Ritual adjustment

I have got the wish I was formulating for myself in the last entry: small daily inroads made on the manuscript. This makes everything else possible, including early rising to take out the dogs, done without difficulty or regret. My neighbour praised me for the latter activity this morning, calling me dedicated as Millie and I keel-hauled ourselves back up the driveway. It was a moment of small pride, especially since I think of myself as an evening person who underneath it all is naturally lazy.

Each of the dogs has quite a different character to their walk, though we take the same route, and observing it is part of the pleasure. With Arthur I go out the earliest, the better to avoid other dogs, heavy vehicles and the public in general. His is the most serious of the walks, involving the frequent stopping, sniffing and marking that’s the responbility of the alpha. (If you want to get your heart rate up while walking a dog, then don’t choose an intact male for the purpose; your pace with them will be discontinuous.) There’s always a wariness, too, when I’m walking with him: his fear-aversion to larger dogs is considerable and I have to be prepared to practise the time-honoured small dog rescue technique of scooping him up to my shoulder if danger threatens. But the street is quiet in the early hours, my best protection, I hope, against disaster.

Millie will ride low and run fast along the angle where verges meet fences, then come to a dead halt over something imperceptible to me but essential to her: a smell? a sound? Yesterday it was the realisation that she could fit her muzzle in the opening of some decorative bricks. Attempts to distract her from these distractions lead only to a polite but intractable sitting down. The walk becomes an exercise in projecting Zen down the lead, the better to keep quietly moving.

Evie (or Knieves, after Knievel) is the most straightforward and the most fun of the three to walk. Head up, trotting out and occasionally galloping, looking back up the lead from time to time to see that I am paying attention and barking (cutely, still, since she remains a puppy) at any person or unexpected object in the far distance. Her only vice is picking things up off the ground, which again makes an exercise in anticipating obstacles for me. On one of our first mornings out, she swallowed whole a tea bag in a single movement of taking it in her jaws and ingesting it.

So training for me in mental alertness, this, as well as a needed assault upon my blood sugar while my insulin production levels remain low on waking. (In my larger days I was hyperinsulinaemic, the precursor of diabetes; forestalling as long as possible the day when that family and lifestyle ailment returns remains a priority for me.) But it’s also, I’m hoping, the final in a series of keys to getting balance in my life that will better facilitate my writing, and a way too to take in hand the fear that something will happen to my dogs.

Walked first thing, they can stay at home while I’m working, instead of the complicated jaunt across the neighbourhood to the harvestparents, where the question of just who is alpha, the dogs or the people, has led to many unproductive afternoons for my mother and her craft work (two words, note, nothing to do with these guys). These former rituals of transportation and supervision no doubt looked strange to outsiders, and led to more than one remark about dog/child substitution or the excess of my devotion to my animals. Really, they came not from mistaking my dogs for children but from the terrible, lasting fear engendered by Arthur’s run-in with a Staffie at a show two-and-a-half years ago. I became sick with fear, in a chronic fashion, that something would happen to him. These last few weeks have been an attempt at facing that down, and extending some sense of taking control into the more primal recesses of my psyche. The fact that the little guys can exercise themselves sufficiently by running around at home is neither here nor there, since we are all better, calmer and leaner for a morning walk, and I happier for the daylong energy that this produces. Part B of the master plan is to continue the conversion of this energy into working on the manuscript which, as I’ve said, is a plan that’s progressing satisfactorily in its early stages.

Touch wood that all this continues, safely for them and productively for me.