NOT WRITING? BEST EXCUSE EVER! - May 1, 2025

The world has been too much with me in recent months, in spite of my feeble attempts to ignore the relentless drumbeat of the political horror show that threatens the sanity of most of us. You would think that writing a story set in the 1980s in a city I loved would provide sufficient shelter from the apocalypse of real life. But you’d be wrong. The story seemed frivolous in the face of our current daily disasters. I wrote nothing for weeks, including a blog post for April 1 that left an empty space here. Not even the guilt I felt was enough to send me to my laptop.

It didn’t help that it had been a year since our last dog had died. We had agreed Cooper would be the last of our many dogs. We were getting older. It didn’t make sense to take on a creature that might outlive us. But I found myself searching PetFinder, trying to convince myself I was just browsing. Then this face popped up.

On April 11, we drove across the bridge to Portland to pick up our new-to-us, eight-year-old rescue dog, a Shih-Tzu/poodle mix, who needed a home.

Arlo loves people, and especially us, not trusting us to be out of his sight. His fear of abandonment has been challenging. So has his lack of leash training and house breaking. He’s full of energy and loves chasing a ball around our yard and our house. He’s a genuine lap dog, something new to us since our dogs had always weighed anywhere from 40 to 90 pounds. Arlo tops the scale at 13 pounds.

The biggest problem has been his manic aggressiveness toward other dogs. It’s still a mystery to us, since he was housed with four other small dogs at the rescue with no problem. We’re hoping that once he settles in with us and his anxiety levels diminish, we’ll be able to introduce him to other dogs without fear of a bloody disaster. If/when that happens, obedience school will be on top of the to-do list!

I’m starting to look at the shelved mystery story again. Maybe I can get back to it during Arlo’s nap time. With luck, he could become my new muse!