Okay, so this may be a little lame, but there’s this Dilbert cartoon that I’ve always liked. I don’t remember the circumstances exactly, but I’m pretty sure it’s when he finds out that his garbage man is much, much smarter than he is. Dilbert makes this strangled gargling noise–there may also be smoke coming out of his ears. “What’s that?” asks another character. “A paradigm shifting without a clutch,” the garbage man says.
Nick tells me that I have trouble adapting to life changes. Not things like moving–moving I know. But other changes, he suspects, give me trouble. “Remember when we met?” he asked gently.
He’s not wrong. After a few years of drop-dead boring first dates and endless drama with not-boring guys who didn’t do first dates, per se, I had no idea what to make of a 1) good guy, who was 2) demonstrably interested in me, and with whom 3) I had actual chemistry.
Naturally, I spent the first month or two in raging denial. “I don’t know,” I would say when asked about him. “I can’t really tell. We’ll see.” I kept searching my mind for any hint of uncertainty; any signals against to offset all of the obvious signals for.
Nick made fun of me for it later.
So here we are, and the thing is that one of the changes I have always resisted is the growing responsibility that comes with grownup things…like leaving for college, leaving college, jobs, plans, apartments, cleaning, taking care of myself. You know: things adults have to do every single stupid day.
And I’ve started to get the hang of it–aside from all of his other wonderful qualities, Nick is an excellent example of a grownup, and I’ve been paying attention.
And then we got a puppy, which is a whole other layer.
Just as I had learned to take care of myself and my own messes, there’s this little needy squirmy thing who makes much bigger messes. It sent me into a panic now and then–particularly the prospect of the holiday weekend ending and Nick leaving me alone with her. I pictured him coming home on Tuesday to an apartment full of dog feces, and me sitting in the middle with my hands over my ears, singing to myself.
It didn’t happen.
Jolie and I are having our problems, certainly, but we’re learning to communicate. She starts licking my calves when she wants to change activities, for example (we have Play, Bed, Love, and Out). And she is getting used to her crate, and if I put her in there after she fell asleep outside of it, she is happy to go right back to sleep with no fuss, even though she definitely knows I am home. Which is how I have time to blog. And grocery shop. And even eat, now and then.
Speaking of which, I don’t think that yoga will work with her so young still, but I’m finding that the Jolie Diet may be even better. It involves tons of stairs, and being too preoccupied with her to remember to eat. I think it’s affecting Nick, too–we’ve cut way back on our bread and wine consumption at dinner, if nothing else. I’m not sure why, unless it’s that we’re completely exhausted by then. But also, last night we had her in her crate for the first time during dinner, and while it was lovely to have some alone time, we didn’t want to take advantage by indulging ourselves too much.
She certainly makes days longer, which I rather enjoy. Now I have to get up by the time Nick leaves for work, and the hours don’t slip by the way they did before. I used to be startled to realize that it was 4:00 in the afternoon and I hadn’t even made it out of the house yet–now I am surprised when it’s still well before noon and I feel like I’ve put in a full day. Every day feels like five, and so we have to remind ourselves often not to expect that she will learn five times faster than she does–which is still quite fast.
“Practice your French on her,” Nick suggested–although he was initially staunchly opposed to the idea of a bilingual dog, he was quickly won over by how well she learned “Viens“…and “Good dog.”
I don’t have to, though. All I have to do is take her outside, and I get to practice my French with about ten people at a time (although the gardienne has kindly allowed us to use the quieter back courtyard now, so it’s a little less overwhelming for her). I’ve met a seven-year-old named Karim, whom we’ve been avoiding after he tried to slip her some potato chips, and two nice older women in our building, one of whom tells everyone Jolie’s age if they pause when she’s near us, and another who lived in Georgia for a few years, and loved Southern culture, but didn’t have a good time because she didn’t speak English.
“Does France annoy you?” she asked, peering up at me from her wheelchair while her attendant silently arranged her for their walk. “Or are you happy here? You speak French, at least, so that’s better.”
That’s the other thing: coolest of all, the puppy instantly makes us French. We obviously live here, and no one asks about our accents unless we apologize for them, first. I think they laugh at us a little for picking such a tritely French name for her–and we did it wrong, because I just looked up her birthday, and we were supposed to give her a name starting with “S”–but she makes us a real part of the neighborhood.
I’m keeping an ear out for her, now. Especially considering how much she’s doing for me, I want to make sure I take good care of her.