M.E. Breen

I see how quickly this could devolve into a blog about dogs. Dogs and cats, and the pigeon that somehow flew itself down twenty feet of chimney to coo in the wall behind the heater. (If I were reading I would already be worried over the fate of the pigeon, so I will tell you at once the rescue was successful; the pigeon appeared young and healthy and had clean, whole feet and flew off as fast as it could.) The incident with the pigeon made plain which of the three animals in this household would survive longest in the wild, and that is the female cat, the shyest and weirdest, the one who if she was human you would say most needed therapy. All she really needs is to hunt a pigeon, it turns out. Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be about the cats, or even about the dog, who is asleep in the sun after a walk on the beach and who looks a little like a young seal in her short-coated, dark-eyed, round-bellied way. All I meant to do was express a mood (content) on a particular day (Easter), but I find it happens quite often that instead of writing about how I am feeling I write about what one of the animals is doing. Maybe this is because the animals are more likely to keep doing whatever they are doing longer than I am likely to stay in any particular mood. Even in a good mood, I always wonder about the mood, Why is it good? Will it last? Is there something I’m forgetting to worry about? and so already the mood is changed. I read somewhere recently that Gloria Steinem said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” which is a much more succinct way of saying all of this, except she doesn’t add that she’s jealous of her pets for how much they seem to enjoy lying around like piles of furry laundry. (Needless to say, my actual laundry is also furry laundry.) In spite of this, I remain content, and head off to hunt for chocolate eggs.

I lived in France for a year in high school and that’s what my host father used to shout at the dog. A poodle, of course: small, black, curly, with a light, sort of squishy body that shook shook shook all the time, which was probably why yap yap yap all the time. Cookie could be made to look remarkably like a duck if you pressed her ears against her head. Quel canard! My father would say, which meant both What a duck! and What a joke!

The point of this being, I feel like Cookie today. I wish there was someone around to press my ears against my head, or at least pat my hair and say, Calm yourself.

So, yes, I don’t know what I’m doing here exactly, but I’m glad I started. What Cookie wanted to do most of all was run run run to the end of the yard and through the poodle-proof gate and along the bike path beside the canal, run like une folle, run totally berzerk, and be less squishy, and way less weird.