Half Bubble Off Plumb
This is the nice, midwestern way of saying someone is a little bit wacky. Slightly kooky. Interesting. Emma is our first dog and she is a half bubble off plumb, even for an Aussie.
As a clinical psychologist, I thought that training a dog would be easy. I spent seven years studying behaviorism and decades providing care for patients with complex mental health needs. The first book I was assigned to study in grad school was Don’t Shoot the Dog, the seminal guide to behavioral training methods.
“How difficult could it be to train this fuzzball of a puppy?” I asked myself.
Turns out, very, very difficult. Sobbing in the shower difficult. Self-medicating with pints of ice cream difficult.
Dogs do what makes sense for them in the moment. For Emma, this meant being an independent agent. She did not like cuddles. She did not like her crate. She did not like her leash. She wanted to explore the amazing world on her own terms. She could be enticed by food, to a point, but cookies were far less interesting than dogs, people, smells, squirrels and cats.
At the dog beach, Emma used to run in the opposite direction when we called her name. She knew it was time to go home and she was not having it. She did not care that we were waving about broiled salmon chunks. She would race away down the beach while all the other dogs flocked to us, eagerly showing off their polite sits. We relied on kind strangers to corral and leash Emma so we could go home. It was deeply embarrassing.
Somehow we all held on and made it through.
Now, just shy of two years, Emma is starting to blossom into a lovely adult dog. Thousands of hours of slow, gradual training means that she has decent recall. She will wheel around, out of a pack of running dogs, to come to us (and our cheese) when we call her name. It is magical.
Sometimes I wake up at 2 am and take a moment to revel in the silence of the house. The dog is deeply asleep.
“No barking! No whining! No toenails click-clacking about!” I whisper quietly, hugging myself with joy before rolling over and going back to sleep.
The new puppy arrives in three days.
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Like getting a second dog when the first one nearly broke you. This is not a decision made by someone of sound mind. If Emma is a half bubble off plumb, so am I. Together Emma and I will forge on, both slightly askew, with a new puppy trailing behind.
