In a comment on my last post, Susan said “I thought Pepe WAS a baby!”

Good point. He’s a prosthetic baby.

prosthesis. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prosthesis (accessed: October 15, 2008).

1. a device, either external or implanted, that substitutes for or supplements a missing or defective part of the body.

For instance, those cool racer feet for someone who’s had their feet amputated, or saline implants for someone who’s had a mastectomy. It’s fairly obvious why someone without feet would want artificial replacements: even if they don’t look or feel like feet, you can still walk and run, which is the important part. Replacing a breast with an implant is a little less clear, because the implant carries risks, making it harder to detect any recurrence of cancer; it doesn’t look or feel like a breast; and the practical uses of an implant are subtle. I’ve thought about it though, and if I had a unilateral mastectomy I think I’d have an implant. Clothes would fit better, but also the weight on my body would be balanced and I would be less susceptible to the backaches that women with a single large breast get.

Anyway. Back to Pepe. I always wanted a large family, and I like babies. I never had the circumstances I wanted to start a family, so never did. I was always certain of my decision, but I missed the kids and babies I didn’t have. Sort of an itchy, uncomfortable feeling that had me looking for something I knew I didn’t want.

Then I got dogs. They aren’t kids or babies, but they occupy the itchy kids-and-baby spot so I can settle down and concentrate on my life instead of my itch. Kind of like a saline implant isn’t a breast, but it holds the clothes in place and allows one to head out and do the groceries without worrying about the alignment of one’s spine.

Yes, he is wearing a sweater.

The other day I took the dogs for a walk in the Parc Regional de la Nature at Papineau and Gouin. Pepe’s stamina is not so good these days, so I tucked a baby carrier in a bag just in case. And I did end up using it, posing great, if imaginary, social difficulties. Sometimes I could completely hide him inside the carrier and I could imagine that other people assumed it was a baby. But mostly his head stuck out. Besides, pretending your dog is a baby is even creepier than just treating it like one. 

I knew that rushing up to people and explaining that YES I Let Him Walk, But He’s Thirteen With Kidney Disease And He Gets Tired, OK? was not the right thing to do. And staring people down with an I Dare You To Say Something expression was not fun for anyone either. So mostly I avoided people’s gaze, which is interesting because when I am not carrying a chihuahua in a baby carrier I’m not aware that I look people in the eye that much.

One possibility would be that I just stop taking him on these walks, and just let him walk up and down the street in front of the house. That would be the sensible thing, right?

Another would be to get a BAT CARRIER to perplex, amaze and amuse.

Found on stuffonmymutt.com. Thanks, Leanne!

We paid an old-fashioned weekend visit to Mark’s friend Mary who was having her end-of-year cottage-closing party on a little lake in the Laurentians. Food was brought by everyone, children were brought by most and dogs were brought by very few (we dropped ours off at the Dog Lady’s on the way up). The drunks were sociable but not lascivious, the children were active and excited but not rude, agressive or whiny, the food was identifiable and nutritious. As this party lasted two days and as many but not all guests made multiple appearances it’s a little hard to count numbers; but I suppose that Saturday night there were about twenty adults. It ended with a bang this afternoon as the last five of us hard-core partiers played a rousing game of Cranium™.

Anyway, it was very nice.

We left this evening in time to pick up the dogs before the 7 pm curfew, giving a lift to a friend. The dogs were happy to see us but bore no apparent resentment towards the Dog Lady. Exactly perfect. We locked Pepe into his usual cage in the back of the station wagon and drew the cover over to muffle the sound of his barking somewhat. I sat in the back seat with Poupoune on my lap and our long-legged friend sat in the front. I quickly realised that Poupoune reeked something awful. After quick and urgent discussion windows (which had been raised against the rain) were lowered and I stuffed Poupoune into a plastic bag to contain the nauseating odor. This arrangement worked quite well, Poupoune being pretty compliant when she knows what is wanted. Upon our return home both dogs were ushered promptly into the bath and thoroughly scrubbed… and de-flead while I was at it.

I think the other dogs at the Dog Lady’s did the territorial thing and peed on them. And then I think the Dog Lady sprayed them with Febreeze.

[originally transmitted by e-mail August 29 2004]

Poupoune is my favourite dog. She is alert, attentive, attached and one of the most fully alive of earth’s creatures I have ever known. She is also irritable, ill-tempered and quarrelsome.

This winter she’s been grumpier than usual. Cranky. Snappish even. Things she’s never enjoyed — like having her paws caught during wrestling matches — get snarls and air-bites now. She’s become totally fed up with Pepe, not tolerating his presence anywhere near her. And she’s bitten us three times, drawing blood once. The first two times we could kind of understand what provoked her. But when she and Mark were napping together as usual this week and she bit his leg when he shifted in bed was just too much. I immediately made an appointment with the vet.

As I explained to the vet yesterday, my hypothesis was that she’s in pain and snapping at whoever happens to be nearby. The vet put forth another hypothesis, that she’s becoming blind and panics when approached by someone or something she can’t see.

Well, both hypotheses were eliminated. Her vision is excellent (no cataracts, pupils respond well to light, and she blinks when you tap your hand towards her eye), her joints are smooth, flexible and non-tender, her innards sound and feel perfectly normal, and when she runs excitedly around the room sniffing and leaping she doesn’t hesitate or favour any side or leg. For good measure, her temperature and bloodwork were also checked and show absolutely no abnormalities.

This is when hypothesis 3 was brought out: not sick, just bad. (Or in vet-speak, “exhibiting inappropriate dominant behaviour.” Same thing.) The first question the vet asked me when exploring this hypothesis was “Does she exhibit this behaviour in one particular place or situation?” The answer being “Yes, in the bed,” the take-home advice was “Don’t let her in the bed any more.” (Recalls the old joke: “Doctor, my arm hurts when I go like this!” “Well, don’t go like that.”) We were also offered psychoactive medication (for her) to help in the behavioural-modification program.

We’re pretty much going ignore the advice. We certainly don’t need drugs to manage her. We were worried she was ill, and $212 later we know she isn’t. We have our answer. She’s 11 lbs / 5 kg (about the size of a cat but without the sharp claws) and bites us maybe once every one or two months. We don’t have kids. It isn’t a safety concern and we enjoy napping with her. We’ll just be a little stricter: she won’t be allowed in the bed without us. And more severe with consequences when she goes too far, because we won’t be worried about her. We’ll know she’s just being bad.

[originally transmitted by e-mail May 2, 2004]

Glossary:
Outremont: well-to-do professionals live there. Rich people too.
Nerve.com: the personals site where I met Adam, and Mark, and Anne (in that order).
100 pounds: about 45 kilos.

>on 4/15/03 3:51 PM, Cummins, Alison at wrote:
>Um, may I forward this? It’s funny and lovely. (Just like you.)

—–Original Message—–
From: Anne McKnight [mailto:______@sympatico.ca]
Subject: Re: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true story

Hi,
A funny story about Internet dating, with the moral being, you never know what will happen.
Remember last fall when I met that cool musician guy with the heady imagination, had a nice coffee with him, after which he asked to meet up again, and then he up-and-said his trials (”") with Internet dating were over, when we actually hadn’t even been on a ‘date’?  

Well, the scene at that time was kind of bleak.  I was dog-sitting. In outremont.  In a house with no good food to raid, except for dog food, very expensive dog food.  The dog had allergies and had to be given pills often.  The dog’s allergies made its anus itch.  The dog would sit & spin on its poor itchy anus for hours on end.  I didn’t know this was an allergic symptom.  I thought she had to go out.  I took her out alllll the time.  She has no discipline and weighs over 100 pounds, and would drag me down the street, towards other dogs, towards piles of dogshit, towards sodden donuts in gutters, all of which I would pry out of her mouth.  If she put anything in her mouth, it would activate more allergies, more sitting & spinning.  Is it any wonder I turned to alternate-virtual–worlds?  Also, I was writing grants, which in academia means inventing parallel lives you will probably never get to live.  Which I have already not gotten to live about 7 times since I moved here, all those parallel lives recycled back to the drawing board…

So, anyway, I answered the cursory, wildly funny ad on nerve, and started a conversation with this guy, the musician.  Even though I was stuck with the itchy-anus dog, in outremont, with no food but dog food, it made me happy.  I met him, and that made me happy too, since more than ‘dating trials’ I thought, oh at last, someone I can talk to about the freaky things I like, music & etc.  well, that didn’t work out, obviously.  I was dissed-electronically, ick.  

The synchronicity of the conversation was good though, as it got my imagination deceived, productively, into thinking it had an interlocutor.  I wrote a grant proposal to pay for all those things I invented in the parallel worlds that crossed between that conversation & the parallel universe sponsored by the government of quebec.  

So synchronicity point 1, is that K**** says, Sunday, he is working with the guy who is the ***** man at *****, who is this guy.  Oh really, say hi for me.  So, yesterday, Monday, synchronicity 2–I find out that I got the grant.  45K + 10K for equipment, sound & image editing stuff.  I guess I owe that guy a beer some time.  Even though he has a girlfriend, and protocol dictates we will probably never be in a together-drinking situation anytime soon, due to the blowback such an encounter in his single days would oh-so-predictably provoke. Moral of the story:  you never really know, do you?

Chalk up another felicity for parallel, virtual lives, and the unpredictable directions they go…

a

[originally transmitted by e-mail April 15, 2003]

My father arrived back from Nunavut on Friday bearing the following images.

***
Skidoo-driving mothers trailing kamatiks - [dog]sleds - ferry their children back and forth from school. Open vehicles like skidoos are much more popular than warrm, wind-sheltering ones like trucks.

Skidoos are used to hunt caribou. Dogs are used to hunt seals because they can sniff out breathing holes in the ice. By law, dogs must also be used when guides take southern white hunters to bag a polar bear.

***
Northerners don’t think much of southern white hunters. They skin their bear then have the pelt stretched so that a six-foot bear becomes a nine-foot trophy.

***
One of the ministry of education administrators, a southern white woman my father was consulting for, was recently widowed. Her husband was a prominent inuit hunter who died while stranded in a storm so severe that helicopters couldn’t go out to search for him for four days.

His brother explained that if he hadn’t become separated from his kamatik and his dogs, he would have been able to survive two weeks. As it was he was only able to hang on three days.

Only two of his five dogs survived the storm.

***
A northern dog will stand on top of its doghouse in minus forty weather and high winds simply for the sake of being top dog. (”What is a northern doghouse?” “I haven’t been inside one so I can’t really say, but from the outside it would appear to be a packing crate.”)

***
When leaving Arviat for Yellowknife he realised that Yellowknife was a southern city after all: it has trees.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 31, 2003]