Skip to main content

From a dog's eye

Ruby on the move
It's been over a year since we rescued Ruby from a woman who took her in from a high-kill shelter.  This one-eyed Pomeranian has become ingrained in our life and has increasingly burrowed into the daily fabric of our household, so much so that our departures from the house now incite pure wailing from this small pup (no more than 5 pounds or 2.2 kilos!) in such a way as to create the impression that she is grappling with threats to her very existence.

But we know better.  For all the trauma she suggests she is encountering, it has become apparent that this wailing is used as a ploy to regain our attention, in the hopes that she could take the same travels as us and not stay "cooped up" in the powder room that acts as her open-air cage when we are out on extended jaunts.  When we come back, we find the house expectantly quiet, expectantly because we know it is only a matter of delayed seconds before she starts crying again.  Which does not stop, of course, until she is back in the warm embrace of her owners.

I sometimes imagine what life might be like from her viewpoint and what anxiety she must face when her care is in the hands of animals who are much bigger than she could ever grow (although her grandma tries very hard to fatten her up!); in this daydream, I lose sight of the fact that her contentment probably does not take this notion very far, as she ultimately falls fast asleep when we are around, secure in the knowledge that she is loved and will get the attention that presumably sustains her.

Of course, this is all random pondering.  From a dog's eye, it might be much simpler - the dreams of cold pavement beneath paws and a curious world awaiting discovery, with an occasional meal thrown in.  All it takes is a lot of love and a little food, and life is good.  Should that not be enough for all of us?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...
2 comments
Read more

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...
2 comments
Read more

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...
2 comments
Read more