Bosco's Parade Route
Bosco the Wonderbeast has many strange characteristics--everybody thinks their dog is special, but Bosco is mostly just strange--but maybe the strangest is her parade route.
First, a quick background. Bosco is half whippet, half Australian shepherd. This means that her instincts are to round things up (the Aussie half) and then kill them (the whippet). Whippets are fantastically fast dogs--once, in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere in Canada, I had four TV stations; two of them showed whippet racing. It takes a greyhound about a hundred yards to get up to 35 mph or so; whippets are there in two or three steps, but by a hundred yards, they're pretty much done.
When Bosco gets a large treat--say, a new bone--she takes it on a parade, running laps around the kitchen, through the dining room door, into the hallway, into the living room, back into the kitchen. The record for this is somewhere in the high 40s, and the average is probably 25 or so laps.
Sometimes she looks like she's really enjoying it. Sometimes, she looks like it's a chore she has to perform. But it is a rule: get a big treat, take it on a parade. This is a dog that likes rules, and if you don't give her one, she'll make one for herself, and she'll stick to it.
This is all related, trust me. I was thinking about when I first moved to Japan, a dreadful place called Utsunomiya, a big industrial city, filthy air, water that gave me a sore throat, crowds, noise, the works. I lasted six months there before moving into the Japan Alps, which were clean and incredibly beautiful.
In Utsunomiya, the office where I worked was on the main street, a mile or so from the train station. About once a week, one of us would have our bicycle stolen. We'd go downstairs after a hard day's work of teaching English to people who really didn't care at all, and no bike.
The theft victim would trudge off to the train station, and there the bike would be, parked somewhere obvious. It wasn't so much stolen, as borrowed by somebody about to miss a train. Fair enough.
I rode to work along the same roads every day: past the bowling alley (bowled a 206 there once), through a residential neighborhood, past Nudo Toyo (which was always being hosed out every morning and was frightening just for that reason) and a pachinko parlor, down the underpass beneath the train station (where most days a woman was trying to navigate the slopes on her wheelchair), and then along a shopping street, before popping out onto the main street in front of our office.
My own parade route. Some days I enjoyed it, some days, not so much.
A friend of mine, living abroad for the first time now, asked if I had any advice at all.
And what I came up with was this: never, ever take the same road twice.
Leave the parade route for Bosco.
First, a quick background. Bosco is half whippet, half Australian shepherd. This means that her instincts are to round things up (the Aussie half) and then kill them (the whippet). Whippets are fantastically fast dogs--once, in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere in Canada, I had four TV stations; two of them showed whippet racing. It takes a greyhound about a hundred yards to get up to 35 mph or so; whippets are there in two or three steps, but by a hundred yards, they're pretty much done.
When Bosco gets a large treat--say, a new bone--she takes it on a parade, running laps around the kitchen, through the dining room door, into the hallway, into the living room, back into the kitchen. The record for this is somewhere in the high 40s, and the average is probably 25 or so laps.
Sometimes she looks like she's really enjoying it. Sometimes, she looks like it's a chore she has to perform. But it is a rule: get a big treat, take it on a parade. This is a dog that likes rules, and if you don't give her one, she'll make one for herself, and she'll stick to it.
This is all related, trust me. I was thinking about when I first moved to Japan, a dreadful place called Utsunomiya, a big industrial city, filthy air, water that gave me a sore throat, crowds, noise, the works. I lasted six months there before moving into the Japan Alps, which were clean and incredibly beautiful.
In Utsunomiya, the office where I worked was on the main street, a mile or so from the train station. About once a week, one of us would have our bicycle stolen. We'd go downstairs after a hard day's work of teaching English to people who really didn't care at all, and no bike.
The theft victim would trudge off to the train station, and there the bike would be, parked somewhere obvious. It wasn't so much stolen, as borrowed by somebody about to miss a train. Fair enough.
I rode to work along the same roads every day: past the bowling alley (bowled a 206 there once), through a residential neighborhood, past Nudo Toyo (which was always being hosed out every morning and was frightening just for that reason) and a pachinko parlor, down the underpass beneath the train station (where most days a woman was trying to navigate the slopes on her wheelchair), and then along a shopping street, before popping out onto the main street in front of our office.
My own parade route. Some days I enjoyed it, some days, not so much.
A friend of mine, living abroad for the first time now, asked if I had any advice at all.
And what I came up with was this: never, ever take the same road twice.
Leave the parade route for Bosco.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 8:57 PM
1 Comments:
Good advice, but awfully hard, and you know how important I think variety is. Perhaps we're wired for habit. But there may be compensations. If you have a parade route for a time - say your walk or my walk from the Sunshine Mansion to Nagai Station, Osaka, early '90s - it might stick with you long, long after you've quit doing it, and find yourself in completely differnent surroundings. All the individual walks conflate into a durable memory. Also, if you have a parade route, and still pay attention, you'll be jarred by the inevitable novelties, since things changes and occasional weirdness happens along the way.
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