MY NEW DOG

Tillie has a new dog. Well, it was supposed to be hers.

A guy on her dorm floor, David, has parents who raise Tibetan Terriers. He said that they sell the puppies, but that sometimes they have older dogs that didn't sell as puppies, and they would probably be willing to give Tillie one. If the logic of Tillie getting a dog escapes you--she lives in a dorm, she's going to be a live-in counselor at a church camp all summer, and she's living in a dorm again next year--you're right, but I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. Having successfully fought off pleas for a kitten at Christmas, my defenses were weakened. I said if they wanted to give her a Tibetan Terrier, I'd come over and pick it up.

Two weeks later, I got the call to go to the dorm and pick up Tillie's new year-old Tibetan Terrier. He was black, matted, on the small side for a TT supposedly (according to the breeders, anyway--they said he was a runt) and very nervous about being away from his familiar people.

I drove over there and Tillie and a dog-loving friend from the dorm were sitting out in the rain with the dog. (Dogs are not allowed in the dorm buildings AT ALL, EVER, as we found when we tried to walk our lab into the dorm briefly while trick-or-treating with the little girls at Halloween. One of the Residence Hall Nazis, horrified, immediately shooed us out, as if we'd tried to lead a cattle drive through her building.)

So there they were in the rain. They said good-bye to the dog and retreated for drier quarters while I carried the dog to the car (he was apparently unacquainted with a leash). I'm not even sure Tillie really wanted this dog by this time, or if she was just taking him to be polite, having said she wanted him before she saw him. He was not a face-licking, love-everyone kind of dog. He was a matted, slightly smelly, get-me-outta-here kind of dog. Tillie hasn't shown much interest in him since. Of course, she has finals this week. She's busy. It's my dog, basically.

Anyway, I took him home. We named him Telemain, after a magician in the Dealing With Dragons book series.

I am a former dog groomer, and I couldn't stand the mats being in my house for one minute, so he got an immediate brushout and haircut and then a bath. That wasn't quite enough, so the next day he got another haircut, smoothing things out a bit more. After that he was starting to look pretty darn good. And I was very surprised that our nervous dog acted steady as a rock during his (somewhat painful) brushout. Most nervous dogs will snap when they feel pain. This guy was possibly one of the steadiest dogs I'd ever groomed, although he still obviously wanted to be somewhere else. Odd.

His hair was odd, too. The books say that TTs have hair something like human hair. They are supposed to be one of those breeds that you can get if you have allergies. At first I intended to just brush him out and keep all the hair, but it started to look pretty quickly like he'd suffer horribly through a humid Midwest summer with all that hair, so I took some off. It's amazing stuff, thick, but with no undercoat. I guess to survive in Tibet, you need some significant hair.

He actually looks a lot like a black cockapoo, but by golly, the dog really does seem to be a TT. He looks like the pictures in the books (minus some hair, now) and he acts like the descriptions. His shyness is apparently a feature of TTs, who, one book says, will turn and walk away when disturbed about something. He doesn't like strange people, and he's not thrilled about going places.

After about two days, we--especially I--ceased to fall into the "strange people" category, and I found myself with a pretty good dog. He follows me around. He lies at my feet when I'm on the computer. He sleeps by my side of the bed.

I was a bit down today over the usual struggles with Angelo, and I went in my room and lay down on the bed for a while. Telemain actually got up beside me and licked my face. The other dogs like me, but they don't show quite this intuitiveness. The books say that TTs tend to sense the emotions of their owners. Hmm.

The last thing we needed around here was another dog, but I like my new dog. David'll have to give Tillie one of her own someday.