Firefly, the native-born dog, is celebrating the nation’s birthday with enthusiasm and teeth. Primo, the Italian, is still not completely accustomed to the ways of our people.

Heh. Not many emails actually make me laugh out loud but that did it.

I really need to work on these two and their craft. I still have the bee costume, but it’s huge and I could only use it if I put both dogs in it at the same time. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be hip to that.

So it’s time to get resourceful. I’m an American, I should be able to innovate.

………

HA! Rick sent me another one. This is almost as good as putting an actual bee costume on her.

My birthday is not right if I can’t have Taco Bell for my private celebratory lunch and this has been the case since I was 16. Tell me I need “help” all you want, I know what I like and what I like is some gosh-damn Taco Bell crunchy beef tacos and a Nachos Supreme. So that’s what I had for lunch today and I feel pretty great about it even if it means there’s something deeply wrong with me.

Meanwhile, I’m being a spaz and checking my email every couple of minutes because I had a job interview last week that went great, and they sent me a test to do on Saturday (it’s an editing/proofreading job that I really want very badly extremely so much), and I’m waiting to hear back from them. I know it’ll probably take a few more days for them to evaluate a 15-page document with hundreds of edits (half of it was unintelligible jibberish that had to be completely rewritten and the other half was highly technical stuff with very subtle errors but plenty of them), but profound impatience is a weakness that dominates my soul so I’m horribly squirmy today. I want this job even more than I want birthday tacos every year AND THAT IS A LOT, MY FRIENDS, A LOT.

So if you have one birthday wish for me, let it be that I get this job or another one like it (I’ve applied to several in the last week). Also please wish me a bounty of tacos for the rest of my life. I really thought that my craving for those crunchy little bastards would diminish as I got older but the opposite is happening and it’s more than a little disconcerting. I mean, objectively, they aren’t that great of a food item, not sweet or salty or savory. They are little but grease and crunch, and full of truly disturbing low-quality ground “beef” product that probably directly causes colon cancer and dementia.

Tough shit, I’ll take my chances. I eat an excellent diet otherwise so I shall not question myself further.

And now some birthday dog performance art. Firefly doesn’t hold still long enough for me to get many good “ABBA” poses of her and Primo together but we’re working on it.

I’m just grateful she lowered her ears enough to allow Primo into the shot. She’s a good girl. And she does the marvelous stair-sit just like Primo, which makes me ha-ha-ha out loud every single time I see either one of them doing it. They don’t merely rest that way for a moment – it goes on for several minutes while they nearly fall asleep and I nearly black out from finding it so terrific.

I realize he is just a dog, and I have too much time on my hands to ponder certain things, but I would so dearly love to know about Primo’s life before we met him. I would pay a large amount of cash money to learn exactly how a gentleman like him ended up in a cold rainy outdoor dog shelter in Italy. You couldn’t possibly ask for a more pleasant indoor companion; he knew all his commands in Italian and quickly adjusted to them in English, he never chews anything, never poops or pees inside, never does anything bad at all except get abominably stinky sometimes. He sticks with you off-leash, he (usually) comes when called, he only barks when he’s playing, and best of all he is extremely human-friendly but in a dignified way. He doesn’t slobber and jump on you like a fool, he just approaches you with an approving air and sniffs you and likes you. He would like to enjoy your company and possibly have an adventure with you (a nice calm dignified adventure). Especially if you’re this child.

The photos in this post were all taken by my lovely sister Becki, a superior photographer and the grandmother of this little girl. She doesn’t especially like dogs but she still was touched by how sweet Primo was to Hay, how he followed her around all day and “protected” her from Firefly’s spasmodic bullcorn.

I know many dogs are also perfectly friendly with little kids and this isn’t exactly remarkable. But it still moves me. It still makes my heart twitch a little bit, just like when he welcomed Firefly into his territory and gave her his bed and his food and his humans without a single bit of protest or weirdness, because the more I realize how tender and sweet and loving this dog is, the more I ache at the thought of him in that shelter. He must have suffered so deeply there, not only because he was alone and cold and terrified but because it seems immensely obvious to me that he had a loving home before that.

His trusting personality along with his obedience make a pretty convincing case that he was in the shelter because something tragic happened to his humans, such as he had an elderly owner who died. I just don’t believe he was with irresponsible or neglectful people that dumped him there because they didn’t have enough time for him. And somehow it is more heartbreaking to think of him losing a good family than to think of him being surrendered by shitheads. At least if he had shitheads before, he was better off at the shelter where he could be adopted by people like us. Not that he’s worse off now with us than he was with the presumed wonderful previous humans; I just think about what it must have been like for him, to suddenly go from his safe, loving family into that shelter.

Or maybe it’s all a stupid train of thought, because almost every dog I’ve had as an adult came from a shelter and they have all been sweet. I’m sure many of you can say the same. Firefly, for example, is sweet and trusting (once she knows you – strangers, we’re still working on), but I know for a fact she was surrendered on purpose because the Humane Society’s files said it. Dogs are naturally trusting of humans, I think. Something just seems different about Primo, to me.

I know, I know. I think about it too much. He is a dog. They have short memories and live in the moment. It’s just that he is so damn wonderful and I’m so glad that he’s part of our lives because he makes every single person he meets smile. There’s so much value in that.

I promise the next post won’t be packed full of cuteness and hugs. I think I’m going to post pictures of our new shotguns. Aw yeah baby.

That was 8 months ago and they hadn’t seen each other since, but Hay’s mother tells me the kid talks about “Peemo” all the time. So when we finally had Hay over this weekend while my sister (her grandmother) was here visiting from out of state, it was love renewed. Primo resumed his gaze of admiration, and nearly ripped Firefly’s throat out when she barked at Hay. But it was a hot day so after a few hours, he was crashed out in the shady grass, which must have made Hay think he didn’t love her anymore so she picked a dandelion (I told her it was a “pretty flower” – kid can learn the truth when she’s older) and offered it to him. He sat up for a minute to sniff the bounty…

And then his head flopped to the ground again because who’s a sleepy boy? and that’s when Hay began to worry that he was never going to arise.

“Why isn’t Peemo beathing?”, she asked, and I assured her he was breathing, just not moving. She was unconvinced even though his ribcage was moving up and down, but she’s barely 4 so expectations should be low regarding her medical diagnostic talents.

She looked back and forth from him to me, looked at the dandelion, and started whispering while caressing him. “Peemo, wake up…Peemo. Peemo. Peeeeemo. Peeeeeeemowwwwwwww.”

It turns out she does possess the deductive skill to reckon that my sister and I wouldn’t be laughing and merrily taking pictures while cooing “OH MY GOD HOW CUUUUUTE” if the dog was in fact dead so she decided to accept Primo’s determination to have his nap.

Even Rupert-not-his-real-name thought this was cute. He usually doesn’t think anything is cute but even the hardest-assed hard-ass has a soft spot and I guess Rupert’s is Primo being adored by a curly-headed 4-year-old.

You’d think he was being murdered by Firefly, brutally murdered. This is why I take videos of them playing too, as evidence that he puts her on the ground as often as he likes, and in fact he taunts her into chasing him, and in further fact he loves every moment of it because who’s a good boy.

I love it so deeply and so thoroughly that I get the same feeling, when I’m out there poking around the shrubs and inspecting the trees and the crepe myrtles, that some people get with the endorphins of good exercise or good food or whatever makes people feel that rush of joy. Those tiny little bits of bright green growth poking out all over the branches of our smallest Live Oak tree (low enough to the ground for me to be eye-level) are like actually seeing music.

But instead of taking pictures of all of that, I took pictures this morning of Primo and Firefly during their regular after-breakfast Backyard Spaz-Out Romp Time. The only bad thing in all of this is how I feel about making Primo wait this long for a playmate – he must have been so unbearably bored before Firefly, but he never pouted about that. He’s just enjoying the good times now, as dogs do.

It is amazing that dogs play like that and don’t injure each other. I’d love to know what’s in their lime-sized brains, telling them to hold back, don’t chomp down just apply teeth this much and no more. Once in a while one of them will yelp because it gets “too real”, which always makes the offending chomper cool out and even be a little submissive for a minute.

With these two particular dogs, it’s usually Firefly who gets too chompy and Primo has to correct her, and her way of apologizing is sometimes to go get a toy and bring it back to him for taunting purposes. Today she brought the red-bandana ball and he took it from her…

…then she brought the stuffed Christmas bear, dropped it near him, and sprinted away…

….then she brought a stick and dared him to come get it.

He was too tired to care.

Sorry about the snow some of you got in the last several days, by the way. Your spring is coming and you’ll probably love it even more than I’m loving mine even though you might not have delicious nachos with peppers on them. I don’t know where that came from.