Matching Tracksuits

Our pup has come a very long way. I thought, when we got her, that since she’s a border collie (smartest breed on the planet, right?), things would be easy. She’d be easy to train, easy to control (after all, you can get those dogs to do the most amazing tricks herding sheep), easy to house-break — just easy. But it turns out that BCs are too smart for their own good: it makes them a little stubborn at times. And that describes our Clover perfectly: stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. But we didn’t give up on her: we took her for some obedience training, we left her a couple of times for one-on-one days with a trainer, and for the last year, things have been going great.

Now, we have a few tricks with her.

• You can, for instance, drop a piece of the most tempting meat in front of her and she’ll just sit down at it, shifting her gaze from the meat to you and back to the meat, a pleading look in her eye, and she won’t touch it until you tell her, “Eat.”
• In the morning, you can open the door and tell her, “Siusiu,” and she’ll go out and immediately relieve her self and come back inside.
• You can call her and she comes and sits beside you.
• If you want her on the other side, just say “Other side” and she’ll switch sides.
• You can tell her to stay and then kick ever her most beloved ball and she won’t go darting after it until you tell her “free” or “go get it” or “release.”
• “Heel” means “heel.”
• When you’re taking her for a walk and stop moving, she sits — sometimes immediately, but usually after a bit of hesitation. (There’s that stubbornness.)

For her birthday, though, we got her an agility course. The Girl began training her yesterday. It was fairly simple: she figured out that she had to jump over the bar, had to jump through the hoop. Easy-peasy. She looked up at L like she looks up at me when we go for a run: “Was that supposed to be a challenge or something?”

Today, the Boy got in on the fun. He had a little difficulty getting her to jump without a leash on her to guide her, but soon enough, he’d worked out his own way of bribing her with a little treat.

My Ántonia

I finished reading My Ántonia today — or rather, listening to it on Spotify. I first read that book in college, and it astounded me, particularly one quote: “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” More than O, Pioneers! (the only other Cather book I’ve read), I really connected with the sense of nostalgia that pervades My Ántonia. That’s why I remember that quote almost a quarter of a century later: I read it shortly after some emotionally traumatic losses (not deaths, just losses) in my life, and I was wallowing in nostalgia about those lost relationships.

I had forgotten, though, about the ending:

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

“What a little circle man’s experience is.” What a lovely notion, what a great truth.

Returning to Dickens

“What to listen to now?” I thought, as I finished the Cather novel early in the day and still had plenty of outside work to keep me occupied. Much of the morning I spent cleaning rocks. Yes, cleaning rocks. The drainage trough (for lack of a better term) I made at the base of our driveway has, over the years, become more and more clogged with dirt. Now instead of wicking water away from the drive, it just serves as a barrier and makes it puddle water. What’s more, with all that dirt, weeds had a great place to grow. So I pulled out all the rocks down to the landscaping fabric, washed the dirt off the rocks, and put them back. (Coronavirus quarantine has lent itself to long-ignored, not-necessarily-critical projects.) Anyway, I was still working on the rocks and the book finished.

Spotify is sort of hit-or-miss with audiobooks: there’s very little (that I’ve found) that’s relatively recent, and a lot of the older books are actually in translation — lots and lots of German audiobooks I’ve found.

When I lived in Poland, I had some difficulty finding affordable English-language books. Penguin Classis, though, were plentiful and relatively cheap. That’s how I read almost every Dickens book in the space of three years. There are a few that I never found, though, and I thought today might be a good day to return to Dickens.

I hadn’t really read him in almost twenty years. I teach Great Expectations some years to my English I Honors students, but that doesn’t really count: the last year I taught it (two years ago, I think), I didn’t even read it with the students.

So today I began Dombey and Son. I’d forgotten how clever and witty Dickens can be, and how gifted he can be at beginning a novel. Think of his most famous, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Or my personal favorite Dickens beginning, which I’ve mentioned here before, Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Dombey, though, has a clever opening:

Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good time—remorseless twins they are for striding through their human forests, notching as they go—while the countenance of Son was crossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.

Of course, Dickens can be tiring with all his subplots and sub-subplots (after all, the longer he stretched novels, which were always published in syndication in magazines, the more money he could make from a given book), but I’m thinking he’ll be a lot easier to listen to than read.