Open Writing

One of our dogs doesn’t know when to stop growing. That’s Belle. The other doggie, Frankie, has not yet become attuned to the prevailing feng-shui in our household. That is strange because Border Collies are smart, adaptable, and eager to please. Yet although she has graced our home with her presence for the best part of six years, she has always insisted on sleeping south to north, when our beds have always been set east to west.

Now, gentle reader, you might find having a dog on your bed distasteful. However, we do not. In fact, we encourage it because sometimes they need a high level of intimacy with their adoptive parents for their comfort and reassurance, etcetera.

Frankie presents a contradiction, for while her herding instinct is extremely powerful, untaught, and untrained, her fear of loud noises is learned behaviour, due to her first year of life that was lived under intolerable conditions. That is how she ended up with us.

This magnificent thirty-seven pound athletic machine will herd the live-long day without tiring. People who see her performances at the Dog Park are enthralled and aghast at her speed, skill, focus, and drivenness, and are often driven to exclaim, "She should be herding sheep!"

Of course, I wholeheartedly agree. She was born to herd. However, she does have a flaw that is unacceptable in champion sheepdogs, and that is her fear of loud noises. Perhaps it is a throwback to her puppy days when she lived in Eureka, Montana, with a young family who didn’t understand Frankie’s breed.

It is a recurring story of a family falling in love with a BC puppy – I mean, have you ever seen one? They are the cutest and most fetching of puppies. So, people ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over them and then suffer from a temporary form of insanity known in the world of Abnormal Psychology as Bordercolliecutepuppybuyersregretophrenia. You might not know the term, but it is real enough.

It has a known ætoiology, and the prognosis is extremely poor and, to date, no one has been cured of it. In order to save the patient, a surgical operation is required to separate the puppy from its short-sighted owner. This hurts the puppy, but the patient is then released from the condition and is free to go and get another cute puppy, a course of conduct in which there is a high risk of re-infection.

The onset of BCCPBRO – referred to by mental health professionals as ‘Backup Bro’ - comes when the cute and totally adorable little puppy reaches five or six months of age. That is the age when the ones that will become champion herders get into gear and begin by herding cats, kids, other dogs, and anything that moves, or doesn’t move.

It has to be admitted that a flash of black and white fur tornadoing through your living room at Mach-4 can be disconcerting. This is especially true if you like to live a quiet life. Of course, the decision to house a Border Collie as a house pet was insane. No one should get any animal without researching the pros and cons, and without finding if the animal’s behaviour will disturb their tranquillity as they sit in their recliners, sip their coffee, smoke their whatever, and watch the daily grind of television soap operas to break the boredom of life.

Genuine BC owners are out before sun-up walking their dogs in all weathers regardless of how sick they themselves are. One’s own sudden death is probably the only legitimate excuse for not taking ‘Shep & Co’ out for exercise, play, fun, and work.

I digress. Frankie’s previous owner – I will not call her a parent – opted for the surgical procedure because she failed to beat, knock, and shock the Border Collie out of her. Finding that all her abuse had failed to reduce Frankie from what the Good Lord had made her, she turned her in to Libby Pound in Montana and paid the five dollars turn-in fee.

The horrors of Libby Pound have been publicly exposed by ex-employees as rivalling the horrors of Auschwitz and Belsen, if not in volume, then certainly in degree. It is a chapter best left unopened, which is where I leave it for the present time.

The Judas-fee was paid and Frankie was led to her abysmal cell among scores of doggies who had been neglected, abandoned, abused, and un-adopted. We saw her picture online and fell head over heels in love with the little mite.

It was a happy day for all of us when we took her home. She settled right in, scoured the place to find the best corners for her nest, and then got right down to work trying to herd our old dog, Shep.

Shep had, he said, reached that point in life where speed wasn’t everything any more. What he meant was that speed wasn’t anything at all any more, and daily demonstrated it by his regal walk at funeral pace as he strolled through the grasslands and forests displaying his fine shaggy black and white coat to impress pine squirrels, wild turkeys, and the whitetail deer who treated our a acreage as their own.

He mostly just laid down between our chairs, his lugubrious face resting on his paws, his eyes half-open and half-closed. That’s not hard to do, and that’s probably why Old Shep did it.

But Frankie was a whirlwind. She favoured a figure of eight, a reverse loop, and a complicated set of cryptic sweeps that defy description but which involves going around, over, under, and through various articles of furniture and furnishings, all at great speed. She is, after all, a Border Collie!

We spoke nicely to her, loved her, gave her open signs of our approval, and just let her get on with it. Six years later, she is just the same, only Belle became her victim, er, flock of sheep, now that Shep is gone. I tell you this so that you can get something of the flavour of the most lovingest dog in the world – Frankie.

I mentioned noises, and these included thunder – you can guess how that would affect her if she was rounding up thousands of scattered sheep on high moors and there blew in a thunderstorm. Frankie would go straight home, head down, shoulders hunched, ears flat, and her belly a quarter of an inch from the ground. It is a sad sight to see.

The other night was Independence Day here in the USA, and that means fireworks. At the first report, too close for comfort, Frankie assumed the position, and headed for me like a short wide serpent. I gave her continuous comfort for her distress.

When it was time for bed, we retired to our new-that-very-day King Sized Bed. I didn’t know whether to sleep on it or to hold the FA Cup Final on it. Gay took one side, I took the other side, and Frankie took the whole middle section. Belle came up for to inspect the new arrival, enjoyed it for a while, and then jumped off and took herself to one of her many sleeping places for the night.

The bed is six feet and six inches wide, and seven feet and eight inches long. It is huge. Yet after Frankie had settled down by my side and under my arm until the percussive incendiary devices were spent, she then moved down the bed and curled up in the space made by Gay’s bent legs for an hour, before lying between us, her head bent at an awkward but customary angle against Gay’s back, and her back legs splayed over me. She sleeps on her back whenever she feels safe.

There is now more than ample room for all of us. I can boast that I now have ten inches spare between me and falling out of bed, which made a change from all previous nights, because when Frankie spreads out she occupies more space than anyone could have imagined.

Only the night before, when we slept on our Old Faithful Queen Sized Bed, my lower legs, and part of the uppers too were hanging over the side of the bed, dangling as if the life had gone out of them, due to Frankie manipulating [should that be ‘pawnipulating’?] us both into positions where I could either try to move the little grumbling sleepy head to a neutral spot, or else rise and go sleep in the recliner, a deed I have performed many times. Frankie’s purpose, she explained, is to find lebensraum, a policy that has caused some disturbance in the past.

It will be a few years since Gay began saying that the bed wasn’t big enough for our family of two adults and two furry teenagers. "We need to get a King Size," she would say over and over and over. Last week she seemed more serious that comical and had looked at the advertisements in the local newspaper, written down telephone numbers from television commercials, consulted Google, and consulted the ten-ton telephone directory to check bed prices.

Remarkably I found myself drawn into the conspiracy and did some surfing and scanning of my own. "Do you want to come with me and look at beds?" she asked, brightly on Independence Day. I didn’t. I had begun to droop. It was close to ten o’clock and I had been up since five am, been to the dog park for a couple of hours, and was now ready to head back to bed for a nap.

When I fall asleep at the keyboard, then I take the hint. I had fallen asleep several times in the space of ten minutes, so I took nature’s hint and hit the bed. I should explain that we don’t actually go ‘in’ the bed, but only ‘on’ it. It’s the Arizona thing. Today will be 114 Fahrenheit, and the over night ‘low’ is ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Therefore, ‘on’ the bed is all we can stand. We haven’t been ‘in’ bed for four years!

For the past two nights storms have been brewing as the Monsoon Season gets itself into gear in the Valley of the Sun. Frankie’s radar detects approaching storms three or four days before they actually hover over us and steal our dust, then drop raindrops as big as walnuts that deliver someone else’s dust to replace the stuff they pilfered a day or so earlier. And then several days of absolute deluge. We know how Noah felt when he had his share of major precipitation.

When Frankie smells the storm, she adopts a hull-down position and heads for storm corner, where, like King Ahab, she faces the wall, and longs for death to overcome her. When she does that, I call her to me, and cuddle her as if she were a baby. At bedtime she snuggles down between us and eventually displaces one or more of us with her contrary feng-shui position.

But the advent of the King Sized Bed no matter how far she stretches herself out, she can no longer eject us, and so all three of us have the bests sleeps we have ever had in our lives.

Gay’s forethought is vindicated by the success the new bed has brought, and our doggies are obviously as happy as we are about it. If you have a Border Collie and you are either as smart or smarter than it, then you too will know that you need a King Sized Bed so that all may sweetly sleep and share in the rest of the innocent.

You don’t believe me? Well, then, why don’t you ask a Border Collie?



Copyright © 2008 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED