wag

Sniff sniff sniff pant.  Thing about this cold white stuff is it kills all the smells, hides the scat and the shit so you have to work harder to – what’s that?  A person!  By the gate.  C’mooon!  He’s coming in.  Look at you, tall bloke, I can jump up just as high as your head.  Look!  You coming in or what?  Yes!  Hello to you too!  I can’t say it out loud because I’m a dog.  Hurry up and lock it after you then, come on come on.  Good, right then, you want to play?  Here, look, here’s a stick.  Come on.  Stop trying to look at my collar, will you?  Ahh, that’s it!  Tug of war with the stick.  Nice growling too, for a human.  Oh, go on then, have a quick look at the collar if you want.  And that thing too.  Hmm, shiny isn’t it?  Yes, that’s my name.  How did you know that?  Now stick again!  Yeh yeh.  Ok I’ll chase, nyeowww.. WOah.  This white stuff’s slippery innit?  Again again.  What you doing with that thing by your ear?  Who you talking to?  Throw it again!  Rrra, ok this is fun tug of war but.. woah!  Think you’re clever swinging me round and round, don’t you?  I’m not letting go!  Ha!  Told you.  This bit of the car park’s boring now; there’s not much left of the stick now too.  It was rubbish to start with now I keep losing it in the white stuff.  Who are you talking to?  I’m off for a sniff sniff sniff.  Ha, following me?  Mug.  What?  Whatcha got then?  Is that cat, I smell?  I’m not gonna come just because you’re clapping and slapping your thighs, numpty.  Hang on, why you running away now?  CHASE!  Ok, I’ll win.  I’m a small young dog, sniff sniff.  See?  I overtook you EASY.  Who’s..?  Oh hello mistress.  Uh oh, that’s a lead.  Pfft.  Fun while it lasted, sniff sniff pant.

Time echoes in pets

The parents recently bought a puppy which closely resembles one they bought when I was six weeks old.  I grew up with it and was probably excessively wounded when it died.

 

We were roughly 12 and a half and I’d never known a day without him.  It remains my harshest ever experience of grief, for which I suppose I should be grateful.  After all, it was just a dog.

(Even so, just typing that last sentence still smarts: "just a dog"?! *sniffle*)

Seeing recent photographs of Mum with the new puppy couldn’t help but evoke comparison with similar photographs taken roughly my lifetime ago.
 

The puppy itself is impossibly cute right now, eight weeks old, its character and lolloping running style still immature and undefined.

 

Can’t help thinking a touch morbidly though.  Will this be their last dog?  One which will see them into proper old age?  Might I even, one day, be obliged to take custody of it, when it’s fully grown, old itself, creaky, a faculty or two gone?  If not this one, maybe another.  A smaller, downsized, more manageable one.  Where will I be then?

As ever, I can’t even guess where I’ll be in a handful of years.  A decade or so hence still appears as intimidatingly unforeseeable as it did when I was a child.  There’s still no plan.

 

Time seems to resonate more strongly through family pets than through humans, possibly due to their limited lifespan: more manageable chunks of time for the memory. As well as their permanent-seeming embroidery into the fabric of day-to-day family life at the time, and the gaping space they leave when they go.