My wife is visiting her best friend, who lives a couple of hours away. This is a Good ThingTM. I'm a big fan of keeping my wife happy, and visiting her best friend helps make her happy.
But two things happened this weekend that changed my plans. First, we decided that Pixie, our lovable toy poodle, would stay home with me. She gets carsick, and the two hour drive is just miserable for her. Second, at the last minute, all the kids decided to go with mom.
So here I am, at home with Pixie, and getting ready to ride a century. Now, Pixie is a Good Girl. Normally, I could feed, water, walk, and play with her, then schedule my ride right, and she'd happily curl up into her crate while I was gone for 8 or more hours. Normally.
But Pixie is also a very social dog. We have a big family - eight kids - and we usually have people in and out of our house a lot. With 'mom' and all the kids gone, Pixie is very lonely. Everybody left Thursday night, so she's been missing everybody for over a day now. She rings her doorbell to go outside, so I take her out, and walk her for 30 minutes while she takes me all over the neighborhood. I get her inside, and she runs all over the house looking for the people she was convinced had come home while she was out. Five minutes later, she's ringing her bell again, and we start the cycle over. It went on like this all evening, and now all morning.
It took me a while to figure out that she was headed everywhere where my kids hang out - the path to the bus stop my two daughters take, the walkway to the elementary school my youngest son takes... the yards to my kids' friends' houses... the park where they all play... over and over, every trip, two or three times an hour.
It's pitiful. She's lonely, and no amount of ME spending time with her can distract her from the basic truth of her world: everybody is MISSING, but she's convinced that if she goes outside and comes back in enough times, they will magically come home.
I just simply can't see abandoning her in her time of need. Next week, that ride is mine. For now, I'm trying to console a lonely puppy.
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