Dogs

For the past few days, and the next few, we are hosting a neighbor's dog while she and her son are on vacation. The dog is terrific, pleasant, doesn't complain, goes about his business (which we'll get to in a moment), and we'd have him again in a minute, but let's just say you don't really know a dog until you live with him.

Clancy, theirs, is a small springer spaniel. Clancy runs around the house randomly sniffing the floor, like one of those ergodic pool cleaners filmed at 18 frames per second and played back at 24 fps. He'll also run back and forth between the hallway and a given room 10 or 20 times in a row, as though he's got doggy Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. "Gotta touch that chair again. Again. Again. Again..."

It suggests a way to clean floors while you're out of the house. Rubber-lined cloth dog booties that you soak in floor cleaner. Then, you hang a timed treat dispenser over a shallow pool of diluted cleaner. The dog roams the house for a while cleaning the floors, then replenishes his foot-mops when he shows up to get his half-hourly treat.

This would be true even if Sage were making an effort to make Clancy feel like a welcome guest. Sage, ours, is a very large black lab, about 110 lbs. Sage is and always has been, an only dog. So sharing is, shall we say, not in his nature. He seems to want to play, but he's also a little threatened and annoyed by Clancy hanging around, getting treats there were clearly meant for him, before Clancy showed up. So he'll growl at Clancy while his tail is up and wagging. All part of the cognitive dissonance of being a large lab, I suppose. Fortunately, Clancy doesn't seem to mind, ceding whatever it is Sage thinks he wants, and going back to sniffing out the ghosts of parakeets who once lived here.