A messy day in a messy week

I guess I'm pretty average. Start with great plans and a list of things to take up. Then every day happens. Or every week. Annnnnd....the meetings come along. And the e-mails demand answers. And the big revelations and epiphanies short-circuit into the "self-delete" file. Or they look pretty puny on the screen. Doesn't stop the nagging sense of unfinished or even unstarted business.


Right now I'm having a visit from my old friend insomnia, from all the little worries of the day that I didn't get put in place by bed time. Like our dog's snaggletooth. It looks pretty harmless, even comic the way it puts a permanently puzzled look on George's face, with the lower right canine tucked inside instead of outside, but it's apparently been erupting even further, or he's bumped it, or something, so now, instead of  leaving a little rubbed spot on his upper gums, it's digging into the back of his upper canine. So he needs dental work or he could lose both upper and lower. I didn't want to do much earlier, because he's so darned cheerful and playful, and trusting. When we had to have our Springer Spaniel's broken toe set, it made him pretty suspicious of everything we tried after that, and gave him an erratic temper. I'd hate to see George get the same way. But he'll be a lot worse off if we don't do something. Poor little guy. No dental plan for the dog, either.

There's a piece in GEIST Magazine this month, from J.R. Carpenter: "Words Dogs Know." Perfect the way it puts a canine Zen spin on things. My favorite right now is this:

melancholia When playtime is over and the long nap in the dark is over, and the early morning walk is over, sometimes in a hurry, sometimes even in the rain, the people shut the door behind them and the dog is left to his lonesome.

Left on his lonesome, George eases his melancholia by redecorating. One recurrent signature is to centre my boot carefully in the middle cushion of the white leather sofa he is never supposed to get on.  When he's had a bout of removing everything from the pocket where we temporarily house all the plastic tubs and trays and cardboard tubes for the recycling, or of playing hamster with newspapers and magazines, or of just getting into things, he disappears to the bottom of the basement stairs as we come in the front door, and becomes deaf to our calls. When he's done nothing but nap or chew his pigskin stress-relievers, or stand on the coffee table beside my wife's easy chair and stare out the window (which he can see out of perfectly without getting on anything), he greets us all happy and bouncing and shaking himself with pleasure. So when he's not at the door, we have first to go looking for what he's done, and couldn't stop himself from doing.

I think his word would be perspective: When the people aren't wasting the barbecue to cook fish (which is fit only for cats) or chicken (which they don't seem to realize is fit for sharing with the dog), its flat top is best valued as the highest point in the back yard, the command tower from which to keep a dutiful eye out for all those things one has to keep an eye out dutifully for, and from which to bark the bark at all those things at which one has to bark the bark. 

Maybe this space is my barbecue top, tonight.