Cassie

I have been trying to write this post for several days. Many of you, over 250 of you, have already read about this over on Facebook but because Cassie was responsible for the start of my Of Dogs and Writing posts, I wanted to write about her here on the blog at least one more time.

Last week, at the all-too-young age of 5, we had to make the difficult decision to put Cassie down. I will not go into reliving her many medical issues right now. All I will say is that her quality of life had fallen to such a low point that it was kinder, to her, to let her go. It is never an easy decision to make but I am firm in the belief that it was the right one. Still, that doesn’t mean the experience was easy. My husband and I have cried a lot of tears.

Cassie was a special dog, a heart dog. Even though I have had dogs all my life Cassie taught me how much I didn’t know about having, training, and living with a dog. And I loved every minute of it.

Cassie wasn’t that interested in other dogs. She was polite enough to wander over and say hello.

But she wasn’t interested in playing with them and couldn’t see much use in chasing them around the yard.

So she was an only dog. A spoiled, only dog who had her own Lazy Boy chair. It was good for presiding over the kingdom.

And it was good for napping.

Cassie took her naps very seriously. It was always a good time for a little shut-eye.

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Her favorite TV show was Pitbulls and Paroles and she would come into the library and hop in her chair whenever she heard Tia’s voice. She also loved anything with horses or chickens in it.

But she was terrified of the movie The Hurt Locker.

She was very smart.

And very brave.

And willing to try anything I asked of her when I said the words, “Trust me.”

She loved being up on things for the best view. Like guarding the patio.

On the chest guarding the library.

Keeping an eye on what’s happening in the kitchen.

Pretending to be invisible on the antique settee.

She didn’t even mind if getting up on things made her look silly.

Or got her dirty.

She was the official inspector of all boxes that came into the house.

She was also the home improvement building inspector.

She wasn’t very good at playing hide and go seek.

But she knew exactly which door held the leash, and which door hid the high value treats.

And she was sure the water features in the yard were just big doggy water fountains.

Her favorite toys were a giant orange gorilla and a little blue ball.

And her favorite place to be was in the garden.

In the garden is where I learned many of my life lessons and writing lessons from Cassie.  It’s where she taught me to be still, to be in the moment. Which is why I am not going to grieve forever for Cassie, although there will always be a Cassie-sized hole in my heart. To grieve always is to allow yourself to be locked in the past. That’s not what Cassie wanted. That’s not how Cassie lived.

So we have opened the door of our hearts to a new rescue dog, a white German Shepherd named Zoey, who will have more lessons to teach me and more love to give me. We’ll pick Zoey up in just a few hours. And she will sleep in Cassie’s bed and play with Cassie’s toys and wander in Cassie’s garden. And she will bring me back to the here and now, in the moment.  And I think that will make Cassie happy.

For those of you who have asked, donations in Cassie’s name can be made to the German Shepherd Rescue of Northern California which is where we adopted Cassie. As an all volunteer run non-profit, they can use all the help they can get.

Farewell my wonderful friend. You will be missed by many. Thank you for the lessons. Thank you for the love.

When Cassie first came to live with us it became apparent very quickly that she hadn’t been socialized around other dogs much at all. In fact, piecing together the few stories we knew about her it appeared the most of her interactions with other dogs had never been very positive. We wanted to change that. We wanted her to be as comfortable and as confident around other dogs as we were.

First we introduced her to my brother-in-law’s dog, Circe. Circe is a high energy German Shepherd that truly never stops moving. Poor Circe was dying for someone to play with but Cassie, after a few cautious sniffs, preferred to stay close by our side. We introduced her to the neighbor’s dogs, a trio of senior citizens who barely came up to Cassie’s knees. One of them barked twice quickly sending Cassie back to her hiding spot behind my legs.

At the dog park Cassie would take a few steps toward a dog but then as soon as the other dog showed any interest in her, she backed away. Over time, on her walks around the neighborhood, she has run into some of the same dogs over and over again. Mostly one or two sniffs is enough for her but after 2 years she has, at least, stopped hiding behind us.

I’ve written all my life and whenever people ask me what I write I’m often a bit flip about it and tell them, “Whatever I can get paid for.” In later years I’ve amended that to say that mostly books for kids. And it’s true that I’ve written and published all sorts of things from working at newspapers to writing for parenting magazines to short stories and articles about the craft of writing. I’ve written books for kids of all ages. I’ve been published in a lot of places and a lot of countries. I’m a writer. I know that and I’m pretty confident about that (even if my confidence wavers from manuscript to manuscript.)

But I never said to anyone, “I’m a poet.” I’ve never claimed it. And the less I claimed it the more it grew to be something that belonged to other people and not to me.

I think that’s because most of my poetry has been written from an organic and instinctive place to help me sort out emotions behind some pretty intense life events. Through-out my career I’ve studied characters and plots and theme and setting. I’ve read poetry but I didn’t study the craft of poetry. I don’t understand a lot about rhyme or scansion or poetic forms aside from haiku. And when people blog or write articles about what it means to be a poet or a verse novelist or to even think poetically, well, I look at every article as though it were written about me, about my deficiencies as a poet. For some reason I felt like I had to learn more, write more, publish more before I could claim that title.

For the last few weeks the lady next door has been dog sitting for her brother. Mya is a lovely, small boned Golden Lab with sweet eyes and a hunger for playing catch. She’s been in the backyard a lot the past year and I’m sure she and Cassie have sniffed through the fence a time or two. Last week, when I had the front patio door open, Cassie starting barking like crazy. It wasn’t her “something scary is out there and I’m protecting you” bark. It was different. She barked loudly then stopped. A few seconds later there was an answering bark. They went back and forth a few times until I finally went to check it out. I figured someone was walking their dog and had stopped in front of our house and Cassie was just confused about what to do.

But no. It was Mya on the front lawn next door, straining to get to Cassie and Cassie at the screen door straining to get to Mya. They’d never met face-to-face before but they were pretty excited about the possibility. I let Cassie out into the courtyard and my neighbor brought Mya over to say hello. I’ve never seen Cassie so happy to see another dog. They sniffed each other quite thoroughly (something else Cassie doesn’t normally do or allow done to her) and Cassie even gave a play bow, the first I’d ever seen from her.

My current work-in-progress, like all of my stories, is a healing journey. Not an easy one as I mine my past for emotions to carry to the page. It’s written in verse because, well, because that’s the way the voices have come to me. Before I dug into the project in earnest, I reread many of the verse novels on my shelves. Some were free verse. Some were filled with a variety of poetic forms. Some were told in a single point of view. Some were told in many voices. Some made me cry and some made me laugh. At first each book I read made me feel like there was no way I would ever be able to finish mine. That I just didn’t have it in me to do right by the story in verse. But by the time I finished rereading about 30 of them I was filled with something different than confidence. I’m pretty sure it was acceptance. Acceptance that I am a poet and poems are one vehicle I use to tell my story.

For the past few days Mya has been coming over for short visits and each time I watch Cassie greet her new friend, I am amazed at her level of confidence in approaching and allowing herself to be approached by this young and very active dog.

As a writer I am always asking why. Why does this character do this thing in this situation? Why would that character react that way?

Why would Cassie decide this was the one dog she would let be her friend?

Why now, after writing poetry (and a whole lot of other things) all my life, am I finally willing to claim that being a poet is, indeed, one part of who I am as a writer?

Maybe the why isn’t really that important.

Maybe it’s enough to just be who I am supposed to be.

Getting a new dog is like getting anything brand-new. You bring it home and for a while — days, weeks, months — it becomes your entire world. Such was the case with Cassie. When we first brought her home her separation anxiety was so bad that she would follow me into the bathroom, refusing to wait on the other side of the door. And of course there were the classes we took and the initial obedience training that meant focused time working together each day.

But time marches on and suddenly I look at Cassie and see not a nervous rescue dog. Not a puppy or a doggy teenager but a grown-up dog who is secure because she knows we love her and she has a forever home. We can leave her loose in the house while we are gone without worries about coming home to find accidents or something chewed up that we wished we had put out of her reach. It’s nice having this new and more mature relationship with her. Oh, we still play the back and forth game to open the doors when she rings the bell but life is a bit calmer because she is less needy.

Or is she? Just because she’s not in our face begging for attention doesn’t mean she isn’t needy. When the handyman was here working I ran Cassie through her tricks and she hesitated at a few of them. I tried to remember the last time I worked on them with her but couldn’t. If I want her to be at the top of her game I can’t just assume that she will remember (or be inclined) to perform tricks she learned 2 years ago but hasn’t been asked to do in months. I need to revisit them regularly. Daily, even just for a few minutes, is all it takes.

Isn’t it the same thing with writing? We’ve written before so we assume that we can do it again. And we can. But if we aren’t paying attention to our writing self on a daily basis we are going to have to expect to be a little rusty each time we sit back down at the computer.

I’m putting playtime with Cassie back on my to-do list. Right after I take a look at my work-in-progress.

I haven’t done a dogs and writing post in a while and when I tried to think about why, I decided it must be because I’m not training Cassie as much as I used to. As a new to us dog, we went through a lot of training but now that she’s been with us a couple of years we’ve slacked off. I realized that she isn’t playing as much as she used to. Not that she was ever that much into play time but she did have a few favorite toys she’d take out of the toy box and shake around. I tossed the egg baby for her and she watched me with a total lack of interest. I shook Mr. Monkey and gorilla in front of her face and she turned her head. I lined up all the stuffed animals that made noises and set them off one by one, the rooster, the monkey, the dog, the pig, the frog and the laughing koala that sounds like a baby. She walked away and rang the bell to go outside.

I followed her outside as she made her way around the garden. She shadowed a giant Carpenter bee as it danced from one pink Clarkia to the next then when it flew away she continued down the path to Dogwood alley. I sat on the glider and watched her meander down the bluestone path, sniffing the Monkey Flower, the Yerba Buena, nibbling on some grass. She reached the gate at the end of the path and nudged it with her nose to check, I suppose, if we humans had forgotten to latch it so she could go to her favorite spot in the front courtyard. As she came back up the path I watched the finches dart in and out of the Sambucus which is half-covered in flowers and half-covered in unripe berries. A pair of Mourning Doves poked around the base of the St. Catherine’s lace which was swollen with buds not yet ready to open.

She paused at the arbor at the end of the path and pushed her head through the mass of Clematis and Ribes and Pipevine, then, finding nothing, she joined me on the glider (she’s mastered the art of going back and forth on it.) She pushed past me to sniff the Ceanothus hanging over my head (I’m sure there was a bee involved) and when she pulled her head back, it was covered with tiny blue blossoms. We sat there together for a few minutes. She continued to sniff the air and I watched the doves move toward the Manzanita at the edge of the patio.

One of our resident hummingbirds zipped by and Cassie jumped off the glider to chase it then stopped when I uttered those words no dog wants to hear – “Leave it!” I’m sure I only imagined her sigh of frustration. She traced the path the rest of the way across the yard, (paying no attention to the doves), nuzzling the water from the bubbling rock (earning another “leave it”), sniffing the mulch under the Japanese Maple and then she ignored the path and chose to clomp her way through the ferns and Seep Monkey Flower to the other arbor where the Hummingbird Sage stood guard. She nosed all the flowers, almost ate a spider and then thought better of it and walked down the other sideyard. This side has no plants, nothing great to smell unless you count the garbage can but still, she walked to the end and nosed the gate just once, like she didn’t really want to get out, before coming back in my direction.

She never paused when she passed me, she just headed right up the back step and rang the outside bells to be let in, glancing over her shoulder at me when I didn’t move fast enough to suit her.

I got the idea that this is a path she has traveled many times.

That’s the way it is, sometimes, with some writing, some stories. We travel the same paths over and over again, visit the same characters, the same setting, again and again and we wonder if we are making progress or just chasing our own tails as we walk in circles in the story. I don’t know that we can really judge it (though we try to) when we are in the middle of it all. I think the most we can hope for or the best we can try for is to pay attention because each time through, the view changes a little bit.

My garden isn’t always in bloom, there aren’t always bees for Cassie to follow, and at times there are so many birds in the yard that I make her wait for ten minutes before I will even let her outside, no matter how much she is ringing the bell. But every time she goes out, any time of day or night, she walks the same path, from gate to gate, sniffing the air and paying attention to what is in her world.

I think I owe my story the same kind of dedication.

I think I’ve said a time or two that Cassie is not a big fan of the rain. When she has to go outside she gives me a look as though all that wet stuff falling from the sky is my fault and that I plan the whole deluge around the times she is going to be outside. Her ears go back flat on her neck and she tucks her tail so far between her legs that it disappears and generations of German Shepherd breeding seem to disappear as she slowly creeps outside.

Today on my way out to teach a poetry session it was pouring. Big buckets of water coming down. I turned down the street toward the school and there was a person walking briskly down the sidewalk of one block. They had their rain slicker on and bright red boots and they carried a matching red umbrella. On the next block was another person walking in the rain, the hood of their rain coat pulled tightly around their head. Both people were out walking their dogs in the pouring rain. Both dogs were labs. And they were reacting to the rain in a completely different fashion than Cassie. While their humans walked down the sidewalk those labs looked as happy as could be. Their tails were wagging and their ears were up and they were prancing a happy dance.

On the way home from class it was still raining. Up ahead of me on the road was a car with the passenger window rolled down. A big Golden Retriever had its head stuck out the window. I watched his mouth open and shut, open and shut, and I thought he was barking but when I got closer and rolled the window down a bit he wasn’t making a sound. He was opening his mouth because he was trying to catch the rain as it was coming down. And as I passed him, I swear that dog was smiling.

Sometimes I’ve tried to force myself to write a certain type of story because I think that’s what the market is looking for or what a particular editor is looking for or even, horrors, because I think it would be easy and a quick sale. It’s like I wanted I wanted to be a Lab or Golden Retriever when I knew all along I was a German Shepherd. I believe the best stories are the ones that come from some place deep inside of us. For me it’s usually about trying to make sense out of something in my life. Trying to tell a story that doesn’t come from my own heart doesn’t work for me. (That’s not to say I haven’t tried. I have. They just haven’t been the best of stories.)

I can’t make Cassie love the rain the way those labs and that Golden Retriever do. And that’s okay.

There are things that Cassie can do that I bet none of those dogs can do. And that’s even better.

Don’t try to force your story into what someone else is writing or selling. Your stories are YOUR stories. You’re the only who can tell them.

We’ve had some nice weather around here the past few days and the birds have been visiting our yard in a steady stream. The sparrows splash about in the bird bath, the doves laze around by the ground level pool, and the finches and the robins take turns at the bubbling rock.

The bubbling rock is in perfect view from the patio door, right about Cassie’s eye level. So lately when the bells ring I’m not sure if she wants to go outside because she has to take care of business or because she wants to chase the birds. She doesn’t have a super high prey drive but the birds are mouth-sized and fluttering around and I see her instincts kick in. So before I open the door I give her the command to “go slow” and she walks out there at a normal walking pace, giving the birds plenty of time to fly away before she reaches them.

We must do this a dozen times a day. She sees the birds, she asks to go out. I open the door and tell her to go slow. The birds fly away before she gets there.

But still she hopes.

Sometimes it’s hard for writers to find hope. If you don’t have a submission out to an editor or an agent or even a critique group hope seems a little hard to hold onto. But if you’re not putting words down on paper you won’t ever reach the point of having something to submit to an editor or an agent or your critique group.

Hope is good. But you still have to do the work.

When we first got Cassie she had such severe separation anxiety that whenever one of us left the room she would stress out and if one of us left the house she worked herself up into a huge panic. She would beg to go outside a dozen times and then run up and down the stairs and mostly whimper and let the other person know that in her mind, the pack should always stay together. I wondered if we would ever reach the point where we could leave her home alone.

At first she would whine would we put her in the crate but over time she just accepted it and calmed down. We got to the point where we could leave the room and didn’t always have her following at our heels (unless we head to the kitchen but that’s another whole issue.)  So it was a big deal a few months ago when we decided we could finally leave her alone in the house without locking her in her crate. We took the door off the crate so she still had a den to go to but when we left the house we gave her free rein. We never leave her for very long, a couple of hours is about it. She’s always been great about it. She doesn’t destroy anything. Doesn’t get into the garbage. She pretty much just hangs out and waits for us to come home. And when we do come home she makes us feel like the most important people in the universe with her five minutes of welcome home love. For the last few months we’ve been leaving her on her own a few times a week for a couple of hours each time with no problems at all.

But something changed recently. My husband left for work one day and Cassie was fine hanging out with me. Not long after that I had to leave too. It seemed like a norm exit. I left and she was happily sitting on her rug by the door, watching me go. She wasn’t excited or frantic (we’ve long since learned to put on our shoes a while before we’re going to leave.) I thought everything was fine. Then I came home a few hours later and the welcome home love attack that normally lasts just five minutes turned into I’m going to glue myself to your leg and never let you out of my sight. She tried to climb in my lap. I invited her onto the couch with me and she jumped up and then tried to climb down it the other side. I moved to work at the table and she straddled the feet of the table, which couldn’t have been very comfy, in order to get as close to me as possible. Every so often she would whimper and nuzzle me. It was a worse anxiety attack than she had had when she was brand new to us. Even a bully stick couldn’t get her attention. She totally ignored it. I took her for a walk. I didn’t help. She continued to follow me everywhere, never settling down, never closing her eyes. I thought when my husband came home and she saw the pack was all together that she would calm down but she just switched back and forth between the two of us.

Bedtime is usually a pretty basic routine and once we’re all upstairs together Cassie crashes on her bed. Not that night. While we sat in bed and read, she paced back and forth from each side, whining, occasionally putting a paw up on the bed. We’ve never allowed her on the bed, not once, so I was shocked to see her try to jump on the bed to get in-between the two of us. Finally, when the lights went out, she settled into her bed and slept. In the morning it was like nothing had ever happened.

This has happened a couple of times now and the last episode was so bad that I know we have a problem to deal with. It’s like she’s forgotten that she has stayed home alone just fine many times without an incident and is thrust back into the feelings and fears she had when she first came to live with us.

I’m in a bit of a writing funk write now. I have a few ideas about how and why but that’s for another post. The thing is right now I’ve forgotten what it is like to be in the middle of a book and have no idea where I am going with it. I’ve forgotten that it really is darkest before the dawn. I’ve forgotten that I’ve written books, finished books, sold books. I’ve forgotten it all and am just all alone, right there in the middle of story that scares the hell out of me for one reason or another. And once that fear grabs you, that irrational fear that doesn’t listen to all your friends and peers telling you how you did it before and you can do it again, well, once that fear grabs you, it’s hard to shake it loose. I can know in my head that the important thing is to just get a crappy draft down but then my heart says a bunch of other stuff and, well, most of us have been on that merry-go-round before.

Most dog training advice centers around repetition so I’m going to try that for myself. Baby steps. Ten minutes. Ten sentences. Ten words. Even if they are the same ten words every day for a while until I break the funk I hope to remind myself of what I know is true, I’ve done this before.

I can do it again.

When one of us in in the shower, Cassie considers it her job to keep guard, usually at the top of the stairs. Sometimes she demands to be in the bathroom so she can poke her head around the shower curtain. Yesterday she decided to stand guard just outside the door. When I got out of the shower she was nowhere around. I figured she was in our room, asleep in her bed there. I checked but no Cassie. I went downstairs and checked everywhere, her crate, her bed in the library, her bed in my office, by the front patio door. No Cassie anywhere. I checked outside to see if my husband had let her out and then forgotten to let her back in again.

No sign of Cassie anywhere. I turned to go back upstairs and suddenly, there she was, at the top of the stairs looking down at me. I didn’t think much about it. I figured I had just missed her.

We have a spare room upstairs that has some exercise equipment, TV, and a little antique French settee. The settee is there to keep it safe (instead of in the garage) while I try to sell it. To keep Cassie off of it I put a dozen small pillows, stacked all over it, so you couldn’t even see an edge to sit on. No one really goes in that room and it’s mostly just the place you throw things to get them out of your way. I feel bad that it’s a mostly underused room. Most nights, while I’m brushing my teeth, I stand in the doorway, staring into the room trying to figure out how we can better utilize the space. Last night I poked my head in the room and what did I see?

A dozen little pillows on the floor and a nice Cassie indentation on the settee.

I had to laugh. Sure, if I had been there to see it I would have told her no. But I couldn’t help but admire her capabilities. She saw the little Cassie sized couch and wanted up. She removed the pillows. And then I imagine she had a nice nap while I took my shower. I would have given anything to have been able to watch her getting those pillows out of her way.

Most of the time we make Cassie wait for permission to do just about anything. She’s so dang smart that if we don’t, she’d soon be running the house. But sometimes we can’t anticipate what it is she is going to want to do so she takes matters into her own hands. Sometimes we have to stop her but sometimes she gets a nice nap on silk cushions out of the deal.

I’ve spent a lot of my life waiting for permission to do the things I want to do. I don’t know who I expected to give me that permission – family, friends, people in some sort of authority or another – but I’m tired of waiting. Going forward I’m going to try and do more of what I want to do, write books, make art, work in the garden and fill my life with the things and the people I love, without waiting for someone to tell me it’s okay to do so.

Anyone care to join me?

Due to health issues, Cassie gets 8 pills a day. They’re spread out, four times a day, some with food, some without food. I finally had to buy one of those big plastic pill containers that had four compartments per day just so I could make sure I didn’t forget to give her one. They’re mostly big pills and not the kind you can just mix in with her food. I figured out that a slice of American cheese works pretty well for pill pockets. I take a small piece of cheese and mold it around the pills and she scarfs them right down.

As I was filling the compartments with all the pills today (and trying not to think about the cost of all this medicine) I started thinking about the commitment we made to Cassie when we rescued her. At the time we adopted her we had no idea that she would have medical issues. We went to an adoption day, fell in love with Cassie, and brought her home to start a new life with us as soon as possible. We’ve lavished her with love and treats and toys, and most importantly, training. When the health stuff popped up we just started dealing with it because that’s what you do when you love someone, even when that someone is a dog.

And then I started thinking about how some people might give up on a dog with health problems and expensive medicines. They might say enough is enough and walk away from the dog, unwilling to deal with the expense or the hassle of a dog with health issues.

Not us. We’re in this for the long haul. Sorta like that “in sickness and health” promise my husband and I made when we got married.

Sometimes writing is easy. You start to write a story and you fall in love with it and the words seem to fall from your fingertips to the page with hardly any effort at all. And you smile to yourself and think, man, it’s so dang easy to be a writer. This is the life. But sometimes writing is tough. Plots fall apart. Characters misbehave. Theme evaporates right before your eyes and you start to wonder why you should even bother, especially with the state the publishing industry is in right now.

If you feel like you’ve had enough and you want to walk away, go for it. Because if you can really quit the writing, maybe you didn’t love it quite as much as you thought you did. Now quitting isn’t the same as taking a break. We all need those breaks to shift our thinking to another part of the brain for a while. But when you are in a story, you need to make a commitment to finishing that story, even when it seems like everything is stacked against you. Sometimes all you need to do is promise yourself to keep on keeping on, one word at a time. The battle will fight itself under the surface and as long as you don’t quit, you don’t lose.

When we first started giving Cassie all this medicine I felt bad. Several times a day I had give her something yucky. Something other dogs didn’t need to deal with.

But you know what? Cassie doesn’t look at it that way. When I pop open one of those compartments she comes running into the kitchen from wherever she is in the house. She knows she’s getting a pill. And she knows that pill is going to be coated in cheese. She’s not thinking about it being medicine. The way she sees it, she gets four yummy cheese treats a day.

It’s all in how you look at it.

There are two things that Cassie takes very seriously, food and sleep. She loves to eat but she REALLY loves to sleep. The whole process of settling in for a nap requires much pacing and groaning and moaning and sighing when, at last, she lowers her body to the floor and closes her eyes. She’s pretty predictable too. After dinner she plays for a while and then it’s coma dog, crashed out in the library or whatever room we are in at the moment. This is good and bad. The good is that she’s quiet and not bothering anyone. I can write or we can watch TV without popping up to rescue the ball out from under the couch 100 times. the bad is that she’s a coma dog. By that I mean she won’t wake up. Which wouldn’t be a REALLY bad thing except that before we go upstairs so we can all go to bed she really needs to go outside and take care of business one last time.

But she won’t wake up. It’s sleep time and she intends to keep right on sleeping until I can give her a good reason why she ought to get out of her comfy bed. That good reason is usually the sound of me tapping the lid of her cookie jar against the side of the jar. Like a doorbell, it gets her attention. With the promise of a cookie, she’ll get out of bed and go outside.

One of my favorite times of night is our bedtime routine. After her last trip outside she trots off to my husband’s office to tell him goodnight and then waits at the bottom of the stairs, for me to follow. We head up to the bedroom and she goes through the whole settling down process and then she rests her head on the edge of her bed and stares at me. I usually sit up with the light on and read for a while. When I finally turn off the light she moans as though she has been suffering 100 years waiting for the dark to fill the room. I love the sound of that groan.

Recently we decided to let her have a chair in the library. (Sorry, Cecila) It’s been really funny to watch because she’s a big dog who should be able to bound up into the chair easily but instead she climbs up, one foot at a time, like an old woman. And now she has a new routine. After dinner and playtime she naps in her bed in front of the fireplace and then after a few hours, climbs into the chair and goes back to sleep.

But she is still coma dog, intent on sleeping through any possible command I give her. Like I said, she takes her sleep seriously. She gives it 110%. And then some. She commits.

Some books are harder to write than others. Some come out as gifts and we stare at them, wondering where they came from. Others tease us with a few sentences or a paragraph or two and then it gets tough and we find it easy to walk away from the story. And sometimes walking away is the right thing to do. Sometimes a story needs a longer incubation time.

But not always. At least not for me. Most of the time for me it is a matter of taking it seriously. Making a commitment to tell that particular story with the same single-minded determination that Cassie applies to taking a nap. I might do a lot of pacing and circling and moaning and groaning before I get comfortable with it but the important thing for me is to put in the time, the butt in the chair and the fingers on the keys.

Lots of people want to “have written” more than they want to make the commitment to be a writer. You have to be willing to do the work.

Sunday night we went to dinner with friends. We don’t go out much and most of the places we go, we take Cassie with us. But this time that wasn’t possible. We knew we’d be gone about three hours so the big question that came up was, is she ready to be left alone in the house?

She’s never been a destructive dog. Never counter surfs. Never gets into the garbage. Except for a fondness for my favorite pens and plastic water bottles, we’ve been pretty lucky. But she’s a needy, nervous dog who came to us with severe separation anxiety. I used to spray myself with DAP every time my husband left the house just so she would whine at a lower decibel.

She’s almost two years old and there’s no reason she shouldn’t be able to stay alone in the house. Dogs all over the world do it every day while their owners are off to work. But still, I worried. We practiced leaving her for short bursts of time, an hour here, a half hour there. Sunday night we got ready to go and Cassie went through her typical frenzied routine. As soon as she saw me with the brush for my hair she started barking and prancing around the house. She worked up so so much excitement at the thought of going out that I expected her to make herself sick.

I moved the bully sticks into the laundry room and shoved the leftover Halloween candy inside the microwave. Garbage was emptied. Pens put out of reach. I unwrapped a brand new bone and put it on the floor in the library. Normally that’s enough to take all of her attention but that night, she just didn’t care. She ran over and sniffed it once and then raced back to the front door. We kept postponing the leaving, giving her a treat if she went to her rug and stayed quiet. Petting her and then finally, rushing out the door before we could change our mind and stay home.

I waited on the porch, expecting to hear some frantic barking. Nothing. I glanced at the front window, waiting for her to fling herself against the glass. Nothing.

We went off to have an enjoyable evening of adult conversation without the tangle of a leash underfoot (or patio seating) and I didn’t start to worry again until we were on the way home. I told myself as long as she hadn’t trashed one of our antique pieces of furniture it would be okay.

Normally when she hears one of our cars in the driveway she gets excited and dances around on her rug near the door. But not this night. We stood on the porch and peered in the sidelight window. I saw her, on the floor in the library, next to her bone. She slowly stretched and walked over to her rug and sat down. When we came inside she wagged her tail a few times and then went back to her bone. She hadn’t chewed it at all while we were gone but now that we were home I guess she decided it was okay to let herself enjoy it.

There was no barking. No frantic jumping. No racing around the house because we came back.

Many times I’ll have a writing project that I want to do but I put off doing because I’m afraid I won’t do it well. I procrastinate, ask my husband a million questions, email friends, and play a zillion games of Lexulous on Facebook. Eventually the time comes when I can’t put it off any longer and I dive in. And when I finally knuckle down and do the work it isn’t suddenly easy but I do eventually remember that hey, I’ve been at this writing thing a while and I’ve worked up some skills. And I remember how much I love this crazy business I’m in. I always forget all that when I’m about to start something new or difficult or different.

What are you not doing because you don’t think you’re ready?

I bet you’re more ready than you think.

I know I am.