to say nothing of the dog*

Lately it just seems that everyone and his/her dog is kicking the bucket--which sounds terribly irreverent, maybe even crass, but I'm getting really tired of documenting bad news. (I may have to make up for it with reams of "positive energy" à la L.)

I hadn't yet noted, for instance, that Freckles, Dave & Ci's "baby girl" since 1996, is no more. (I feel dreadfully compelled to launch into Monty Python's dead parrot skit, but I'll let the link do that instead. I haven't got it memorized anyway.) I'm not as callous as I seem to be: I do feel for them, because Freckles was a member of their family. She'd had surgery on her leg a few months ago and recovered nicely from that, yet recently she seemed bloated and unlike herself. A trip to the vet revealed a tumorous mass. Rather than have her spend the remainder of her time in agony, her owners decided to put her down--not an easy decision since they were so attached to their pet.

Dave & Ci can't say they haven't had their share of interesting pups. In addition to Freckles, they had a big, beautiful, husky-gened dog up until 2001 or 2002. Early on he won himself the name of O.T., short for Old Testament, because he took a huge chomp out of Dave's Bible. Apparently he had once devoured a few pounds of chocolate while the family was out (even a small amount of the good stuff can be fatal to cats and dogs). He pulled through that one; I wonder if it's because some of that India paper still lined his stomach.

And Freckles, well, she was a dog unlike any other I've ever known. She once bit our former Ottawa pastor (with ample reason, it turns out). Last summer when I accompanied Ci and Freckles on a W-A-L-K, that bundle of speckled freneticism tried to jump over the fence separating her from "Buddy," a neighborhood pooch a few doors down. You'd have thought Buddy was on a trampoline the way he bounced from one corner to the other in response. The last time I saw Freckles I made a huge mistake: I pronounced the word comprising the letters "W-A-L-K," remembering only too late that the family always, always spelled it out. That crazy doggie got so wound up, I haven't uttered that word since. I wonder if her family will promenade about, forevermore spelling out that word. Do you suppose this is how words enter and exit the vernacular?

R.I.P. Freckles


*To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) is the title of a science-fiction novel by Connie Willis. (She tends to focus on "soft" or social sciences as opposed to "hard" or applied sciences, although the latter crops up, too, if you know where to look.) Willis's novel makes numerous intertextual references to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889), whose subtitle is "To say nothing of the Dog!" I highly recommend reading the two in juxtaposition. If you don't enjoy them, do not tell me, because I simply worship the literary ground that Willis steps on.