Detective Ray's Agency: The Case of the Displaced Dachshund

This past week I was head of the pack. Hunter, Tank and I spent a full week at Kevin and Sarah’s since they both needed to be out of town and their baby Birdy needed her grandma. As always, the sleeping arrangement was a challenge with the extra Dachshund. Hunter and Tank have been accustomed to cuddling up to me for oh…the past 15 years so we hardly think about our bedtime protocol anymore. They are old and set in their ways. They are spoiled. So am I. Birdy, on the other hand, is being encouraged to sleep in the kennel next to her parents and I agreed to work on that with her.

Of course I mustn’t be too stern, this is my only grandpup. So our first night together, I snuggle into bed about 9 pm with three dogs and an unspoken agreement that Birdy can stay as long as she was content in one place so we can all sleep soundly. We all fall immediately into a deep pack animal sleep.

Maybe an hour passes before I feel Birdy climbing over me so I swiftly dispatch her to the kennel.
At first, silence, but before long there's a pathetic little whimper from inside the steel bars. But I won't be weak and sternly say "No! Go to sleep Birdy."
The whimper continues, and finally I put the blanket over the kennel and achieve silence from within. Fast forward a few hours into a satisfying sleep, I feel a canine form, it's especially silky coated, sweet smelling...hmm it's a long and lithe daschund scooting up from my feet to my armpit . It snuggles right up under my chin as if to say "I love you" like no other than......Birdy! She settles right back to sleep there.

I'm deep into sleep so I just think "Well she escaped the kennel. She can stay if she remains cozy like this.” And she did.

Morning comes. 3:30am anyway. My tuned in 'mom ears' hear the sound of Hunter needing his early morning wee.
I respond like a pro, throwing off my CPAP gear and reaching for the geriatric daschund I love so much...but where is he? Birdy's in my armpit, Tank next to her...the rest of the bed feels empty. I had visions of Hunter having fallen off the bed, lying helplessly on the floor making his obsessive morning licking sounds...but wait. The slurpslurpgruntslurp sounds he makes are coming from....the kennel! Poor Hunter !

I put the wrong dog in the kennel and he hasn’t looked at me the same ever since.

Hunter’s look of utter betrayal haunted me for the rest of the day.

Masks

This is a wonderful and fitting poem for these rocks. Even though Dunbar lived in another time and may have been expressing the pain black Americans were experiencing when emancipation was supposed to be the whole answer to their suffering, he is still relevant. In 2020, there was such a ragged divide between those willing to wear masks for others, and those refusing to wear masks, that this poem spoke to me in a different way than he may have intended. After you read the poem 4 times, please continue down and notice the rocks I painted that reflect my siblings and masks. And as I’ve mentioned before, rocks help me write so ‘Thank you’ Mr. Dunbar for writing this poem, and thank you reader for reading the poem and my blog and noting the connection.

We Wear the Mask

BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence. Dunbar, "“We Wear the Mask.”" from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, )

Ray Kids

Cheryl, Diane, Brian, Richard, Leslie

In a span of only six years there were begat five children to Edward and Adele Ray. In general, these children played nice and grew up with love and respect for one another for the first half century of their lives; then, along came Donald Trump and Covid and first signs of real trouble between them.

I am the youngest, and I have been trying to write about the painful change in our sibling relationships, but I have failed. I wrote plenty, then erased it. Rewrote, and deleted. I’ve never had so much trouble expressing a thing. So I’m just going to let Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem

"We wear the Mask" express the depth of the pain.

But I will say three facts I am confident of:

• At one point, my brother Richard pointed out that within our group of five siblings, we reflected the US divide, that three out of five Americans supported the Covid measures being taken, while the other two out of five did not. But we will be ok.

• We have different ideas about what fair, right, and good mean, and we have had a rough time these past few years. But we will be ok.

• In 2020, I painted these rocks in a bit of an emotional storm and it shows. But we will be ok.

The Court Jester

A hot beverage,

a spiral notebook, unused,

freshly cut grass,

new socks, still in the bag,

a book the librarian is going to share,

a newborn baby,

picking out colors for a new house,

the canvas, prepared,

White shorts,

can you feel that?

It’s hope, but it is joking

because

Hope is, I think, a court jester.

CLR 2022

Example of narrative development over time- The Owl

——An email to a friend-

I have a story for you, it was like we were in wild kingdom! Last night around 10:00 p.m. Rick and I took the dogs out as he was leaving. We stepped across the alley when suddenly there was a swoop and beating of wings coming out of the alley, very near us.... descending upon us and then clunk, a heavyish-felt sound. Ka-thunk. Just Ka. Thunk.

And then whoosh off it flew, heavy wings lifting it up slowly without it's dead body in tow.

It took a second to figure out what had happened—the whole thing happened so fast.

I guess we upset an owl who was in the middle of hunting and eating a small hawk. It swooped down towards us and dropped its prey and flew off. The hawk was almost dead it was just kind of twitching it was so gross it made me sad I didn't understand it--because I have never seen anything like that so close. I thought it was a rat at first it was so heavy and big.

That's my story and I knew you'd appreciate it since you know what happened to Tank's mother (the owl ate her)... It crossed my mind that maybe the owl decided it wanted Tank instead of what it had and dropped the hawk to grab a Pomeranian instead—losing both (Aesop told it: http://read.gov/aesop/026.html)

Okay that's my story—it seems incomplete, but it really revved me up last night you should have seen me jumping up and down, screaming in a whisper so as not to bother the neighbors.

I wrote that on September 17th, 2020, and tucked it away, hoping to revisit it later. A weekly date had finished with a beau minutes before. It had not been a satisfactory end. I was just thinking to myself. "He has his priorities and they do not include me. He will never think of me as part of his life, but rather a responsibility to fulfill, a drag, pulling him away from his life." And so, because I expected to be his happy priority, as he was mine, I had just decided then that we should probably end it, and to me, this realization was painfully dramatic. As the dogs and I walked him out I felt the owl was giving testimony.

“If you don’t stop now", the owl said, “the relationship will eventually drain you of all energy, exhaust you, essentially drop you in the alley as dead as this hawk."

Fast Forward to Friday, August 7th,2021. The Delta Variant has just swooped into Ellensburg spiking numbers 103%, and we were barely aware of it because we are, of course, vaccinated. It wasn’t as late in the evening, but it was in the same spot, when the owl checked in, this time with his approval, I thought. My spirits were high and I was invigorated, surrounded with the love of some good friends heading out for an extra fun walk.

The owl swooped down the same path as before, just over our heads, but with empty talons this time The previously mentioned beau now just a friend, joined us later that evening for lighthearted fun and we parted politely at the end of the evening, each of us the priority in our own life.

So here I am, almost a year from the first incomplete owl story with what joyfully felt at first like a complete story to tell. I’m guessing it’s not really the whole story.

One of my very early rocks, painted in 2017, looks like the owl who is now my wise neighbor.

Covid and The Dress

"I have no reason to wear a beautiful dress. None." came the mournful whimper.

The world weary woman was drinking heavily and she was not alone In fact, the existence of this crowded outdoor drinking hole seemed to be diametrically opposed to the fact that there was a Covid 19 pandemic. Drug use and alcohol abuse was up, endemically, and she was participating in the tendency, slobbering her ideas, and unknowingly, the virus, from one end of the table to the other.

Tears were streaming down her face but because of the pandemic’s demand for mask wearing in public, there was no make-up to be ruined, so that was something. She was certainly wearing no mask now, nor were the others, because there was a rule that if she was outside, or sitting down, she didn’t have to wear one.

"I have no reason to wear a beautiful dress. None."

And as she spoke, she draped herself over the others at the bar. She trusted that her Drunkeness protected her and the others at the bar, and the virus smiled at the opportunity to grow. It would grow stronger and reach farther than any of the other COVIDs would. And this time, it had the idea of a dress to thank.