Disclaimer: 😬
Scout and Japhy like to tell people that Coogee, our dog, went to live on a farm. They talk about him like just another member of the family: “my dog / he lives at the farm.”
People often go “ohhhh,” when they’re told this, and I give them a private nod, like “no he really does.”
In Pennsylvania!
Though Pennsylvania also sounds like a euphemism.
We got Coogee from a rescue in Colorado a decade and a half ago. They breed cattle dogs down in New Mexico, and I suppose he had lost his flock. A rescue down south had shipped him up to Denver, to where all the families are.
He was really a half-red half-blue heeler, like his bottom half had been dipped in the gold and the brindle sprinkled on top. We bought him hiking boots and a backpack, and would take him backcountry skiing. On the way back from the mountains, he’d stick his head out the window and take the joy of it straight to the face. Once, he got pink eye from driving at 60 mph down I-70, but you know what? He was so happy he didn’t care, still beating his tail on the floor as he lay gazing at a slanted, rose-tinted world.
Heelers are the most loyal kind of dog. It is also true that they don’t care much for people other than their owner. In dog parks, he’d stand awkwardly in the middle, jumping whenever anyone tried amiably to sniff his butt. Coogee also had a habit of lunging at other dogs when we walked. Once, when Noodles was with a friend and Coogee did his agro lurch, Noodles went, “He never does that!”
And our friend said, “he did that exact thing last time and you said the same thing then too.”
Coogee was very smart, though, and we trained him to walk with us off leash, and do all kinds of tricks. I believe he loved nothing better than standing on top of a mountain.
Coogee did not love New York City. After we moved, we had a dog walker come during the day, but she’d write in the diary that he had refused to go further than the end of the block. We moved to Brooklyn in time for Scout to be born, and Coogee now had someone to lie on the floor with, someone home all the time. When she was just a starfish bristling with the sounds of the world, she would reach out a hand and scrunch his nearby fur.
By the time there were two children under 3 in the apartment, there was no space left. Twice, Coogee snapped at the kids after they lumbered under the table where he was hiding. The second time, he left a faint pink mark on Scout’s nose.
I uploaded a photo of him to a cattle dog adoption website, and we were contacted by a couple looking for a sheep dog. They didn’t have any sheep yet, and figured they’d start with a dog. “He’s doesn’t actually know how to herd,” we told them.
“That’s OK, we don’t know how to handle sheep,” they said.
After Coogee had been living on the farm for some months, the four of us went to visit him. The farm had old barns and a chicken coop and orchard, the hill sloping down to a creek. The couple helped Scout and Japhy to fetch eggs and feed the chickens. Coogee was excited, he yipped and wagged his tail when we got there, but spent much of our visit roaming the edges of the farm, lost in his doggie work.
After that, the kids had a place to imagine him running around.
This past spring, the couple told us they were worried about a growth in Coogee’s throat, and invited us to visit before he went to the vet for the results. The kids didn’t want to come on a four-hour road trip, so Noodles and I drove south without them.
I knew Coogee would have aged, but when I saw him — slow, a bit blind, a tile reading “I am deaf” around his neck — the memory of seeing him led out of the apartment on a leash a few years earlier landed with a whumpf.
He didn’t recognize us right away, and when I ruffled his fur, I felt his body thin under that lovely coat, the two black spots on his back as silky as they were when he was a puppy. The couple talked about how lucky they felt that we found them, and I glanced around their living room. There on the bookshelf was Introduction to Sheep Herding in hard cover. (Still no sheep.)
The couple buried him on the farm in May, and it felt like a tricky time to tell the kids. Noodles and I both wanted to be home to do it together, but we didn’t want to ruin dinner, or the weekend, or birthday week, and then we were away. Was it worse to tell them from Australia, so far away from their pet?
We got back, and still hadn’t told them. Now the leaves have fallen and last night it snowed, but we talk about him and the farm in the present-tense.
We have a dog
he lives on a farm.
Goodies
If you want more blue heeler action, read this great essay by Sarah Miller.
Rosa Lyster, never not gold, on an art heist, and on rich people playing at being revolutionaries:
At her trial for the theft from her parents’ house, Dugdale, for some reason, spoke like a person who had learned English from 19th-century rebel songs. She called the judge a ‘yeoman’, and predicted that he would give her the longest sentence he could out of fear of ‘the united strength of people of no property, brave men and true
Amy Key in Vittles on poems as food:
On other occasions I crave something dense, like a chocolate truffle, but there’s a craving behind that craving – biting down on someone’s shoulder. How gently can I keep them between my teeth, like a mother cat with a kitten in its mouth? I want tender resistance, for my bite mark to quickly fade
I realize that the Americans here don’t know any of these Aussies, but can I give a hardy “ahoy” and recommendation for Hamish Blake’s new podcast, “How Other Dads Dad.“ As advertised, Hamish speaks with a different dad each week for gems on how to do it, for a generation raised by dads who largely didn’t.
Rebecca Woolf talking to Amanda Montei for “Mad Moms”:
I think a lot of women do that because FEELING NEEDED has been our social currency – whether that need is sexual, or maternal, etc.
This San Francisco Chronicle story about a dad who touted his 8-year-old’s historic climb of El Capitan — later downgraded to “ascent” (i.e., he shimmied up ropes) is such a fascinating case of what I’ll call The American Precocity Complex (editors, I’m here to cover it.)
It has come to my attention that not everyone has read “Negroni Season.”
… and happy book launch to Kate Baer, whom I interviewed back in 2020, and who now has her THIRD POETRY COLLECTION out. It’s called And Yet, and it’s a ripper.
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 <3 <3 Do share if you like! Or tell me what you think.
If you thought this was a bit of alright, you might like some previous KAFKA’S on:
oh! 💔
I want one of these illustrations for Christmas!