It’s going to be one of those weekends, I fear…
Ghost has one distinction among us: He’s the only one who was born here. He was a rescue pup from a local pound and came to the Gulch at an absurd age. LB also arrived as a fuzzy little pup, but old enough to be ready for his life apart from momma and the litter. Ghost, as I understand it, has never known anything else but right here, in our home that’s made of heat and cold and glare and dirt and juniper and cactus and nondescript barely-not-dying bushes, where everything that lives must be approached with caution.
Ghost owns this place. He’s in his prime – unlike his gigantic predecessors, he hasn’t grown feeble just because his age approaches double digits. He casts a long shadow on the territory that he guards quite zealously, backed up by his dumb but very loud mountain-of-muscle sidekick.
But like the rest of us, he does have some … shall we say, personality quirks. The first is a legacy from his days as low dog in the pack, I suppose. Whenever our weekend neighbors come up, he wants to go stay with them. He’s been doing it since he was a young dog.
They usually welcome him; they’ve been going along with the joke for at least eight years. But Ghost, alas, does have a second quirk; he does not get along well with young things. Our weekender neighbors have a herd of grandchildren, some of them quite small. The older ones know what not to do around Ghost, but nobody assumes that Ghost is child-safe. He’s not. I don’t leave him alone with my own granddaughter.
And so sometimes Ghost is not welcome there. And he does not understand this. In the past, I just sadly locked him in Gitmo to keep him away. But we can’t do that anymore, and he just can’t spend his days indoors. Oh, sometimes, for a little while, he wants to keep me company in the kneehole of the desk, or monopolizing the big-boy chair. But mostly he needs to be out and around.
So yesterday he went off to visit the weekenders and had to be brought back, and I have no doubt that today he’ll go off to visit the weekenders and will need to be brought back. And I’ll confine him as much as I can, and he won’t understand it but he’ll put up with it until he can sneak off again.
And then Sunday will come, and we’ll get on with our lives as hermits together. Because beneath it all we really are buddies.
