“Ouch, dammit!”

Harry and Halley suddenly forgot their need to escape and turned back towards me with remorseful eyebrows peaked.

We had been near the end of our walk on a sunny, frosty morning when a neighbor’s dog surprised us from behind, suddenly barking the “you’re on my territory” bark that every other dog knows means it’s time to move out on the double.  This particular dog isn’t usually out on our morning excursions, so I wasn’t prepared for it.  But since we were, in fact, on neutral ground (the paved road), I called to the dogs to “walk!” and dug in my heels to pull them back down to a normal pace.  My heels, however, did not find adequate friction on the frosty pavement, and decided instead that a position somewhere above my head would be more appropriate.  I instinctively turned as I went down to avoid landing on my back or taillbone – and encountered the pavement with my elbow instead.

I knew I should have worn a coat.

I could tell that I was bleeding inside my sweatshirt, but rather than examine it there in the road I decided to get back home and attend to it.  I walked the dogs back to their kennel, then entered the house.  My lovely wife greeted me.

“Hurry, help me move this to the front door!”  It was a TV cabinet she had listed on craigslist, and the mark – er, I mean, buyer – was on his way over.  So we moved the cabinet, and he arrived.  He dickered over the price, naturally, and we took a while to make change and then carry it out to his truck.  Then I went back inside and showed my wife my wound.  There were actually two – a broad flaying of the underside of my forearm, and a smaller, deeper cut behind my elbow.  Of course, I had to explain how it happened, and of course it was all my fault for being stupid.  She cleaned it up, and said she’d bandage it properly after I took a shower.

In the shower, I happened to flex that arm and noticed a spurt of blood against the side of the stall, which stopped as soon as I extended my arm again.  Naturally, I had to repeat the experiment a few times out of curiosity until I began to feel dizzy and nauseous and my field of vision became interrupted by bright blind spots.  So I ceased my attempt to earn a Darwin award (too late anyway, I’ve already peed in the gene pool four times [apologies to my offspring for that metaphor]), rinsed off and exited the shower.  My wife came in to continue her nursely duties, complaining about the blood I got on the white towel.  She bandaged me up, and I went to lie down until my head and stomach felt better – while being serenaded by my wife’s witty remarks concerning the well-documented male tolerance for pain and suffering.  I’ve never fainted from bleeding, but I’ve never felt closer to doing so than I did that morning.

I just happened to have a doctor’s appointment scheduled a few days later.  My arm was still swollen but no longer bleeding by that point.  The doctor looked it over, made me move it around, and concluded that there was no break.  “Don’t re-injure it,” she warned.

So, I haven’t been walking the dogs for the last few days – I want to let this fully heal first.  Every time I go out to feed them, they look up at me silently as if to say, “We’re really, really sorry.  Are you ever going to walk us again?”

The dogs and I took a detour from our usual morning walk to visit a neighbor’s new cows – two Dexter heifers intended for milking.  The Dexters aren’t much bigger than our two Labradors, and they viewed Harry and Halley suspiciously from the safety of their fenced pasture.  For some reason, the dogs didn’t seem interested in chasing them – apparently they identified them more with sheep than with deer.

On our way back, I spotted the neighborhood’s Pileated Woodpecker.  We often hear his rapid drumming on the many dead trees in the surrounding forest, but we rarely get a good look at him. This time he drifted across the road about two feet over the pavement and landed on a cedar in the lowlands on the north side.  When I heard the familiar drumming coming from the south, I turned and saw his double!  It’s the first time I’ve ever seen two woodpeckers together.  I didn’t know then how to determine their sex, so I don’t know if they were mates or competitors.  But thinking about woodpecker sex reminded me of one of my great-grandfather’s favorite rhymes:

Woodpecker pecked on the woodhouse door
He pecked and he pecked ‘til his pecker got sore

My great-grandfather was not known for coarse humor – or any humor, really.  But my Dad said he would always laugh heartily after reciting that one.

Speaking of avian identification – now that the robins are out in full force, we’ve noticed a few smaller birds among them that look like mini-robins, except that the head and back are black rather than gray, and they have little white spots on their shoulders and a large white spot on the breast.  After searching whatbird.com, I believe these to be Spotted Towhees.

Both of our dogs are now on medication.  Halley takes Benadryl for her allergies, and Harry is on Melatonin to treat Alopecia.  He has two strangely identical regions of hair loss on either side, between his ribs and his hips.  The vet conducted a blood panel to rule out various diseases, and suggested we give Melatonin therapy a try.  Fortunately, Melatonin is relatively inexpensive, and it’s a simple matter to get a Labrador to swallow anything smaller than a softball.  Labradors put the “omni” in “omnivore”.

Food is a long-standing common bond between humans and their canine companions, and dogs never feel more useful than when they can help us to acquire a meal.  Once when I was a wee lad, my grandparents’ hound dog (whom we called Laddie, but my aunt called Hamlet) brought a freshly killed rabbit up to the house.  My sister and I cried over the poor thing, but my grandparents skinned him and cooked him for dinner.  I had to admit that he was pretty tasty, whatever his relationship to Peter Cottontail or the Easter Bunny.

Not that we were unused to our place in the food chain.  My sister and I often named and loved the calves that we eventually saw loaded into the pickup truck to be taken to the slaughterhouse, and we were well aware that the beef we later consumed came from their flesh.  I’m reminded of the bear rituals of the indigenous Northern cultures, in which a bear that has been raised as a member of the family is finally slaughtered for its meat, often with apologies to the bear.

Once when I was about five years old, I ran into my grandparents’ house after being chased by a large Leghorn rooster.  Those things can get pretty mean – they’ve been known to peck the eyes out of small dogs.  When I told my grandfather about my encounter, he said not a word (he hardly ever did).  But we had chicken for dinner that night, and I’ve never enjoyed more my status as a carnivore.

February 12.  I meant to write about the simultaneous 200th birthdays of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.  But not even the fact that it was also Halley’s fourth birthday could drag me away from work long enough to hum a few bars of The Birthday Song.

February 13.  I could have written more about my grandmother, who would have turned 106 that day.  Or I could have explored the subject of triskaidekaphobia, especially since it was a Friday.  Somehow I never got around to either one — perhaps posting on that day felt unlucky.

February 14.  For Valentine’s Day I considered an essay on the subject of love, which brought to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition:  “A temporary insanity curable by marriage”  (Some patients have reported side-effects such as children and other contractual obligations).  Actually, I did write something for that day — a sonnet for my wife:

Westward towards the setting sun they sailed
Your mother’s parents, and your father too
From Sicily and Hungary they hailed
Two families joined in Jersey to make you

Westward towards the setting sun we two
Each drove to California all alone
What we’d find there, neither of us knew
Reaching for a new life on our own

And now the western sun has brightly shone
Upon us fourteen times on Valentine’s
As together our two lives in love have grown
And within our children beautifully combined

They’ll bear our love to generations yet
To shine beyond the time our sun has set

February 15.  The birth of Wirth – who is now 75 years old.  Not to mention the birthdays of Douglas Hofstadter, Galileo, Praetorius (who also died on February 15), Susan B. Anthony, Cyrus McCormick, Ernest Shackleton, Matt Groening, Chris Farley, and YouTube.  I didn’t even have time to post clip-art of a birthday cake, because we were too busy rearranging my daughter’s room, breaking furniture, and shouting.

February 16.  President’s Day (or Presidents Day, or Presidents’ Day, depending on what or whom you’re celebrating).  Originally a celebration of Washington’s birthday, now that it’s established on the third Monday in February it can never fall on that great man’s actual date of birth (February 22).  How fitting, since subsequent presidents haven’t quite reached his magnitude.  Taken as a celebration of all US presidents, all I have to say is: good luck to anyone who finds their butt in that hot seat!

“How did you do this?” my wife asked, holding a pair of mud-stained sweatpants I had thrown in the hamper.

“There’s a story behind that,” I replied.

The road where I walk the dogs forms a loop surrounding a central high ground. When they built this road, they raised its grade a couple of feet and placed wide drainage ditches on both sides, with culverts leading from the interior to the exterior of the loop. But this system has proven to be insufficient. During the rainy winter months and well into spring, the ditches and much of the adjacent area remain full of standing water. Many of these are now wetlands protected by the city’s Critical Areas Ordinance, so the drainage system cannot legally be improved.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I’m irked that a botched engineering job has become eternalized by statute. On the other, I enjoy all the wildlife we see on our walks. Just today we spotted two mallards swimming in one of the wider ponds. Of course, they flew off as soon as they saw two Labradors approaching.

Halley and Harry like these wetlands, too. Even though we give them plenty of pure water to drink at home, they prefer the thick, dark concoction of algae and who knows what else that’s been blending naturally for months. They get in up to their shoulders and eagerly lap it up — I’ve often wondered whether it might contain some fermented material.

Being so close to the road where cars whiz by at twice the posted speed limit, I don’t let the dogs off their T-leash. But the six-foot lead is long enough for me to stand back from the bank of the ditch while they enjoy their swim/drink.

During one of these sessions today, something on the opposite side of the ditch caught Halley’s attention, and Harry dutifully followed her interests. I dug my heels in and pulled back on the leash to keep them from going too far, but with all the rain we’ve had this year the ground was much softer than I had supposed. My feet began to slide towards the ditch. I called to Harry and Halley, but since they could feel that I was giving them more lead they assumed they had permission to continue their pursuit on up the opposite bank.

I should have jumped over the ditch, but I realized this too late to have enough of a running start. At least I managed to keep from toppling in face-first as my feet slid off the embankment. I tried to sit down on the bank, but quickly descended into the muddy water, feet first — the tops of my waterproof boots submerged about an inch below the water line.

At that point, I lost all command of my vocabulary. If the school bus hadn’t just picked up all the local children moments before, they might have received an early education in a dialect of English based largely on the Saxon tongue.

My indiscreet remarks drew Harry’s attention. He leaped back across the ditch, trying to be helpful. But Halley didn’t join in his return flight, so their T-leash brought Harry up short of the bank. He’s grown a lot over the last year, and all 70-odd pounds of him came down on his front paws right in my groin.

Strange thoughts cross your mind at a time like that. I was suddenly reminded of the wise words of my high school football coach. “Yes,” I thought, “I should always wear a cup.”

I climbed back up the bank, inventing new words and reusing old ones, but I slipped a couple of times and so muddied my knees as well.

“And that, my dear, is how I produced the unique pattern of mud splatter on the garment that you’re holding: mud on the knees and the bottom of each leg, a big spot on the seat, and two paw prints in the crotch.”

Walking the dogs this morning, I heard the call of a songbird. Such a happy sound, charged with the expectation of Spring. Then I realized that the interval between the two notes was a minor third. We usually think of music in the minor mode as having a sad or eerie sound, yet this little bird sounded quite happy to me.

But this association of major => happy, minor => sad has not always held. In ancient Greek music, the modes that were similar to our major mode (Lydian and Ionian, for instance) were according to both Plato and Aristotle only good for drinking songs and silliness. They favored the Dorian and Phrygian modes, both of which sound minor to our modern ears primarily because of their diminished third. Of course we must realize that neither of these philosophers universally represented typical Greek thinking. Here’s an interesting and different take on the ancient Greek modes, while we’re on the subject.

Middle Eastern music almost always sounds minor to me — yet is often joyous, as demonstrated by the art of belly dance. Though this music includes many tones that lie in between notes on the chromatic scale, our western ears tend to hear them as sharpened or flattened versions of their nearest semitone neighbors. Yet more often than not they seem to approximate the minor rather than the major scale.

Apart from music that imitates nature, the way we hear a particular piece of music has less to do with any innate qualities of the tones themselves than with the idioms to which we have become accustomed to associating specific meanings. Those idioms, like the idioms of language, evolve over time through gradual changes in usage.

The first time I listened to Bach, I found him oppressive — because my experience and understanding of classical music at that time was defined by a superficial appreciation of Mozart and Rossini. But after I became more accustomed to listening to Bach, I began to realize that he was one of the most joyful composers to have ever lived. The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (which Bach wrote as a very young man) is probably the closest thing to multiple orgasms that can be expressed musically — albeit sublimated to a “spiritual” plane. Yet most modern first-time listeners would only hear “Phantom of the Opera”.

This also explains why every generation generally fails to appreciate the music of the next generation — they’re using a new idiom, and we’re quite happy with our old one. After all, you have to be able to whistle a tune in order to consider it “catchy”.

To many eighteenth century listeners, Beethoven sounded like noise — full of gratuitous dissonance and booming drums. To the nineteenth century he sounded divine, combining a mastery of Enlightenment-era forms with the raw emotion of the nascent Romantic period.

When I first heard the music of Gustav Mahler, it seemed to me nothing more than a jumble of unrelated symphonic textures. But each time I listened to one of his symphonies again, I would marvel “How could I have not heard that before?” This happened with each of his ten (or eleven) symphonies, even after I was already a fan. Each one introduces new idioms that have to be grokked before they can be appreciated.

In Alma Mahler’s biography of her husband, she told a story that I’ll probably mangle because I can’t locate the book right now. But it went something like this: Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler were walking through the woods near Vienna and discussing the current state of music. Brahms was of the opinion that the newer composers were ruining everything. The two arrived at a little bridge, where they stood and looked out across ripple following ripple on the brook that flowed beneath them. Mahler pointed to the successive ripples and asked, “Which one is The Last?”

There can never be a final style of music, because the needs for human expression keep changing. The same thing goes for human language, and it’s also true of programming languages. A programmer becomes an expert in a few languages and comfortably expresses any solution in the idioms those languages provide. But the next generation will always produce something new that better expresses what they need to do. The older programmer may resent these innovations and try to point out the flawed theory behind them, but the younger crowd will ignore this and continue to sing right along. And no matter how old you are, if you are young at heart you can join in, too.

Now that I think about it, since my songbird’s call is only two notes a step and a half apart, it’s also possible to hear them as the major fifth and third. If you then imagine the tonic two steps beneath the lower note, it fills the little tune with joyful anticipation — the anticipation of Spring.

26,964 spam messages in my Postini filter this morning — and I just cleaned it out yesterday. There’s no way that I’m even going to scan through all of these looking for familiar addresses. Heck, at 250 per page I’m not even going to bother selecting them all and deleting them 108 times. I don’t have time for 216 mindless mouse clicks and 108 page refreshes. I’ll just let all these expire and get deleted automatically. If you sent me something and I didn’t respond, you might want to leave a comment for me here on my blog instead. It gets fewer than 1000 spam comments per day, and between Akismet and Auntie Spam I manage to sort those out pretty well.

Walking the dogs the other day — or (as everyone I encounter invariably remarks) as they were walking me, I began to see that activity as a metaphor for my life: barely under control, unable to slow down, being dragged along by others. Suddenly I planted my feet and pulled back hard on the leash. Halley and Harry turned back in surprise to inquire into the cause of this unaccustomed demonstration of my will. I made them walk at a slower pace the rest of the way, and I felt a resolve to do the same for my life. To take back control.

Later while I was working, we lost power to a windstorm. My wife and I sat together on the couch under blankets and talked. When the power came back on, I didn’t rush back to my computers. We made coffee, and I stayed beside my wife on the couch. I finished a second cup before I finally went back to work. Later, I called a prospective client and told them I wouldn’t be able to work for them — I just have too much on my plate already. It was a fine opportunity — good money, and work that would look nice on a resume. But something inside me said “NO”, and I decided to listen to that something this time.

Walking the dogs this morning, I ran into one of my neighbors whose name I can never seem to remember. I keep wanting to call him Mike, but the one thing I do know about his name is that it’s not Mike — because I called him that one time before and he replied, “No, it’s not Mike, it’s _______”. Now if I could only remember what was in the _______.

“Hi, Chip!” says NotMike, as we approach each other from opposite directions, each walking our respective dogs.

“Hi howya doin!” I reply, trying not to make it too obvious that my greeting is devoid of proper nouns. The look in his eyes and the way he says “Chip” make it clear that he knows that I know that he knows that I don’t know his name. I haven’t for some time now, and every time we meet he greets me by name and I don’t call him Mike or anything else. But I’m too embarassed to simply ask him his name again, and he doesn’t want to embarass me further by just saying, “it’s _______” again.

But it does seem like he should be able to carelessly slip it into the conversation if he really wanted to be nice about it. He could say something like, “Yesterday my wife asked me, ‘When will you be home for dinner, _______?’” and then I’d quickly memorize it forever. Except then I might mistakenly think his name was “Asshole” or “Aftersix”.

Why can’t he have his name sown into the front of his wool cap or tattooed on a visible body part, so I could discreetly read it? But names in tattoos are almost always either girlfriends or moms, and nobody has their name sewn on their clothing after about the third grade.

Couldn’t he stick a temporary name tag on his chest? He could excuse it by saying he forgot to remove it from his jacket after attending a conference the day before.

NotMike’s dog Kiki (funny how I can remember her name) was always cautious around Halley — but now that I have two over-exuberant yellow labs, NotMike has to keep Kiki on a short leash when around them. Kiki strains at the leash and growls at my two puppies, who likewise strain at their leashes in an attempt to inflict on Kiki their standard greeting of Death by Licking. It provides a good excuse for cutting our uneasy conversation short and proceeding on our separate ways.

“Goodbye, Chip!” says NotMike.

“Have a good one!” says I, not calling him Mike.

Maybe one of these days I’ll call him “NotMike” and see what happens.

UPDATE:  I finally apologized for forgetting his name and asked him what it was.  He replied, “Mike.”  So not only could I not remember his name, I also couldn’t remember the wrong name I called him that one time.  Unless, of course, he read this post and he’s playing with my mind.

Living on an island has its advantages, but also its hindrances.  Like when your return flight into Seattle gets delayed because of an electrical problem and everyone’s forced to deplane and board another jet and arrive in Seattle at that time of night when the ferry’s scheduled departures start to spread out and you’re biting your nails urging the cabbie to drive as fast as he can to the ferry terminal because you want to make the 12:20 and you get there just in time to find out that it’s really a 12:15 and you just missed it.

And the next ferry isn’t until 1:35 AM.

And everything’s closed anywhere near the terminal.  You could walk up to Pioneer Square where the music’s always playing, but you’d have to carry your bags with you and might be just in time for stabbing hour.

So you sit in the ferry terminal reading Aristophanes and drinking vending machine orange juice because they don’t even have coffee and you have to stay awake because if you miss the next ferry you’ll get to spend the night.

But I made that ferry, and caught a cab home.  I stumbled in about 2:15 after having been up since 6 AM and of course after having been away from my wife for three days I couldn’t go straight to sleep and I vowed when I finally closed my eyes that I would never open them again.

So I slept in and had a late breakfast and reunion with my children and went to get the dogs from the boarders (about an hour and a half round trip) and back in their kennel and play with them for a while after all this time away.  Finally I unpacked my computer and reconnected all the peripherals and reminded Vista that I really do have two monitors and here’s how I want to use them and read my email that had backed up like a bad toilet and didn’t even touch my feeds and played catch-up all day and now it’s the end of the day and I’ve barely gotten anything accomplished.

That’s the hindrance of living on an island.

This morning as I was walking Halley and Harry, Halley took one of her frequent detours to sniff out the morning news, while Harry and I stood by patiently. My thoughts wandered (as they usually do, having no natural leader among them) and I didn’t notice that Halley began to squat down. When I finally looked in her direction, imagine my surprise to see Harry eating the Play Doh right as it was being squeezed out of the factory!

I grabbed him by the collar and scolded him, “You crazy canine! You don’t have to take everything Halley tells you to do literally, you know!”

Then I remembered a story my father once told me about a “safari” down in Florida to which he had taken some other family members (I had already grown up and moved out by then). He said that when they came upon a herd of elephants, he saw one elephant insert his trunk up to his eyeballs inside his companion. My Dad had opined that perhaps this elephant was selflessly helping his fellow-elephant with a case of constipation. Sure enough, the trunk re-emerged with a huge lump of, um, well you know what — which the pachyderm proctologist proceeded to devour with relish. (No, not pickle relish). The reactions of all observers were generally along the lines of “Ewwwww!”

Remembering this story led me to wonder how common this practice might be among various species of animals.

After some creative Googling, I found that this behavior is called “coprophagia” — an excellent word formed from Greek kopros (feces) + phagein (to eat). According to Wikipedia, natural selection has made the practice a regular feature of certain species, being beneficial to their survival in various ways. Elephants, for instance, are born with sterile intestines, and need to load up on bacteria from the guts of other elephants before they can digest their food properly.

The article also lists several possible reasons why dogs participate in the feces-fest. Some sources indicate that it’s a generally harmless behavior, if disgusting. I’d have to admit that it would be nice not to have to pick up after them — but it sure makes that lick to the face feel a lot less friendly.

Now that our puppy Harry is big enough to walk a few miles, I take both him and Halley out on my morning walks.  I purchased a swivel coupler so I can put both dogs on the same leash, about 18″ apart when fully stretched.  At first, Harry kept getting Halley tangled up by going around behind her back legs, but after a while they learned how to keep clear and duck under the leash instead of trying to jump it.

Harry’s endurance has bult up quickly.  He now pulls Halley along most of the time.  The vet says I’m not supposed to run him until he’s a year old, but sometimes they both just want to go, so I let them run and I pant to keep up.  They’ll gallop along happily, tongues hanging out, looking over at each other occasionally.  I can’t help but imagine their conversation:

HARRY:  I can run faster than you now.  I ought to be the lead dog.

HALLEY:  You little squeak-toy!  I answer only to the Almighty Humans.  I’m the boss here, and don’t you forget it.  Besides, if you’re such a leader, why do you always cringe and pull back on the leash whenever a vehicle goes by?

HARRY:  It’s prudent.  Besides, I want to make sure you don’t run out in front of a bus, because I love you so much.

HALLEY:  Love?  Is that why you try to bite me in the butt whenever I take a pee?  Or why whenever the Humans favor me with a Divine Belly Rub, you try to straddle my face?  If I need that kind of love, I’ll pose for Playpup and at least score a few bones for the indignity.

HARRY:  I got your bone right here.

Poor guy, he doesn’t know that next Wednesday he’ll be neutered.