivalence: “I can’t come right now because I have to feed these people,” referring to the crew of Martin, Roz and Charlie painting the interior of the new garage. In a call to Diane we settled upon Sunday morning for a visit.
“You know that if I look into the face of a spaniel puppy, I’ll be hooked. I have no resistance whatever. I just melt.”
Then I came down with the flu. This was the first such session since my retirement six years ago, and it came as quite a shock to the system. Kept awake by the disruption through the rest of the night, Bet scrolled on her iPad through dozens of photos of Diane’s dogs, increasingly wondering if she was up to the six months of interrupted sleeps it would take to house-train a puppy.
By Sunday morning I had recovered enough to make the drive up to Hwy 7. When we arrived Barby was part of a joyful tangle of 10-week-old spaniels in a playpen. She was warm, cuddly, and clean. Her antics with a plastic bone kept us in stitches while Diane finished grooming Time. Then we met the yearling. Time is a fine specimen of an English springer, particularly happy when in the company of a big bunch of puppies. But it became immediately obvious to us that she had bonded strongly with Diane. Time, to my mind, was a one-woman dog.
At length Diane mentioned that she also had Cagney, a retired show dog (like Blue), whose main drawback was her age, 8 ½ years. She further mentioned that Cagney doesn’t like other dogs, and could use a home for her declining years well away from other animals. While Bet cuddled with the puppy I asked to meet the old dog.
Cagney turned out to be a beautiful, dignified specimen in the peak of condition who looked as though she would love to have a new home away from the kennel. Same as Blue. We took her for a walk.
She definitely knows which buttons to push on a human, does our Cagney. In the agility test she hopped neatly into the Lexus and perched on the back seat, awaiting instructions. While well trained, she showed herself quite human in her delight with the smells and unexpected freedom of a winter walk outside. She’s no robot.
What chance did a puppy have against a classy, experienced lady like this?
Once home, following the house tour and the food dish location, she proved quite amusing. Cagney’s a talker when she feels like it. Her woofs of delight and happy exploration of her new house added great cheer to the household.
Though bred and trained for the bench for her whole life, on the first walk in a field Cagney had a whale of a time bounding around her new territory. She flounced around, exuberance in every leap. Breeding kicked in each time she reached the end of shotgun range, and she would quarter to left or right and loop back to us.
Of course no clump of hay or brush could go unexamined.
But she reminded us most of Blue whenever a camera came out. True to her show dog heritage she played naturally to the photographer, and concluded her first photo shoot with little yelps of pleasure. What a ham. When posed between us on the Ranger she suddenly decided it was time for affection, and planted a big kiss on my face as Charlie moved in for a closeup.
Bet read this draft over, handed me back the computer and said, “While sitting there this afternoon reading with Cagney at my feet, I thought: ‘The house feels more like a home now.’”
I guess both ladies got what they wanted.
THE MORNING AFTER (UPDATE):
Morning is much livelier here now. As I stumbled down in the dark for coffee, a white shadow awaited me on the mat at the foot of the stairs. She bounded around, emitting little yelps and barks, but quietly. No time for a leash. She looked out the lane at what must have been a coyote, then headed out into the field to do her business. Happy loops, enjoying her freedom, but not for long, because hunger beckoned.
Back from her run her thoughts were only on breakfast, which she encouraged with a series of relatively quiet howls. Hoovered the kibble. Affection time. Upstairs to greet Bet, still faking sleep. Back down to me. Then she fell asleep beside me on the floor when I opened my computer.
A dog owner’s life.
The long goodbye
May 3, 2009
She lies and sleeps, utterly still on her bed and we tiptoe around the house so as not to disturb her, even though she is deaf. Our old springer spaniel, Moody Blue, is on her last legs, and it is very hard to say goodbye.
I used to teach new classes a lesson on Robert Frost’s two-line poem, The Old Dog.
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
But in Blue’s case we don’t remember when she was a pup. We adopted her at nearly seven years of age. All of her formative experiences were with another family, her handlers, and various breeders. Blue, you see, was a champion show dog, and raised four litters of pups. If you see a good looking, even-tempered black and white springer in the Ottawa Valley, there’s a good chance it came from Maberly and one of Blue’s litters.
So why was a great dog like this up for adoption, and how did she end up with us? Well, the story has it that she bounced back to the breeder because, when her owners brought home a new kitten, she promptly killed it. When Diane Herns told us this, Bet and I in unison responded, “And?” The odd indiscretion in a hunting dog is only to be expected.
Life with a show dog took some getting used to. She was always quiet, clean, and very obedient, but she hated dogs. That wasn’t much of a problem because we’d had lots of practice handling quirky mutts. The swimming lessons were a challenge, though. Honest, she didn’t know how to swim, and what’s more, she was a very slow learner at ladder-climbing, jumping from docks, and the other skills we had come to expect of a spaniel. What kind of life does a show dog have?
Another thing which threw us at first was strangers’ reactions when they saw Blue. In the evening we often went by golf cart to Chaffey’s Locks for ice cream. Blue heard “SHE”S BEAUTIFUL!” so often that first summer that I think she started to think we’d given her a new name. There she’d stand, outside the Opinicon Store, poised on her mat in the box of the golf cart as she made nice to every potential judge who came her way. Did I mention that Blue was an uncommonly good looking dog?
As she adjusted to life in our home (no worries about her jumping in the pool, anyway) and the boat (major dog-avoidance strategies were indicated), Blue seemed happy to take the new routines in stride. The farm was another matter entirely. A model lives her life hungry, but at the farm Blue proved a true garbage gut, and after a few expensive trips to the vet because of mysterious ailments from things she had eaten, we decided Grandma had to rein in her compost heap, and that pasture romps were not a success.
At the marina one trick at which Blue excelled was the “Stay!” command. Her favourite place to “Stay!” was on the wide ledge behind the stern seat of our boat, WYMBADIITY II. One day a bemused woman came up to me and explained, “I was just admiring that very realistic stuffed animal on the stern of your boat when it suddenly sneezed, woke up, and looked straight at me. It was real!” In fact Blue bore a striking resemblance to that popular toy.
Once when a former student invited our boat to her wedding to use as a prop for photographs, I heard her uncle joke about the young woman’s beauty while we snapped away at the happy couple: “She’s just like a dog: you can’t take a bad picture of a dog.”
This poise in front of a camera was Blue’s true talent, and it endeared her to everyone in the family. She was our son’s model and muse in his early days as a portrait photographer. Even in her declining months, she still groomed up nicely and would work with anyone holding a camera who approached her.
As Charlie brought pals to the house, Blue developed another reputation on Twitter as perhaps the dumbest dog to draw breath this century. Part of this no doubt came from Blue’s vanity: she always made sure she was standing in the right light, and with proper posture. Turns out this meant posing in front of every car entering the driveway. She would just blithely walk into the path of a moving vehicle and expect it to stop and disgorge admiring humans. Then she would receive their adoration in her dim, regal manner. This was her life.
I haven’t mentioned Blue’s warm, loving manner or how fond we have become of her over the last seven years because this is a story of a dog, not of private angst. Blue’s passing will mark the end of an era in our family, and tear a large hole out of our lives, as the passing of a dog always does. It is for this loss alone that we mourn: after a long time of quiet and dignified suffering, the poor dog will at last be without pain.
the Walnut Diary 