Beagle and Friends: Part I

Maximilian the Beagle has some close doggy friends (as any gentleman Beagle should do). Of these friends, perhaps the most velcro-y/needy/possessive/loving of them all is Grace.

Grace is half Australian Shepherd and half Vizsla. And her third half is something bigger and more than either of those two breeds. (Yes, she has three halves - if you met her, you'd understand.)


This is Grace when she was a puppy. Since then, her nose has gotten pointer (all the better for bopping you with), and she's gained about 50 pounds.

Grace developed a near-violent love for Maximilian from the beginning. She wanted to play with him and chew on him and run around with him. But Maximilian, being the regal Beagle that he is, would only willingly partake in one of those activities - allowing Grace to chew on him.


She would nibble on his ears and his neck like she was grooming him. The photo above is, I believe, her being caught in the act and saying: "What? What am I doing wrong?" Maximilian is clearly in a posture of acceptance. It's a good thing Maximilian's Beagle ears are fairly thick.


This is Grace, being a little more kind. Instead of chewing on him, she is trying to spend time with him by partaking of one of Maximilian's three favorite activities, napping (the other two being eating and walking). Grace can never ever be close enough to anyone - ever. Even if it's uncomfortable for both parties. Notice, that Maximilian is again displaying acceptance posture, but is getting his snooze on nonetheless. To be fair, Maximilian has taken over her chair.


This photo is from some years later - Grace has obviously mellowed out a little. But her need to be (very) near the people and things she loves has not been daunted. And on a hot summer's day, this is apparently enough physical contact to keep her happy.


My favorite picture of the Beagle and the Vizsla-Australian Shepherd is this one. I'm pretty sure Grace also prefers this type of activity to napping (I couldn't say for sure about Maximilian). This is during a walk around a pond in the middle of a hay field. Hot and happy dogs.

They will see each other soon - we can only hope that one of them (who shall remain nameless) won't piddle on the floor in excitement.

A time to get up

To everything turn, turn, turn;

There is a season turn, turn, turn;

A time to fall; a time to get up... (hmmmm?)

It happens to the best of us...

We all fall down.

This one was from the inaugural rollerblading outing with the Beagle. It could have gone better. But... well, it could have gone worse.

The Beagle saw a squirrel. The Beagle wanted to chase the squirrel. I saw a downward slope (hill). I saw a curb. I wanted to hop (lightly) up onto the curb and keep rolling. The rollerblades (extensions of my own feet that they are) did not want to hop (lightly) up onto the curb. They wanted to get stuck on the edge of the curb. The rollerblades won (well, not exactly - they got a little scratched up). The squirrel won. My knee lost (not pictured: my elbow (which also lost)). Maximilian was unscathed (though he was unfulfilled in his squirrel-chasing quest).

There is still a scar (in part because I have trouble leaving scabs be and in another part because - see below).

Same knee, different Beagle story. This one is the result of walking along a sea wall with the Beagle. Beagle jumped down. Leash became taught. I impulsively jumped down to follow (big rocks were waiting to receive my leaping feet below the base of the sea wall).

Did I mention that there was algae on the rocks? And that we were very near the sea (which is full of water (and water is wet)). Algae was slimy, and I slipped. Beagle (with all 20 of his claws for friction) landed seamlessly. Perfect 10 kind of landing.

Not as expansive an injury as the first example, but somewhat deeper and filthier. Scab has just recently subsided to make way for a now purple scar right in the middle of the scars from the previous injury.

This photo is not of the result of falling down, but it seems to fit in with the common theme of leg injuries.

No, I was not crawling through a coal mine.

I was birding in a long-leaf pine forest (wearing shorts, obviously). Long-leaf pine forests sometimes catch on fire (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not). This one still had lots of charred snags and twigs and little trees standing from the last fire.

And there were birds to get to. Many little birds.

So we walked through the thicket for many, many steps. Each step caused charred sticks and thorny vines to thrash my legs (through no fault of the trailblazer (who was wearing jeans) - only through my own fault for wearing shorts). I went home happy and scratched up and not at all regretful about the damage. I saw several new birds (with help - thank you B).

Sometimes I fall down. But usually it is worth it. They should make antibiotic ointment in a pump dispenser for folks like me.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it is even good for a person to get good and scraped up once in a while. It happened all of the time when we were kids, right? Well, it happened to me when I was a kid.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

(not) The big picture

Reason #7 why digital photography is magical:

Sometimes you take a photo that frames the being/object/scene you wanted to capture.

Sometimes there exists a photo within a photo (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not).

Sometimes you can allow less to be more.

I am prone to looking at an original photo and wanting to keep only a piece of it (or at least, wanting to keep this smaller piece separately).

I am apparently especially prone to doing this with photos of vegetative matter.

In these instances, I can feel as if the piece is greater than the whole.

These are all examples of that.

These were once all photos with more in them than what you see here. But now I like them better as smaller pieces.

This is an especial favorite. Really, what good is a photo of the whole log when you can have this instead?

More striking?

More interesting?

Cropping can change the lines of a photo, can let you show what you really wanted to be seen.

It's as if you can take the important part of the photograph and pull that out to be front and center.

And, in this way, you can hope to let someone else see better for having less to look at.

Peace man

One decade ago today, a baby boy was born. I went (either that very day or the next (it was, after all, 10 years ago)) to the hospital to meet him. Someone handed him to me. And I held the bundle of blankets that held him. I looked into his blue eyes and saw something remarkable.

We became good friends, this boy and me. I would build him towers from blocks. He would gleefully knock them down. I would blow him bubbles. He would run around popping them and shriek with joy.

He called me Gaga then (this was way before Lady).

He was a boy's boy, this one. He was happy in mud puddles and piles of leaves and racing up and down hills. He loved his bike, Star Wars and Legos. He still loves his bike, Star Wars and Legos. I watched him develop and grow out of a favorite shirt. I helped him practice hitting, throwing and catching a baseball. I tried to show him that things can be fun even if you aren't the very best. But that it's important to try your hardest. Life can be confusing, can't it?

It's less confusing when you can make a child's eyes smile.

This photo is one of my very favorite photos in this world. It feels to me like a perfect, peaceful moment.

It is the boy again, being very much a boy. At the zoo, quietly enjoying the mist tent on a hot summer's day. A day on which the boy was so excited to see the elephants and big cats that I had to give him a piece of gum to chew to give him something else to think about.

At some point, I moved far away from the boy (geographically speaking). I missed him, and he missed Maximilian. He came to visit a couple of times. We had fun at the beach and in boats on a gator hunt that would have made Mr. Dundee envious.

When I would go home to visit, the boy and I would go on adventures together. I took him birding. I put him in my kayak and gave him the paddle. I let him walk on the ice of a frozen pond. I put up a tent in the backyard, and we camped. We discussed the various methods of bear protection. We discussed the potential for one super hero to triumph over another. We went to museums. We went canoeing with my mother and two dogs (and no, we did not tip over). I watched the boy become a big brother - twice. I watched him play baseball and basketball and show his cattle.

Last year, my sister had a child, and I officially became an aunt. The boy isn't exactly thrilled with my new official aunt status. But he will always have me to be there for him.

How can it be that it has been 10 years since I held that blanket? I do not honestly know. The boy is only five or maybe six. I am missing some years in there somewhere. But I think he can account for them all.

I can't wait for all of the new things we can discover together. And very few things in this life are better than watching the boy see and enjoy and learn about bugs and birds and games and moving water.


On your 10th birthday, and every day, for you a thousand times over - peace man...

Note to the boy's mother and father: If this will embarrass the boy, please don't show him. Just give him a hug for me. I don't want any eye-rolling on my account (because we all know that the stage of eye-rolling seriousness begins in earnest when a person turns 10 years old - but we will all love him anyway).

Bean stream of consciousness (March 2011)

I have on my yellow rubber rain boots and my Valentines' Day pajamas (it is, after all, March), and I'm ready to conquer the living room and maybe the whole block.

Well, hey Max. How are you doing this fine morning? I'm going to pet you and lean on you a little bit with both hands while looking over at my aunt to see if this is acceptable.

Do you need to be covered up with this hairy blue blanket? Are you cold? I've seen my aunt cover you up all except for your eyeballs. Is this so that you can hide from me and my incessant greetings for a while? I could try to do this, but I don't think I can gather up enough of it to cover any part of you - even your paw. You're sitting on the hairy blue blanket, see? If you wanted to budge a little or even get up, I could pull out some blanket and then you could sit back down, and I could cover you right up.

Your paws certainly are nice. I sort of wish I had claws too. Are they much trouble to maintain?

These yellow rubber rain boots have handles. Hmmm. Wonder if I can pull the boot off my leg with the handle.

Whoopsie daisy! Almost tipped myself right on over there. Good thing I have a low center of gravity. Especially when I'm sitting on the floor. I am like one of those inflatable bop bags that never quite tips all the way over.

Maybe these boot handles are what people mean when they use the phrase pull yourself up by your (yellow rubber rain) bootstraps. Maybe I'll try it.

Nope, didn't work. Guess I'll have to get up the old-fashioned way (using my hands and knees).

I'm going to wander over here now, okay?

Maybe now, I'll bang my face against this chair arm a couple of times. Bang bang. Okay, now what?

Maybe you would feed me something if I look at you sweetly? No, this isn't working right now either. I'll have to go closer and beg. Breakfast time, okay?

Then maybe eventually I can change out of my pajamas and yellow rubber rain boots and into some daytime clothes and yellow rubber rain boots?

Sound good to you? Okay then, ready break!

...

Later that day:

Tail thumping

My most favorite thing about the Beagle (other than his ears) is when he thumps his tail on the floor as he's sprawled out, relaxed. This is most fetching not when it is in response to my pets or the suggestion of food or a walk but when I simply walk into the room and look at him being peaceful and he looks back. And with the happiness of the most relaxed dog in the world, he thumps his tail on the floor (or the couch or the bed or wherever he happens to be sprawled out at the time).

This tail-thumping says to me: I love you, and I am happy, and I love you, and thanks for feeding me and walking me and brushing me and petting me and giving me treats (and even for bathing me, even though I pretend not to enjoy it) and I love you and you are my favorite in the whole world.

And you mine, Maximilian.

Cabbages and kings

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings."

~Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking-Glass

Carefully stringing unlikely words together is one way to perform magic. The words above are especially magical to me. I do not know what they mean.

But they still mean something to me.

They put me in mind of two of my other favorite pieces of lyricality...

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night

Sailed off in a wooden shoe---

Sailed on a river of crystal light,

Into a sea of dew.

"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"

The old moon asked the three.

"We have come to fish for the herring fish

That live in this beautiful sea;

Nets of silver and gold have we!"

Said Wynken,

Blynken,

And Nod.

~Eugene Field

Wknken, Blynken and Nod

and...

While Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers

Turn around and say good morning to the night

For unless they see the sky

But they can't and that is why

They know not if it's dark outside or light

~Elton John and Bernie Taupin

"Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters"

on Honky Château

Elton, Eugene and Lewis - strange bedfellows, yes? Perhaps. But in my mind, these pieces all fit together into a type of goodness that I don't know how to categorize.

Shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, and kings or wooden shoes, crystal light, seas of dew and wishes from the moon or Mona Lisas, mad hatters, bankers' sons, lawyers' sons, night and sky. What does it all have in common? What does any of it mean? Nothing and everything all at once. Kind of like goats and violins and happiness or clocks and elephants and toothpick buildings.

These are the things that art can do to us. Art can bring to our consciousness an awareness of something we cannot explain and never anticipated (at least consciously). And this leaves us fuller than when we never knew there was something missing.

Skink tails and cockle shells

I was walking the Beagle in the forest the other day. It was a warm, muggy late afternoon. I had had to fight my way through graduation traffic on campus to get the Beagle and myself to the forest. Part of me wanted to just abandon my car and walk straight home (which may have been faster).

Maximilian is not always the swiftest of creatures, but this day, for some reason to which I was not privy, he was on high alert (even though it was warm and muggy). This spelled badness (well, almost) for a skink who happened to decide to dart across the path in front of us, right in front of us. Had the skink not moved, the Beagle never would have seen it. He may have sniffed it, but it would have taken his sniffer longer to locate the skink's specific location (had he just hunkered down) than my patience at the other end of the leash would have allowed (being in the moving-forward mentality that I was).

But no, the skink thought he knew better about beagles and their propensity to spot a lone, tiny skink hiding in the leaf litter. The skink made the decision to bolt. And bolt he did. So fast that I hardly saw him.

Maximilian, for his part, saw him right away and darted to the right side of the path (from which the skink originated) quicker than you can say lickety split. Faster than the Beagle moves for most anything other than a scoop of food (which, to be fair, the skink may have represented). While I'm still trying to figure out what's going on (not really trying too hard because this is not an unfamiliar occasion - to have a beagle at the end of the leash chasing something in front of you), Maximilian chases this poor skink clear across to the left side of the path. By the time I figure out what in the world he's up to now, I think I see him give one mashy chomp onto a silvery blue little Squamatan.

But all he seems to have come up with is this...



The silvery blue little Squamatan has escaped! Er, minus his tail - or the end of it at least. This is not the first time Maximilian has induced a Squamatan to autotomize its tail parts. I bent down and picked up the little two inches of silvery blue tail and felt it squirm in my hand for a good while. It was a very odd feeling, to be aware that there was no living being attached to this wiggling piece of tissue. That this piece of tissue was accomplishing this feat all by its onesie. That the synapses and chemicals were working inside of the tissue, undirected. That instructions for this disaster management plan had been laid down long before and were now being implemented at precisely the right time (else the Squamatan may well have been in the Beagle's belly).

Autotimization has always been of particular interest to me - that some organisms have the capability to drop body parts at will. Starfish are probably the most well-known example. I have written numerous reports about this capability throughout my schooling years. But really, we don't know much about how it works. If we did (and maybe someday we will), we could possibly begin to facilitate the re-growth of lost human extremities.

Do we possess an ability to figuratively autotimize pieces of ourselves in an escape situation? To jettison some baggage to distract others and make a clean get-away? Hmmm, that could be handy. Note to self: think more on this later.

All of these thought processes were going on as I watched the tail twitching in my palm. Maximilian was watching me watch the tail wave back and forth (probably entreating me with his big beagle eyes to pass over his rightfully won snack (such as it was)). And after approximately 45 seconds of this, I realized... the trick had worked! Neither of us was thinking even the least bit about the actual Squamatan. The actual Squamatan was wriggling its way (tail-less) to safety somewhere in the forest outside of the radius of a leashed beagle (because, believe me, leashed beagles definitely have radii). The tail was an effective distraction.

I had just seen natural selection at work. What a rare treat. But really, when I thought harder about it, it probably isn't that rare that we get to be such an observer. Our noticing it, that is the rarer thing.



Note to readers:
Lest you think otherwise after reading this, Maximilian is not a vicious being. Just wanted to clear this up in case you got the wrong impression here. He is an animal, and he sometimes does what animals do (that is, when he isn't pretending to be human while doing things that humans do (like sleeping on beds, eating cheese and carrying on conversations with the neighbors)). I challenge you to look into those brown beagle eyes and see anything but sweetness.

Finger Food

I opened a can of black olives one day last week.

I sniffed the juice of the can of olives. I plucked out an olive. I ate the olive. I thought of Thanksgiving. I remembered being a child at Thanksgiving (except for the Thanksgiving when I had stomach flu and had to (even though I was self-proclaimed recovered) eat tuna salad and crackers for my meal instead of the traditional fare).

Based on the strength of my association between Thanksgiving and the taste of black olives, I am going to assume that we did not have olives often in my family outside of major holiday meals.

At said meals, we always had a relish tray on which olives (both green and black) held a prominent and indispensable (in my mind) place. Many a time was I in charge of assembling the relish tray (Pillsbury crescent roll can-popping, unrolling and baking being one of my other main responsibilities).

Many a time I opened the can of black olives, popped a few in my mouth and then proceeded to put one on every finger of my hand and then eat them off of my fingers one by one. I thought this was grand fun. I was happy to know (even though I couldn't there) that my sister took over the role of eccentric aunt and presented this exercise to my not-yet-one-year-old niece last Thanksgiving. I am told that she too enjoyed it.

It is something of which all of God's children should partake. And so. I am happy to share: my new revelation for the week (small though it is): the taste of olives pulls my mind in the direction of the Pilgrim holiday.