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Friday, October 08, 2010
Graduation Day
Imminent
NO LONGER AN ENT. Because everyone is asking so insistently... yes, Raebert is about to graduate from his puppy obedience class. Next Tuesday. He's not the valedictorian. That honor will go to an impossibly cute bulldog named Rambo, but Raebert has done very well in school. His handicaps and advantages cancel each other out. Handicap? As a sighthound, he can't stop watching everything that's going on, even the stuff in the remotest corners of the warehouse-type structure where classes are conducted. He's especially mesmerized by the forty-foot mirror on one side of the training ring. He keeps seeing a gorgeous deerhound whenever he looks. He can't take his eyes off that boy. Neither can I. Despite the distractions, he has proved himself adept at sitting, staying, and doing figure eights. There's also a command called "hurry," which is about heeling faster than average. That's when he leaves all the other students in the dust. Not by being faster. But by being a deerhound. Second gear -- anything faster than a stroll -- invokes that silken, flowing stride even greyhounds don't have. Suddenly, everyone else disappears. Like watching a racehorse warming into race mode. Beautiful.
I'm not a proud papa or anything. Strictly objective. He's close to his full stature now, though not filled out. Sometimes it seems like you can hear him growing it's happening so fast. Lying down, he can't ever get comfortable because the bones and ligaments and tendons are all expanding, getting bigger.
And he's definitely smarter than Psmith. There. I said it. But I still miss the lord of all things. That's the ingratitude of humanity for you. Raebert wouldn't be here at all if we hadn't lost Psmith. So why do I keep thinking, when Raebert wants to curl up next to me, how much fun it would be to have both of them beside me? Two deerhounds? Three? In this direction lies madness.
I promise to resist temptation. Unless some forward thinking political party adopts the intensely more reasonable slogan than anything we've heard to date: "More Deerhounds."
Then I'll be a goner.
P.S. Don't be grumpy. The last time I had a deerhound puppy I stopped posting for several months. This time I'm being comparatively cool. So don't give me any grief. You don't know what it's liike. It's like watching God doing a Michelangelo, adding that one indispensable detail to the Sistine Chapel. Divinity.
MORE DEERHOUNDS: Note the advanced cerebration of the 'round the Mulberry bush' game. Rocket scientists, every one of them.
And the flowy side, when they're not the wind itself:
Psmith's
daddy at Westminster.Yeah, he won the hound group, he did.
Okay. I'm stopping now. Because Raebert's beside me, sleeping though not snoring. Deerhounds don't snore. Kewl.
