We rolled in the grips of passion like From Here to Eternity, oblivious and uncaring that dead grass, dandelions and Ospika traffic would have to do for the sound and sensation of Hawaii`s surf and sand.
"You magnificant, delightful creature," I cooed. "Give me kisses from your perfect face."
My words left her panting, until a deluge of cold reality dampened our stolen situation.
"Animals," said my fiancee, rolling her eyes, before giving us another blast of the garden hose for good measure. "I should probably get them both fixed."
I fell in love with the cutest dog in the world two weeks ago (many thanks to all the other dogs who participated - it wasn't close but you're all winners in your own way). Pepper is a mixed-breed mongrel in the same indiscriminate manner as when the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois attempted to form a coalition government to replace Stephen Harper's Tories. Best guess is she is part blue heeler (ironic since her answer to "Heel!" is to dig in her heels and make like a Republican Congress), part some sort of collie.
You can see the herder in her from the way she patrols the backyard like a naval commando and the way she looks at me like I'm a wayward sheep. She's also smart as I found out the other day.
"The Economist`s fear that the only path for the European Union is either panic, default, dissolution and chaos or monolithic superstate is particularly bleak," I said to her.
"The Economist`s solution is by its own admission naive and technocratic," Pepper replied, glancing up from the English newspaper's leader on the future of the EU. "Europe`s leaders lack the will and mandate for more federalism, however limited, let alone the mutualization of debt that Eurobonds would provide."
"You are both fools," said Olive the cat, stretching from a nap as she wandered into the living room. "The EU is an ill-born, weak-kneed, mealy-mouthed affair and its common currency is as thin as the sanctimonious ideals on which it was based. Its destruction is assured; it will burn and the whole world will burn with it. That's why I'm spending the next year under the bed - that and the fact you brought that ridiculous sack of fleas into this house."
"You're more cheerful today, Olive," I said. "I love you."
"Bite me and hold my calls," Olive answered.
I may have supplied appropriately doggy and kitty voices for Pepper and Olive. But they both know more than me about austerity and hardship. Olive was a pregnant mom on the streets of Vancouver before she was rescued.
Pepper's path before she came to Prince George was more like Europe during World War II, the choice between starvation and a bullet to the back of the head, which is how her mother died. She spent the morning before we picked her up foraging for garbage and avoiding gang rape from bigger dogs in a place where the sexual and substance abuse among humans is so rampant the dealers peddle the anti-nausea drug Gravol.
Apparently if you take 30 pills in a pop, you'll enjoy a hallucinatory experience.
It was a good reminder that in a month marked by distant cannibalism, a desperate form of iSadism, stock shocks and more Syria, there's plenty to be troubled with beside dandelions right in my own backyard. The community where we picked Pepper up from proclaimed, with a sweet sense of tongue in cheek, that it was more than a one horse town (there were maybe seven on the billboard). Where she'd come from was even more remote, a community tenuously connected to Canada by a graded logging road and police who were about an hour and a half away.
The person we'd gotten the dog from had grown up in a Third World laced with the kind of corruption only narcotics can provide. And she was shocked by what she saw right here in northern B.C.
The vet who examined Pepper later that day gave her a decent bill of health. "She's very thin and you can feel her ribs," he said. "Her belly's a bit swollen, so she's probably got worms. She's probably never seen dog food before so she'll have a bit of diarrhea. She's OK though - her world's been turned upside down today."
Mine too, by four spotted paws.
