Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Dogs

When dogs make us look good, it’s because they are great

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Cagney looking good at making us look good.

There are days when my students make me look good.  They don’t know they are being observed or that I would love it if they were interested, busy on their assignments, immersed in learning and my principal is watching.  But there are days when all of them seem to be in sync with me and each other.  When that happens, they make me look, they make themselves look good.  But this post is actually not about my students. It is about my dogs.

My husband, daughter and I went to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving, and we took the girls (our Labradors) with us.  And they made us look really good.  Put two big dogs with one little dog (the resident canine) in a small house with five people, two who are not too steady on their feet.  Just imagine it a minute, and you’ll understand why we always put the girls in the enclosed porch area.  My husband’s parents feel bad that the girls are out of the family society for the few days we are there. But we always fear that unexpected movement and an elderly person falling. However, this time, we let them talk us into allowing the girls to stay in the house just for the first few hours of our visit.

Cagney and Lacey never ended up in the enclosed porch.  They were tranquil (probably hoping we would not notice we forgot to put them out of the house.)  They moved slowly when slow people came near.  They sat along side a slender leg, looked up and backwards at the sitting senior and then lay their heads gently, still and calm to received kind pats.  They wagged considerately (only took out two leaves from the ivy by the door).

They made us look good.  They made themselves look good.  I don’t think they’ll be spending any time in the enclosed porch ever again.

#dogs #family

Things my dogs do that make me laugh

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Life with the ladies
  • Lacey (the chocolate) jerks up, ears alert and forward, nose twitching.  Cagney  (the blonde) runs through the kitchen with deep questioning growls.  How could she even know what the other one was doing in the living room.  And nothing was happening anywhere.
  • My husband is out and will be gone for several hours with no definite time of return.  Three minutes before he pulls into the driveway, my dogs start running from window to window, pushing the blinds aside in front of the sliding glass door and all around noisily announcing that he will be home soon.  They don’t stop until he has walked inside the door.  How will I know if there is going to be an earthquake if this is how they behave when he just pulls into town?
  • When Lacey wants to go out, she sits next to me, taps me with her paw, and when I look, she leaps straight into the air, flips both rear feet high up on one side and lands like a bucking bronco.  No matter how many times I ask if she has to go out, she will just sit and look at me like I am deranged.  Apparently, she does not believe in repeating herself.
  • Outside Cagney is the aggressive dog.  Inside Lacey takes control.  What did they do, draw up a contract?
  • Cagney runs around the backyard with her bottom tucked nearly beneath her, tail practically non-existent, a regular golden blur.  Lacey races the same track, legs flying out to her sides, tail out like a flag tail deer, ears flapping and beats Cagney to the door.  How?  She has so much wind drag she should be taking air and circling the yard.
  • When asked if she wants more water, Lacey gives me her paw.  Cagney shoves her nose in her water dish. If I ask Lacey again if she wants water, Cagney will put her nose in Lacey’s water dish.
  • Lacey sleeps with my daughter.  In the morning, if my husband or I try to let her out, she will not exit the bedroom until our daughter climbs out of bed and walks her into the hallway.
  • We know who pooped in the wrong place because one stays in one place and the other walks around leaving a trail.
  • Lacey will not use the back steps, even if it means taking a header every time she goes out and must leap from the doorway to the brick pathway below, avoiding the three steps down that would be so much safer.
  • My daughter’s bedroom is up a flight of thirteen steps.  It took Lacey six months before she learned to go down the stairs without ending up a ball of tumbled dog at the base.  Going up was no big deal, even exciting, but heading down in the morning, well, it was a good thing Cagney was willing to catch her at the bottom.
  • Cagney gets the greatest kick out of my husband. All he has to do is grab the back of the dining room chair and lean it toward him.  Cagney will spring to her feet and go into attack mode, a wide-mouthed grin spread across her long snout.  Don’t get me started with how she reacts if he pulls his t-shirt up to cover his face below the eyes.
  • When Cagney pretends my husband is a burglar (t-shirt collar pulled up to his eyes), Lacey will nip at Cagney’s feet until she agrees to play with her instead of him.

So what are your four-pawed friends doing to keep you content and entertained?

My life with dogs

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Lovey – ready for any adventure

I have had several dogs in my life, all lovely ladies. Each has given me years of devotion, enthusiastic support, and a warm sympathetic shoulder.  This post honors the girls no longer with us along with the two that currently make our lives a delight.

KELLY: a standard red dachshund my father acquired at the local pound in Costa Mesa, California.  She was already grown and well-seasoned with experience around children or she would have run away upon entering a house with five kids under the age of seven and a quite settled cat.  All of us, including the cat, formed an instant attachment to her.  She endured being wrapped up to look like she was wearing a babushka, aka my baby brother’s rather rangy blanket; carried about by my sisters and I with an arm wrapped about her upper torso and the rest dangling down to our knees; and numerous moves about the country (CA to MN to CA to PA to MA to NJ) all in less than four years). My strongest memory of that little lady occurred during a thunderstorm when I was eight.  The towering oak growing just outside our den was hit by lightening sending a twenty-foot-long, eight-inch in diameter limb to the ground where we normally kept our boat which had been moved to the backyard to undergo repairs (excellent timing for an engine update).  Our father was out on a date.  We spent the evening searching for Kelly.  It was a bit of a treasure hunt to us kids.  She’d been there in the den moments before the tree limb crashed to the ground.  We were moving to the upstairs to search further when our father arrived.  He kept telling us she would show herself when she was ready, but he followed us about on our search any way.  Found: Spare bedroom, armchair with skirting around the bottom, two white starred burgundy eyes reflected the flashlight we’d shown underneath it.  In that splash of light, those eyes wiggled and nearly sent us scurrying back down stairs.  My father caught us mid-scramble and checked under the chair to pull out Kelly who was fit to shake her bones out from inside her own skin.

She had style.

LADY:  a lab the color of milk chocolate who looked like a bear cub as a pup, pudgy, with hair that stood on end like fuzz.  She leaped off an overlook, by accident, of course.  She was jumping up to sit on the top of a low rock wall where my husband was standing looking down, and over she went, slipping due to the ice on the top.  She fell a good fifty feet and landed on the only section of dirt in a carved out rock ledge.  We  raced back to the house, located rope, a large side-open duffel bag and a warm blanket.  We skidded our way back through icy roads hoping she hadn’t moved from the small ledge.  When we returned to the site, it had snowed in our absence of more than an hour.  (Yes, I should have stayed, but my husband was not about to leave me alone at an empty roadside overlook.)  We ran to the rock wall and looked over.  Neither of us could see any sign of her.  We screamed her name.  Imagine two people leaning over a wall yelling, “Lady! Hey, Lady.”  Aw,  we can laugh now.  Suddenly, a small snow flurry appeared on the rock ledge below.  And there was our girl looking up at us. She was clearly stiff, cold and frightened.  We scrambled to tie off ropes and toss over the bag with its tether which I kept hold off, having nothing else to clutch as my husband preceded to repel down the cliff edge to get to her.  Mind you, he had never repelled in his life, but at 24 he felt fairly confident that day was not going to be his last.  She waited for him right up until she saw he intended to stuff her inside a bag and zipper it up.  She fought him with every fiber of her six-month-old canine body.  But she didn’t know he was not going to waste his time nearly killing himself going down and then up a cliff without bringing back the spoils.  He won, then climbed back up.  I learned how to pray better that day.  Then the two of us pulled up the bag, unzipped it, pulled her out and wrapped her double in a blanket.  No broken bones, lots of little cuts and one sizable half moon slice in a foot that showed bone and tendons when lifted — so stitches and a white bandage she was quite proud of was her only souvenir, that and a fear of heights.

Lovey – bathing beauty

LOVEY:  Lived to be fifteen years old, a deep chocolate Labrador, seventy-six pounds of solid rock.  She tangled with something in our back yard.  She had in a matter of two minutes managed to acquire a slice in her scalp that laid bare a good two inches of skull and two punctures in her chin.  I was about five months pregnant at the time and had college class to get to, but I hauled her off to the vet and left her sedated to get bandaged, and returned from class to pick her up.  The vet had found it necessary to shave the top of her round crown, trim tissue around the cut and stitch her up with fourteen stitches, fourteen very stiff, long black stitches which stood up from her head like a Mohawk haircut due to the tightness at which he had had to pulled the skin together. Her favorite activities were swimming, having shovelfuls of snow dumped on her while the driveway was cleared and running circles around my husband as he road his dirt bike.

Our girls today.

And now LACEY & CAGNEY:  One is a deep chocolate brown, nearly black Labrador, while the other is the palest of yellow labs.  They curl up like reverse image bookends, and we wonder if they choreograph their positioning.  The blonde loves the vet even though he is always treating her for allergies, while the other who hasn’t a physical complaint to speak of acts like she is off to her death every time we go in for yearly shots.  She curls her toes so her steel-hard nails become ice skates then slips all over the vet’s linoleum floor getting more and more out of control as she loses her balance and her grace while Cagney looks on as if to say, “Really, I can’t take you anywhere.”  Of course, this observation is coming from a Labrador that cannot traverse the back yard without checking for unfriendlies along every foot of the walkway.  Opposites, absolute opposites.