How did I get this blog? I was trying to sign up to read my brother's blog,"I was just saying...with John", and I understood the Blog site to say I have to have my own in order to read his. So now I have it and so -- what the hell? -- maybe I'll put my thoughts out there into the Universe. No one could possibly care, anyway, what I have to say.

And who is Rascal? He's my third child, now an old dog, a 19 pound Bichon-a-Poo who came to live with me on my 40th birthday. At the time, I was on an extended leave from my Official Court Reporting position, home with my five and three year olds. I decided that, since I'd never had a dog of my own -- oh, some my parents brought home when I was a child, but not really MINE -- at the age of 40, I COULD HAVE ONE. It was scary, a revelation to me that I didn't have to ask permission for it. It was also a scary revelation that it took me 40 years to "dare" to have my own dog. Especially considering I graduated in the first class of Women's Studies majors at UMass Amherst. (I'd love to expound on the duality of human nature at this point, something I've been thinking about more and more in my 50's, but that's another blog.) And my husband pushed back on it, too! I still remember getting up the nerve to tell Steve. We were in the car at night, coming home from the surprise birthday party a woman from our church threw for me, and I was feeling pretty wonderful, what with all the attention. I slowly explained it to him, lowering the actual price by $50. He tried to intimidate me a little, by raising his voice: "We don't need another dog." "What about Duke? He'll feel slighted!" "And we have the cat no one likes!" "How much did it cost?", etc, etc. I told him he was lucky it was a puppy I wanted and not another child, and he shut his mouth. After that, it was more of a continuing, low level resistance to the poor dog that Steve employed, like calling him "Turtle Bait"in front of his large male friends. (It took many years after Steve finally came to love him for Rascal to come around to liking STEVE.)

Rascal was a continual joy. It came from his breeding. When I met his mother, a black miniature poodle, I could tell she was a lovely, refined and obviously intelligent dog. The breeder related to me her perfectly calm behavior while pregnant and attending a basketball game. His father, a handsome large Bichon, very acrobatic in the way of his breed, which was bred for entertaining humans,. [history here] When I was at the breeder's home, he ran two or three circles around the room, up and over the furniture, before doing a slower prance around, obviously showing himself off. So Rascal was bi-racial! His head and ears are like a black cap, the rest of him is white, except for a black spot on his left rump and top of his tail. I remember Rascal, who was the last pup of the three left un-spoken for, attentively watching his father. The other pups seemed to have eyes only for the humans in the room. That worried me, that my pup was different. I thought perhaps he'd not been handled as much because his coat was rougher than his sisters. The breeder, a local Bourne woman named McKenna, told me what to feed him, and explained the pups had been washed almost daily since birth, to accustom them to the grooming they would have to go through because of their constantly growing, white coats. We had to leave him there, he wasn't ready to wean yet, and Kelsea, my five year old, screamed all the way out their house and cried all the way home, even though I told her over and over we were coming back for him. She and I had seen the breeder's ten year old daughter pinch our Rascal defiantly while staring at us, but not so that her mother could see.

Five pounds when I got him, I'd slip him into my barn coat pocket when the kids and I went out to get the eggs from our chicken coop. As he got older, his "circus dog" behavior made us all laugh and laugh. He's jump as high as we could hold our hands out, do circles in the air. He was continually leaping and acting the clown. Who would ever think a dog could know what would make humans laugh?

Of course, the main reason I'd never gotten a dog of my own was because after my four years in college, I was flailing around trying to find a job, and ending up in office work, moving from apartment to apartment to my parents' house, and then back to my own places. And I don't believe in the current thinking, leaving the dog home in a crate, for God's sake, or even out on a run in the back yard. Dogs must be with their pack, or it's no life for them. And my jobs did not allow me to bring my dog in. I could only dream of stuffing my loyal dog under my desk in the courtroom. My only break came when I had children and stayed home with them. Thank God and my husband. The best years of my life.

Now Rascal is 13 years old and faltering, a bit. He can't see much, doesn't hear AT ALL, sleeps all day and night, if you don't find something for him to do other than eat, and we're all starting to think, "Hmm, how long is he going to last?" But then you take him for a walk in the woods, and he's like a kid again! Well, limping and hopping a bit, but happy and full of life.

So, in case he doesn't last much longer, and as a partial antidote to my daughter going off to college and my son getting a (very lovely) girlfriend, I brought home a kitten this week. As a matter of fact, my husband REALLY didn't like the kitten I brought home this week, either. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about my husband at this point. I'm trying to become a positive thinker, and that's definitely clashing with the Old Man's point of view... We'll have to see about that, won't we?