Attending the school of Ruby

Have you ever been sitting on the couch reading the newspaper or watching the news or catching up with a show on Amazon, and your dog comes up and stands on the floor and stares straight at you?  I mean, right into your eyes.  Our dog Ruby does it all the time.  She’ll walk up and she’ll just look at Tracy until she does what she wants.  Of course she can’t speak except in the language of Ruby, which we’re still learning every day.  

Maybe she needs to pee, so Tracy will say, “You want to go outside?”  If that’s not it, she’ll just keep standing there looking from one to the other of us expectantly.  She’s not asking us something using words, as Tracy might ask me to hand her a magazine that’s in front of me on the coffee table, or I might ask her to turn off her reading light so we can see the picture on the TV better.  But the look on her face is expectant.  She’s alert and poised and waiting for us to figure out what she wants.

With me, she doesn’t stand there and stare, she rubs against my leg and turns her head and looks at me upside down, or she pirouettes on her back legs pawing at the air with her front paws until I look up from whatever I’m doing and acknowledge her.  She does the same thing, pawing at my leg when I’m at my desk writing when she has seen a squirrel or feeding deer through the sliding door and wants to go outside and chase them.   

Sometimes we’ll run down a little list of Ruby stuff, like picking up one of her toys and shaking it to see if she wants to play or walking over to the kitchen to check her water bowl to make sure we didn’t forget to fill it or looking under the table to see if she has nosed her rawhide chew into a spot where she can’t get to it.  It often turns out that what she’s doing is waiting to see what we’re going to do.  That usually happens later in the evening, towards bedtime.  Her little inner clock has signaled that it’s time to go upstairs to bed, and she’s waiting for us to get the message too.

Like many dog owners, we spend quite a bit of time talking to her.  She’ll be walking around sniffing the floor in a way she doesn’t usually do, and one of us will say, “Ruby, what are you doing?”  We’re not expecting a reply, although sometimes it becomes evident that she’s following one of the carpenter ants that are in some kind of mating season and are crawling around the studio more than usual.  But we’re not talking to ourselves, we’re talking to her.  One night I was curious about what she was doing standing over by the sliding door to the patio looking out, and an instant later we got hit by a thunder-burst that shook the panes of the studio windows and pelted the roof with a sound that practically drowned out the TV.  That’s what she was doing, waiting for the rain.  She could smell it coming, or maybe with her sharp eyes she could see it moving in sheets across the yard toward the studio in the dark.

The school of Ruby doesn’t have spring break or summer vacation.  It’s in session every day, year round.  I don’t think a day goes by that we don’t learn from her, or she learns from us.  Maybe the most wonderful thing about the school of Ruby is its routine.  It’s like being permanently in junior high, the same things happening in much the same way at the same time every day.  I was a terrible student and used to think school was boring and ridiculous until I had kids.  Then I saw what the routine of school did for them:  its repetitiveness helped give order to their lives and challenged them at the same time.  It wasn’t like they did the exact same thing every day, although the general outlines of the routine didn’t change.  It was that doing the same thing emphasized the freshness of change when it happened, and it happened all the time with what they learned and how they learned it.

It’s the same at the school of Ruby.  We have a routine in the morning.  She’ll be on the floor on her thick terry-cloth pallet or getting a few last winks at the foot of the bed when we wake up, and we’ll lie around for awhile drinking coffee and checking our phones, and then the time comes for me to go down to the One Stop Market and get the paper and whatever else we need, so one of will call out, “Monster!”  She has a nickname, The Monster, we use sometimes to get her attention.  “Monster!  You want to go One Stop?  Want to go in the…car?”  Oh boy does she know the words “One Stop” and “car.”  She’ll launch herself from the foot of the bed and start this thing she does we call mongling.  She gets up against Tracy and nose-dives under her side, digging with her feet to get deeper under Tracy’s arm or her waist, and she’ll start grunting, making what can only be described as a deep noise of excitement and delight, and she’ll flop onto her back and wiggle until one of us rubs her belly, and she’ll turn over and nose-dive again under Tracy, and then she’ll shift over to me and begin a completely new set of moves, slithering up against me moving her nose along my body until she’s right under my chin, and she gives me a single lick of her tongue, and then she moves over and starts nose-diving under Tracy all over again.

It’s completely wonderful, her excitement and anticipation that she’s going to do the exact same thing she did the day before!  She’s going to get in the car with me and drive to the One Stop and possibly see dogs being walked along the roadside and a couple of squirrels and maybe even some wild turkeys crossing the road!  There’s absolutely nothing new that’s going to happen, yet a mundane routine is transformed into something magical by a dog.

There are no diplomas at the school of Ruby.  You don’t graduate from learning every day about the depth of her love.