You can click this picture to download it as desktop wallpaper. I swear this wasn’t my idea. Jennrock asked me for it. I’m not that obsessed with my dog. Really.
So I adopted this dog and named her Frances, after Baby’s real name, as revealed at the end of Dirty Dancing. I chose the name because the dog did a tidy little grapevine step to chase a quarter rolling across the floor of the shelter. Also, this way, when I slip up and call her Baby, I won’t be too far off base.
I didn’t have any really solid reasons for wanting to adopt the dog before I did. I’m not a “dog person” per se. I don’t pride myself on being loved by dogs, I’m not an expert on dog behaviour, and I certainly don’t need my dog to give you a sniff-over before deciding we can be friends. But I’m home a lot, and I like walks, so I figured, why not. I thought it might be nice to have another living being breathing in the room with me while I work all day. And it is. Also, LOOK AT THAT FACE!
My lack of clear motivation didn’t stop friends from trying to invent me one. Some speculated that the dog was somehow supposed to replace a baby, while the Rapper worried that it was meant to replace him while he was away at work. I take issue with both of these theories because first, no baby I know was ever born with teeth this bad, and more importantly, I don’t trust this dog to run errands for me on her lunch hour. I don’t believe she’s going to read labels and make sure products do not contain modified milk ingredients. No deal. The dog, I figured, would let me know in her own time why I needed to have her around. She needed a home; I had one. The dog’s message would come to me when I was ready to receive it.
I didn’t have to wait very long. The first part of that message came through loud and clear this past Sunday, when Frances celebrated her second weekend with us by devouring 300 grams of chocolate in a desperate bid for canine suicide that was promptly thwarted by the Emergency Vet at a cost of roughly $0.75/gram.
“GET DOG GATES!” Frances telepathically screamed at me from triage. “BE MORE ORGANIZED. And for the love of dog, never, ever, ever go out for brunch again, leaving me alone in the apartment for an hour and a half, how could you?!!!”
When the dog speaks, it turns out, I have to be pretty selective in my hearing.
(For the record, the chocolate was in a sealed bag, at the bottom of my back pack, which was zipped closed. I thought I had unpacked all the groceries, but I missed that one item at the bottom. Prior to the Chocolate Incident, I wasn’t all that worried about that kind of thing, becuase up until that point, she had expressed absolutely no interest in eating anything for any reason. Sustenance or pleasure– she was having none of it. I know you’re not supposed to feed dogs chocolate. And not just because people keep telling me that when I tell them this story. I KNOW. And yeah, this paragraph has nothing to do with good storytelling, and everything to do with my not wanting to hear about it in the comments, so shut up, OK?)
The important thing is, Frances was very good at the vet, and she survived. I wasn’t surprised that she was good, given that she sleeps 22 hours a day and tries to avoid moving if at all possible as long as she’s indoors. She’s a nervous puppy (and by ‘puppy’ I mean 4 year old, adult, full-grown dog), not because of me and my chocolate neglect, but because her previous handlers most likely abused her, so she tends to tense up and just freeze around strangers, which makes poking her with needles pretty easy. NO, I DON’T POKE MY DOG WITH NEEDLES.
Sorry. Where was I?
Right. Frances. There’s not too much else you need to know.
- When we’re asleep, she creeps to the front of the apartment, and takes our shoes back the couch, where she sleeps with them until morning. She doesn’t chew the shoes, she just piles them around her. She seems to find them comforting. Because I’m an awful person, I’ve now put a gate between the dog and the shoes, for the protection of the couch.
- We like to go for long walks around the neighborhood. Outside CAMH, a man offered the dog a cigarette. She said no.
- Old men on bicycles often stop and remark “now thur’s a fiiine bea-gull.” I don’t know why they talk like that, or how the Beagle came to be the preferred breed of old guys on bikes.
- When the wind blows, her ears billow out beside her head, and I want to run ahead of her on the sidewalk to see what she looks like from the front, but I don’t, because then I’d have to drop the lead, and she’d almost certainly chase her nose right into traffic, and I’m an awful pet mother, but not quite that awful.
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