Parking mad

 Pepper and I love parks. She adores the interesting smells on twigs, blades of grass, tree trunks. And she loves dropping a pee every 20 paces and a humungous poo just when

a nice lady is walking by. I love it for the nut balls I get to see. One day it was a guy

practicing juggling. throwing 6 and more balls in the air and dropping most of them. Continuously.A sort of Cirque de failure and quite entertaining.

Then on another day a buff young man and his girlfriend were acting very suspicious and I thought they were here for a mid-day make-out session but on my second occasion of walking past them I saw they had tied a thick rubber rope between two trees and were practicing tight rope walking. They were more successful that the juggler but not by much. And then there was the lady with the dogcart. She had a Doberman the size of a small horse harnessed in this little trap and was teaching the dog to respond to the reins before jumping in and trotting around the parking lot. And speaking of the parking lot there is the gentleman above who either has a very heavy chair that he can’t move any further than he has or he truly prefers sitting in the lot and not the park. A bugaphobe perhaps? Grass allergies? A love of asphalt? He’s not that far removed from the great British sunbather who sits along beach promenades the world over in all kinds of weather and wears a knotted handkerchief on his head for sun protection. When I see minor eccentrics like I see in the park I get all nostalgic for when I lived in Manhattan and would walk through Central Park which was more like central casting for `unusual’ people. I recall a woman with cat on a leash standing with her upraised arm beside the tree in whose branches little kitty has climbed and was now soundly sleeping .Then there was the red faced man with the boa constrictor which looked a little too tightly wound around his neck.There was the old woman with 2 Cockatoos on her shoulder who swayed like hula dancers maintaining their balance as she shuffled from garbage can to garbage can. And then there was the man with the Shetland pony causing one guy to ask me `what kind of dog is that?’ The sights didn't always involve animals.I remember being surprised by a man high up above me in a tree playing a violin.And by an older woman walking on her hands through a busy crowd and nobody giving her a second look.Or the time I saw a character dressed as Christ carrying a prop cross and being followed by three guys dressed as roman soldiers.Again nobody even blinking except me. My new park may have a lesser league of eccentrics but without them it just wouldn’t be worth the walk. And Pepper agrees.

Driving Miss Crazy

There she sprawls in the sunshine all relaxed and sleepy and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But just an hour before she was a very different animal. A crazy beast on wheels. And here’s the reason. I have a leash that clicks into my car seat belt lock so I can drive her places safely. Or so the theory goes. However the leash is a little too long or the distance from my back seat to my front seat is too short I don’t know. All I do know is that when she is clipped in she can stand on my car’s console and be right there at my shoulder. And that’s exactly what she does criticizing my driving by whimpers and mini yips and impeding my driving by leaning on me and licking my face. I don’t know if you have ever had a full facial dog licking while driving at 40 miles per hour but I can tell you its a little hazardous. The speed cop we passed didn’t look too impressed but thankfully he stayed in barracuda mode and let me go by. Every time I turned Pepper leaned on me and at 70lbs that’s a significant weight making my steering the slightest bit wonky. And then it’s more howls yowls and doggie equivalents to having a nervous Nellie passenger telling you to slow down, slow DOWN, SLOW DOWN!

The weird thing is that on our return journey –we had been to the park for a walk-

she just hunches down on the console and makes no noise at all and my face stays

unlicked. Crazy are the ways of the hound.

Dog walks man

Sometimes I am the Homo Sapien or as David Bowie put it The Homo Superior. Other times she is much more Sapien than me, and way more Superior.

I can explain.

I’ve been able to get Pepper to the local park several times recently and do a little more intensive walking. I felt it would be good for both of us. We were both very unused to this level of exercise. At first I was walking her into the ground and when she came home she would just collapse in a heap. But recently she has taken a one hour route march around the park in her stride. While I have been feeling the pain she has been unwilling to get in the car at the end of her walk and instead wanted to go around one more time.At least one more time. Walking with Pepper in the park is now man versus mutt in a battle till the first one drops. It started off as a stop go stop go stop go kind of thing with Pepper

peeing and spraying every five feet and at the end of it I couldn’t believe there was a drop of urine left anywhere in her body. Now while she still goes into a sniffing frenzy for the first twenty minutes or so she soon calms down and goes into hard core walking mode.

At first any and all other dogs got her back up and her bark on. Now when she’s in the walk state they are all invisible to her.Now when we come back its me who collapses into a heap and falls into an achy snoring coma. She slurps up her bowl of water and wanders around waiting to get back in the car.

This dog was definitely made for walking.

K-wow

Some mornings when we’re on our walk I imagine Pepper and me deep in conversation about stuff. A dog’s eye view of stuff and my view. What was on tv last night. What that woman on the corner has put out for trash. What the weather forecast is. This was one such chat we had this morning.

`So what’s like then? You know, a job? What’s it like?’

‘Well, it fills up your day and you go to it and they pay you money.’

`And what do you do at this job? Do you chase things?’

`My tail sometimes.’

`Here,are you trying to be funny?’

`No I was being like well I was trying to use it as a metaphor because I don’t actually have a tail.’

`So you chase your arse then?’

`It was a common figure of speech for going round in circles’

`What’s circles?’

`Really?’

`Nah I know what circles are. I know geometry.’

`Dogs don’t know geometry’

`What’s a dog?’

That’s what us humans call you dogs. We call you dogs. Or dawgs!  You aint nothin’ but a hound dawg.’

`We don’t call you humans.’

`No.? What do you call us then? Woof I guess.’ Pretty much every thing is  a woof to you.’

`Smeg. That’s what we call you. Smeg.  And we are K-wow from the royal house of

Wolfen. Ok Smeg, would you be good enough to pick my feces up now, there’s a good chap.

Frankenpepper

 

I have created a monster. The dry food that is and has been Pepper’s every day every meal ever since she was a pot bellied little puppy has been left untouched of late.She no longer rushes to scoff it down. She would sniff it and then shoot me a disparaging look before slinking off with a theatrical sense of disappointment. At first I didn’t respond. I’d leave it there until she was so hungry she had to eat it and I ignored the baleful stare I would get as I put food in my mouth. In the end though I caved in and to perk up her food I started adding scraps of uneaten chicken or beef or pork  chopping it up fine and mingling it in. For a while it was a genius move. Pepper was back eating with gusto and every meal ended with an empty bowl. Then she started siphoning out the added meat and leaving behind the dry food. And I chop that stuff up pretty fine so she must have the eating skills of an anteater. Now she’s started turning her nose up at some of the meat I’m adding. Turkey? OK if it’s just cooked . Day old? No thanks. And now every time I sit down to eat she’s like the starving face of a famine victim staring up me crying pitiably.I’m thinking of going cold turkey again. Or no turkey. No anything again.But I have this dream that I fall asleep and while I sleep she gnaws the flesh off my arm.When I wake up I have this bony skeleton arm dangling. And she looks at it and I see her lick her lips.I have created a monster.