It's a dog's life

I can't get over the fact that Rusty will go right ahead and pee on a tree trunk or a fire hydrant just as Geni has her head near whatever he is aiming at, because she is sniffing to determine who was the last dog that came through.

Invariably, Geni gets sprinkled, if not downright wet, by Rusty's stream. Disgusting, I think. But she seems completely unfazed by his crass lack of consideration and walks away like nothing happened.

I wonder why she doesn't get annoyed, like I do when men leave the toilet seat up. You can tell a lot about a man by whether or not he puts the toilet seat down after he's done, and what such an action tells isn't all that good. I guess Rusty would be the kind of guy who always leaves the toilet seat up.

In his defense, though, Rusty does defer to Geni a lot, allowing her to walk in front of him and to push him off the particular spot she wants to be the first one to smell. He also allows her to be his scout, signaling new and exciting odors or an oncoming dog that must be barked at and shown who's boss in the neighborhood.

At this elderly stage of their lives, the rabbits are no longer chased and the cats, while eliciting some interest and excitement, are often completely missed. One calico cat in the neighborhood just has to crouch down into the grass and the dogs will walk by it, only a few feet away, as it were not there at all.

There's not doubt that Rusty and Geni, in their geriatric years now, make a cute pair with their increasingly graying faces and their slow, if bounding, gait and their obviously more-than-middle-aged girth.

"Are those your attack dogs?" One neighbor asked with a smile the other day from his car as he drove by us while we were walking the dogs in the early evening.

The dogs, with their hanging tongues almost touching the ground and with their goofy faces that say how much they love their walks, looked anything but dangerous and fierce. During an earlier walk a few weeks before, we'd told said neighbor that he could not pet them because they would probably bite him.

Point taken.

Geni is up for one more surgery in the coming weeks because she has another tumor on her left paw that must be removed. If it's not cancerous, it will grow until it makes her movements difficult (and she's already ailing from arthritis on her right paw) and if it is malignant, it needs to come off anyway. But we hate to put her through the stress and the possible problems of anesthesia, given her complicated medical history.

I'm almost always happier that I have dogs rather than children (especially since the dogs won't bring girlfriends or boyfriends I'll hate, or ever talk back to me, or leave me and go to college where they'll get into who-knows-what kind of trouble that I won't be able to save them from). But I do wish I could explain a few things to the dogs and have them understand me.

To Geni, I'd like to explain why we're going to have to send her to the torture house (the vet) to be carved up one more time. And to Rusty, I'd like to explain a few things about what it means to be a gentleman.