Inert Gas

If I ate an entire box of donuts after dinner, and I mean entire -- box and all -- I'd fart all night too. I'd probably have the decency to sleep with my butt as far from someone else's face as possible, but Manny gets away with stuff like that.

Actually, I cherish Manny's odd sleeping position (no matter where I move, he shifts so that his rear end is never far from my nose); it's what he's always done, and, in the wake of Leo's death in May, it did not go away. Unlike his eyesight. Or his boundless energy (when you bump your face into brick walls constantly, you slow down a little). Or his delightful ability to sleep soundly all night and until a very civilized hour in the morning, no matter how often Leo barked his head off before dawn.

These days, Manny is restless, and he starts making the most awful noise at four in the morning, like clockwork. I had never heard this particular noise before Leo died, but maybe that's just because all the barking drowned it out. It's a crackly whine, a high pitched quasi bark that has a bit of that nails on a blackboard quality, though it would probably be less grating at a more decent hour. I try to be tough. I squeeze the pillows over my ears and pretend I hear nothing, wanting desperately to go back to sleep. Sometimes he'll stop, but the longest we've made it before I give up and take him downstairs for breakfast is five.

Poor Manny. It's a common refrain these days. He lost his best friend and mentor. He went blind. I often find myself wishing I could explain it all to him, why Leo never came back that night after we carried him out, why everything in his world suddenly went dark. Sometimes I think he blames me; I am the last person he saw with Leo, and I am, come to think of it, probably the last person he ever saw. I know he's just a dog, but I can't help thinking he must wonder why his world was suddenly turned upside down.

Poor Manny. Okay, let's face it. Manny's no fool (for a dog), although he does continue to go face first into the same walls in the same house he's lived in all his life. He does milk things a bit. He knows that when he plants his fat ass on the ground and refuses to budge for a walk I'm not going to force it. He knows that when he pees in the house from time to time I'm not going do anything more than sigh and mop it up. He knows that when he pulls all the books off that one shelf in the office when he thinks I've been gone too long, I'm just going to quietly put them back and sweep up the little bits of pages he's chewed.

I did draw the line on the poor Manny thing when he got skunked. Poor Manny was everyone's immediate reaction. Hellooooo???? How about poor mommy? Manny thought he had found a friend, thought he smelled divine. Did he have to try to scrub a fat dog at two in the morning with tomato juice? Did he have to go to Walgreens at three to look for some other miracle ingredients? Did he lay awake on the couch with a pillow over his nose until it was time to go to PetSmart for a bath? As I recall, he was snoring happily, having been treated to an unexpected play date and a few soothing spa treatments.

But, for the most part, poor Manny still works. Maybe one day, when he doesn't have that perpetual sad look in his unseeing eyes (I think he always had the same sad look, but it used to just seem funny), I'll stop cutting him so much slack. But for now, I'm secretly glad he treated himself to a few donuts, even happy he had the wherewithal to sniff them out and retrieve them from the table.

And I'm a little stuffed up anyway, so, at bedtime, Manny's ass can stay just where it is. I wish it would just stay put for a few more hours.