Daily Archives: September 7, 2009

Dogs, Friends

Drama

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Lughnasa                                  Waning Harvest Moon

Rigel has not come home.  We don’t know where she is or how she is.  Her absence is palpable.  At night she sits on the couch with me, her head in my lap as I watch a few TV shows, wind down from the day.  She was not there tonight.

Our neighbor left in an ambulance again.  Another suicide attempt, this time with tylenol pm.  We cannot know the pain in another persons life, not even those close to us.  The barrier of flesh and mind holds us out, even when we try to overcome it.  This is the truth in solipsism.

There were two police cars, an ambulance and people going in and out of the house.  I watched for a while, behind a gauze curtain and felt like an Italian grandmother leaning out a window in a Boston neighborhood.  Drama, the kind that touches lives daily on every block in every city and town in the world, grabs us, makes us want to know how things come out.

Kate gave his wife a call and offered to be there for her.  She has a big heart and a generous spirit.

The longer Rigel is gone, the more a feeling of sadness creeps over me.  I don’t want to feel it.  It seems as if I do that I’ve given up on her and I haven’t, but now she’s gone at night.

Dogs, Great Wheel, Holidays

Waiting for Rigel to Come Home

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Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon

Vega returned home.  Kona let all the dogs inside (her major outdoor trick) and Vega walked into our bedroom where I had laid down for a bit.  When I got up to see if Rigel had come home with her, she apparently got up on the bed because I found many burrs and stickers deposited on my side of the bed.

Rigel is still out there, somewhere.

Until she comes home or we decide to try and find her an alternate way, I won’t take Vega out to discover their escape hatch.  I want Rigel to use it to come home.  There’s probably a subtle psychological truth in that, but I’ll leave it to you to discern.

On another note, this is a holiday, a holiday of ending.  Labor Day, aside from its apparent purpose, has acquired a status, at least here in the northern US, as the end of summer.  This comes not only from the meteorological changes, September 1st is the end of meteorological summer, but also the return of kids to school.  Here in Minnesota people go up to their lake cabins to shut them up for the winter and the whole atmosphere becomes one of back to work, time to get serious again.

As a holiday, it has a certain numinosity, a feeling of difference, of quiet, of peaceful.  Today I have a sense of lassitude, a languor.  That’s partly from the intense work of the last week in researching and writing Roots of Liberalism and partly my body’s response to holidayness, perhaps you could call it its holiness, a time set apart, different from all other days.

Waiting for Rigel.

Dogs

On the Lam

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Lughnasa                         Waning Harvest Moon

Vega and Rigel are gone.  In a 45 minute period while I lined up framing for a painting to hang over our fireplace they escaped and were returned and escaped again.

When I got back from the framer, a message blinked on our answering machine.  Pam, the neighbor across the street, had called.  The people who live behind us to the south had caught Rigel and had her on a leash.  Vega slipped her collar.  They were kind enough to bring Rigel home and open the gate and let her in the back (fenced) yard.  Vega snuck back in via their escape route, a route I cannot identify.

I wandered the neighborhood calling their names, met several of the neighbor’s dogs, but neither heard nor saw anything of Rigel and Vega.  I feel helpless, especially since we do not, stupidly, have either a chip in them or tags on them.  If and when we get them back, a chip and tags are going on for sure.

My plan is to wait a while and see if they come on their own.  They like it here and we have lunch for them, so if they’re free, they will return home.  Later, I’ll call animal control, but I’d prefer not to right now since I don’t want to explain the lack of tags.  We keep our dogs fenced and I exert a good deal of energy to keep them contained, so we’ve operated on the (false) assumption that we don’t need to be too prompt with tags or chips.  Wrong.