Daniel Pinkwater, forty-some years ago, wrote a children’s book called, Roger’s Umbrella. It’s about a little boy whose mother makes him carry an umbrella to school. When Roger objects that that umbrella gives him trouble, his mother tells him that umbrellas are all alike and you just have to know how to talk to them. Off Roger goes, troublesome umbrella in hand, and, sure enough, it gives him trouble. In fact, it carries him off, eventually landing him in the back yard of three old ladies. Who actually teach him how to talk to the umbrella.
Roger’s adventure with his umbrella sprang to mind this morning as I struggled to manage my own umbrella while cleaning up after the dog. A pronounced updraft made the usual choreography a challenge. If only, like Roger, I had learned how to talk to umbrellas at some point, my movements might have been less comical.
Further along in our walk, I ventured into outright slapstick. Rascal had, inadvertently, wrapped his leash around the pole of a street sign. I tried to get him to unwrap himself—something he’s normally quite good at—but he didn’t recognize the pole for what it was. So, umbrella in hand, I started to walk around the obstacle to get him undone. He thought I had changed my mind about our direction of travel and, obligingly, followed me. Which kept him wrapped up. I couldn’t manage the leash, umbrella, and doggie clean-up bag well enough to just stand still and unwrap the leash. So I went around again.
This time, clearly thinking I’d lost it, the dog just sat and watched me. Perfect. We were untangled and could resume our walk. Only, my rapid double circuit of the street sign left me dizzy. When we stepped off the curb to cross the street, my gait was such a stagger that my first few steps missed the crosswalk entirely. The dog, in his wisdom, refrained from comment.
Of course, he’s recently developed a quirk of his own. We keep a plastic bag of shredded paper in our room, by the shredder. When the bag is full enough, we take it downstairs and dispose of it. Our goofball dog has been getting into the shreds at night. We find them in the morning, artfully scattered across the rug. Not too many. Some here. Some there. As I said, artful.
When we adopted Rascal in mid-2012, the Humane Society estimated he was four-and-a-half years old. He’d been a stray before going to the Humane Society, so the folks there could only guess at his age. In any case, he is roughly fifteen years old, definitely a senior fellow. Why, now, has he developed a shred fetish?
I Googled dogs and shreds and got lots of hits. As far as I could tell, however, all of the hits were about dogs that like to shred things. While Rascal enjoys shredding the occasional used Kleenex, he gets few enough chances to do this that the behavior isn’t too bothersome. And, as he doesn’t then eat the Kleenex shreds, his pursuit of Kleenex is, again, okay with us.
Rascal’s shredding things isn’t a problem, as it seems to be for the eleventy-seven canine shredders that showed up in the Google search. Nope, our problem is with Rascal’s attack on already-shredded paper. Is he pouncing on it? Curling up on it in such a way that it poofs out of the bag? What’s up with the pup? We’re unlikely to find out. My husband shut the shred-relocation program down last night, when he draped the coverlet over the bag of shreds.
I’d kind of gotten used to finding the shred patterns on the rug in the morning, and didn’t particularly mind cleaning them up. One of our kids, as a toddler, used to rearrange autumn leaves on our walks, picking some up from one spot and moving them to another one, down the block or around the corner. An artful pursuit.
In addition to decorating the rug with shreds, the dog’s been decorating himself. As we make our rounds through the area of a morning, they drop, one by one, out of his dark fur onto the sidewalk. I pick them up, umbrella willing, and we continue on our way. If I see them on him before they drop, I do my best to remove them from his coat, but he’s made it clear that he doesn’t see the harm in them and he’d rather they stayed where they are. Think of it as immersive art, he says. There are worse things a senior dog could get involved in.
20 January 2023
Enjoyed reading about Rascal & his shredder fetish. What a fun furry pal! 🥰 Carole