Point of View: For All Seasons
O’en’s become a boon companion, largely a creature of habit like me, and our evening walks, when it’s just us on the darkened streets of our neighborhood, has become one.
He is less anxious then, as am I, though every now and then he’ll stop, look, and listen. I, who am awaiting with bated breath the arrival of new hearing aids, am kept guessing. Nevertheless, I tell him not to worry and we walk on.
I — Mary too — have been protective of him, helicopter parents, I suppose, in that regard, for we don’t want repeated the mauling his forebear, Henry, suffered at the hands, as it were, of three Rhodesian Ridgebacks who’d piled out of a van all of a sudden one day, and, in pinning him down, had left him forever wary when it came to getting along with other dogs.
O’en, a preternatural democratic socializer, a friend to all, be they four or two-legged, has been spared that trauma thus far, and I hope he forever will be. By and large, in his nine months on earth, he’s been having fun and feeling fine — more or less the words that have largely served as my guide.
Hovering, I know, is not considered good parenting, and yet we do, content that he remain innocent insofar as possible of this dog-eat-dog world. As we watched, fascinated, while he humped his bed the other night, I suggested we get him a rubber Pomeranian.
No, no, I know that is going too far.
“They are predators,” Matty Posnick, ARF’s training guru, has said, “not fuzzy people!”
And yet, and yet. . . . “Well, it’s only natural,” I said as the humping went on. “We’re all human beings here.”
“I’m glad we got him,” Mary said the other day. And I, who’d been wary at first, wondering if we were up to it, said I was too.
For one, he’s exceedingly handsome, noble looking even, a fact that perhaps will serve to elicit from me better, less petty, behavior. In short, I think he might be becoming my role model.
O’en, a man for all seasons, a fuzzy man for all seasons.