Travels with Ashford
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I’m writing this while sitting in McLaren Park, on a tree stump with a back like a chair. Ashford has spotted a nice clump of tough-looking grass, has settled in beside it and is chewing on it while I write. I don’t complain at his choice of food, grass being the least of it; he just came down from the duck pond up the hill where, on the water’s edge, there’s some kind of mud-soaked root that he loves to gnaw and pull on. Maybe it’s the dog equivalent of sarsaparilla or cotton candy. Maybe I’d even like the taste if I tried it, though being around Ashford has gradually taught me that the chasm between what dogs like to eat when permitted to forage and what the rest of us like to eat is a mile wide.
The other day he seemed to have gotten hold of something that, barely seen out of the corner of my eye, looked like vomit. My negative reaction (the loud exclamation, the lunge for his harness) was strong enough to frighten Ashford into his most submissive posture–on his back, eyes rolled back, paws curled sweetly in his best take on a helpless puppy.
It was vomit, his vomit, foamy with bits of grass, and he wasn’t particularly interested in eating it. I apologized, and we moved on. As a child I learned to compulsively cut out all the “bad spots” of bananas, apples and so on, so this sort of reaction has a long and nuanced history. He’ll just have to keep on working on providing me with a view of all that; it is probably clear to him that I have a long way to go.
A few weeks ago I met a woman in the park who said her eyes had been opened by reading how dogs have so many more smell cells than we do; in comparison our noses hardly work at all. Reading about that, she said, had improved her ability to be patient and let her dog smell things as long as he wanted to. I was impressed by what she said.
On the way up to the duck pond today, I met a young woman who was standing watching a black labrador retriever who was a little way off under the trees. I asked if it was her dog; and she said, yes, she was waiting for him to completely sniff one extremely interesting leaf. I could tell she was bearing up as well as she could. I had been having one of my own less patient days with Ashford’s insistence on a dog’s right to smell fully and completely, so I told her that I knew what she meant, that we’re here to learn these lessons (which are about being in the here and now, it seems to me), and our dogs are willing to repeat the lesson many times. “Many times,” she agreed. By then I was watching Ashford take his own blessed time smelling a fallen branch, and we both moved on as soon as the dogs were willing.
