Bo-Bo Knows Books Can Bite

I have officially shed blood for my book. This isn't some ain't-writing-
a-slog metaphorical blood--we're talking honest-to-god hemoglobin. There I was innocently re-reading with an eye toward the next draft when--bam! The fucker bit me.

In all fairness, this heinous attack may not have been entirely unprovoked. During a writing class last night, I might have comically eulogized my decision to demote one of my point of view characters. And while I'll admit I should have done it out of the book's earshot, I certainly gave Maura (said demoted character) a fair trial. But after spending two long nights deliberating until three in the morning, the evidence was clear--Maura had to go.

But Maura's a fickle bitch. I should know. I made her. So I guess her vindictive streak shouldn't exactly surprise me, but here in the real world, we get a little blindsided when figments of out imaginations go for blood. Inspiring sweat? Sure. Frustrating us to tears? you betcha! But characters leaping from the page and drawing blood? That's the realm of Stephen King's The Dark Half, isn't it?

Maybe not.

I want to take the high road, here--I really do. Particularly given I'm human and Maura's just paper and ink. But the bitch cut me, man! Right across the tip of my favorite finger! And messing with a writer's typing fingers? That ain't right, yo!

So Maura? Here's my bandaged salute. This shit is so on.

Bo-Bo Knows Whiplash

When I finished the rough draft of my novel, I expected to go out of my mind. Tears maybe? Dragging Bo to the beach so I could run off some energy? Bowling over Mike with the atomic force that comes from crashing through a lifetime spent telling myself I just don't finish what I start? Blinking at my computer screen as my brain came to the surreal realization that the fifth book was the charm?

I did feel joy, and I did celebrate. But there were two celebratory obstacles.

The first was the easy one. The end of the rough draft means the start of the revision. While embracing a forward-ho! approach did wonders for powering through this draft, it left quite the mess in its wake. Think of it like hosting a literary block party in your living room--all cocktails and music and fun--only to wake up with so much cleaning to do you have no idea where to start. Not to mention the gaping holes in the wall...

The second obstacle was harder.

On November 5, I learned that one of my closest friends has stage four pancreatic cancer. I heard the news the way a sister might take such news about her brother--hard. But when I started to shut down, I rallied myself. My friend is a brother-in-art who helped me embrace the pioneering spirit of creative living in a largely apathetic world. He believed I was a writer before I believed it myself. His enthusiasm for this novel was and is unconditional and constant. Shutting down was just about the best way to spit on everything he taught me. So I rallied. On November 7, I finished the draft. It was fucking done!

But with exhilaration came whiplash.

That first weekend, spikes of joy alternated with the flatline of loss. I finished the book with a stubborn insistence that putting it off was to dishonor all the ways my friend has supported my writing, but any joy I felt about reaching "the end" gave way, eventually, to guilt. A wise friend told me this guilt was natural, but I had to let it go. That life is too short to waste worrying. That I had to embrace joy when it comes.

People say life is a roller coaster--you're up then you're down, screaming and scared one minute and laughing like a loon the next. But there's got to be more to life that strapping yourself in and bracing for the loop-de-loops. We have more control than that. We have to. Life is more like a see saw--one minute you're riding high and the next you're on you're ass, but you have the power to stay on the ground or launch yourself back skyward. And no. I'm not quite on board with my life-as-see-saw metaphor, either, but you get what I'm saying about our hand in pushing ourselves up and away from the ground. What I'm trying to say anyway. Embrace joy when it comes? I did. I tried. I'm trying.

Bo-Bo Knows Hope

I didn't walk Bo on this this near-60 degree November morning; I bounced. I smiled so much, people smiled right back at me.

For the first time in my lifetime, the United States elected a president that gives me hope infectious enough it spread from my mind to swallow my heart. I know electing President Obama doesn't fix the many hurts of this country. I understand that electing President Obama means the work is just beginning. But I also understand that the prospect of the right kind of work beginning, finally, brings a national hope I've never known.

My morning walk takes me right along the ocean. The sea was calm today, lapping like a lake, and I couldn't help but feel like that was the earth itself taking a deep breath and saying we can, we will, we must.

Bo-Bo Knows to Vote Yes on 3

I admire people who rant tirelessly in support of the great issue of their lives and metabolize their sense of justice into activism. But as much as I would like to have a missionary's spunk, my heart beats to a less warlike rhythm. I see twelve sides --at a minimum--to every story. Choosing just one can be problematic.

On Tuesday, November 4, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to ban greyhound racing. A yes vote would make racing illegal as of January 2010.

Although the kindly and curious people who stop Bo and me in the street used to chat about Bo's top speed, these days they all ask me how I think they should vote on question 3. They're looking for a hell, yeah! A passionate cry! But what I tell them is this:

I think the tracks in Massachusetts are better than the horror shows that pass as racetracks in other countries, but I didn't like what I've seen given my experience with Bo. I'm voting yes.

Don't get me wrong: I understand that adopting one greyhound doesn't exactly make me an expert on this issue, so here are the links to the arguments from both sides:

YES--The argument for ending racing.
N0--The argument to keep it going.

That said, here are my Bo-infused reasons for voting yes on 3:

1. Scrawny Bo--When we adopted Bo, he weighed ten pounds less than his current svelte--but healthy--weight (the photo above shows Bo-Bo's fresh-from-the-track, xylophone ribs).

2. Wormy Bo--Bo came to us with a pooper full of worms.

3. Abandoned Bo--We adopted Bo through the Wonder Dogs adoption program at Wonderland Dog Park. The staff was very responsive to our requests for information, the program pays to spay and neuter adoptive animals, and the adoption director allowed us to visit the kennel to choose our Bo. They even helped us identify the dogs that were gentle enough I wouldn't have to worry about him around friends and family--particularly my then-3-year-old nephew Ryan. We narrowed the choice to an as-yet un-spayed female dog and the dog-who-would-be-Bo. When we couldn't decide, the program organizer had a solution: take the neutered dog for the weekend and see how it went. He sent us home with Bo, his papers, and instructions to call if we had a problem. No one from Wonder Dogs ever called to see how we were managing.

4. Nameless Bo--Bo's kennel name was Ricky, but he never once responded to it, yet he started responding to to "Bo" and "Bo-Bo" after living with us a week.


5. Stretchy Bo--At our house, Bo spends most of his day sprawled out to his full length across one of three of his ginormous pillows. In his more spaztastic moments, Bo will co-opt one of his many squeaky toys for a rousing game of pounce-and-toss. In the kennel, Bo lived in a crate lined with shredded newspaper. Though he could stand and lay down, a full sprawl was out of the question. He had no toys.

6. Skittish Bo--Bo shies away from strangers holding canes, crutches, surfboards, clipboards, or balloons. When I took him to a fun run at Wonderland last spring, he shook. I know that the shaking was probably about being in a building with hundreds of people around him at once, but the image of him with his head drooped in his alma mater is one I can't get out of my mind. During his race, Bo clocked in at 27 miles per hour out of the gate, but by the time he reached me, he had slowed to a trot and started whimpering. His eyes had the same haunted look he gets when I'm getting ready to leave. Hey, I know that there isn't exactly a one-to-one relationship between what it looks like a dog might be thinking and what he's actually thinking. But crying is crying.

The thrust of a commercial being aired by the opposition to question 3 focuses on the 1,000 Massachusetts residents who will lose their jobs if racing is banned. But if question 3 passes, these employees will have more than a year to choose an alternative path. Greyhounds never had the luxury of choice. On behalf of my favorite retired racer, I'm choosing yes on question three.

How will you vote?

Bo-Bo Knows How to Keep His Ass in a Chair

There's an old truism that successful writers know how to keep their asses in their chairs and write. I used to think this was pretty straightforward--the secret to writing as simple as finding the time to write. But there's a little more to it than that.

As I near the end of the rough draft of my novel, I'm finding that I paid so much attention to braiding the main storylines together that I failed to notice all the loose hairs I dropped along the way. I know that stray hairs are supposed to be tamed by the hairspray of revision, but you try ignoring a shrieking chorus of the what-about-mes and see how much progress you make! I would be galloping happily along and then--bam!--fallen tree. Sure, I could leap over it, but every time I tried that, the chorus only screeched all the louder: What about me?

These brain banshees made the nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart.

These were the moments I most wanted to check Facebook, play with Bo-Bo, study Greek, clean the toilet, torture myself with articles about Sarah Palin, and just generally invent hours of distraction under the guise of letting the fiction problem percolate at the back of my brain. But detours cause delays, and every day I'm still--still, STILL--working on this (expletive deleted) rough draft, I'm in grave danger of inappropriate laughter (yesterday, I laughed at a student when he told me how bummed he was that the only win his team logged during the entire football season was the result of a forfeit).

So for the sake of my sanity and social niceties, I kept my ass in the chair and forced my fingers to keep moving on the keys. And then the weirdest thing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, a character I hadn't realized was even in on the present dilemma showed up on the screen in my head and started hauling off that tree (oh, just stay with me a minute because telling you what he was actually doing would make very little sense given that you haven't read a lick of my book). I started to describe what the character was doing, and soon the tree was gone, and I was back to galloping.

In her novel, "The Fiction Class," Susan Breen says writing description is "like watching a Polaroid picture develop--first come the blurry shadows of the central forms, and then the details emerge slowly."

Yeah. What she said.

But I will add this. Our job as writers, then, is to keep our asses in our chairs long enough that our Polaroids make themselves known to us. Because once those Polaroids appear, you're not going to want to move your ass until your fingers have done their keyboarding thing.

Bo-Bo Knows Mom's Got Mixed Feelings About the End of Her Column

On October 22, the Boston Globe published my swan song. Since 2006, I have enjoyed writing a weekly column for The Boston Globe Sidekick section ("Campus Calendar" during the school year and "Road Trips" during the summer). This edition of "Campus Calendar" is my last.

As of Friday, October 23, Sidekick will be no more. In fact, many of my favorite parts of the paper will be no more. Or--more accurately--most of the non-hard news content will be crammed into a single section. While it sucks to get a column yanked away from me before I was ready to let it go (I liked collecting the extra paycheck and keeping a big toe in the newspaper world), I'm sadder about what this means for journalism.

I'll grant that the kind of journalism I liked best isn't exactly the kind of stuff that was ever going to shortlist me for big awards. Hell, the kind of journalism I like best wasn't ever going to shortlist me for any awards. And I'll admit that all my proudest journalism moments came from focusing on meatier issues:

• an investigative magazine article about the surge in homeless families in Massachusetts,
• a reporter-at-large profile of the Million Mom March for gun control in Washington D.C, and
• an interview with a local World War II prisoner-of-war who trusted me enough to break down as he told me his story.
  

In fact, I have a friend with a PhD in chemical engineering (the last I understood of his work, he was researching strategies for growing bananas infused with vaccines) who called my recent profile of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult a "gimmick article" because of its "hanging with" premise--Picoult agreed to have a tarot reading done with a few million Boston-area public looking on via my article.

I say a good gimmick has its place. The standard profile asks a writer about the issue raised in the current book, offers information about the writer's local readings, and describes any interesting detours the writer took along the road to publication. The trouble? Most fans know all this. Enter gimmick journalism--give these fans a look at the question their favorite writer asks a tarot reader and take a snapshot of how she responds when the news isn't good, and the fan gets to glimpse one of the writer's previously hidden sides.

Will this kind of journalism win a Pulitzer? Hardly. But as I said before, it does it have it's place. Oh, yes, yes, and yes.

I know that the longer I go on here, the more it sounds like all this is just sour grapes. This couldn't be further from the truth. As a former journalist, I really liked keeping my skills honed and my bank account infused with extra green stuff. Yes, I'm sad to see this chapter close, but I embrace it as an opportunity to spend more hours on fiction.

And I'm finding that the universe agrees.

I'm within a week or two of finishing the rough draft of a novel about three misfit Elvis impersonators. When I walked into the Sidekick wrap party at Lucky's on Congress Street, where had the soon-to-be-ex Sidekick writers gathered? At the table under this Wertheimer photo of Elvis on a motorcycle. And within minutes of my arrival, the bee-bop band at the back was singing Frank Sinatra's That's Life. Salient lyrics?

"That's life
I tell ya, I can't deny it,
I thought of quitting baby,
But my heart just ain't gonna buy it.
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try,
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing:
Each time I find myself laying flat on my face,
I just pick myself up and get back in the race."

I'm not the biggest fan of hoo-doo voo-doo, but even a person more cynical than me would have to take this cosmic coupling as a sign.

What really bothers me about losing the column is this: The Boston Globe decided to combine Sidekick, Living/Arts, Food, Style, Weekend, and A&E into one daily tabloid section called G. While the mock up looks beautiful, and I have to give the Globe props for trying to maintain coverage in all these areas at a time when fiscal realities are more like nightmares, it bothers me that smooshing all this content into one space emerged as the best option. If a readership can be mapped to sections of the paper, hard news is the brain, business is the bottom line, and sports is the heart (particularly in this town), but the sections they're cramming together into G? These are the soul. Stuffing them into one box is like:

• slashing art funding in schools;
• a generation who can buy a single song on itunes and is never enriched to find that the song they hated when they first bought the CD has become the favorite;
• watching a movie before reading the book;
• watching a movie and never reading the book;
• never learning that the Beef-it's-what-for-dinner music is actually the "Hoedown" section of Aaron Copland's "Rodeo."
  

You get my point.

My husband recently bought a new piece of software that allows him to compose music and record a playback without having to record individual musical parts manually. Mostly that means he writes music with his instruments, translates it into line notation, and then has the computer play the finished score for him. He's been playing around with exercises that embrace his heavy metal teen years. I particularly like grooving to a song he calls "Pigs on Parade" (it's supposed to be a Nine Inch Nails homage), and I would share it here if I wasn't absolutely technologically useless. Suffice it to say it both rocks and rolls. Hard.

So Mike decides to share his little ditty with a few key people. The response? Accolades from the likes of me and a few others, a whole lot of crickets, and one particularly chilling response from a coworker:

Why would you do that?

Mike tried to explain about the creative urge.

Oh no, the coworker said. I'm am NOT a creative person.

Yikes.

We're all creative by nature, aren't we? I don't mean everyone's a musician or a writer, a painter or theoretical physicist. But when we decide to improvise our way to a scrumptious meal, invent plans C through Z when plans A & B fail, or dream up a perfect solution to mollify an angry client, we're being creative. We forget that at our great peril.

The value of the arts is not just about the poems or paintings or stories or novels or sculptures or plays or operas. It's about what these poems and paintings and stories and novels and sculptures and plays and operas make us think. So notice the arts around you while they're still around to be noticed. You'll be a little splash of technicolor in an increasingly black and white world.

Bo-Bo Knows the Idiocy of Fashion

Bo-Bo is all about functional fashion. His year-round fur aside, he was perfectly happy with a simple collar in classic black (I was the sucker that upgraded him to a more handsome design). He doesn't care that when the winter hits he'll be wrapped up in a coat that makes him look like a stained glass window (it was the only one that would fit him). And even though Petco tries to tempt him with the latest and greatest in doggie chews, Bo always comes back to his as-of-late-disemboweled monkey we gave him on day one. He's quite sentimental that way.

Bo-Bo knows the idiocy of fashion, which makes him smarter than half the women in the world. Hear me out! Somebody--designers or magazine editors or some combination of both--decides what's in for the season and lemmings with more money than sense go out and buy it. I have a fashion-conscious friend who's always trying to tell me that certain things I like aren't "in."

Well, screw that! If I like something, I'm wearing it. You think I'm gonna retire all my peasants skirts when they finally go "out." Not even hardly. And really, just because somebody says it's fashionable to wear big shirts with a belt around them doesn't mean it looks anything but idiotic. No white after labor day? Fascism! Boots in the fall and winter only? Tell that to the cowboy boot wearing population!

Need further proof fashion is insane? Ever try walking the beach in those ankle socks eveybody's wearing now? They slip off of your ankle (because by design there's NOTHING to hold them there) and migrate to just beneath your heel. Because walking on the beach is SO much better when you're walking on a wad of cotton.

And no, it didn't bother me at all that my preference for walking the beach in crew socks led to a sock line during the height of sandal season. Oh, the horror! Believe me, the kind of people who care about my sock line aren't the kind of people I want to bother with. Bo-Bo--who once gnawed off the booties I put on him in a lame attempt to protect the pads of his feet from rock salt--agrees.

Bo-Bo Knows Recovery

The squirts. The runs. The trots. The shits. Whatever your favorite euphemism for diarrhea, Bo-Bo has it. Every hour since midnight. Sure, new parents get kept up half the night, but at least they don't have to take their babies outside and whine at them to just poop already.

We called the vet. The tech at reception told us to collect a sample. We told the tech said sample was liquid. Very liquid. Tech assured us even a smear would do. We collected a sample. Scratch that. I collected a sample. Bo yelped as he went, as if to say, "the burning, oh the burning!"

I took the sample to the vet. Ever drive in a car with a plastic bag smeared with poo? Don't. The tech tested the smear for, I don't know exactly, but it came up negative. I drove Bo home. Bo's pooping went from chocolate fountain to just plain fountain. Shitting water is never a good sign. Neither is barfing bright yellow. I called the tech; the tech called Bo and me straight back into the office.

Injection of antibiotic. Pills. Food so expensive I took out a second mortgage. Fluids administered by IV. Did you know pooches get their fluids dumped under the skin? The effect is remarkably Quasimodo. Tech swore the fluids would be absorbed in an hour. And, although Bo was not to eat again until tomorrow, he needed more antibiotic tonight. Because there's nothing so fun as shoving a pill down a starving pooch's throat.

Bo retaliated by crapping in the house while I tutored. I'm pretty sure it was the aforementioned shits that caused this, though there's an off chance Bo's little gift might have been a critical response to the little song I sang to him while we waited in the vet's office (to the tune of the Oscar Meyer wiener theme song):

My Bo-Bo has a first name
It's B-O-dash-B-O
My Bo-Bo has a second name
It's G-O-T-2-go

He'd like to stay out all the day
And if you asked me why I'd say
Cause Bo-Bo has the shits today
And that is really not O-K.

In my defense, I got nothing but interrupted sleep last night. And when you think about it, who's fault was that?

Bo-Bo Knows Barks are Worse Than Bites

If Bo-Bo were a kid, he'd be the boy raking in candy from strangers. He'd be the first to jump into the pick-up for a ride the rest of the way to school, the one who dives right into the skeevy van for an up-close look at those puppies the nice man promised were there.

Bo-Bo has done busted his radar for stranger danger. In Bo's addled brain, every dog we meet while walking's a potential friend, and never mind the owner straining to keep her 140-pound bear of a dog from launching at us; never mind that this little pug's doing his best impersonation of a snarling beastie. Bo-Bo loves--or at least wants the chance to love--everybody! His greet-the-world-with-open-paws approach is decidedly not cool when we're up against the kind of dog whose prime directive is collecting a piece of anything that crosses his path, but it does have its advantages against the loudmouths on our walking route. Oliver the howling, barking, demon Beagle, I'm looking at you!

Every day we walk by Oliver's house, Oliver summons a deep, hellish, howling bark. He jams his head betweent the posts of the fence when he can, but mostly he follows us, hollering and lunging, with nothing but a bit of white picket between him and Bo-Bo...and me. Now I'll admit it: I jump every time Oliver's hound-o-hell greeting shakes me from my thinks, but Bo just galumphs along, mouth open in his can-you-believe-I-get-to-walk smile. Oh, his ears may perk up, and on days when Oliver's voice is particularly strong, Bo may take a quick stutter step into the street. But mostly Bo-Bo registers Oliver's complaint with the classic ignore-him-and-he'll-go-away stance.

Bo's take on life is devilishly simple, right? Just ignore everything that doesn't matter and bop along with your day. Tell me, how is it that a dog who can't figure out when there's food in his dish can be so very wise?

What if I dealt with those dogs barking in my brain the same way Bo deals with the Beazulbulb Beagle that snarls at him ? What if I just ignored the fear growling around the back of my brain and--now here's a novel thought--wrote the damn end of my book already?

What. What the? Bad boy, Bo! Bad...? 3r8q dfd*&&*(fdafdj90

Bo-Bo here. Had to take over. Couldn't stand it. If my racing homeys talked about running as much as mommy talks about writing they'd have been shot. Well, maybe not shot, but same same. You gets my meaning. Racers race. Writers write. You gots five scenes to the end? Writes them, okay? I didn't win seven races by jumping out of the box and examining the track ahead. I ran like a mother lover. Once I even cutted off the big dog. You gots to take risks, okay? So get onto that stupid clicky thing that like so much and run your damn race already, okay?

Oh and while I'm here, I wanted to tells you that little rhyme you have when you're eating something yummers and I ain't getting any? You know: Nothing for you, Disco Stu? I know you're proud of it, but it ain't cool.

So anyways, type alright. One, two, three: theeeeeeeerrrrrrreeeee gooooooooeeeeess cliiiiiiiiickyyyyyy! Get it? There goes clicky instead of there goes swifty. Aw, forget it. Just writes already, OK? Just not so much you skimp on my walkseses.

Bo-Bo Knows Bad Poetry

So many of you know that when a special occasion intersects with a certain brand of Cathy punchiness, you're apt to get a limerick in your (birthday, retirement, thank-you) card. This may seem like harmless goofy fun, but it's actually a sickness. I offer my March 7 "Bo-Bo Knows Weird Al Yankovic" post as exhibit one.

When Mike and I went to a wedding last month, we sent Bo to doggy jail. Oh, it's not much of a prison. The space is a big warehouse. There are no cages. Potential guests are screened to make sure mostly sane pooches like Bo don't have to deal with crazy, violent, idiotic dogs (so chiuahuas, Jack Russel terriers, and that demon Beagle who lives three doors down need not apply). This outfit is probably about as close to doggy nirvana as Bo's gonna get.

That is, until we have the colossal gall to abandon him there.

To retaliate, Bo does what any self-respecting, submissive sissy must do in this situation: he curls up in a ball for two days and doesn't pay any attention to us. His antics inspired the latest Cathy Canine romp to the tune of one of my favorite Elvis rockabilly songs, "Blue Moon of Kentucky." I'm imbedding the music video below for those who aren't familiar with the tune; Bo's lyrics follow.

Bo-Bo of Our Condo
(With apologies to Bill Monroe)

Bo-Bo! Bo-Bo! Bo-Bo pouts the day away.
Bo-Bo pouts all through the day;
'cause he thinks that'll make us stay
Bo-Bo pouts through the day!

I said Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on because we left him overnight.
I said Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on until his mama makes things right.

On a lonely Friday!
Mom went away!
Slipped through the door!
Orphaned forever more.*

Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on because we left him overnight.
Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on until his mama makes things right.

If the preceding doesn't convince you that my phonetic tinkering's a sickness, know this: I've moved on to bigger phonetic challenges. Behold my first (and likely my last) villanelle (this is the poetry form made famous with "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas) :

The Critic

On days like this the sky's a burden, too.
Air pushes, pushes down until I'm small.
I choose to hold it up for me, for you.

It's not clear why they call this feeling blue.
My busy, cluttered mind slows to a crawl.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.

The doubt that was a seed took root and grew
into a beast that hides all but his growl.
I choose to hold him off for me, for you.

My thoughts turn to a mottled, ugly stew;
the beast and reason ready for a brawl.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.

The critic arms himself and starts to spew.**
Protect the dreams you don't want him to maul.
I choose to hold him off for me, for you.

And though I know the beastly barks aren't true,
they clog like dirt in motors and I stall.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.
I choose to hold it up for me, for you.

Bo just grunted and rolled onto his side. That's Bo-nglish for "why don't you call this post Bo-Bo Knows Bad Poetry's No Way To Finish A Novel." I whole-heartedly agree. So I'll close with my Bo-inspired Haiku:

Bad poems are a
painful procrastination;
someone stop me now.

* The first draft of this line read "Mom's a dirty whore." I've decided the revision's more in keeping with Bo's character.

** This rhyme caused my husband physical pain.

***Alternate title: "Take THAT Writer's Block!"

Bo-Bo Knows that Sometimes the Things We Want Most Scare Us Senseless

As previously mentioned, Bo-Bo is more of a whimperer than barker. And also as previously mentioned, Bo-Bo's hmm-hmm-hmm is often a signal that there's a canine someone lurking that Bo wants to say meet and greet. Bo's crying teamed with his pricked ears and prancing paws is what I've come to call Bo's I've-taken-a-vow-to-leave-no-bung-hole-unsniffed dance.

But about once a week, the ecstasy backfires.

Bo prances, prances, prances, but when he gets too close to the object of his affection, he decides, oh hell no! His spine impersonates an overgrown elbow macaroni, and he darts clear away. Sometimes into oncoming traffic.

There are times Bo's skittishness is warranted: when that dude in a wet suit decided two feet in front of Bo that right then would be a good time to swing his surfboard in a vaguely weapon-like fashion, when the man who looked so wholesome from across the street actually reeked of cigarettes and sized up Bo like he was a turkey in November, or when a button of a dog turned into a ferocious (but bitsy) beast who barked so hard he hopped backwards and bared his sharp (but pint-sized) teeth.

Most of the time, though, Bo cowers for no good reason.

What if Bo's apparent skittishness was really shyness? What if Bo finally worked up the nerve to talk to the brave and beautiful Cleopatra only to realize this Afghan Hound is so far out of his league Bo can't even remember what made him think this was a good idea a few seconds ago? What if he'd desperately like a turn with the red Frisbee that Meghan-the-cattle-dog carries in her mouth, only Bo can't figure out how to ask her to share? What if he sees a kid he'd love to fawn over but just can't get past that fearsome stroller the kid's trapped inside?

So often the things we want like hunger scare us into staying starved. Last week I set myself up as a literary Olympian, averaging roughly ten pages a day. I made peace with the "rough" in rough draft. In that mindset, I didn't have to remind myself that the journey toward a finished book started with finishing a first draft. I wrote without fretting, and I wrote a lot. I came off of that week with the end of the book clearly in sight. But embracing the "rough" in rough draft felt like an exercise in naivety when I considered the revision to come--jettisoning thousands (upon thousands) of extraneous words and condensing tens of thousands more. I may want a draft more than anything else in my world*, but I've slowed down because (let's not sugarcoat this, shall we?) I'm scared shitless about finishing. And really, I don't have to tackle the revision if I don't finish, right? Well, yeah, but living with unfinished business is so much worse than wrestling the mess. That hunger will start to feed on itself eventually.

When Bo cowers, I put one hand on his back and pet the other dog until Bo comes around. If the threat's human, I stand between Bo and the offending bi-ped until Bo creeps closer to check him out. The way Bo inches closer and closer still until his tail starts whipping around again is no different than the inching, inching, inching I have to do, first toward the draft, and then toward the revision.

Fear has its place (urging us to jump out of the way of oncoming buses, avoid darkly lit alleys, and keep medical appointments), but beyond physical fitness, fear isn't a call to retreat. When it comes to our psychological hungers, fear's a sign that we should press bravely on--no cowering or jumping into oncoming traffic.


*My wishlist for the world at large includes a McCain drubbing in November and a national education policy that recognizes that true intellect is a marriage of pedagogue and poetry, that scores of children get left behind when schools prioritize core academic skills at the expense of the arts.

Bo-Bo Knows That Way Lies Madness

Bo-Bo hasn't really been curling up at my feet this weekend. I blame a mean case of the writing blues. The particularly nefarious, unwarranted strain.

On Friday, I shared my madcap triumph from last week. I also shared the fact that I had set August 28 as my personal deadline for finishing the rough draft of my novel. Unless I have another week like last one, I'm not going to make it. And I don't have the kind of schedule this week that will allow for another week like last one.

The completest in me is bummed about this. At the end of May, I bought a pair of cowboys boots while Mike and I were visiting Nashville. They cost more than my wedding dress (which actually isn't as bad as it sounds because I'd be damned if I'd pay that much for a dress I got to wear for about two minutes). The point is, the money I shelled out for the boots was the most money I'd ever spent on a single article of clothing, so I made a deal with myself: the boots stayed packed away until I finished my rough draft.

So I was picturing strolling into class on August 28 with these handsome babies complementing my favorite bohemian skirt. And being that I spend a good part of my day cooking up fictions, in my mind this grand entrance involved climbing onto the classroom table and doing a little victory boogie. Or maybe a Texas two-step, in honor of the boots.

Clearly, missing my deadline is for the best, because really, how would I even manage climbing onto a table in a skirt without flashing half the class and the students in the Emerson dorms next door? At this point I'll confirm that your suspicions about my fictional life being way more exciting than my day-to-day, real life are 100 percent accurate. Well, maybe 90 percent accurate. I once convinced a wee Scotsman to twirl around a bar with me, traveled to Vegas to research the skin trade, and braved my sister's wrath when I not only taught my 4-year-old nephew, Ryan, the word scrotum, but traumatized him with the intel that he had one, too (this after he pointed to Bo-Bo's recently-neutered floppiness and informed me that Bo had a poopy).

But back to the blues. Because of recent mania-level outputs this weekend's page total has fallen a little short: I only wrote 10 new novel pages.

Only? ONLY?!! There was a time when my weekly writing goal was 10 pages a week (2 pages every weekday). Measuring my progress against my 62-pages-in-six-days mania is like a marathon runner deciding that the only worthwhile training schedule is 26.2 miles a day. That way lies madness, indeed.

Especially when you look at the rest of my writing weekend. I wrote not one but two blog entries. And perhaps the most wonderful writing weirdness in a long time: a short story poured out long hand. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to sit down, write for a while, and stand up with a first draft down.

So my failure to repeat my (ridiculously Olympian) goals this weekend is nothing of the kind, just as missing my (completely arbitrary) August 28 goal isn't really a failure. For a little while, I'll be switching back to a more manageable two-to three hours a day schedule (I'm not a full-time writer, after all) and see where that takes me. The way I figure it, getting to class on Thursday knowing that I have as few chapters to write as Bo has paws on his body is cause to go ahead and dance on that table...even if I have to do so without the boots.

Bo-Bo Knows That Sometimes He Takes a Backseat to Forces he Doesn't Understand

It was a rare moment of calm. The ball was holstered. The kids temporarily paused in their never-ending marathon tracked in a loop from the living room, down the hall, and around the kitchen of our 1100-square-foot-ish condo. Bo-Bo chose this as the moment to merge from the den where he'd retreated after the kids started whooping somewhere around lap 213. The way he figured, it was finally time to return to the excessive fawning he enjoyed as guests arrived. He figured wrong.

People use the phrase, "it's a dog's life" to describe a lifestyle that falls somewhere on the spectrum between lazy and nirvana. Clearly the person who coined that phrase never watched the worried dance of a dog's eyebrows, never saw the bowed head of a dog who knows his place in the alpha-to-zeta pecking order is nowhere near alpha. The way I figure it, a dog's life is plagued by nearly constant worry. Bo can't talk, but I've been watching his body language carefully, and I've figured out that the top three thoughts rattling around that canine brain of his are:

1. Food now?
2. Walk now? and
3. What about me?
   

I say Bo can't talk, but that isn't because he's not trying. Barking? No. Bo only barks when I'm being lazy about getting him out to pee or he thinks we forgot to feed him because he wasn't actually present when we put the fool into the bowl—this particular canine code red requires a physical show and tell: we trek into the kitchen, rattle the doggy dish, and tell him, "it's in the bowl, stupid." No, barking is too normal for this one, but Bo-Bo's a champion whimperer. He whimpers when there's a person he wants to greet, a dog he'd like to lick inappropriately, a balloon he'd desperately like to run away from (this week he's been particularly traumatized by a parrot-shaped Mylar balloon tied to the sign of the ice cream parlor at the end of our street). He cries when we leave and when we're standing outside the door fumbling with our keys. And lately he's started to hmm-hmm-hmm when I take the turn for our 25-minute walking loop instead of continuing straight along the 60-minute loop he loves so. This has been happening a lot lately because Bo-Bo's mommy (that would be me) has been prioritizing writing her novel over just about all things—her health, Bo's sanity, housework, prompt personal hygiene, paying bills, sleep, and any work that doesn't have an immediately looming deadline.

Don't get me wrong. Bo's been nothing but supportive. So long as his bladder isn't ripe, he's at my feet, whether I'm at my desktop computer in my office, curled up with my laptop on the bed, or commandeering the kitchen table. But there's something in the way he watches me that screams, what the hairy heck is it you're doing exactly?

The trouble (or maybe it was no trouble at all) was I enrolled in a novel workshop this summer to inspire myself to make good on my promise to finish this novel (my first) by the end of the summer. But instead of being content setting a private bar, I announced what I had in mind during the introductions at the first class. The class ends on August 28, and I've been working in a fever, but it's unclear whether I'm gonna make it. But, dammit, I'm going down swinging.

In the last three weeks I've written 128 pages—62 of them last week alone. For those of you who don't know about these things, that's not just a lot, it's the fucking mother lode (at least for me, anyway). On my best weeks I usually do somewhere between 10 and 25 pages. Somewhere the literary police are plotting to test my blood for all manner of banned substances: speed, excessive caffeine, more sugar than iron in my blood, latent mania, etc. But really, the answer is simpler than that. I blame Michael Phelps. Here he was collecting medals like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and I was pretty much missing it all playing with my imaginary friends. To make up for it, I staged a literary Olympics of my own. Last week I challenged myself to write 70 pages in 7 days, and I came close enough that five days in Bo-Bo sat on his pillow with his paws over his ears, screaming, the clacking, the clacking, will someone stop the clackity, clackity, clack, clack clack? I chronicled the whole business via Facebook status updates. Here's how it went down (slightly abridged):

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16
10:26 am— Catherine is honoring the Olympic spirit by setting a ridiculous goal: 70 pages by Thursday night.
3:21 pm— Catherine has 3 pages done...67 to go!
4:23 pm— Catherine has 5 done...65 to go!
6:47 pm—Catherine has 7 done...63 to go!
10:25 pm—Catherine has 10 done...60 to go!
11:14 pm—Catherine has 12 done...58 to go!

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17
12:43 am—Catherine has 15 done...55 to go!
8:23 pm—Catherine has 16 done...54 to go!
10:29 pm—Catherine has 17 done...53 to go!
11:32 pm—Catherine has 21 pages done...49 to go!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18
2:18 am—Catherine has 26 pages done...44 to go!
1:27 am—Catherine has 31 pages done...39 to go!
2:00 pm—Catherine has 32 pages done...38 to go which means she's closing in on the halfway-to-goal point....

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19
12:16 am—Catherine has 34 pages done...36 to go (and she's boring of this update conceit but feels compelled)...
9:13 pm—Catherine has 36 pages done...34 to go.
10:45 pm—Catherine has 40 pages done...30 to go.
10:53 pm—Catherine thinks it's time for a change of venue...come on laptop, let's me and you find a new place to camp...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20
12:37 am—Catherine is falling behind: 43 done/37 to go...
9:10 am—Catherine is falling behind: 43 done/-27- to go... (thanks to Lisa B for the catch!).
11:10 am—Catherine had 45 done/25 to go...
12:34 pm—Catherine had 48done/22 to go...
3:07 pm—Catherine had 51done/19 to go...
7:54 pm—Catherine had 54done/16 to go...slowing down only to outline the end...the END (which unfortunately still feels pretty far away)...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21
11:13 pm—Catherine has finished her experiment. 62 out of 70 pages completed. That's roughly 89 percent. But I get bonus points for outlining to the end. Definitely A for effort.

Suffice it to say, I'm pretty damn exhausted. The trouble is that outline I mentioned on Wednesday? It was for six chapters and an epilogue. There are seven days before class. With round numbers like this, it's like the universe's egging me on. Bo-Bo just raised his eyebrows at me and released one of those doggy sighs he usually uncorks when he's pouting. The message is clear: Get on with it so we can get back to our regularly scheduled walks already.

Bo-Bo Knows Daddy Wears Aprons

Washing Bo in a tub that I can stand beside: $15.

Treat for Bo following traumatizing bath: $0.10

Bag of those same treats to bring home:$4.99

Getting the Globe to publish a photo of my husband in an apron: Priceless.

Bo-Bo Knows Blood-Sucking Fiends

Bo-Bo is a tick magnet.

I guess if I was a Pollyanna, I’d consider it a compliment that he’s a sweet enough that an army of prehistoric pint-sized goons want to feast on his blood, but the optimism is lost on me. I get distracted by the feasting on his blood bit. If we’re fortunate about anything, it’s that Bo has tan-and-white hair styled in the canine equivalent of a buzz cut. When you think of the percentage of hiding spots ticks have in Bo’s coat verses the coat, of say, Cleopatra, his Afghan-hound girlfriend who often gets walked with a pink banana clip on top of her head to keep all that hair out of her eyes, we get off easy on tick patrol. Even so, those vampires are a cunning lot. Unless they choose to settle in on Bo’s legs, we can’t actually see them. They hide out in the relative depth of the hair around Bo’s neck. We’ve found one under the half-inch—half-inch!—edge of his ear, another near his doggy ding dong, and at least half a dozen in the caves between his paw pads.


Most dog owners would just dip Fido in a chemical bath or slap a nuclear-strength-flea- and-tick collar around Spike’s neck, but such brilliant inventions are a big Greyhound no-no. I don’t really get it, but the math goes something like this:

thin greyhound skin + sensitive blood = serious health hazard.

OK, fine. But blood-sucking fiends are a serious health hazard, too! Fortunately, we’ve only found dog ticks. These aren’t the lime disease carriers, but they can give humans something called Rocky Mountain Fever. And if you’re dying to know about Rocky Mountain Fever, do your own damn Google search. The last think I need is to have the symptoms of another disease in my head to pick from the next time I’m feeling a little under the weather. I already have something like a panic attack every time a migraine strikes: This feels like a stroke. What if this time it’s a stroke. This is it. The big one. I’m coming to get you Margaret! So I need to know the symptoms of Rocky Mountain Fever about as much as a problem gambler needs to be reminded of the high that comes with beating a full house with a higher full house.

It’s bad enough that the Google searches I did to determine that Bo had dog ticks and not deer ticks gave me nightmares. Have you ever looked up ticks on the Web? They don’t just give you a bullet point list of what to look for. They give you pictures. Giant poster-size prints that’ll give you flashbacks to the Saturday creature features that scared the piss out of you when you were kids. You remember? Those horror movies about insects? I remain traumatized by the one about the ants where a kid is swarmed by the things and jumps into a pool to drown them and drowns himself in the process. There was also one about a tarantula invasion. In that one a child gets cornered on a swing set. Are you itching now? I’m itching now. So, yeah. Pictures that show a tick with all those legs and gnashing teeth and what looks like a suit of armor get filed up there with the killer ants and tarantulas and come out in my dreams. Particularly this one:

I was in Ireland, but it looked a little like Venice. There were tinkers* lining the streets. There was one guy in a car with his head resting in a tin washtub filled with water. I didn’t feel this was the safest pillow and called the nurse who was on our tour with us. She woke him up and said he’d been poisoned. The remedy was a shampoo. She supported his neck with one hand, and shampooed with the other washing ticks ranging in size from the horrific silver-dollar shaped to the wake-up-before-you-crap-your-pants, king-crab size. I’m sure if I hadn’t woken up, itchy as all hell, I’d have been swallowed by the kind of tick you’d expect to see in Jurassic Park.

So what’s a poor bug-phobe to do? Due diligence, of course. At first, this was twice-daily checks in which Mike and I went on blood-sucking safaris and evicted those pesky pests first with pliers (so NOT the tool for the job as Bo’s yelp told us), then with olive oil (we’d read that olive oil would make the ticks give up the ghost; instead the smell of oil in his ear—so close to his mouth—sent Bo into a fit of trying to lick his own ear which, while amusing, did nothing for the tick), and finally with pliers (just right).

But really, who wants to spend the summer on tick patrol?

I decided to beat the bloody bastards at their own game. For about a week, Bo and I went on a very odd walk. Every bush we past was met with an inspection. If he cleared it the whole week through, it was good grass. If I found a tick hitching a ride, that place was toast…at least for the summer. And though to passing cars I’m sure it looked like I was giving my dog some seriously bad touches, we figured out that there was a nest of blood suckers in the fields down by the cemetery and in the playground by the beach—they are so off the daily tour. Combine that with Winthrop’s cruel no-dogs-on-the-beach-from-May-1-to-Oct.1 rule and Bo-Bo’s having a very urban, very concrete-only summer. We pass the entrance to the beach; he whimpers. We pass the cemetery; he whimpers. We pass the playground; he whimpers. On the plus side, there’s no more barbaric tick-removal rituals, and I’m no longer having nightmares about blood-sucking fiends.

* I think the word tinkers might be derogatory. This is the name our tour guide had for the wandering people of Ireland, but this same tour guide also told us that “tinkers” had a habit of finding things before they were lost which seemed like a stereotype to me. In any case, this was a dream.

Bo-Bo Knows Fame

Bo-Bo gets mentioned in my (micro) article in today's Globe. Extra! Extra! Click here to read all about it...

Bo-Bo Knows Dingleberries

'Nuff said.

An Open Letter to My Adoring Public

Dearest peeps and pups,

Bo-Bo here. Seized the keyboard while Mommy's doing whatever she does in that little room off the middle of the hall, so I gots to be quick. But I'm a greyhound; quick is kind of my specialty.

Here's the thing about Mommy. She means well. She hatches these giant big-hearted ideas and then, well, you should see the way her face falls when she can't make them happen. Just for a for instance, she's got these big ideas to enter me in a charity fun run, get me certified to cheer up old folks, and get me a pal of the four-legged variety. Progress? Not yet, not yet, and not yet. But, like I said, she means well. Take this doggy bloggy, for instance. She really wants—

What is it, daddy? What? Ok.

Ahem. Daddy informs me that this thing is a a blog, not a bloggy. Whatever. The point is Mommy really wants to be consistent and make this happen every Friday like clockwork. She's even got a list of cool things she wants to write about, but she also really wants to marry Daddy on April 19, which apparently means a to-do list of about a million thousand tiny little details. Yeah, I know. Daddy and I don't really get what the fuss is about either, but fuss she will.

The thing is, I'm all for it. As far as people go, Mommy and Daddy are porterhouse steak bones in a world full of milkbones. Sure, I'm a little hurt that I wasn't invited to the wedding—something about the board of health and serving food. No fur off my tail, I'm a resilient kind of pooch. Mommy should know. Look at how fast I bounced back that time she slammed my tail in the door—seriously, no hard feelings. Kind of the opposite actually. I'd like get them a gift for their wedding, but mommy went and retired me so I can't exactly go out and buy these pots and pans they keep drooling over on that Bed, Bath, and Beyond Web site. But there are two gifts I can give them.

Gift number one. First, I can be a trooper when they lock me away in jail when they get hitched (they don't think I know what the word kennel means, but believe me, I know it well). I will go bravely and continue to love them when they spring me after tooling around this Ireland they keep talking about. Besides, they win points for making arrangements for Meme and Grampy to spring me after four days instead of 15. That's something.

Gift number two. Second, Mommy recently asked someone if they could wrap up a few extra hours a week for her between now and the wedding. This is where I come in. I've just changed her bloggy, I mean, blog, password. I mean, sure, she really wants to update this page every Friday, but she could really use that time to finish up wedding plans. So I'm giving that time back to her. Bo-Bo Knows will take a break in April and be back in May. Don't even start to argue, Mommy. It's already been decided. No more Bo-Bo Knows until you're a married woman returned from your honeymoon.

And I ask just this in return: please stop calling me "crazy." You're not even going to change your last name when you're married, but you have no trouble calling me twisted nicknames:

• Crazy
• Dummy
• Bo-Bo MTV raps.

Enough, OK? Love to my favorite peeps and a milkbone for each of my fallen racing homeys.

Your favorite furry beast,

Bo-Bo

Bo-Bo Knows Paralysis

At the end of our walk this morning, Bo-Bo took the stairs to our second-floor condo at a full gallop. We're talking faster-than-a-speeding-bullet, leaping-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound action. On the second floor landing, Bo executed a tight spin that can best be described as Bo-Bo breakdancing. Then, with his mouth open in the smile-pant (described in the joys of exercise post on Feb, 22), Bo stared at the closed door as if he were a jedi-in-training who might one day master the ability to turn knobs with the power of his pea brain.

On the day Mike and I adopted Bo, Bo-Bo had considerably more hitch in his stair-climbing giddyup. Because Bo-Bo spent the first four-and-half-years of his life as a racer,* he never encountered many of the things that most dogs see from the time they're small pups: the roar of a garbage truck compacting trash right next to you, the ghostly glow of the gas station against a black night, and stairs. For most racers everything in their lives—food, water, crates, vets, the tracks they race on, and the vans that get them from one race to the next—is pretty much available at ground level. So when greyhounds trade the track for a suburban retirement, they've got a little adjusting to do. Running in the park at 40+ miles per hour? No problem. Walking up inclines? No sweat. Stairs? Holy mother of racing, what the hell is that?!

There are 15 steps on the staircase that leads from the lobby of our condo building to our door. The first time Bo encountered them, it took him 30 minutes to climb them. You do the math. It would have been less of a hassle to carry him up and down the steps, but we were nervous about the precedent that would set. Carrying 65 (now 70-something) pounds up the stairs on the inaugural climb might seem like the hospitable thing to have done, but we feared that if we babied him on day one, he'd get used to the royal treatment and never set paw to staircase. So we coaxed and encouraged and let him crawl up his slow way.

The thing about greyhounds is this: when they're wigged out they turn into statues. This isn't just a bad metaphor—greyhound owners actually call this behavior statueing. When spooked (and fresh retirees spook easily), greyhounds go rigid, hang their heads, begin to pant, and freeze so completely that they won't even swallow—the spit in their mouths drips to the ground instead. The first few weeks Bo was with us, anything new or loud could trigger paralysis. He statued halfway across busy streets. He statued if a plastic bag caught a wayward wind and skittered across the road. He statued so completely and so often that I had to take him out an hour before I had to leave for the day just to make sure I had time to deal with my fuzzy statue and get to work on time. The first day Mike and I introduced him to stairs, Bo-Bo statued so hard Michelangelo took the credit. It seemed like Bo-Bo really knew paralysis.

They say that given time, most people begin to look like their dogs. I don't think my body will ever be so toned as Bo's, and I know my ribs will never be as immediately apparent to the naked eye, but that doesn't mean that Bo isn't my mirror image. And while I have no problems with a staircase, a garbage truck, the glow of a gas station at night, or potentially haunted grocery bags, I do know what it feels like to shut down a little when I feel like I'm over my head. Like Bo on the staircase, in the best case scenario I refuse to move forward or backward; in the worst case, I retreat to the landing I started from.

On the day Bo learned that stairs weren't maybe quite as daunting as he thought, Mike stood behind him to make sure that Bo didn't turn back. He reassured him by running his hands over the dog's back and haunches, told him softly that all he had to do was put one paw in front of the other, and patiently guided his paws in the order they should fire. Mike did this not just the first time Bo-Bo scaled his urban Everest, but every time he tried it. Later, when Bo freaked out about the prospect of descending, Mike stood in front of him so that Bo would know that even though it might feel like he was launching himself downward, Mike wouldn't let him fall.

Mike is such a part of the fabric of my daily life that I forget to look at him closely. Then I see him again in some little something he does—the way he smiles at a stooped, old lady in the market and reaches for the pickles she couldn't quite reach herself, the way he shares music and books and games he loves with his friends according to their interests, and the way he's patient and supportive with Bo, so like the patient support he offers me on days I've worked myself into an unholy standstill where I'm figuratively drooling when I really need to take action. Just as we know that carrying Bo wouldn't help him, not really, Mike knows better than to carry me. But navigating the staircases that scare me into a statue is always just that much easier when Mike's there to remind me I won't fall, help me brainstorm what that next step will be, make supportive suggestions, and always and ever stand aside and let me find my own way.

We got Bo in December, 2006. By June, 2007 Mike and I were engaged. We're marrying next month. Mike likes to say if he'd known getting me a dog would make me say yes to marrying him, he'd have done it a long time ago. The truth is I just grew the hell up and was finally able to see what was right beside me all these years: through the good, the bad, and the everyday, Mike and me has always meant Mike and me. Just as Mike helped Bo best by standing beside him and letting him come to his own conclusions (stairs aren't so bad**), Mike helps me best by living by this simple idea: teams are only as healthy as the individuals playing on them.

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* Before we snatched Bo up for our very own, he raced in Massachusetts and Florida under the name "Bohemian Hoosier." We like to think of him as our little champion, but his 8-in-99 lifetime record indicates "our little loser" might be a more accurate name. You can read about his pedigree here where you will be as alarmed as we were to find that Bo-Bo's great-great grandfather "Rooster Cogburn" is also his great-great-GREAT grandfather, an incestuous fact that begins to explain why Bo bumps his head on the desk. Repeatedly. Clicking on the lifetime record above takes you to an accounting of every race Bo ever ran. I'm particularly fond on the listing for the November 12, 2005 race he won. The track notes indicate that he "Ran Down Leader." I picture it this way: Bo-Bo finds himself three lengths behind some cocky 100-pound bully. He looks around and realizes he's the only dog anywhere close to the leader. He looks at the leader and thinks, I can totally talk him, then he bows his head and takes off; by the time he looks up, he's closed the gap to two lengths. He breaks into an all-out sprint. The result? Bo-Bo's at the finish line, happily wolfing down the marshmallow treats reserved for winners. "Ran Down Leader" indeed. That's my boy!! But all this is an entry for the day I corner a trainer and shake down some answers about Rooster-gate.


**View a short film of Bo-Bo's first success with stairs:

Bo-Bo Knows Generics Are Dead to Me

The PetGold® poop bag dispenser is a tiny plastic column that lives at the end of Bo-Bo’s leash and contains a roll of poop bags for sidewalk emergencies. If you’ve never seen it, the thing works on the same principle as a stamp dispenser—put your roll of 100 stamps in and enjoy. But as nice as it is to have bags holstered when you need them, I have this warning for pet owners out there: do not cheap out and buy generic refills. Oh, no, no, no.

My computer-programming husband-to-be once told me that the companies that design software for ATMs demand that their programs run at 100 percent accuracy. This may seem like anal perfectionism, but it’s really just good business—if ATMs were only accurate 99 percent of the time, you’d get screwed every hundredth visit.

The generic pet industry could learn a thing or two from their banking colleagues. If your product is designed to be the only barrier between your customers hand and dogshit, 100 percent product dependability is really the only option. Because if I have to be on the losing side of a mistake, I’ll pick a financial error to a fecal error every day of the week.

Except today, apparently.

If you saw a woman swearing on Winthrop Shore Drive this morning, that was me. If it looked like I was trying to use a pile of sand as a handiwipe, it’s because I was. If it seemed like I was standing there with my hand outstretched, looking up and down the street for a handout, I was actually calculating that I was pretty much at the exact halfway point in the walking loop I take with Bo-Bo and trying to decide whether I would be more likely to cross paths with a Purell®-carrying parent if I turned back or pressed on.

I pressed on. Unfortunately, my besmirched hand was still outstretched when I got home

I’m sure there’s a lesson buried in today’s Bo-Bo shenanigans. Maybe the fact that I had to open a door, unhook a leash, and answer a phone left-handed was supposed to be a metaphorical call to shake up my everyday routine, a reminder that even when my tried and true methods fall quite literally to shit, I’m resilient enough to find another way. But right now, all I can think is the shit streaks that graced my right palm earlier today.

And while I have never in my life been more grateful to get the chance to wash my hands, I have to admit I was obsessively disappointed to find that the label on my hand soap boasts that it kills 99 percent of all bacterial while the label on my generic hand sanitizer claims a 99.99 percent kill rate. Slackers, both. I mean, seriously. What’s a girl gotta do to kill germs around here? Dip her hand in boiling bleach?

Bo-Bo Knows Weird Al Yankovic

Bo-Bo knows Weird Al Yankovic for dogs. Weird Al Caninovic, maybe? How about Weird Cathy Canine? Or maybe just Cathy Canine. But then, who really wants her name paired with anything dog related? In any case, Bo-Bo's inspired quite the canon of canine choruses.* Here are just a few:

Bo-Bo Is My Sunshine
(With apologies to Davis and Charles Mitchell)

You are my Bo-Bo, my only Bo-Bo.
You make me walk when it's cold and gray.
You are my furry home gym on four legs,
please don't take my Bo-Bo away.

The other night, Bo, as I lay sleeping,
you woke me up with your cold nose.
You told me, "get up and put your coat on
'cuz I gotta take a poo."

You are my Bo-Bo, my only Bo-Bo.
You make me walk when it's cold and gray.
You are my furry home gym on four legs,
please don't take my Bo-Bo away.


Walking Together
(With apologies to the Turtles)

Me and Bo and Bo and me
No matter how they toss the dice, he has to pee.
I got to get him on the leash so he can wee
as we walk together.

I can't see me walkin' nobody but you
for all your life.
When he's with me, oh how his pee-pee will flow
for all his life.

Me and Bo and Bo and me
No matter how they toss the dice, he has to pee.
I got to get him on the leash so he can wee
as we walk together.

Bow wow wow wow
bow wow wow wow wow wow wow
bow wow wow WOW!
Bow wow wow wow
bow wow wow wow wow wow wow
bow wow wow WOW!

Me and Bo and Bo and me
No matter how they toss the dice, he has to pee.
I got to get him on the leash so he can wee
as we walk together...

* I'm going to update this post with more canine choruses as they occur to me, so check back!!

Bo-Bo Knows He's Not an Original

Some well-meaning loved-ones expressed concerns recently that my decision to launch a dog blog might be a sign of my impending psychological collapse. That way madness lies and blah, blah, blah.

Pah! At least "Bo-Bo Knows" isn't a cat blog.

Look. I know I’m not the first girl to get swept away by the charms of a jock with a sweet temper and buns of steel—a quick Google search nets* several forums devoted to lovers of retired racers (these are just three):

• Everything Greyhound
• Grey Talk
• Greyhound Gap

Not to mention the hundreds (maybe thousands) of dog blogs out there including greyhound-specific blogs. So to those who say I'm tipping toward touched, I challenge them to google "greyhounds," greyhound blogs," and "greyhound forums." Consider that exhibit one through about 2,000,000 that I'm in good greyhound-gaga company.

In fact, while I was researching the company my blog keeps, I noticed something. Bo's two-timing me by using aliases and playing doggy house with a number of other families. Here's a photo of Bo masquerading as "Clifford" with mama Jen from Jen & The Greyhounds (my favorite hound blog because of Jen's greyhound-art connection).

Et tu Bo-Bo?

According to The American Greyhound Track Operators, greyhounds sport** 18 coat colors. Officially, Bo's a red fawn. Though I'd argue that his white belly and the white-cape-like mark on his neck make him a candidate for a new, 19th color. I'll call it "wonderdog."

The point is, not only am I not the first person to discover the joys of adopting a greyhound, Bo isn't the first greyhound to steal the hearts of man. He's not even the first red fawn to do so. And though I'd like to think he might be the first wonderdog with that honor, I'm sure somewhere in this great, wide canine world of ours, there's a Bo-Bo-impostor with a similar cape wiggling his furry butt into the heart of some family who thinks they're the first to feel that way, too.

If it's true "there's nothing new under the sun,"*** why do we bother? Well if you're talking about adopting dogs or getting married or striving toward goals, that's easy: it's new to us.

But when you're talking about art, it's trickier. Why is it that we reach for the same stories again and again? Why is it that people gravitate toward the same ideas? I'm not talking about a network television channel pumping out reality knock-offs to capitalize on an unfortunate trend. I'm talking about watching your ideas start to blossom from other minds.

I have a phobia of repeating myself. I see a program like Eli Stone hit prime time (a show about a lawyer whose inoperable brain aneurysm is turning him into a visionary) and I'm sure everyone's gonna assume I ripped off the idea; one of my characters suffers from musical ear syndrome as a result of—everyone now—a brain aneurysm. Or a writer friend sends me a glowing review of Beautiful Children (a novel about the Vegas underbelly) and I start to wonder if I should rethink the backstory of the kid from Vegas in my novel. My fiancé is kind enough to lovingly point out that such thinking is, in fact, insane. These two details are small potatoes in the grander scheme of my novel. Besides, boiled down, doesn't every story sound like every other story?

I wouldn't give up on Bo just because somewhere someone else is cooing over a Bo-Bo clone, so I'm sure as hell not gonna let a couple of similar details make me give up on my book before it's finished. Loving a down-on-his-luck retired racer is about the richness the rascal helps me reap. Writing is kinda, sorta about the same thing. Because though it may be true there's nothing new under the sun, there's plenty new under my sun. My book and Bo-Bo for starters.

* Bonus points to anyone who noticed that using the verb "nets" here is a humdinger of an unintentional pun. I like unintentional puns. What I hate is when narrators on food network shows precede a pun with a pause and then say the word as though it's in italics and all caps. A good pun should be quiet as a well-behaved greyhound. The enjoyment reserved only for those who notice them. Bo-Bo completely agrees.

** Oh, I'm just full of them today.

*** No pun, here. Just a note to say I think that's from Ecclesiastes.

Bo-Bo Knows the Joys of Exercise

The smile you see above—yes, dogs smile—is the expression that bubbles up when Bo’s anticipating the company of adoring fans, enjoying an extended walk, or running. This particular smile was the result of an off-leash, crazy-eight dash Bo-Bo enjoyed in a fenced-in playground down the street from where we live.

A quick disclaimer about the photo—This isn’t the best picture I’ve ever taken, but you try capturing a perfect photo when the dog you’re trying to shoot is running like a drunk at 40 miles an hour. Whatever National Geographic pays its photographers to capture endangered squirrels-in-flight is not enough. Even with a beast as stupidly submissive as Bo, capturing the photo I want is really a game of patience (waiting while he mopes about), cunning (figuring out the exact moment he’s gonna snap his head down, fold his body in two, and take off), and skill (I got nine pictures of blurry Bo butt for every one picture of the smile I was after).

So anyway, when Bo-Bo runs, he smiles the tongue-lolling smile of a goofy bastard who's focused on nothing but the happy-go-lucky perfection of the present moment. Clearly, he's a nut. Running’s that thing I did once in a mad panic to flee the eerily moonlit woods that my 10-year-old brain—freshly warped by a marathon reading of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”— convinced me was haunted. Running’s that hurdle my volleyball coaches forced my teams to clear before we could get to the business of practicing with an actual ball. Running’s the supposedly good-for-me exercise that makes my lungs burn in a way that feels about as healthy as breathing next to a chain smoker. Running has made me feel a lot of things, but joy is certainly not one of them.

Not, so for Bo-Bo.

But then again, Bo’s built for this, right? Greyhounds have lungs giant enough to accommodate all the extra air they need to run, hearts strong enough to slam that air to their giant, oxygen-hogging muscles, and spines so flexible that they can fold up when they run only to leap in mid air and fold up again just in time to land (the one time Bo-Bo ran in sand, the tracks he left behind looked like the trail of a giant kid hopping on a pogo stick). My body, on the other hand, is best suited to curl up with a book and lose myself in an imaginary world. Or better yet, camp out in front of a computer and create those imaginary worlds myself.

And while I’m sure that Bo-Bo loses no sleep over the fact that I have a richer imagination than he does, I can’t help but envy him his exercise-induced ecstasy. Bo loves running, so when given the chance, he’s happy to make his drunken dash under the slide, around the sandbox, and back again and again and again. Bo loves walking, so when I take him out, he struts at the end of a leash, his smile wider than the tracks he raced on before we rescued him. In fact, Bo loves walking so much that on days I’m taking my sweet time getting him out the door, he’ll remind me by quietly poking his nose into my breakfast; he only graduates to a tentative bark when it's clear I've moved on from reading while I finish my breakfast to just plain reading. And you should hear the alarm that boy sounds when I have the audacity to sit down at my computer to answer an email or two (though to be fair Bo generally sits at my feet while I write, so he knows all that click-click-clicking means he’s gonna get ignored for a while—barking’s the only sure-fire way to make sure his walk comes before the keyboard claims another morning).

Maybe it’s not the joy of exercise that I envy. I’ll never be much of a runner, but I have come to love walking Bo daily; I’ve even been known to laugh as I try chasing him during his sprints. In the 14 months we’ve had him, Bo’s helped me realize that walking brightens my day as much as it brightens his—so that’s a big something he’s already transferred. But I do envy his focus:

Bo walk? Walk Bo? Walk Bo now? Walk! Walk! Walk!

He loves it. He wants it. No excuses.

But what about me? As a human, I’m the one with the higher order thinking skills. For example, I’m the one who holds Bo back when he wants to traipse into oncoming traffic. I’m the one who can trace a particularly terrible bout of diarrhea back to Bo’s cherished, but apparently toxic new treats. I’m the one who can tell the difference between a plastic bag skittering in the street and Bo’s new best friend. And yet, as important as writing is to me—and I’d have to say it’s at least as important as Bo’s daily constitutional is to him—I don’t always put it first.

And why is that?

It’s not like I’m some dumb (but loveable) animal who needs to wait for someone else to open the door and let me play. My time is mine. My computer is always on. My ideas are always waiting for me to pick them up and play with them. And yet, every once in a while, I catch myself sitting around and hope, hope, hoping today’s the day some leash-wielding someone will give me the command: Sit. Write. Good girl.

At least on those rare days when Bo doesn’t get to go for a walk—they’ve been few, I swear—he can blame me. I guess we have that in common, Bo and I. When I fool myself into believing that work schedules, wedding plans, or socializing are acceptable excuses for preempting my writing, I’ve really got no one to blame but me.