A Little Distance Is Sometimes Needed to See Your Work

Miniature in my Year of the Dog Dog-a-Day project. ©2018 Susan diRende

It is always a surprise to me how different a painting looks the next day. Sometimes a favorite suddenly looks out of whack, and I hurry to fix it, upset that I posted something so off. The real kicker though is how many I post thinking they are middling to bad only to realize the next day that I captured something alive and really lovely. I apparently need distance from the work and my intention for what it should look like to be able to see the work that it is.

Skateboard Curses

Most dogs hate skateboards.
 
Or skateboarders. The distinction is unclear, because I am way too busy controlling my dog to make detached observations.
 
My dog goes ballistic at the first sound of those tiny wheels rolling over the concrete. Even before the board and rider are in sight. This leads me to suspect that the dog hears in the rumble-and-clack some unspeakable threat or insult. I listen for it, and sure enough, I can imagine the board is flinging a stream of curses — fukyoufukyoufukyoufukyou — and what animal brain would not attack back under such insane and senseless assault.
 
 For my animal brain, it is not skateboards that speak so, but honking car horns. If I am calmly waiting for a pedestrian to clear the crosswalk before turning and the car behind me starts honking, my only desire is to put my vehicle in park, get out of the car, and attack his tires. Or piss on them. Or both.
 
 It’s no good telling me to ignore the idiot. How do you ignore someone honking his horn at you? Impossible. How do you not attack. Well, when there are skateboards around, I keep my dog on a very short leash. And since I have my own version of a leash that began with toilet training and continued at least through driver’s education, I would no more get out of my car on a busy street than I would piss on the fire hydrant on the sidewalk. Much as I might want to.

The Feast of St. Rocky, Patron Saint of Dog Lovers

Today is the Feast day of Saint Rock or, as he is familiarly known, Saint Rocky. Saint Rocky is the Patron Saint of Dog Lovers, having been kept alive in the wilderness when he was sick by a dog who brought him bread every day from his master's table. 

St. Rocky got sick tending the plague-stricken and though the plague did not kill him, thanks to Fido the Faithful, it made him so unrecognizable that when he arrived home in Montpellier, he was thrown in jail as an impostor. When he died, his jailers found a birthmark that proved his identity. Why they did not think to look for the birthmark while he was alive remains a mystery.

It is hard to imagine a dog being caught so long by a case of mistaken identity. Smell is not so deceptive, I think, as sight. Sure, diet and health can change the overtones, but out genetic code gives us our basic smell. Even humans with their comparitive dearth of olfactory information processing, it turns out, can read genes by sniffing. Co-eds in a college experiment got to smell men's t-shirts, and chose as smelling "sexy" the shirts worn by guys whose genetic profile meant an immune system that complemented their own, and as "dull" the shirts of guys whose were the most genetically similar. "He smells like my brother" was a comment that was genetically accurate. The nose knows more than we think.