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:
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