Winter Pups
This is sadly familiar:
Weather or Not
One interesting upside of owning dogs is that I’m far more attuned to New York City weather than I was in my earlier, dogless life. Sure, a ten or fifteen degree swing makes some difference when you’re running from office to subway; but when you’re standing out in that weather for a solid hour, moseying slowly while two small canines consider where they’d most enjoy pooping, even a few points fahrenheit makes a huge difference. This morning, with temperatures unexpectedly back to the wintry 30s after a stretch of balmy spring 60s and 70s, I wished I’d brought along gloves and perhaps a hat.
But the arrival of spring is always a fraught time in NYC. After months encased in full-body cladding, we suddenly see pasty, puffy skin overexposed en masse. It’s a good time for gyms. While the rest of the country sees its peak gym attendance only at the start of the year, New York has a few other surges of gym attendance: one at the start of September, when everyone returns from the Hamptons with a sense of ‘back to school’ vigor, and another in late April / early May, when everyone realizes there’s perilously little time until they might need to show up in public in a bathing suit.
I’ve enjoyed watching restaurants, too, struggling each day to decide if they should open for dining outdoors, with chairs and tables appearing and disappearing. Granted, as a great New York Times piece observed a few years back, outdoor dining in NYC is still well short of the Continental ideal in even the best of circumstances: “nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.”
So, with the weather swinging, we muddle through. Bundling up against intermittent cold, preparing to enjoy pending warmth. At some time in the next month, I’m sure the weather will hit its perfect, crisp spring ideal, holding there for a few weeks straight. It’s the time when I, and everyone else, thinks, “yes! this is why we live here!” Sure, after that brief interlude, the city becomes a humid, stinking, summer shithole, and we all fantasize about moving somewhere, anywhere else. But then, in the fall, we have another perfect, beautiful, crisp three weeks. Which carries us through the freezing, slushy winter to another year. Rinse and repeat.
All of which is to say, spring is (sort of) here. Let’s enjoy it while we can!
Doubling Down
Welcome, Penne Newman, (biological) younger sister to Gemelli, and new addition to the family!
FML.
Nuts
Every morning, Gemelli and I head to Riverside Park for a walk. Before 9am, dogs are allowed off leash there, and Gem is wild with freedom. As much as he’s thrilled to explore, and to look for ladies (in human years, he’d be in his late teens, making chasing tail his primary hobby), what he really wants to do is poop in privacy.
Normally, he stays fairly close to me, rarely wandering more than a dozen feet from my side. But once we hit the Riverside Park Promenade, he takes off sprinting. A hundred feet or so ahead, he ducks behind a tree, and drops a morning deuce.
Frankly, I understand. After the embarrassment of pooping at leash’s end the rest of the day, the luxury of going solo seems well worth the effort.
Recently, however, a handful of squirrels have taken up residence in the trees above Gem’s favorite poop spot. I assume they must be harvesting the acorns, though they’ve been at it for at least a week, and I can’t imagine there are enough acorns still in the trees to sustain the effort. Nonetheless, if you’re under those trees, a regular barrage of acorns comes dropping down around you. I’m not certain that the squirrels are trying to hit you, but the proximity of the drops seems pretty suspect.
Gem seems more interested in observing the tree squirrels – occasionally barking at them, considering ways of reaching them ten feet up – than in pooping. After five minutes of chasing bouncing acorns, we move on. But it isn’t until I put his leash back on some twenty minutes later that Gem seems to realize he still needs to go.
On that final stretch of the walk, Gemelli looks at me repeatedly with a mournful expression. And then, somewhere close to home, he crouches and squeezes out an unhappy poop. He won’t make eye contact while he’s doing it, or for the rest of the walk home. Clearly, he’s been robbed the high point of his day.
Homeward Bound
I remember, when I was younger, watching the movie Homeward Bound, and wondering how good a dog’s sense of direction was in real life.
At least in the case of Gemelli, I can now say: problematically good.
Gem not only remembers where things are, he also has strong ideas about when we should visit them. When he comes with me to work, for example, he always drags me to the pet store, many blocks away, even if it’s been months since his last visit. He knows where all the pet stores are in our home neighborhood, too, as well as all the TD Banks (where he can find water and free biscuits), and not a walk goes by that he doesn’t try to take us to a least a couple of those stops.
A few months ago, my younger brother got a cockapoo, a little girl named Brooklyn. Gem loves Brooklyn. Not in a ‘where the ladies at?’ kind of way (his other focus on walks), but in a platonic, member of the same pack, besties-for-life way. The two of them will wrestle and play for hours on end. Fortunately, and unfortunately, Brooklyn lives just ten blocks from our house. So on any afternoon or evening walk, Gem now also tries to drag us down to see her. And, a few times a week, we let him.
Last night, Jess and I had dinner at a restaurant near Columbus Circle. We brought Gem along, and ate at an outdoor table. Post-dinner, we walked into Central park.
So far as I know, I don’t think Gem had ever been to Columbus Circle before, nor to that corner of the park. But, even in the relative darkness, he looked around, and then started pulling us northward. A few blocks up, he veered out of the park, and onto Central Park West.
“He’s trying to take us to Brooklyn’s house,” I told Jess.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “That’s still twenty blocks away, and he has no idea where he is; he thinks this is near our house.”
But, in fact, Gem knew precisely where he was. And he was on a mission. Up CPW, then across some street in the mid–70’s, and up Columbus. When we were two or three blocks away, Jess conceded. A few minutes later, triumphantly, Gem dragged us in my brother’s building’s front door.
Sure, those excellent navigation skills are at times a pain in the ass. But they’re also kind of a comfort. As Jess has a terrible sense of direction, it’s nice to think that, so long as she’s walking Gem, the two together are likely to find their way home.
Pooped
For the most part, having a dog is wonderful. As I told my brother David, who just got an adorable cockapoo named Brooklyn, having a small dog is like having a stuffed animal that climbs onto you. Observe the two of them, passed out on their couch:
Of course, there are downsides to them, too. One of which is trying to get your dog to poop. And then scooping up that poop in a little plastic bag.
Gem doesn’t really like to poop, so even if he needs to go badly, he’ll walk a good way before finally squeezing it out. Cold weather be damned, he’ll drag me block after block after block while sniffing for a place to drop anchor. Then, once he does, it’s sort of a hit and run: post poop, he sprints off in the opposite direction as fast as he can. When he’s on leash, he doesn’t make it far, though I’m usually stuck bagging with one hand, while trying to resist his pulling through the other.
Normally, Gemelli has a pretty robust stomach. He’ll eat his dog food or his favorite treats, alongside bites of whatever meat or cheese Jess or I might be consuming ourselves, and digest it all like a pro. But on occasion, something doesn’t sit well. Then, when he ‘does his business’, it’s less like building a proverbial log cabin, and more like watching a soft-serve machine dispense frozen yogurt. In the worst case, he simply leaves a brown liquid puddle spreading on the sidewalk. And, of course, by Murphy’s Law of New York Dog Ownership, he only drops those liquid dooces directly in front of expensive co-ops, as the doormen eye us both angrily from inside.
In that situation, however, I’m never certain the correct etiquette. Do I take my little baggie and sort of smoosh the liquid around a bit? Ask to borrow a hose? I’m not sure there really is a good answer. So I usually follow Gemelli’s lead: after the last spurt, we both turn and book it as fast as we can.
Snow Shoes
For the first year and a half of Gemelli’s life, when it snowed, we were stuck inside. I’d take him downstairs, and he’d gamely head off towards the corner. But after a few steps, the combination of ice and salt would leave him pinned in place, holding up a frozen, burning paw while looking at me accusatorially.
A few weeks ago, we discovered [Pawz](http://pawzdogboots.com). Unlike the more structured boots we’d tried before – which Gem removed as quickly as we’d put them on – he at least tolerated the Pawz. And with his feet covered, he didn’t mind the weather. Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night stayed us from completion of our appointed rounds.
This morning, as after the last few big storms, we headed to Riverside Park. On the surface streets, the combination of shoveling, snowplowing, subterranean pipes and foot and road traffic prevented snow from really accumulating. But down in Riverside, eight inches of snowfall yielded eight inches of snow piled on the ground. Which, if you’re a foot tall, is basically shoulder height.
So, today, Gem took about an hour to slog through a half-mile loop of park we can normally clear in a matter of minutes. Undeterred by the difficulty, he trudged happily along, marking trees and garbage cans, and trying to put the moves on the female dogs also out for a stroll.
Unfortunately, most of those hot ladies were much taller than he was today, and it appears “neck deep” is a relative measure. So while he’d run furiously to reach them, just a few of their steps would leave them out of butt-sniffable reach. Apparently, even across species lines, short guys have to work that much harder to kill in on the dating scene.
Treat, Trick
Gemelli will happily eat pretty much any kind of protein. But as you stray from Paleo choices, he starts to get pickier. Most baked dog treats, for example, don’t pass muster.
That isn’t an issue in our own house, where we now only buy the kinds of meaty treats we know he’ll like. But it’s often a source of some embarrassment in the outside world.
In New York City, you can take a small dog with you into nearly any store. Doing field research for [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com), for example, we drag Gem into a good number of clothing boutiques, where he’s invariably a hit with the women behind the counter.
Your dog is adorable!, they say. Those little white boots!
Can I give him a treat?, they ask.
Sure, I tell them. You can try.
The shop girl will come out, biscuit in hand. Gem will sit politely, smile, take the treat in his mouth. Then, after a couple of seconds, all the while making eye contact with her, he’ll disgustedly spit the treat onto the floor, turn around and walk off.
Total asshole move.
*[Ed. note. Forgot to mention this coup de grace: because it’s apparently too easy to clean up a rejected whole treat, he’ll also occasionally crack the treat in his mouth first, before dumping it as a little mound of crushed biscuit on the ground. Nice.]*
Year of the Dog
We didn’t have dogs growing up, so I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when we adopted Gem. On balance, that seems like the best – or perhaps only – way to have made what turns out to be such a big life choice.
H.L. Mencken once said, “if I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.” And though I wouldn’t compare marriage to suicide (at least most days), I do agree it’s a pretty rash, uninformed choice. Because, really, when you’re popping the question, what do you know about what married life is like?
Getting a dog (like, I assume, having a kid) is even crazier. You don’t really get to audition people for the role. There’s no trial period. Instead, this little thing shows up and it’s yours and there’s no going back. Worse, some of those little things grow up to be much nicer dogs (or people) than others, and you have no idea what yours is going to be.
In light of that, we couldn’t have been luckier with Gemelli. He truly is a wonderful puppy. Smart and curious, playful and funny, he’s a happy, confident, friendly guy. He’s just stubborn enough to be related to Jess; regardless of her schedule, Gem somehow manages to drag her every afternoon to Central Park, where he makes her lift him up to watch the ducks in the reservoir. And from the early days when he figured out how to unlatch his own crate, and let himself out to wreak secret midnight havoc, I knew he was enough of a troublemaker to be related to me.
By now, each day starts with a paw to the face (GET UP! GET UP! IT’S TIME TO GO TO THE DOG RUN!!!), ends with twelve and a half furry pounds sprawled across our legs at the bottom of the bed, and I can no longer imagine it any other way.
So happy first birthday Gem, we love you. Here’s to many more years together, though ideally with less pooping inside the house.
Size of Dog, Size of Fight
If people look like their dogs, Gemelli was apparently the right choice, as several people have commented that we do somehow look similar.
But as much as we apparently resemble each other physically, it’s in personality that we even more closely overlap. Like me, he’s laid back, overly friendly, and curious enough to get himself into trouble.
And it seems we’re similar in at least one more way. This morning at the dog run, we walked in just in time to see the three largest dogs there – a husky, a flat-coated retriever and a pit bull – neck-deep in a royal rumble in the dead center of the run. As soon as I let Gem off the leash, he immediately took off for the three of them, jumping straight into the middle of the fray.
“Is that little dog yours?” asked the owner of the retriever.
Yes, I told her.
“And he’s how big?”
About twelve pounds.
“Well,” she said, “he definitely has an outsized sense of self-confidence.”
My dog, indeed.