CHAPTER TWO OF THE ADVENTURES OF BRIOCHE

 

THE ADVENTURES OF BRIOCHE: CHAPTER TWO

 

In this sad and difficult year of deaths and distancing, rescue shelters across the country have emptied and breeders had more demand than they could supply for canine or feline companions to help deal with the unprecedented isolation and losses. Brioche was born in July and yes, I decided last spring to seek out a puppy to accompany me in this year of the quarantine and then, most likely, for the rest of my life.A mere 3 pounds when she joined me in September not quite yet 8 weeks old, Brioche now weighs in at a whopping 8 lbs. and has reached the advanced age of 7 months.

 Although I was raised in a family with many dogs and always had a dog (and sometimes a litter of puppies) while I was raising my own children, once my nest was empty and work was fulltime and often required lots of travel, I gave up on living with a dog and for many years starting in the late 80s had cats instead. But now after a hiatus of almost 40 years, this poodle puppy has joined forces with me for better or for worse. It will complicate any future travel.  It will even complicate going into Manhattan once the theaters and concert halls reopen, but we'll find a way.

Life with her is a circus, endlessly exciting as though there were lion tamers, trapeze artists, and clowns, above all, clowns.  Brioche tries her hardest to understand what I’m telling her, and since all day we are mostly alone, quarantined, isolated from other folk except very rarely, I do talk to her, tell her stories, comment on the weather, on my fatigue and her energy, on the foods we are going to consume separately or (lucky Brioche) together.

FOOD

Having mentioned food, I’ll elaborate a bit.  From the very start I’ve given her boring kibble morning and evening, but at noon—or whatever time lunch happens that day—she lucks out and has a bit of whatever I’m having.  NOT at the same time.  She doesn’t beg.  Doesn’t sit by my side watching as I eat.  In fact, without my ever insisting or scolding she decided on her own that the humans’ meal (because every Wednesday my housekeeper and I sat together over lunch and a few times a brave soul has ventured here for dinner since we’ve both quarantined) has to be respected, endured, whatever verb you want.

 In the kitchen she retires to her own bed (thank you, big sister Virginia) to wait absolutely quietly until we finish.  In the diningroom she goes under the table quietly to wait.  And the wait will continue while I put away our dishes, even wash them, and only then pick up her dish and start to put into it a mix of whatever we’ve had, fish, eggs, rice, couscous, hamburger, liver, chicken… she has enjoyed a varied diet and loves it all.  And still she waits, because now I make her sit and wait before setting down her dish, but she is quivering, the tail going madly back and forth, and I don’t dare push it beyond 20 seconds maximum.  I do believe the word “lunch” is part of her vocabulary.

VOCABULARY

Her vocabulary when I last wrote about her some months ago was very limited.  Her name, command to “sit,” and, sort of, the command to “down.” Although then and still now if she is sitting and I tell her to stay, she thinks that means to lie down and I have to get her back up into a sitting position.

But the rest of her vocabulary is very extensive.  I come back to my parked car.  She’s in my seat looking out the window (not barking) and I say, “Move over,” and she does that promptly.

Of course the word “out” is one she responds to instantly and is at the door long before I’ve put on boots or a coat or picked up her leash or given any other obvious signal.

"Car" is another word she recognizes and responds to.  Not brave enough to jump up onto the seat herself, she positions herself by the door and waits to be lifted up and then, dutifully, moves over from my seat to hers.  Should there ever be a human passenger not willing to share that seat with her we could have a problem.  Only once, when I was getting a covid test in a drive through location from a National Guard volunteer, was she commanded (by him; not by me) to move into the back seats.  She was miserable.  It has never happened since then, but I can see it in her future.

While that one-word command, “stay,” in a sitting position, has never quite taken hold with her, the longer phrases, “Stay there; I’ll be back,” whether leaving her upstairs when I go down (she hasn’t mastered going down, only up), or whether I am in fact leaving her in a parked car, or in the kitchen behind a shut door, she absolutely understands that, looks a bit sad, but does as asked and, again, that wonderful bed in the kitchen thanks to Virginia, she will retire to that bed when I leave her rather than standing eagerly at the door whining or barking or scratching.

HOUSE TRAININGs

House-training would be perfect 24/7 except for my own inability to get up as early as I assume (I really don’t know) would be necessary to accommodate her needs in the morning. So every night I put her, half asleep already, into her bed in the kitchen with her favorite toys and with a puppy pad in one corner of the room.  Some mornings the pad is dry, other mornings she has used it.  But then throughout the entire day she has never had an accident and clearly understands the purpose of a walk.  Although she believes the primary purpose of a walk should be to play, to research every scent in the neighborhood, to find an attractive stick to carry home. In another month when the sun is up earlier and it’s not so cold in the early mornings I’ll let her sleep in my bedroom, no more puppy pads, and will get up whenever she signals that need.  But she has been remarkably happy in the kitchen.  When I come get her in the morning she is standing quietly by the door and has brought every one of her stuffed animals to wait right by the door with her.  It’s a sweet sight.

I had to make one addition to the kitchen because with her new size she can stand on her hind legs and reach into the trash.  I now own for the first time a can that has a lid.

BARKING

She is NOT a barker except when she is really bored because I’ve been sitting and reading for a long time and she wants to play.  Or when I’m watching television and, again, she wants me to play with her. If it’s a Nature program with animals she will watch the screen intently and bark at what she sees and hears.  But if it’s some other program I’m trying to watch, the barks are purely to get my attention.  I can’t seem to cure her of this.  It happens every night, the only time I turn on the TV.  I warn her.  First step when she’s barking, I put a leash on her and tie it to the radiator.  If she still barks, I shut her in another room, my study, where she waits sadly and quietly until I let her out again.  No barking, whining, scratching of the door.  Just waiting. 

She has better hearing than I do. If the mailman puts letters into the box on my porch or UPS or FEDEX drops off a package, she’ll utter one little low bark to alert me and is then delighted if I go open the door to see what we’ve got.  She is a remarkably quiet little lady, except for the TV.

GAMES

But the games! Oh, the games, the excitement surrounding almost everything I do from taking the garbage outside (it’s the tying up of the bag in the kitchen that excites her), to opening mail, to getting dressed or undressed (socks or tights especially tantalizing as they dangle in the air as I pull them on). In fact all footwear is what she covets most, slippers that are light enough that she can make off with them, the routine of exchanging slippers for shoes on going outdoors. Anything new delights her.. She has discovered the Dr. Scholl linings in a pair of my shoes and managed to extract and totally destroy one of them, an infinity of little pieces to sweep or vacuum up. Now I have to be careful that those shoes are really out of reach because she’s gone for them more than once. One Kyrgyz slipper, absolutely irresistible, has now gone into the trash, alas. Does she think slippers are just more fluffy toys like all her stuffed animals to be carried around and mauled lovingly? Or does she know they are forbidden fruit and will get me to chase her in that eternal "catch me if you can" game?

 

 

HOUDINI

I wrote earlier about her skill in exiting the crate, also in opening the bolted kitchen door until now it is both bolted and further secured with a hotpad between door and wall so she can’t wiggle the bolt free. But she has the Bluebeard’s wife fascination with any closed-off space. There are numerous fences and gates in our neighborhood and she will go unerringly to the gate or to holes in the fence and contemplate how to get through into that new territory.  I can’t let her out without a leash. She couldn’t resist the temptation of slipping through one of those gates or racing after a squirrel or the neighborhood gaggle of geese, or our very evident family of skunks.  The skunks occasionally venture out in daylight and I’ve headed the opposite way because they, of course, are fearless.

PLAYGROUND

By great good luck I decided last June, long before Brioche was even born, that I needed some kind of enclosure to walk her when the weather was really awful.  I wasn’t thinking of what fun it would be.  It’s a relatively small space, but large enough that she can race madly around it.  There was already a fence separating my property from the neighbor’s property.  With that as one wall, and the exterior of my house as the opposing wall, we just added the other two sides and a gate.  Brioche loves her playground.  To get to it she races across my front porch to the stairs my handyman provided in September (and the railing for me) and waits at the gate.  I have three different balls there that I throw for her and of course she finds bits of sticks as well that she wants to bring back into the house.  This has been a real godsend when I’m too tired to go for a real walk but she needs some exercise.  I think, but am not entirely sure, that “playground” is another word in her vocabulary.

HEELING

I’ve tried to begin to teach the concept of heeling, that when we walk she should stay by my side and neither race ahead nor lag behind.  A very, very difficult concept for Brioche.  Recently I’ve a new strategy, a long leash with liberty to set her own pace when we are just exploring, for example, on the beach.  But a choke collar and a much shorter leash and insistence on her keeping by my side as instructed by the great Blanche Saunders, with the words, “heel, Brioche,” repeated ad nauseam with lots of praise.  I’m hoping if we do it every day and I’m consistent in using the long leash for fun walks and the short one with that collar for the daily lessons, maybe, just maybe she’ll catch on.  Poodles are intelligent and supposedly want to do what their owners want them to do.  This one has a definite mind of her own.

STAIRS

She has learned so much and can do so much, but one obstacle remains, and it is actually fairly useful to me when I want to know where she is.  Long ago she mastered racing/flying up the staircase to the second floor.  She has no problem with the half dozen steps up or down to the playground outside.  But she is clearly afraid of coming down the stairs from the second floor and will sit there looking very sad if I ever go down without her.  There have been a number of times when she has disappeared from the first floor and then I will hear a distant bark.  She’s up there and stranded.  She must have thought I was going up, but I didn’t.  To bring her down a dozen times every day I sit down and she comes and sits right by my left hip so I can carry her down. For better or for worse, I am her devoted slave.

 

 

To be continued.