Bo-Bo gets mentioned in my (micro) article in today's Globe. Extra! Extra! Click here to read all about it...
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
An Open Letter to My Adoring Public
Dearest peeps and pups,
Your favorite furry beast,
Bo-Bo
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:Enough, OK? Love to my favorite peeps and a milkbone for each of my fallen racing homeys.
- Crazy
- Dummy
- Bo-Bo MTV raps.
Your favorite furry beast,
Bo-Bo
Sunday, March 23, 2008
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* 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:
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* 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:
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Bo-Bo Knows Generics Are Dead to Me
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
Friday, March 7, 2008
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 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!!
Friday, February 29, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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