Bright Sunshine-y Day

So. Following up on my previous post, from two weeks ago today, we actually never—surprisingly, amazingly—lost power when Hurricane Irene, or what was left of her, blew through the D.C. area. I’m guessing that’s because Pepco was stung by my certainty of an outage, unnerved by the vastness of my readership and determined to prevent trees from falling on local power lines even if it meant making their line crews sign kamikaze suicide pacts to prevent it.

Ha! No, what I’m really thinking is, maybe it was like how carrying an umbrella around sometimes seems to have the effect of preventing promised rain. Perhaps my bemoaning the inevitability of power failure was exactly the thing that prevented it.

Anyway, we’d spent days monitoring the forecasts and assuming that when Saturday night’s deluge ended and the sun reemerged the following day, what was being billed as a pending blessing would feel like a curse, as temperatures rose in our sunlit but un-air conditioned home. To our happy shock, however, Lynn and I found ourselves sitting in cool comfort as the post-storm sun blazed outside on that sultry late-August afternoon.

But then this past week came the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. Although nothing about that weather event had sounded particularly threatening—“tropical storm” suggesting nothing an afternoon indoors with a fruity cocktail couldn’t mitigate, and “Lee” sounding rather like Marie Osmond’s idea of a bad boy—that storm in fact kicked far more heinie around here than had the considerably more heralded hurricane.

From Monday through Thursday, rain fell more or less continuously, often in sheets. Creeks became rivers, roadsides became creeks, lawns became pools. Fortunately, the precipitation seldom was wind-driven, however, and the saturation somehow failed to uproot a single tree hovering over our power lines.

Still, I experienced Lee in a way that I had not experienced Irene. And the Bean was the reason.

I haven’t written much, if anything, about our three-legged hound mix since I introduced him, in a blog post early December, as “essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues.” A little more than eight months later, he’s still big and spazzy. He’s better socialized and suffers less separation anxiety now, although he hasn’t made as much progress on either front as we’d like. He’s as handsome and lovable as he was the day we brought him home, but as he has become more comfortable he’s also become more destructive. Time was when he’d feel too freaked out when left alone to indulge in such time–honored canine behaviors as shoe-chewing and paper-shredding, but that’s no longer the case.

In short, Bean has turned out to be exactly as advertised in that old post. He’s very much a Dog’s Dog, in the same way that our late greyhound Ellie, Bean’s predecessor, was a Cat’s Dog. Ellie was aloof and meek. Bean is engaged and rambunctious. Which is great in many ways. But not so much, I have to say,when Noah’s flood is raging, and I’m the one being swept away in it, tethered to the dog by a leash.

See, as I’ve noted before, Lynn is the dog advocate in our house. I loved Ellie and I love Bean, but I have no innate need for canine companionship and would be fine with our never having another one. I much prefer cats, who are less work, less needy, less gross, equally beautiful/handsome and, in my experience and contrary to stereotype, as affectionate, if not more so, than dogs. (I know canines have that “unconditional love” reputation, but the closest to that Lynn and I ever have experienced with either of our pooches is, “You are my best friend as long as you have in your possession, and may give to me, food that I want.”)

So, we rescued Ellie, and then Bean, with the understanding that Lynn would be their real-life, hands-on mom, and I their sitcom dad—amiable and well-meaning, but minimally involved in their raising, and more cheerleader than mentor. In practical terms, this means that, while I’m always there to rub Bean’s belly as I pass him in the house, and to shower him with affectionate nicknames (“Beanie Buddy,” “Beaner Budder,” “Crazy Pupper,” “Handsome Head,” etc.), when I’m getting ready for work in the morning and wearing my PJs at night, it’s Lynn who’s trudging out the door to walk him.

In a real sense, I’m like a member of the cushiest Army Reserves unit, who needn’t ever muster on weekends, let alone ship off to Afghanistan. I merely need occasionally to serve a single soldier his grub, or to lead that same soldier through a short hike on those infrequent occasions when his commanding officer is unavailable.

That soldier, of course, is Bean. Except without an iota of the discipline that should make the job easy.

Perhaps because Irene had proven to be such a non-event as inconveniences go, or maybe because Lynn’s body in recent years consistently has conspired against her, last Sunday Lynn tore a muscle in her left calf while running across a street with Bean. Being the doting husband and enormously compassionate human being I am, I commiserated and fretted over my wife’s not inconsiderable pain for as many as 10 minutes before turning my full attention to how this misfortune promised to adversely affect me. With crystal clarity, sometime during that 11th post-injury minute, I realized the upshot was that I would be Bean’s primary walker for at least the next several weeks.

I also knew that a lot of rain was forecast, starting the following day. Unfortunate timing, but I knew what I had to do: prepare myself mentally and practically. Be a Man and suck it up. Be selfless. Be dutiful. Be the husband and Doggie Dad I must be at a time of familial adversity.

Which is to say, the bitching and whining began pretty much immediately. Followed by the grudging, petulant and absolutely minimal fulfillment of my obligation. And all of this while wearing inappropriate and inadequate apparel that promptly got soaked, because donning proper raingear would’ve taken even more precious minutes away from “All Things Considered” in the mornings and baseball on TV at night.

At 9:30 those first couple of evenings I chirped, “Time to take the doggie out,” hoping to ape Lynn’s usual neutral-to-cheery tone in voicing those words, but knowing I sounded more like Dick Cheney in his heyday, being dragged into an obligatory meeting with America-hating members of the “Democrat Party.”

I had on shorts, a T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball hat—that last being my only concession to the rain. Bean, being the un-Ellie, and thus as oblivious to getting wet as she had loathed it, immediately busied himself doing all the things he does on walks under all weather conditions—stopping to eat grass, employing his hound nose to sniff up every morsel of delicious squirrel and rabbit waste to be found on each lawn and stretch of road, lunging at wildlife, often pausing to stare into space at who knows what.

Meanwhile, victimhood saturated my thoughts, much as the rain was saturating my clothing. “Why me?” “Damn dog.” “[I love you honey, but,] Stupid crippled wife.” Etc. Flashlight in my mouth to illuminate the proceedings, I clamped the plastic implement I call the Jaws of Poop around Bean’s glistening turds, as a waterfall cascaded off the bill of my cap.

After toweling Bean off on the front porch, I sloshed my way inside, careful to say little to the missus beyond the necessarily informative “He pooped,” lest words escape my mouth that I’d best not utter. I then trudged downstairs, shed my wet clothes, toweled myself off, changed for bed, brushed my teeth, took a few deep breaths and tried to leave as much of my bad attitude as possible in the basement.

As the week went on, though, I found that things got better. I like to think I Manned Up, gained maturity, all that positive-spin stuff. I do believe that was part of it—that I started heeding that “angel of my better nature,” per Abe Lincoln. But also, most things get easier with repetition (commuting in D.C. traffic and, in my case, rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates each baseball season, notwithstanding).

A huge game-changer for me was when I stopped bone-headedly repeating my sartorial mistakes and began taking the time to dress for the biblically ridiculous conditions outside. Clad now in a sweat-inducing-but-waterproof raincoat (with its peripheral vision-restricting but protective hood tugged over my ball cap), with jeans having replacing my shorts (although rain pants would have been better yet), and with water-resistant boots covering my feet and lower legs, I came to feel nearly as indifferent to the rain (if not as enthusiastic to be outside the house at 6:15 am and 9:45 pm) as was Bean.

In fact, I daresay it even felt ever-so-slightly fun at times to be largely impervious to the elements that everyone else was hiding from—as if the city was exploding, or radioactive, but those citizens wearing superhero suits like me needn’t be concerned. In fact, even on Friday afternoon—with the monsoons finally ended and the sun back in the sky, but the landscape still as squishy as a Nerf ball—I delighted in wearing my rain boots along with my shorts and T-shirt, the better to follow my crazily zigzagging dog wherever he might lead me without having to worry about soggy shoes.

It’s Saturday afternoon now—the second day of dry, and my sixth full day of primary dog stewardship. Soon I’ll take Bean out for the third of his four daily walks. He’ll be his usual endearing and infuriating self—thrilled to be outside, sniffing everything in sight and nearly everything that isn’t, eating all manner of gross stuff, forcing me into conversation with people I don’t know, or with fellow dog-owners who assume (incorrectly) that I love talking about dogs, and getting mouth slobber all over my hand when I slip him treats he’s done nothing to deserve.

But you know, I honestly won’t mind it that much. OK, as much. I’m in this thing for the long haul.

Maybe, in a sense, I can see clearly now. The rain has gone.