Howdy Doodle

 

It was four summers ago—nearly five—that Margaret drove the six hours or so to the Bay Area, to an animal shelter that specialized in small dogs, especially the small crossbreeds such as goldendoodles (golden retriever/poodle.)

 This was the end of a process that began with her joking suggestion that, after two cat companions over the years, we might get a dog.  The joke soon became serious: she wanted a dog, a small one but not (I was assured) a very small, yappy dog. 

 We visited local shelters, where small dogs were in short supply.  She applied to other places, and ran the gauntlet of questionnaires (with more intrusive questions than would otherwise be tolerated) and phone interviews.  Eventually she qualified to be notified of possibilities, and visited with several dog candidates nearby.

 But the one she was sure she wanted was at the end of that long drive.  He was a rescue dog, a small poodle crossbreed of indeterminate type, found starving in a drainage ditch in the Sacramento Valley.  Because he was black he was less desirable to adopters.  Margaret had to promise to have a fence completed around the backyard in order to get him, and so she did.

 By the time the two arrived back here in Arcata, they had definitely and definitively bonded.  The shelter had called him Ace, not a name we ever considered keeping.  Margaret walked him in the mornings, but we took him together on his afternoon walk.  He got to the point that he let me hold the leash, as long as Margaret was in sight.  He liked that I walked faster. 

 On one of our first walks, Margaret was speculating on what kind of a doodle he might be.  “A Howdy Doodle,” I said.  Margaret is one of the few people who get that joke anymore, since she too is of the Howdy Doody Time generation, every evening at 5 on the family TV.  But she also liked it as a name.  And so he has been ever since: Howdy, and more formally, Mr. Doodle.  

When Howdy stretches to his full height—dancing and twirling before meals—he is maybe two feet tall.  He weighs in at 10 pounds.  His local vet suggested he has some terrier in him, and that seems right.  He has that tenaciousness.

  Evidently the poodle crossbreeds are popular because their hair is hypoallergenic.  And it is hair, not fur, so it grows. It doesn’t take long for Howdy to look a lot huskier than he is.  He needs grooming fairly frequently, if for no other reason than the hair interferes with his traction when walking. 

 The autumn after he arrived, I went back to western Pennsylvania for a long overdue family and friends visit. While I was gone, the fence was finally completed, and Howdy got to explore his yard.  Almost immediately he found a nest of angry ground bees, and both he and Margaret got stung.  That was pretty much the end of his backyard forays. He mostly won't leave the porch without an escort.  So much for the fence.

  When I returned from this trip, I assumed my nearly two weeks away would have eroded some of the progress I made gaining Howdy’s confidence, but much to my surprise, the day after I returned he allowed me to take him on his afternoon walk; for the first time, just the two of us. 

      Margaret took him to a few training classes and maybe once to a dog park and a few doggie dates, but Howdy wasn’t engaged.  After he identifies the smell of a particular dog he pretty much loses interest.  He doesn’t know how to play, either with other dogs, with us or with play objects.  He’ll sit on the beach beside Margaret and watch dogs chase sticks but it has no appeal. He goes to sleep.  Sometimes with me he’ll get into play position, and then doesn’t know what to do. If I toss a ball down the hallway he might retrieve it once.  But if I do it again he ignores it.  I guess he was just trying to be helpful, but if I keep losing the ball, it’s more polite not to notice. 

 He is however very smart.  He can functionally count to three and possibly four.  He knows quite a few English words and a few Italian expressions (particularly “aspet”, short for “aspetta,” which means wait, or just a minute.)  He remembers our several walking routes and always knows the way home. 

 Howdy is utterly devoted to Margaret.  I can come and go but he must know where she is at every moment.  He was with us for only about seven months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and for a long time we were seldom out of the house, except for his walks and other outdoor activities.  Since we’re both retired, this didn’t change much since. So the three of us as constant companions became the way of life he knows.

 Howdy is completely indifferent to cats—they barely register as lifeforms—but he himself has catlike characteristics. He finds that spot on the floor where the sunlight falls for his morning nap.  In particular, he adopts and insists on daily rituals.  He of course knows his mealtimes and walk times, and reminds us with plenty of time to spare.  But we each have other rituals with him, some of which he invented. 

 For example, I share part of my morning biscotti with him. Howdy has figured out that the first smell of coffee is the tip-off.  But he doesn’t always show up right away.  He stays in the living room (or even goes back to it) as I get my coffee cup, the milk for my coffee and the biscotti, all on the kitchen counter.  Then I walk over to the dinette table, passing the doorway to the dining and living rooms.  As I do, Howdy comes running in to intercept me, jumping and twirling.

 Early in his residency, he watched me slice an apple in the evening.  It turned out he likes apples a lot, but only without the skin.  So now my evening ritual is to cut small pieces for him, and I get all the skins.

  I’d noticed that he likes to bring his chew into the living room whenever we are sitting there, especially after dinner.  I thought this might be pack behavior, so in our apple-time I started looking at him while we both chewed on the apples, and he looked back.  He seems to enjoy this.

 I made up an “all gone” gesture for these occasions, which he understands and accepts totally.  He’s also  learned to look where I point my finger, and not just at the finger itself.   

 We used to range far afield in our walks but for various reasons, including a lot of new construction, we restrict ourselves to a half dozen regular routes in and around the neighborhood that we alternate (and alter) at Howdy’s discretion.  There are routes he found himself, and there are routes for some reason he doesn’t like. He can be stubborn but we’ve both learned to compromise. 

 I let him lead our walks, and go at his pace, which usually involves a lot of sniffing and marking, followed by brisk business-like walking.  I read in a book about animal senses that dogs should occasionally be taken on “smell walks” like this, but for Howdy, almost every walk with me is a smell walk.  He evidently has a constantly revised map of the neighborhood in his head consisting of smell trails.  I’ve watched him associate a smell with a dog he hadn’t seen before, then just turn away.  He would rather follow the trail of another dog than meet that dog. And of course he's constantly marking his own trail.  But he's not just mapping territory; he also seems to enjoy smelling flowers and aromatic plants.  

 However I do guide our walks in other ways, to keep him safe and out of trouble. I talk to him, but most of our communication in this regard is through the tension on the leash, to which he responds easily, most of the time. 

Howdy was very quiet for his first few months here but he is now comfortable enough to bark at the UPS truck and others who come too close. He’s also taken to barking at us at times, maybe a little frustrated we don’t get the nuances of his language. He wants to talk, too. Otherwise, he does constant perimeter checks for crumbs, and sleeps a lot.  I see him most relaxed when he is nestled between us on the couch, especially when he’s getting simultaneous rubs.

 So far I’ve learned that while a cat rules the household, a dog becomes its center, since he requires (and insists on) more active attention, and also gives it.  Through this troubling period of Covid, Howdy has held us together happily.  It’s the three of us now.  

Blue and Missy

Blue, looking at me and beginning that eye-blink by which cats signal affection

It's been a little more than two months now since Blue and Missy were taken away forever.  They officially belonged to a young family across the street, but they'd pretty much lived on our back porch.  That family moved to another part of California, and took the two cats with them.

young Blue

Blue was a part of my daily life for a long time.  He showed up some five summers ago, and kept coming back.  We didn't know where he was from, and that--plus another crucial error--probably encouraged him to return even more often.  Blue--the name I chose for those blue eyes--began to gain weight in the area that suggested pregnancy.  Alarmed by this, I started feeding "her."  Very soon we learned where his official home actually was, and the fact that he was male.  By then he was expecting kibble in his bowl on the porch.

Blue was not shy with people.  He cultivated each generation of nearby student renters--especially the females--and probably was given a half dozen names over the years.  (His official name is Richard, which I could never bring myself to use.)  He had a range for his wanderings, but he often wound up sleeping here on the porch, sometimes in the daytime and sometimes all night.  I could see him curled up on the chair just below my office window.  He and I sat together there, sometimes at night.  Once we happened to both be looking in the direction of a shooting star.

Blue knew us, and even if across the street, would come over to escort us to our door as we returned from walks.  Once when we returned from a week or so in the Bay Area, I opened the car door to see him waiting on the sidewalk.  He knew my car and on many other occasions he greeted and escorted me.

That family also had a black and white female cat.  For years she stayed on that side of the street.  We could see her with Blue when he returned to their yard.  Eventually I saw her making some tentative steps down our driveway, then hurrying away.  Then she started coming onto the porch, and pretty soon she had her own bowl.  Margaret named her Missy.

Blue and Missy tussled a bit but they definitely were a pair.  Blue was bigger and cuffed her, which she ignored, but when Missy finished her bowl and nosed into Blue's, he always gave way.

 Apparently Missy hadn't been too fond of the big dog of her official household, and two young children probably didn't help either.  She carved out her spots on the back porch--a hideaway and sleeping spot under a table, and an unused plantless pot for the rest of the time.  The more Missy stayed, the more Blue did.  He had his spots on the other side of the porch, on and under the outdoor furniture.

They presided over the backyard from their positions on the porch.  Other cats came through the yard, eager for their approval.  It was their Garden of Eden, and sort of mine, too.  "With two cats in the yard..."

They settled into this arrangement around the time that our cat Pema was in her final months.  (Blue was sweet on Pema, and snuck a kiss whenever he could bolt inside.  He managed a final one at the door when she was very weak and thin.) After Pema died, being with these cats and taking care of them was more than a comfort.  Just looking at them, watching them on their separate tours of inspection, etc. was nourishment.

We knew they were going but not when, until the last few days, when the big moving van showed up.  The last night on the porch there was a full moon.  I sat outside to look at it, and Missy jumped up into my lap.  She'd only recently begun to do that.  Some minutes later, Blue jumped into my lap as well.  Missy was by then totally relaxed and she didn't move, even when Blue was partially on top of her.  For the first and last time I had them both in my lap at the same time, in the slanting moonlight.

Margaret took this shortly before they were taken
away.  Missy is in her accustomed pot but Blue
is uncharacteristically close to her, and in the sun,
which he didn't usually like.  I guess they knew
something was up. 

In some respects, it was stranger to lose them in this way.  It was sudden and complete.  Though the cats remained alive, Blue and Missy ceased to exist the moment they were taken away.  No one will ever call them by those names, which they knew and responded to.

Now no cats come through the yard.  There seem to be none roaming the neighborhood anymore.

It is still impossible to open the back door, to take a walk and return unaccompanied, to take out the recycling which Blue and then Missy helped me do, to look out a window to the porch and the back yard, or from the front across the street, without being aware of their absence. I wonder about them--I worry especially about Blue, a cold weather cat who now must endure 90 and 100 degree days--but we will probably never know anything about them.

I have these photos and fleeting visual memories.  But nothing can even suggest the feeling of Blue's brown beige bulk suddenly leaping into my lap, rubbing his head under my chin, and crawling up my arm and around the back of my shoulders, his fur against my neck.

Pema R.I.P.

Pema in her prime.  Click photos to see in full.  BK photos

She was in all senses a rescue cat--rescued from starvation by friends who found her in their barn.  They didn't think she'd make it through the night.  She was probably about two years old, but nobody knows.

We met her shortly afterwards, twelve summers ago, and she adopted us.  We named her Pema, after the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron.  As I've said (or bragged) before, she soon lived up to her name, impressing our next door neighbor (not a fan of cats) by sitting still in one place in the back yard and just being.

 Eventually we would say "Meditation, Pema!" and she would stroll into the living room, where she would sit on my lap and I would meditate on petting her just the way she liked it.

She was semi-feral at first and only Margaret's patience and persistence got her out of the cat carrier in the kitchen.  It took a lot longer for her to warm up to me, but once she did, she was all in.

She was smart from the start.  She learned how doors work, and soon opened them herself.  It wasn't long before she became the queen of the household.  But she was never any trouble, except for her various health problems in recent years--she kept within the backyard boundaries outside, and did no damage to anything inside.  Except for a salamander she brought in a few times (and it survived), she never hurt another creature.  She was more of an indoor cat, and in recent years exclusively so.

She had her peculiarities.  She didn't drink water from her water dish (only in with her wet food); she hid from everyone but us, and she refused to be picked up.  All of that changed, mostly in her last weeks.

I nursed her as best I could through her final illness, and with courage she proved the adage about nine lives. Though she had to be in pain much of the time, she insisted on living her life as normally as she could, and even as we adapted, she was sweet and gentle and affectionate.

I learned a lot from her, like always know you have a clear exit before you enter a room.  We got to a point that she understood my words and I understood her non-verbal communications, most of the time anyway. But I won't go into what she meant to me, which was a lot: this is about her.

She was beautiful as you can see (a vet told us that a female with her coloration is rare.)  She was more than rare: she was unique, because of who she was, and who she became in relationship to us.  She became Pema, and she was Pema to the end.  May she rest in peace.  We will miss her every day.

Woof-Woof, Win-Win

Okay, I think we're all ready for a win-win.

Dogs and cats as pets have never been more numerous, but a lot of animals are collateral damage, and have less than happy lives.  Those who aren't abused (or aren't abused anymore) but shy away from humans, still have less chance of survival. In a better world being a people animal wouldn't matter so much.  But that's the way it is now.

 When these animals wind up in shelters, they have less chance of being adopted.  Feral animals who hide or cower don't seem like promising pets.  Their lives may then turn out to be quite short.

On the other hand there are children who have trouble reading, or who can't see the point of reading. (Even before they get to the teen years when smart phones and pheromones dominate, and "books smell like old people.")

Then along came some genius to turn two apparently unrelated problems into one solution: kids reading to shelter animals (this article focuses on dogs, but it's also being done for cats.)

Being read to by a child stirs the animal's curiosity, and a child's voice is less threatening.  To what degree this actually increases the animal's social skills, who knows, but it does familiarize them with humans and human speech, in a safe place.

Meanwhile a kid who likes reading has somebody to read to, and to show the pictures to, just like a parent or teacher.  Or a kid who doesn't read too well is not facing a critic who picks at pronunciation or even aspects of the story that strictly speaking aren't reflected in the text.

It probably doesn't always work--the dog or cat is bored, or the child is--but it seems to work often enough to be a lovely win-win, and maybe the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Blue, Too

And while we're on the feline circuit...Back in 2010, I wrote about a cat that had befriended me during the previous fall.  I called her Blue, for her eyes. She disappeared at the end of a semester, and so I assume she'd had a student owner, and left with her or him.

In 2015 I was befriended by another cat, much in the way as that one, also with striking blue eyes.  I called him Blue, Too.  Or Blue for short.

Blue was a skinny young cat when he started coming around.  (Although Margaret thought Blue was a she--and thanks to surgery, there was no easy way to tell--I always felt he was he.)  He tried to get inside the house, tried to cozy up to Pema, with little success.  He liked me, though.

Because of Pema, Blue couldn't come inside but we spend time together on the back porch. When I sat in the chair he would come up my chest, nuzzle my neck, and make an entire transit from one shoulder to behind my head to the other shoulder.  Other times he would just sit in my lap, occasionally falling asleep. (Once he fell asleep lying on his back--I've never seen a cat do that.)  And in an odd coincidence, one night we both saw a shooting star, just as the first Blue and I had watched the sky during a purported meteor shower (but didn't see any that time.)

I began seeing Blue so often that I worried he was homeless.  Students leaving cats behind is not unknown in this neighborhood.  So I gave him some dry food in a plastic cup.  He devoured it.  (That was very different from the first Blue, who was indifferent to food.)

It soon became apparent that Blue was bulking up, so he was probably eating somewhere else as well.  At first, assuming Nurse Margaret was right about gender, I thought Blue might be pregnant.  So of course I worried even more about food, shelter and where (and when) the kittens would drop.

But time passed, and Blue was filling out more than in the belly.  So that panic passed.

Still, I left a permanent bowl out on the porch for him, and put food in it when he came around.  I would see him on the back porch at all hours, so I left one of the cat beds Pema doesn't use anymore in a protected place.  But during the night he preferred to sleep on the chair.  Still, on many sunny afternoons I saw him asleep in the cat bed.

We spent this past Thanksgiving with Margaret's daughter, son in law and grandson Beckett in Menlo Park, six or so hours down the coast.  Monika, who works at Northtown Books and also does cat-sitting, lives nearby and came around twice a day to feed Pema.  To our usual feeding instructions, I added a note that this neighborhood cat with the blue eyes was apt to come around when he saw her, and if he did, please drop some dry food in his bowl on the porch.

Pema remains very shy of anybody but us, so in the two times Monika has taken care of her while we were gone (several days each time), Monika has never even seen Pema.  But this time she certainly saw Blue, who was very insistent on being attended to, and fed.

When we came home and I opened the car door, Blue was right there looking up at me.

Since then Margaret met our new neighbors across the street--a young family.  They told her that Blue was theirs, and that cats of his breed often adopt another household, and are generally very friendly.  And yes, Blue is male. Only they didn't call him Blue.  They named him Richard.

Even bulked up (likely an effect of castration at any early age) Blue (because I still call him that) is a beautiful cat.  The placement of black, brown and white is striking and various.  As the rainy season began and nights were colder, I don't see him around as much, especially at night.  But usually not more than 2 or 3 days go by without a reunion.  Sometimes he's distracted, but sometimes these are quite joyful reunions.  He still likes me to pick him up (which Pema still does not) and he can still do that transit from shoulder to shoulder.  We're buddies.

Meditating with Pema

Pema the cat joined our household almost ten years ago.  She was a young feral cat, who friends found in their barn, near starvation.  We named her Pema after Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun who has written several books and made many recorded talks about meditation.  In the past several months, Pema the cat has come more fully to her name.

Pema did know about stillness.  She used to sit in one spot outside and look around.  And as she's gotten older, she's spent more time being, well, still.  But she recently made this a more formal practice.

In recent years, when the television came on sometime after dinner, Pema made herself scarce.  I think it was when we had to put speakers on the floor--something about the sound alarmed her.  But recently Margaret and I revived our after dinner practice of meditating.  At first we went the traditional route, on our old meditation cushions in front of the couch.  But after a knee problem Margaret retreated to her chair.  Not wanting to her to feel out of place (and willing to seize on any excuse), I moved my meditation to the couch, where I sat upright.

Our stillness and silence attracted Pema like a magnet.  She can't get up on Margaret's chair as easily as she can hop on the couch, so she joined me.  With just a little hesitation she moved onto my lap.  And so Pema the cat joined us as Pema the meditation cat.  She has adopted this as part of her routine.

Of course, I am expected to pet her, rub her head, cheeks, ears etc., which pretty much disallows single point meditation.  However I try to stay in the moment.
And there are forms of meditation that this should allow or even enhance, such as the kind practiced by...Pema Chodron, of course.

A Video for Catloving French Existentialist Film Buffs

Pet Sounds

People's feelings about each other are often conflicted.  But people's feelings about their pet animals mostly are not. They may have complex feelings about their dogs or cats, but mostly those feelings are strong, direct and pure.  Especially under stress, almost everything can come down to that relationship---as it did in this story about a young actor who felt forced to have his dog put down, and soon after ended his own life.

  People have very direct relationships with their pets, and they tend to judge other people on how they behave towards pet animals. So while the politics of pets is presented lightly, people don't take the topic lightly.  It's a test of basic humanity.

The story of Mitt Romney's summer vacation many years ago has been quietly making the rounds.  He drove 12 hours with his family in the car, and the family dog in an air-tight carrier on top of the car.  The dog got sick, and his diarrhea dripped down the car windows, so Romney pulled off the highway at a gas station, hosed down the car and the dog in the carrier, and resumed driving.

The reaction has been growing, with stories often referring to this Dogs Against Romney website. 

That was the context when David Axlerod tweeted a photo of President Obama with his dog Bo with the message, "How loving owners transport their dogs." 

Cute, right?  But another story suggests how potentially powerful this really is--a story of wanton cruelty that explains the mindset of the Rabid Right to those who don't get it when illustrated by stories involving just people, or even less impressive, politicians.  I won't reproduce the photo here, but it's in the story: the children of a campaign manager for an Arkansas Democratic congressional candidate came home to discover their pet cat dead on their front porch, obviously murdered (the story gives the graphic details) and with the word "liberal"written across its body.

What this says about what humans are capable of is depressing enough, or how far we have not come in being civilized and empathetic.  But the message of where Rabid Right politics are is pretty clear.  It says it for some people perhaps even more directly than attempted assassination, or the vile and racist words of Republican officials including their party chair, or the implications of the cruel policies these folks favor. 

How we treat animals is often better than how we treat each other, and certainly better than we treat the rest of life and the future of life on this planet that provides us with our life.  So the effects of certain policies and beliefs, as well as the hearts of those that sell them, is exposed through attitudes and behavior towards the pets that bless us with their presence.      
  

The Pema Update

As she gets a little older, Pema seems to be embracing her namesake (the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron) as she becomes more still and meditative. She spends a lot of her time in the yard just sitting in one place, observing. She still runs around in the house, and she can still move very fast outside, but these are more characteristic poses. Even our neighbor remarked on it--how pretty she was, sitting still in the sun-- and he doesn't even like cats.

Lately Pema has rediscovered my lap during the video hour--there was a period when she reverted to being alarmed by noises on the TV and literally jumpy, but lately she's been more mellow about sudden swells of music or random gunfire from that location. She moves up my chest and curls up, purrs and even falls asleep. But when Margaret was away for the weekend, visiting her daughter (and grandson-to-be), Pema wouldn't do this. She sat next to me on the couch and rubbed against me, but wouldn't commit to the lap. As soon as Margaret came home, she resumed. Now I'm going away for a week, to my niece's wedding and other visits in western PA, so her routine will be challenged again. Like a lot of cats she's into routines, and now she seems able to slide into alternate ones if familiar situations recur--that one of us is away for awhile. But she's not entirely happy about it.

If you're interested in the earlier history of Pema--a feral cat rescued from starvation--follow this link. And here.

Elegy for Blue

Pema has been progressing further in becoming a house cat--she's actually drinking water from a dish now, as opposed to only when it's mixed with wet cat food --although recently she's been spending a lot of time in one of her little beds (as in the bottom photo.) But this past fall we were also visited regularly by a cat I called Blue, for her startling blue eyes (top two photos.)

At first she seemed like just another of the cats that have come and gone in the neighborhood, sniffing through the yard, curious about Pema. But Blue had a sweet, calm but insistent disposition, and followed Pema into the house a few times, just to look around. Sensing Pema's lack of interest (and occasional hostility), Blue turned her attention to the human members of the household. She became my particular friend. She had no problem being picked up (something that Pema still won't allow), and loved to be petted. She was very responsive to words and even thoughts, but she was also a puzzle.

We didn't know where she came from or who kept her, yet she seemed well-fed and groomed, at least at first. But when I saw her outside at all hours of the day and especially night, I started to wonder. Yet she wasn't interested in food or even water. It seemed to me she lost weight, although she seemed generally healthy. Then when we had a cold spell, I worried when she was outside at night. She came around one of those nights and I carried her inside. She stayed with me, on my lap as I rocked gently on the old rocking chair, but after checking out a couple of rooms, she clearly wanted to go back outside. Still, when we left an old blanket on the porch, she would sleep there through the morning.

One night we sat together in a chair on the patio, checking out a reputed meteor shower. She liked to get her head inside a jacket or sweater, or just under an arm. She came around late Thanksgiving night, and I sat with her in a chair on the porch for probably a half hour or so. She purred continuously for most of that time, until she dozed briefly, and then she was off. She would come around every day, sometimes more than once, and then not show up for a few days. I saw her last in mid December, when she finally deigned to eat from the dish I left for her, although not when I was looking.

I last saw her at just about the time that students were leaving after first semester. They're back now, but she hasn't reappeared. I can only hope that she belonged to a student who wasn't returning, and took her home. But especially since she was abroad at night, there's really no telling. There are raccoons around, and other dangers, like humans and their machines. Blue is a beautiful cat, as you can see. I miss her, and I just hope she's doing well wherever she is.

Happy Easter (and the Dog We Can Believe In)

Photos from the White House Easter Egg hunt plus one of Bo, the Dog We Can Believe In. These and more in Al Rodgers' latest photo blog at Kos. Check it out.

Aloha Bo

Meet Bo, the First Dog: a present to Sasha and Malia Obama from Senator Ted Kennedy. This is the official White House portrait.

Pema

Pema

After we lost our cat Tess, we didn't have a third member of the household for about a year. Then friends who live in a rural area up the mountain from Arcata rescued a young cat. They found her in their barn, starving and dyhydrated. They got her healthy again and began looking for a permanent home for her. We visited to see this still scrawny cat, dark gold with golden eyes. She hid from us but when I extracated her from under a bed, she responded to being petted, almost desperately.

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