On the edge of ends and beginnings

To the readers of this blog

Best wishes for the coming year, whatever it holds.  

Thank you for being here, and for your greetings and comments.  They keep the wheels rolling much more than I imagine you know.  

 

I have been trying to recall, of the numerous resolutions I have made in the 68 New Years  of my life, which resolutions I have actually kept for at least a week.  I cannot remember a single one.  

Am I doing something wrong here?  

As so often before, I am torn between feeling that I ought to do – or at least say – something important, and the realization that I am not somebody important in the sense that what I say makes much difference outside a very small circle.

But that is the human condition for almost every one of us.  Even Very Important Persons are not very important in the great scheme of things.

And so this evening, my 2009 resolution is to be at peace with the smallness of the human condition, to respect the people and the hours in my days by not belittling them as insignificant.  

It’s everything I have, and it’s a wonderful gift.

Dog training by an expert

Dugo was, from the start, irrepressible.  He was born believing that he was number one, and was a natural-born show-off as well.  

Within hours of arriving at his new home, he discovered he could fit under the couch:

It drove Suli wild because she couldn’t reach him.

 

When Dugo got bored, he came out looking for trouble:

 

Suli let Dugo play with her.  But this wasn’t playing. Dugo is on his back for one of his many transgressions.

 

We were glad for all the help we could get.  In fact, by the time Dugo was trained properly, we knew Suli deserved about 90% of the credit.

 

 

Eating the house

Yesterday Peter and I were talking about the kind of children we were.  I said that I’d been an over-socialized self-righteous little prig.

Not me, he said.  ”I’d eat the gingerbread house.”

Eat the gingerbread house!?  the one where the witch lived?  

The very one, he said.

And that is one of the things I have always found so refreshing about him.

Fighting to be top dog

We had no idea when she first joined us that Suli had ever met any Black children, let alone that she had formed an opinion about them.  Which turned out to be, to say the least, highly inconvenient.

We were watching a performance by Black children on television one evening when Suli, whom we thought never noticed what appeared on the screen, walked up to the TV and growled.  We were astonished, and the next day asked her breeders if they had any insights.  They too were surprised but said that they’d come home from work one day and found a group of neighbourhood children standing at the gate teasing the dogs. The children were Black, which, Aino suggested, might be Suli’s problem.

It was very soon our problem.  A family with two children lived four doors down the street from us, and they were Black.  Suli bit through her lead one day (we didn’t know until then she could do this) and made a dash for #4.  I ran as fast as I could which was a good deal slower than Suli, and arrived with Suli barking at the front door, and two frightened children peering through the glass.

One of the best training guidelines we’d learned from the monks was to dominate a dog the way they dominate each other:  put them on their back, and shake them, making as loud a noise and as big a demonstration as you can muster.  

I didn’t need encouragement.  I threw Suli on her back, and shook her, all the while appearing, to all intents as purposes, like a woman completely out of control.  We’d already seen Suli put on hysterical shows of her own, so I had a pretty high standard against which to compete.

When I’d finished, I stood up, secured Suli to a much shortened lead and looked up at the two faces at the window.

I will never forget their expressions.  Nothing, absolutely nothing else I could have done, including the profound apology to their parents that evening, could have convinced them that I thought Suli’s behavior had been totally outrageous and would not, if I had anything to do with it, be tolerated.

As it turned out, it was not the last time Peter or I would have to make it clear to Suli that there were some things that the Top Dogs in the pack would not tolerate.  It wasn’t that she was a slow learner.

But she was very stubborn.

I always want the best for myself

We learned a lot from watching our female dog Suli train Dugo, our new six-week-old male dog.  It was always interesting, but it wasn’t always easy.

We started out with two guidelines.  The first was that we treated each of the dogs with absolute fairness.  If one got a biscuit the other did.  When one was fed, the other got his supper at exactly the same time.  The second understanding was that, although we may operate under a principle of equality and justice, the dogs had to be allowed to work it out their own way.  Whether we liked it or not, one dog was always going to be dominant, and that would, by all laws of canine behavior, be Suli.

We did not worry about Suli having to defend herself.  She was much bigger, and we’d already seen that she had developed an aggressive strategy of defense that could terrify grown men.  Nor was it surprising that Dugo wanted what belonged to Suli.  But it was something of a shock to watch Suli let him have whatever he wanted without any objections at all.

Here is an illustration in four parts.  At first sight, they look like four cuddly vignettes.  But it was a battle by Dugo to Possess the Whole World We have just given Suli and Dugo each a bone.  Dugo is lying on his to make sure nobody takes it, and is working on a rag instead.

Dugo is looking at Suli’s bone.   His simple philosophy is that Suli’s is always the best.

Despite appearances,  Suli and Dugo are not sharing the bone.  Dugo is taking it.

To our chagrin and horrow, Suli lets Dugo have her bone without a fight.  He is still lying on his bone, and Suli is chewing on the second-class rag.

Peter and I had never seen anything like this before, and letting this outright theft go by without intervention by us took a great deal of respect for canine culture.

We needn’t have worried.  What happened next was a revelation.

Dugo joins Suli

By the time Suli had been with us for a year, Peter decided that she was becoming neurotically lonely, a diagnosis undoubtedly foisted on her as the result of living with a psychologist.  

But both of us were out of the house for most of the day, and it was clear that Suli was not the kind of dog to survive that many daylight hours cooped up inside alone.  So we went back to our two Kuvasz breeders, and just after Christmas, Dugo arrived to live with us.

He was six weeks old when he arrived, and had been named Dugo by Aino and Doris because it means “little cork” in Hungarian.  It fit him so well we never changed it.  Occasionally, when he was trying to be grown up, we would add a royal “ram” at the end of his name.  But Dugo was who he really and always was.

Dugo was simply darling.  He thought so too, and that he had a god-given right to whatever he wanted.  (If you’ve never had a dog yourself, think “two-year-old boy.”  It will be a decent approximation.)

So we loved him.  But if all of us were going to survive together, Dugo was going to have to be trained.

Fortunately, we had help.  Suli thought Dugo was simply marvellous, but she was under no illusions that he arrived as an uncivilized ruffian who had to be taught how to behave properly.

 Watching her achieve this was one of the fascinating experiences of my life.  We learned more about dog training from Suli than from any of the books we bought to help us deal with this self-determined breed. 

Christmas Eve Fare

Story from our local paper:

A vicar was holding a pre-Christmas service for the children in the parish, and at one point engaged them in dialogue.  Dialogue is a grown-up word for a question-and-answer session which included the following exchange:

Vicar, holding up a statue of the infant Jesus holding an orb aloft depicting his dominion of the world:  ”Can anyone tell me who this is?”

Child, eagerly competing to be the first to give the right answer:  ”Yes, it’s baby Jesus!”

Vicar:  ”Yes, it is.  And can anybody tell me what it is that he’s holding in his hand?”

Child, eagerly competing to be the first to give the right answer:  ”Yes, it’s a mince pie!”

To all, a happy holiday

A Grown-up’s Hallelujah!

The Number One Christmas song here in Britain this year is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s iconic Hallelujah!  There is a big debate about just which artist has recorded the best version, and to inform myself about this critical issue, I went to U-tube.  I have now listened to 14 different versions.

What surprises me most is that this song is making it as a Christmas song.  I often do not pay much attention to lyrics, but the only way to find this a soothing merry song is to concentrate solely on the chorus, which consists in its entirety of repeated hypnotic Hallelujahs.

Cohen wrote several versions, one slightly more hopeful than the other.  But neither version is a cuddly love song.  It does not burst with joy but with anguish, with that mixture of total selflessness and self-abnegation that marks an obsessive love you know is destroying you and you can’t let go of.  It’s not the victory song as one goes off to love or war for the first time but the dirge as one is returning with a shattered face, a gutted inside, a dead friend on the stretcher beside you.  The Hallelujah! wrenched from the lover’s lips is shot through with despair and bitterness.

I find it a haunting, terrifying, truthful song.  It’s ostensibly the story of King David’s obsession with Bathsheba that broke his hold on the throne.  But it belongs to every human age.  

It’s a grown-up song, and hearing it sung by the young and still innocent is disconcerting.  Those  who do not yet know that love can be as toxic and bitter as sin swing in a gentle euphoria to the anguish of the exalting Hallelujahs.  It is like watching a baby play with an unexploded grenade.

The most popular version of the song ends in the wreckage of isolated angry meaninglessness:

well, maybe there’s a god above 
“but all i’ve ever learned from love 
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you 
it’s not a cry that you hear at night 
it’s not somebody who’s seen the light 
it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

But the version Cohen himself seems to have preferred ends with an existential acceptance, even defiant celebration.  It all went wrong, but that’s how things are.  To life!  Hallelujah!   

“And even though it all went wrong 
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song 
With nothing on my tongue 
But hallelujah!” 

Maybe it’s a Christmas song after all.  A Christmas song for grown-ups who have faced the hopelessness of a shattered love.

 My current favourite cover is at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=T2NEU6Xf7lM&feature=related  .  You can listen to Jeff Buckley’s version at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AratTMGrHaQ  

Or type in Hallelujah on Google.  I think there are 80 covers of the song.

Highly selective loyalty

When Peter and I went to the breeder to explore the possibility of buying a Kuvasz dog, we were thoroughly vetted.  Not everyone, in the experience of these two breeders, was equipped to own a Kuvasz. 

We were invited to sit down in the living room and offered coffee in the presence of two young, excitable male Kuvaszok, made more so by the fact that they were in cages and could not get to us.  In the midst of their clamour, Doris and Aino told us about the breed.  

• It was immensely important that we expose a young Kuvasz to as many social situations as possible.  If we didn’t, their assessement of humans beings who were considered acceptable would narrow to only the two of us, trapping us in their small world.
• We must be absolutely clear that we – not the dog – were in charge.  We had to be certain in our own minds that we were top dog and would not be intimidated or bullied.  This was not a position any Kuvasz would accept without some convincing.
• Kuvasz were utterly loyal to the family to which they decided they belonged.  A Kuvasz would be our dog. Uniquely and totally

Then they let the two barking Kuvasz out of their cages and watched us closely for signs of fear.  When we passed this test, we were escorted to the yard downstairs where all ten Kuvaszok in residence were allowed to roam.

We chose Suli.  She was different from the rest – just a little aloof, a little more independent, and possibly the most self-willed, although Kuvasz and self-willed might be considered by some to be a tautology.

We brought her home, but when we tried to get her to leave the car, she wouldn’t get out.  We went upstaisr, leaving the car door open, and sometime later brought her food down which we left on the floor of the garage.  When we left, she climbed out, ate her supper, and then returned to  the car.

We left her to make up her own mind.  She joined us upstairs about midnight.

We knew she was our dog about week later when a stranger offered her a biscuit she took from us with alacrity.  She wouldn’t take it.  Strangers were not to be trusted.

Suli was our loyal guard for life.  We belonged to each other.

Stay upstairs for Christmas

The first Christmas after she arrived, Suli had been living with us for several months and several of my sisters came to spend the holidays with us.   They arrived on Christmas Eve, and endured what came to be called The Initiation as Suli put on her show demonstrating that she was unambiguously in charge, even though you might think that she was quite possibly crazy.

After her Show, we introduced them to Suli, and spent the rest of the day enjoying each other with pre-Christmas drinks and dinner.  We all went to bed after midnight, and felt quite pleased that Suli had accepted our guests with no more tirades.

Peter and I were up early the next morning, and were in the kitchen preparing the Christmas turkey when we heard The Trouble.  Suli was sitting at the bottom of the stairs growling low in her throat, a sound that was as terrifying as any of her hystical displays.  This was deadly serious.  My sister Mary stood at the top of the stairs, calling us to provide safe passage.  

We escorted her down the stairs,  assuring Suli that Mary was not Public Enemy Number One.  By the end of the day, they were permanent friends.   Suli never forgot Mary again.

And Mary thought Suli was the classiest dog she’d ever seen.  When she was dying and I flew to Denver to help her close up her apartment, I discovered a picture of Suli.  It was the first thing you saw when you walked in her front door.