Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: dog

  • it has sun

    In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.”

    We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He had on a blend of waterfront worker and Clash renegade, a scarlet beanie; she was doused in a long, woollen coat with skirts, like she had stepped out of the moors to take the city air. I was struggling to put all of this into words and he said, “Their cute sort of karate look.”

    I pressed his hand. “Karate-karaoke-paparazzi.”

    We walked back past the housefront biliously painted with darker green highlights which says at arm height worst green ever. He had a conversation with the guy whose dog is wrapped in a torn army blanket, on the metal access ramp to the ATM foyer at the bank. This man is American and clearly made his life here years ago, but his German is poor. As is he. His devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth.

    In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.”

    “I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-height windows shyly, as we pass. “If I ever start gigging again.”

  • nation of dog lovers

    You know you’re in Germany when you can saunter into a department store carrying your dog on a leash. The dog accompanies you up the escalator, looking longingly across at the fluffy bunnies quivering in their mesh cages down in the pet department. When the dog starts barking and kicks up a fuss in the queue to pay for haberdashery findings, and everyone turns with expressions of indulgent affection, that’s when you know you’re in Germany. When the woman staffing the cash register leans in to ask confidingly, Darf er eine Leckerli haben? Is he allowed to have a little treat? She has drawn open her cash drawer and pulled out a little bag of crackling dog treats. She gazes over the counter at the dog with a doting expression. She says, Mäuschen? my little mousie-mouse? wouldn’t you like a little yummy treat? The people at the next register have stopped their transaction to watch. Everybody is smiling fondly. The dog takes the treat politely, then drops it to the floor. His owner, known in German as the Herrchen, the little husband of the dog, bends to pick it up and then the dog takes it and gulps it down. An elderly lady in the queue says, That’s right. He takes it only from his Herrchen.

  • the dark lit me home

    I rode home after writing in a large dim room in silence with four other people. The evening blue was ripening to black, like a terrible bruise. In the dark other, unlighted bicycles hurtled past, people were strolling. The cars make way for bicycles and the cyclists make way for pedestrians and dogs. It is warm still and all the bars spill into the street. At a local bar the owner has a shaggy Alsation who was lounging out front, his paws sprawling forward, his orange ball lying some distance away. People walked around him without question. His head was tilted and he gazed into the sky abstractedly, as if he was looking at the moon.

    Today a boat went by under a bridge I was crossing on foot, just a little motor boat. Maybe the length of two bath tubs. Three people were sat in it, two wearing hats and two with dogs on their laps. They made a wide round and turned to the old rusted pontoon which may perhaps be where the bridge was once footed. The pontoon protrudes into the stream and is painted bright yellow, like an inflatable dinghy, for safety. The man with the doggie on his lap cut the engine and the three of them floated, inspecting the guerrilla garden of bright flowers someone has planted in the rusted out hollows.

    To carry the soil there and fill the rusted holes with fertility, to scramble down the bank every couple of days to water the plants: this seemed to me a beautiful enterprise. I showed the photos I made to a friend who said, Yes: I heard the guy who made that garden painted the outer rims black, because it was lovelier. Then he was fined because it was unsafe; and now all the old metal is yellow again. After our conversation I came out again onto the tree-lined street and rode home, following the moon all the way, more white than yellow, and hiding ineffectually in a tangle of treetops, in obscuring golden street lights, and behind partial cloud.

  • walnut hound

    We are travelling with a medium-sized hound named Felix and tonight I learned something uncanny about him. There is a bowl of walnuts on the low coffee table by the horde of tealight candles, santa-shaped geegaws, and slinky Christmas lights. The adult son of the house picked up a walnut. “Now watch,” he instructed, and gave it to the dog. Felix stretched himself under grandma’s chair and propped his two paws out in front of him. Delicately he turned his head first left then right, cracking the walnut shell from either end with his long white teeth. The turns of his head on the floor looked so adoring, he held the nut between his two hairy paws. Having dispersed the shell he spent a few juicy-sounding minutes extracting for himself the slivers of meat and scarfing them down ecstatically. I’ve never seen a dog behave like that. When I cracked a walnut for myself – with a nutcracker – he came and sat beside me and gazed with reproachful intensity at every movement. They told me how Felix climbs on the couch and puts one paw up on the coffee table so he can reach the bowl.

    The other discovery I made this evening is that if you crack a walnut open cleanly enough, the halved nut with its blade of faintly gleaming wood still attached down the centre can be made to flutter through the air and resembles a tiny butterfly.

  • the lonely honest man

    A man on the street broke my heart open and I can’t stop thinking about him. We had turned a corner heading for my friend’s atelier to surprise-visit her, when out from behind a parked car bounced this large, bounding, fierce-looking black dog. We both stood in front of our much smaller dog and got fierce in turn. The dog’s keeper ran down the street shouting something it took me a while to understand. He was calling, She won’t hurt you! She won’t hurt you! He drew abreast, out of breath, and began to explain his dog was always over-friendly, people got a fright, she wouldn’t hurt a hedgehog, she’s as gentle as milk. In Germany most milk is super-heat-treated longlife and tastes faintly of benzine so I take this with a bar of soap. But the two doggies were gambolling together merrily and the size of the big black hound was no way her fault.

    “She’s 13 years old,” he explained. Garrulous. My partner was looking at the dog closely, then at the man. “Did she… didn’t she used to live on such and such street? Over by the park.” Yes, said the guy, she belonged to someone else then. “Yes… Punker dog.” Well, he said modestly: not exactly a punker dog but he had rescued her from this large co-op over by the markets… “This is Sheila,” he said, nudging her with his calf.

    “Hello, Sheila,” we said. The man went on to describe some more about her and her gentle nature, how long he had had her. I was feeling tuckered out and my attention soon waned. As we parted he said, it was nice talking with you, and then called out something else which I answered, to my shame, with a fake laugh and a generalised kind of “yeah, right,” because his German was too quick for me and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out what it was he had said.

    As we walked on past the florist with its three kinds of pine branches for sale in steel carts out front and its purple pots of heather, I asked, “What was it he was saying at the end?” My partner repeated it. “So was passiert nur selten in meinem Leben.” Such a thing happens only rarely in my life. That is, people are seldom so friendly to him and take the time to chat. I groaned and looked round. The man was, of course, gone, with his big goofy dog, back into the labyrinth of endless cold stony streets. How honest of him, how honourable. How kind and sweet and how little I’d deserved it. Because while he was remarking, like a good-hearted human, that a conversation – even so brief of a streetside conversation about dogs – was a rarity and how nice of us it was to talk with him, when he himself brought so much attentive curiosity, so much willingness to share his history and to lay people’s fears like rice to rest, I had been growing bored and wondering, how much longer do we have to chat with this fellow and his dog, my back is aching, I just want to go home. Now I wish I had heard him and had answered properly. Had given him a hug. Had said, Yes, it’s true: my friend, we are all lonely at heart.