Hotel for Dogs

Walking the dog around the neighborhood at nighttime, it seems like we’re taking a tour of a Mental Institution for Dogs – a wild assortment of insane howls, yips and shrieks. A real Halloweentime Horror Show. Imagined by me then are the countless dogs that make these sounds: their names, much like those certain birds, are comparable English transliterations of their spoken call.

List of Dog Names:

1) “OUCH! YES! OUCH! YES!”
2) “OH! OH! OH! GIMMIE GIMMIE!”
3) “FIVE MILES NORTH! FIVE MILES NORTH!”
4) “BUY ME SOME SMOKES!”
5) “I WILL FIND YOU! AND I WILL END YOU!”

Our dog sounds, when confronted with the calls these bona fide madmen, like a wimpy and squealing rusty porch swing: “eee…eee..eee…”

BUT:

It smells like fall now. Cold with wood/leaves burning somewhere. Smells of foods and sounds of families milling around inside warm and warmly lit houses. There are elaborate Halloween decorations in every front yard of every house on the block.

AND:

All this talk of Mental Institutions for Dogs has me thinking about the Good Old Days when maybe 7-year-old-ish me and my Grandma (Aka: “Nan”; Aka: “Esther Louise”) would go to visit my Great Grandmother (Aka: “Nanny Swick”) at the Nursing Home. We would cruise by the drive thru of Long John Silver’s and get a big greasy bag of deep fried fish parts and head on over to the nursing home where her mother lived. As you know, there is always the smell of bad-smelling cleaner masking the smell of human pee in these places. Specifically: Lauren and I both recall walking through this place with our big bag of Long John Silver’s and being confronted by an old woman in a wheelchair who was, at the top of her lungs, exclaiming “WHERE YOU GONNA TAKE ME?! WHERE YOU GONNA TAKE ME?!?!” Later, there was another old man who screamed, “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!”, which was, many years later, an ad slogan for the Community College I attended.