A week or two ago in the comments on a previous post (I think it was the one about introverts) we were discussing dogs and cats, and the fact that some people are dog people and some are cat people. I said that I was of neither party. That was inaccurate. It would be more correct to say that I’m of both parties. We have two dogs and three cats, though one of the cats is half-wild and hangs around mainly to be fed and to put sandy footprints on the hood of my car. The dog and cat below are my favorites.
Andy, the little white dog, came to us more or less accidentally. My wife was trying to help person A, who didn’t want the dog, give him to family B, who thought they did, but changed their mind. So we took him from A but were unable to transfer him to B, and A didn’t want him back. That was six or seven years ago. I always said I would never have a little yapping dog, and I would not have picked Andy, but I’ve grown very fond of him. His bark is not irritatingly high-pitched and he doesn’t do that completely hysterical bit that some little dogs do.
To my mind there is no better image of pure exuberant physical joy than the sight of an excited dog running flat-out. Andy does this fairly often. He’s a bichon frisé, and is subject to something called the bichon buzz (or blitz) in which he runs around frantically for several minutes. I want a good picture of him in mid-buzz. This one isn’t very good, but it’s the best I have so far.
My wife is definitely a cat person. Having insisted that once the children were grown there would be No More Animals coming to live with us, she seems unembarrassed by the fact that she fell for a snow-white kitten which someone she works with was trying to give away. And that’s how we got Meme.
Where dogs are open, exuberant, affable, crude, dirty, and extremely sensitive and responsive to the people around them, cats are guarded, restrained, cool, elegant, clean, and not particularly interested in what people want of them, though they may like human company—Meme certainly does, and demands it pretty aggressively sometimes. Dogs are active, cats are contemplative. Meme in this picture could be taken to be admiring herself, but I see it rather as a sort of introspection, a dialog with her soul.
The pictures are better if you enlarge them (click on them), especially the one of Meme.
(There are a number of bichon buzz/blitz videos on YouTube. Here’s one.)
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment