My partner and I have had dogs for close to twenty years now. When I was in grad school, I moved out of my parents' house, and in with her; the rent was low, $450 a month (which we split), a sweetheart deal from the landlady who lived above our basement suite, who liked my partner, appreciated how quiet she was. The second year of grad school, my tuition dropped to a few hundred bucks a term, since I was done my coursework: continuation of enrolment status. Suddenly, despite making only $15k/year, I had savings. She kept talking about how much she wanted a puppy. We got a puppy.
That dog was a little bundle of anxieties and health problems that nonetheless almost made it to sixteen. He passed away just over three years ago. Back in 2011, we got a second dog, figuring it'd be good for him to have a friend. And after our first dog passed, we eventually got a second dog again, about whom this gemlog is about.
He's small, loving, energetic; a pile of anxieties and neuroses, and easily, easily the most challenging dog we've ever had. Every now and then, he decides he doesn't want to sleep through the night. He'll bark, and he can go for hours before he gets tired of it. Every now and then I break, grab a blanket, sleep on the couch with the dogs (I know I shouldn't do this, that it feeds the behaviour). The next night we're on eggshells, waiting for the first bark that may or may not come.
The last week he's turned it on again, nightly, and we've been racking our brains to try to figure out why. Is it his bedding? Being an anxious dog, he eventually tears anything in his bed apart, and his bedding was in rough shape. Plus, the temperatures have plunged. The house is heated, but their crates are in one of the cooler rooms. Last weekend I chucked his scraps of bedding, got a couple of cheap blankets at Wal-Mart. No dice. Then we realized: we were sitting on the couch every evening, curled up with the dogs under a sherpa blanket. Is that what he was after?
Last night, when we put the dogs to bed in their crates with a treat, the way we do every night, I put the sherpa blanket in his crate for him. It worked. We had our shower: no barking. We read in silence (blessed silence) for more than an hour, my partner reading a collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories, and myself reading Casey Plett's "On Community". Did it work? Was it all a trick, had he just decided to tear his bedding to shreds instead, the way he sometimes does?
I checked this morning and everything was intact. It seems he had his veggie dent, curled up, and went to sleep. I'll bet our other dog was appreciative, a few feet away. I know we were. It was nice to go to bed not-on-edge, nice not to have to yell at him to go the fuck to sleep (something that does calm him for a bit, sometimes, maybe). We joke: he's the dog we should have had in our 20s, when we had a lot more energy, not our 40s. One of those jokes that is not in fact a joke.