Bullish for grand-pup
You know those bitterly cold days earlier this week? The ones that shook us from our warm autumn complacency and launched us into the icy insult of early winter?
I spent hours of those days and nights bundled up like a crystal vase in an Amazon box, holding a leash while pacing the yard behind my house. At the other end of the leash was a low-slung, snorting block of muscle named Gabby.
Gabby is my daughter and son-in-law’s English bulldog, my house guest while the kids are on vacation. While I’ve had the pup as a guest many times since the kids moved back here, this is the first time it’s been just the two of us, a learning curve that’s been both rewarding and challenging.
In the page of instructions my daughter left, there were the usual items about feeding and just-in-case medications. At the bottom was an emphatic directive that I give her lots of love and affection, because Gabby might be homesick and sad.
To be honest, who could even tell? Gabby, as all of her breed, has a single and unchanging facial expression that is inscrutable.
“Is she mad at me?” I asked my daughter the first time I met her.
“She always looks like that,” she said.
Look at photos of very small English bulldog puppies and you understand why my kids were so taken with her. The underbite, exposed couple of teeth, and all the wrinkles give her an adorable countenance. Her nose is receded in a way that suggests that if I were to reach into her mouth and get behind there, I could pop her nose back out, like one of those rubber popper toys.
Several times a day she wanders to the front door and I attach her harness. We wander the grassy areas around my house. She snorts and snuffles, dragging her snout along the ground. Sometimes she’ll freeze in place as she lifts her head to sample the air.
“Let’s get to work, here,” I’ll say as I shiver in the wind. This dog takes forever to do her business, walking and searching and sampling until she finds exactly the right spot. Gabby is the exact opposite of my late, beloved sheltie Smoothie, who was an organized and precise business-doer. From the front door to the dog park down the block to back home took less than five minutes, an efficiency I appreciated on cold days.
Having Gabby here makes me think of how different a bulldog is from, say, a sheltie or most other breeds. A Great Dane is so unlike, say, a cocker spaniel as to suggest they are not both dogs but two different species.
Centuries of selective breeding have landed this sweet, good-natured, persnickety pup in my care. A few times a day she’ll wander over with her stuffed duck in her mouth. After wrestling it from her I’ll toss it, and that will begin a game of keep away. I’ll chase her around the room for 10 minutes, then she’ll return to her bed and sleep for the rest of the day.
Sometimes when I wake her she’ll lift her head and give me a side-eye stare. From a different breed, that side-eye would mean annoyance or anger. With this grand-dog of mine, it’s just how she looks.
I promised to send photos to the kids while they are away. Every day I’ll capture Gabby sleeping or waiting at the door.
“She’s so cute,” my daughter will text back.
That, she is. The kids return home tonight, and they’ll take Gabby home. I will miss that face.