Greetings from dogdom. We haven’t spoken in a while. I haven’t, at any rate. Carll sometimes reschedules my meditations in favor of meretricious opinion-mongering he deems more urgent. To be bumped for Trump! I personally have no opinion about Trump – never smelled him – wouldn’t want to – politics not my thing – why defile your day? Carll insists you fine folks want to hear him vituperate, luxuriating in his Latinate lexicon. With Trump’s trials, he groans, he must speak up – must, or else what? No such compulsion here. I don’t have to say anything. I speak when spoken to – and because it affords me Carll-time, which I like. Otherwise, he’s hunched over his lit box for a dog’s age, though why it’s called that makes no sense. Dogs’ lives are briefer than humans’ – less than a quarter the length – so we have live faster not slower, get more done sooner in our attenuated spans, like the ancient Greeks. (Achilles wasn’t thirty when he kicked, maybe as young as twenty-one, according to some scholars. Carll’s next birthday, nota bene, is his seventy-second.)

How have I been, more than a few of you have asked. Thanks for your interest. I’ve been … I don’t really know. Compared to what? “Fine” is what humans usually answer, whether fine or not – which is fine, I suppose, only it doesn’t mean much. I’ve been… a dog, leading a dog’s life, meaning the opposite of the cliché, which likewise makes no sense. I’m happy as a clam with my dog’s life, not knowing the meaning of discontent. Why should anyone be unhappy where they are, since it’s the only place they can be?

As of now I’m a year and a month old, a third-grader in human terms, and weigh thirty-two pounds on the vet’s scale. Is thirty-two much or little? Carll groans when he lifts me, so it’s much for him. Jane doesn’t try.

I’ve blown through all my early prohibitions as you’d expect – no dogs on the bed, no venturing outdoors unleashed, eat my meals only when served, poop here and nowhere else… Granted, I sleep in a cage but so do Jane and Carll sleep in theirs. Imprisonment is an idea, not a fact – do the barriers in the zoo keep the animals in or humans out? In Richard Lovelace’s timeless lyric:

(What, you don’t know Lovelace? Poor liberal arts, starved by STEM!)

I’m growing into my vocation – which is to guard our premises, whether Jane and Carll like it or not. Our house has many tall windows, which facilitate surveillance but provoke anxiety. When deer appear in the field or chipmunks beneath the birdfeeder or wild turkeys strut or a tortoise trudges, what am I to do but bark? Released, I rush up and down stairs (M.C. Escher could have designed this house, it has so many stairs), swift as thought, but not swift enough to apprehend the invaders – not yet!

I really like Jane and Carll because they really like me. That’s how it works, right? Love unreciprocated is a tormenting madness. Sometimes Jane and Carll annoy me – when they brush me or force me to gag on my monthly tick pill – but I trust their motives, even as I abominate their tactics.

The pool opens this week. “Cockapoos enjoy swimming,” Google reports, but that may be Russian pranking. I keep my distance from Carll when we’re near the pool. It’d be just like him to plop me in – for my own good!