Better Betty Management
Kim is away this week. Betty is confused. Betty is always a little bit confused, but she is especially confused this week. On a normal day when she is not sleeping, she will wander from here to there in the house with a modicum of purpose, seeking something I presume to be Kim’s presence. It reassures her that Kim is nearby. Lots of people, including Kim, anthropomorphize that as Betty’s love for Kim. I have a more basic interpretation that Betty knows where her bread is buttered and after a lifetime of seeking sustenance as her full-time profession, she is quick to realize that Kim is the best thing that has ever happened to her. She wants nothing more than to keep that by her side. I am not convinced that that is such a wrong or even crass definition of love. Few of us cease to exist in the absence of the love we have known, and most of us seek out a substitute that can best fill the gap, whether in our need fulfillment or in our souls. With Betty it is a bit more challenging to define since that purposeful trot in search of Kim can quickly turn into a stand and stare at the void program for Betty since I think she forgets what she was going from here to there to do. Betty serves as a mechanism of foreshadowing to me as I suspect there may come a day when I too wander the house in search of Kim and then get distracted and wonder what I went from here to there to find.
We have Colean, our local dog-sitter/walker helping out his week. She comes three times per day to feed, walk and medicate Betty. It is not clear that that is all that Betty needs to sustain herself in the long run, but it seems to cover the majority of her needs for a few days of Kim’s absence. With Gary and Oswaldo here with me for most of the week, we give her that added margin of attention and occasional treats to keep Betty right where she wants to be in terms of immediate needs. While that is all well and good, even Betty is smart enough to realize that that is only a temporary fix. If we plan to be gone for more than a few days, we bring in the heavy artillery in the form of Natasha. Natasha is Betty’s surrogate mother. Natasha reckons that if Colean is a public school tutor, Natasha is a private school counselor/teacher/guru. If Colean gives Betty 90% of what she needs to survive, Natasha gives her 99%. But even after an extended absence, Betty knows to welcome Kim home with open paws, less probably because of the added 1% she gets from her, and more because of the extra credit of permanence and that intangible “love” factor that Kim provides her.
Betty’s pattern in Kim’s absence is to sleep in our bedroom, but just as she tends to sleep on the floor or rug under normal conditions, she does that as well in Kim’s absence. Colean comes by at 7am to take Betty out for a walk, to give her breakfast and to give her one of her two insulin injections for the day. Betty is a high-maintenance pet, but after that routine, Betty settles in to her morning nap. Nothing about Gary and Oswaldo’s presence seems to bother Betty too much. They have stayed with us a lot over the last three years, so she seems pretty comfortable with them. Kim says that she is also comfortable with the Thursday morning cleaning crew that comes in to clean the place up, so this morning she was destined to be left with them while the three of us took a mini-roadtrip up to Palomar Mountain and Lake Henshaw. While at lunch, Kim called and explained that the cleaning crew reported that Betty had had a living room accident involving a case of doggy diarrhea, which they cleaned up. That was good luck for me on timing for Betty. While I have done my share of cleaning up shit, doggy diarrhea is not high on my list of things to clean up.
When we returned after eating lunch out on the road, Betty was pretty much engaged in her afternoon nap until Colean came around again at dinner time for a repeat of the walk/feed/medicate program. Afterwards, as Gary, Oswaldo and I entertained my sister Kathy and her husband Bennett for dinner, Betty had the good graces to leave us alone and further catch up on her sleep back in the living room or bedroom, as she pleased. Usually I would expect her to be at my feet begging for some piece of the ribeye Oswaldo had nicely grilled for me, but she just did her own thing instead. That gave us lots of time to chat and chew as they say. Afterwards and for several hours of watching the original Jack Reacher movie, she just snoozed away in the bedroom and was not characteristically underfoot. For some reason, Betty seems at ease with this configuration of Gary & Oswaldo spending time with me while Kim is off galavanting around NYC. She is allowing Colean to take care of her and she is spending the rest of her time just snoozing the day and night away. They say dogs don’t really have a sense of time other than what the sun tells them. Betty’s patterns would agree with that conclusion since she still gets up about 6am and is fast asleep before 9pm. She does give off a vibe that she is missing something in her life, which we know is Kim, but I guess that Kim is away from her enough for her to have adjusted and just go with the flow until she eventually returns.
It will be interesting to see how she copes over the weekend when it will be just me and her (and Colean’s continued three-times-a-day interventions). I haven’t really decided what I will be doing this weekend since my dance card is currently wide open. In some ways, I will be more or less in a Betty state of mind since I won’t really have any obligations nor anything specific to do. I’m not sure that laying around the house all day and catching more Z’s than I normally do is all that good for me, so while I like to liken my mental state to that of our lost and aged street dog who has landed herself in dog heaven, I will have more down time than normal if I do not plan to use it some other way. I’m guessing that I will take a long motorcycle ride one of the two days since I do that so infrequently these days. We just drove up Mount Palomar yesterday, so the logical route might be to go check out the Ortega Highway. I like wandering through the hills over Lake Elsinore and haven’t done so in quite a while. Maybe I’ll check in with my motorcycle friend Capistrano Bob and see if he wants to meet for a ride up the mountain. I can then follow him back down to the Ocean and ride back through Camp Pendleton. I may even see if its possible to explore the base since I always go past without seeing what’s what over there.
I tend to make fun of Betty when I speak of her to people. I talk about how she doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on around her. She certainly does have a ditzy way about her, but as I sit here getting a peak at an otherwise purposeless weekend ahead of me, I start to understand her state of mind a bit better. She may not have a clue, but I’m beginning to think that maybe she does need to have a clue to be happy. She gets fed and has a warm r cool spot to sit, sleep or relax in between being fed on a regular schedule. That’s not a bad deal for any of us. I keep wondering if there is anything I can do for better Betty management, and what I am starting to conclude is that Betty’s life is already pretty perfect.