cornered

as you know, max and guthrie are the dogs we share our lives with. we do pretty much what they want, which is mostly not much, and we're all fairly content with that as long as there's an occasional hike in there for the non-max members of the family. this is how things have been for a long while. but lately max is getting a new personality and although the sweetie and i find it a little bit mystifying and mostly charming, guthrie has had it with max. i'm not kidding. the fact that max has no body fat to speak of means he's cold, even in warm weather. even indoors. now, pudgy little guthrie is a furnace on four legs and max seems to be able to feel the wake of heat when guthrie walks by. especially in the car, max will do anything to get himself up next to guthrie. and guthrie, a cuddler by nature, has taken to scooting as far to the opposite side of the car as he can. the way children do. he's touching me. HE'S TOUCHING ME!!! max will twist himself and his harness all sorts of ways and will sleep like his neck is broken if it will give him even a tiny bit of warmth off guthrie.

max's new personality involves a lot of wandering around, getting lost in corners, then crying. loudly. very loudly. and although i'm not sure, i suspect that when this happens and we're not home, guthrie completely loses it. several times we've come home to a frantic guthrie at the door and a horrible ghostly wail from beyond, from somewhere in the house. because max will nose toward a corner from across the room, wedge himself directly into it, then stand there, always helpless and sometimes scared. he will bellow like a cow until someone finds him (this is not always as easy as you think), lifts him out, redirects him and watches that he doesn't go and redeposit himself right back where he got himself trapped (by the way, that's dog nose juice, not blood, all along the wall there by max's nose. and that's time number three visiting that particular stuck place in the space of ten minutes).

you're thinking we ought to maxproof the house and we have, to some degree, but that dog is like a cockroach or a rat, able to flatten himself and squeeze into tiny places you'd never find a normal dog. his bones are all he has left these days and they fold and slide over each other. and i know i've dragged him out of one small spot and set him down in another room altogether, only to turn around and find him wedging himself right back where he was, fixing himself up to cry again (that's what's going on in the pair of photos behind the mellophone). like the strange repetitive circling and the wounds that won't heal, this particular behavior seems to be a hallmark of whatever is tearing down max's brain. the fact that max's body is dying doesn't seem to interest him much. it is just a new way of doing things. but in addition to this dying his body seems to insist on, he's managed this new way of living that's really sort of lovely. he gets lost in the house maybe twenty times a day. it's not because he doesn't know where things are or because he is blind. he goes to water and food without any confusion. he knows where the back and front doors are at the apartment here in brooklyn and in the house upstate. he can look up the stairs and track my movement from a floor away. and the fact that he finds himself under the same chair in the kitchen five or six times a day suggests he's intent on going there, not really lost the way we might get lost. that chair is not something he'd find unless he went out of his way.

and i suppose there are folks out there who might say it's cruel that i've run to get the camera more than once when i hear the crying, because i know he'll be stuck, looking ridiculous, a good photo. and certainly some might not think i should laugh when i see this poor old dog stuck against walls and doors and sometimes, well, more often than he'd probably admit, stuck against shadows or changes in patterns on the floor. but you can only be sad about something so many times before it gets ugly and you get too tired. and the truth is that it is funny to see this spidery dog walk directly across a room, navigating furniture perfectly, only to be sucked into a corner as if by giant dog magnets. and every time we take him outside and watch him walk only downhill, it's funny. and sad and scary.

and each time he cries out and one of us goes to find him, he looks up with eyes i'm not sure he really uses all that much because he seems to be past all that, looks up at us like he's finally safe. every single time. and when we pick him up he is so grateful to be found, so grateful to be in someone's arms. he knows right where he is.