Bo is My Emotional Smoke Alarm
Most dog owners will claim that their friend is the sweetest creature on four paws, a nice sentiment but clearly not accurate. My buddy Bo holds that title, has for years and at 11 can probably keep it for another three or four.
He does have the advantage of being a very pretty boy. People tend to treat the good looking among us a shade better than the rest, and at 80 pounds he’s never met a mean person. People who don’t like dogs steer a wide path around his considerable presence, and people who do like dogs treat him like approachable royalty.
Bo is the second dog I rescued from my old Dad, Max was the first. Possibly a little lighter in weight, Max rippled in muscles from his hard head to his springy toes and was a true rescue. At 80 and a little frail, Dad couldn’t safely handle Max and planned to return him to Lab Rescue of California… before I stepped in. Nine years later I actually helped Dad buy Bo, a somewhat skinny and humbly well behaved fully trained duck dog. Reversing my denial driven “assistance” was the least I could do when home life morphed Bo into a bounding bundle of action.
It took some months to rub off Bo’s rough edges, but then his sweet nature took the fore. Max, who was 10 by that time, quickly schooled Bo on his tertiary place in the family pecking order, but Bo was just naturally a good boy. Max loved to stretch every rule, break them clean when he could. Bo couldn’t conceive of rule breaking as a concept.
At age 92 Dad could no longer live alone, I moved him in with us, and Bo took up his watch. Sweetness was never Dad’s forte, and dependency rankled his sense of self. I tried to look the other way from the occasional kicks aimed at Bo, Bo ignored them entirely and maintained his position at Dad’s feet.
Max left the family first, Dad followed four years later. I wrote about their departures here on Medium, Awkward Endings, and The Race is Run. Five months prior to the Covid lockdowns I had moved Dad into an assisted living facility, and then into their memory care unit. When the facility shut their doors to us (Bo and I) I was suddenly relieved of the daily duty to show up for cocktail hour and dinner and to deal with his fairly regular emotional and memory upsets. Bo and I sailed into uncharted waters, the two of us rattling around in a three-bedroom house and able to do what we wanted, when we wanted. I ventured into rebuilding the life that had been interrupted for a decade by my accelerating elder care responsibilities.
Hand tool woodworking was my savior.
An Ebay purchase of an antique Stanley joiner plane tipped me down the rabbit hole. I bought the plane so that I could work on some wood embellishments to my drift boat without having to drive twenty minutes to my old business shop to square and straighten the edge of a board. But cats have kittens. The plane needed restoration and sharpening, and it turns out you can learn how to do anything on YouTube. Within weeks I was building work benches, buying more old tools, restoring more old tools. Good clean fun and the only drawback was waiting in line for limited pandemic entry to Home Depot.
It only took about eight months and the onset of freezing winter days for me to realize I needed an indoor shop more than I needed a master suite; the suite was unfinished anyway and needed little conversion to suit my rough purposes. While Bo never liked to spend time in the garage shop he didn’t mind visiting the indoor version. I came to realize, however, that I wasn’t always fun to be around.
I had what they call “anger issues”, directed at myself of course, and totally out of proportion with the triggers that set them off. I’d like to say that I was capable of rebuilding the sagging psychological structures that fed my rages…I wasn’t, of course, but I could access expert help.
I had started counseling to deal with the stress of 24/7 caregiving and continued after discovering in the process that I had problems of my own. Ever patient, Kara helped me delve into the sources of my silly outbursts, and as I toned them down I also started to notice the effect they were having on Bo.
I suspect that any sane person would have found the spectacle of a very adult man stomping around and swearing because he couldn’t find his pencil to be disturbing. Bo’s only irrational side is brought out by tennis balls… his normal and rational reaction to my upsets was to slump down with trembling feet and shoulders, at which point I would have to take a few deep breaths and get down on the floor to reassure him that HE wasn’t at fault and that I was going to be okay.
I feel that I have improved a lot over the last year. Rarely does the slip of chisel or a fugitive C clamp piss me off that much. But I still do react to the missteps and misplacements, usually with a low volume moan or a salty phrase. When an unhappy sound does escape my lips however, I can expect to hear the clumping of Bo’s bad leg as he traces a path from his favorite couch in the front room back to the shop.
He peers in the door, gives me a look that clearly says, “What’s the problem NOW?” and then lays down under foot or on one of his shop beds to make sure he’s broken up the bad vibes.
Sometimes I’m too focused on my task to even be aware of my distress signal, Bo’s face at the door is my first clue that things have gone a little south emotionally. In my contracting days we had a little shorthand for required behavior when clients were around; “milkshake rules” meant that the first person who swore had to buy the crew a milkshake as punishment.
While beer was probably the drink of choice on our sites, I had picked up this standard working with a Mormon contractor and his “dry” crew; the concept always gave us a laugh. I guess I’m now working under biscuit rules, not that Bo ever makes a profit from my lip slips. I have noticed that he is pulling the same trembling act when I swear at lying politicians on the evening news, can a monk’s vow of silence be far behind?
