I am sitting on my porch swing (Blake in his cage alongside) writing entries from mid-month and watching a squirrel eat the berries off the European ash.
Sunday night neighbors had a progressive dinner of all tapas. I remember a couple of times babysitting for 3SK when they went out for progressive dinners in Old Lyme, which occasions now strike me as a bunch of inebriated people driving around town. This, happening all in walking distance, was safer. I had about a half-glass of well-seltzered sangria and stumbled on the sidewalk when Inga's family walked me home, and they laughed at me for having no tolerance. A silver maple had buckled the sidewalk! Really nice company and conversation and dogs and babies.
I came home with one of Scarf's wineglasses in my cooler and a request to borrow a movie, and in the mailbox today was a key to Inga's house, since I had offered to walk her. So today I did something daring: I walked Blake. Not on my shoulder, as I once brought Percy to do laundry, fetch the mail, or even drive to the video store, because Blake is so much flittier than steady Percy, and not in his travel cage, mostly solid with vertical slits for ventilating cats not optimally placed for a cockatiel to watch from, but in a small cage about the size of the travel cage, but vertical, a bird cage intended for wee things like finches. Percy lived in it, between us on the moving truck's bench seat, on the drive from Connecticut in 1995, except of course he was mostly on my shoulder; his regular cage was in the towed Terrapin along with his playpen and other awkwardly-shaped things.
I don't know why I kept that finch cage. Blake has had the more suitable--horizontal, sturdier, opaque--travel cage since 1999. But he hates that, I hope only because he can't see out of it. He hates his harness to the point I would never trust that he would ever stop struggling to extricate himself, and either do himself an injury in the process or by trying to flutter away from its leash or by successfully fluttering away from it altogether. So into the finch cage he went.
This was interesting! This was new! He leaned forward, steering. I left a note at Inga's about an obvious leash and supply of poop bags, dropped the movie at another house, and brought the glass to Scarf's. We sat on her porch and chatted with Blake between us and her dog, a huge Lab/Newf cross, gently curious about the bird, at our feet, sniffing. Blake chucked at the dog in greeting, but then huffed when she turned her head quickly.
Anyway, it gives me hope that maybe he could get used to a dog. And I love the neighborhood group Scarf has pulled us all into.
At some point in here one of the neighbors lent me the book for the next discussion, The Dogs of Babel. I don't know why I didn't note it at the time and I thought I said something about its making me glad I didn't read Lives of the Monster Dogs.
Oh, I know when it was. The Saturday RDC and I got back, a half dozen of us congregated chez Scarf, where it took us in a brigade all of nine minutes to move 500 bricks from the garage around the corner to a better spot. At the progressive dinner the next night, I hurled myself on someone and demanded to know whether it would be okay, much as I hurled myself at Jessie five years ago demanding to know whether The Amber Spyglass would be okay. You just don't do that to dogs, and please don't be that stupid about your dog.
What reminded me that Dogs of Babel had been missing from SC until today, 9 September, was that over lunch I began William Trevor's Death in Summer, the other bookgroup's August selection, which I didn't read because I wouldn't be back from vacation in time. Kal just lent it to me, and wheee, it starts with someone's wife dying and leaving him with her dog. And Dogs reminded me somewhat of Time-Traveler's Wife. All books are one book.