adventure out of these friends driving to places far
distant? Here is the answer.
Sadie Beagle only travelled as far as my house.
As I get older, more and more I wonder why I myself would need to travel. I have friends who can travel for me. For example, there are five people I know who travelled in 2014 to Phoenix, Arizona. (Apparently there are relatives there.) They also planned a short side trip … to San Diego.
What is that to me, you may wonder. How do I get any
adventure out of these friends driving to places far
distant? Here is the answer.
Sadie Beagle only travelled as far as my house.
Sadie has been our houseguest before, although never in March. That brings some adventuresome differences. For one thing, I'm less able to stake her outside in the backyard, as I do with Buddy, since Sadie is too much of a house dog. Then when we drive out to the woods, Sadie is not quite as sure what to do with her feet in the snow – especially where the snow is still deep and her feet sink down to dangle from her belly in the cold damp, or where the hillside has turned to ice and her claws have no traction. (I find I have a similar issue with the icy hillsides.) Even in the city, there are more ice sheets and puddles than we ever dealt with during her August visit of 2012.
Buddy isn't the premier host, I'm afraid. He loves the snow and the water and the ice and runs ahead without giving a thought to how well or poorly his guest is coping. Fortunately for Sadie, Buddy has a human to pick up the slack.
Nevertheless, and despite my personal misgivings, Buddy and I travelled all the way to Hartland in July. This is our second time to Hartland; we go every 5 years.
The Road: This year, reversing the logic of the last trip, I determined to travel east of Lake Winnebago on the way down, in an attempt to avoid the perpetual construction to the west. That road was closed. We were sent on a detour farther east to the Old Road. The detour returned on another state highway … which was itself detoured. Fortunately I made no wrong turns of my own and so arrived only half an hour later than I had planned.
The Neighborhood: The last time we visited Hartland, I thought the neighborhood was too much a development; it seemed too planned, too isolated from the rest of the community, and with too much emphasis on cutely curving streets. This time as we walked around on those same curvy streets they seemed less problematic to me. In five years, the whole neighborhood has mellowed. (Or, I suppose, maybe I have.)
The Boy:
The boy child was invisible when last we visited,
barely even existent. Now he is talking semi-coherent
English. Where was the dog last night?
I
asked him. Well,
he said, she's supposed
to be in my room, but I don't know if she was.
That's a pretty sophisticated response. It contrasts
with many of his other attempts at communicating
both in English and in louder, less articulate formats.
Succumbing to my typical failing of projecting my
own experience into the lives of others, I attribute
a great significance to his beginning with what he
believes to be the correct ordering of his
world. Then I wonder how he will resolve the certain
conflict between the order in his mind and actual
reality. But, as I say, I may be projecting my own
experience of life to him.
The Girl: Even younger, the girl child has a greater propensity to smile than has her brother. We adult humans all seem to enjoy this. My prediction is that she will soon discover that sweetness and light can be a powerful tool to manipulate the world to her own ends. Indeed, there are already signs. I'm not sure this is a good skill to have, but I say that if I am to be manipulated to another's will, I'd rather it be with a smile than a scream.
The Zoo: My last trip to the Milwaukee Zoo was far longer ago than the boy's lifespan. Many of the exhibit spaces are still much as I remember them from my own boyhood but there are also changes. One of the changes is in the charges; admission wasn't $14.25 half a century ago. Another change is the omnipresent commercialism exemplified in naming rights, commercial signage, and inundation of the grounds by the vegetative reproduction of the gift shop. All these changes are reflections of shifts in society at large. I'd guess that the role of the zoo within its community has remained comparatively stable. I would feel quite comfortable considering another visit in another 30 years.
The Dog:
After Buddy's last visit, he wrote to Bela asking,
Do you want to have fun again? I do.
When we
showed up five years later, Bela replied, Yes, I
do.
And they did. Buddy and Bela undertook the
running of circles (ellipses, more accurately) and
did a fine job of both chasing and being chased.
They had fun.
But what I, as a human, noticed most about Bela was
her exquisite body language. When Bela and Buddy
play and Buddy gets overly excited, Bela will roll
on her back into the standard canine submission
posture. She's not really submitting to anything;
she's saying, That's enough agressiveness. Let's
play more calmly now.
But when Buddy is being
affectionate with the humans in Bela's family, her
response is to position herself calmly between the
human and the guest dog. Her genetic history is as
a retriever, but in this she's more like a herder.
The Way Out: Later, Buddy tried to repay Bela and her family for the great time by protecting their house from a straying canine. (At least, this is what we think he was trying to do.) Unfortunately, Buddy doesn't have a fine sense of the tradeoffs of property preservation; in order to chase off the other dog, he ripped through the front window screen. Oops.
Upon a Visit To a Specialist
