I met up with a tough old rancher the other day. I was in a store, returning a giant black bowl-thing that’s actually used to hold a horse’s salt lick, though I was going to use it as a dog’s water bowl. It was large and heavy enough to stay stable if my sons inadvertently kicked it; I could turn it into just what I was looking for.
Turns out the bottom was ever so slightly convex and when I filled it with water it tilted back and forth just a bit. This caused the water’s surface to appear to fold and flash silver, almost like tin reflecting.
My border collie found this terribly disconcerting and backed away from the bowl like it was the giant, humming vending machine outside of Rite Aid, something else he finds terribly disconcerting.
Border collies tend to find many things that don’t involve sheep or tennis balls disconcerting. Mine is also afraid of motor homes and low, floaty balloons. The water bowl battle was not one I intended to fight.
I found myself trying to explain this to a store employee who was not at all sure someone dumb enough to use a salt lick holder for a dog bowl should be allowed to return anything.
“He’s afraid of drinking water?” she said, incredulous. That’s when the rancher, who was also an employee, stepped up. “He’s spooky,” he said. “Of course he’d be afraid. What you need is an old tire — you set the bowl right down in there, real tight, and the tire keeps it from moving.”
He and I stepped aside and chatted dogs. My son beside me, king of the chatterboxes, was mute and, frankly, gape-mouthed. Ranchers appear much tougher than the rest of us, and my child was duly impressed.
We talked rattlesnakes (I listened), shotguns (I listened), getting kicked by cows (I listened), and training. His methods were tougher than mine, and his expectations higher: “I need to be able to put a dog on a sheep and know it’s done.”
We talked about training a dog to come when called. He said he usually gives a dog two weeks, and if by then, he utters the name and the dog isn’t at his heel, he has to get rid of it.
My son, stunned, was silent, staring.
I knew he was thinking of Asia — our other dog. We adopted her from a rescue organization two months ago. Teaching her to come to him has been an ongoing hard lesson.
He’s put peanut butter on his fingers and waggled them in front of her. He read an article about canine body language and spent the next two days with downcast eyes and his head wrenched sideways every time she was near. Once he laid down in the hall and pretended to be asleep, hoping she’d approach. After 10 minutes of absolutely no response from her, I spread canned frosting on his bare toes and told him to continue to keep still. Such are the lengths we’ve gone; it works sometimes.
But, much of what he’s tried hasn’t worked, certainly not every time. It has been a bit- by-bit journey, and what progress either boy or dog makes one day, can flit away by the next. Then, they start over again.
Painstaking, boring, repetitive — training anything to come to you is a task that can feel like walking up a sand hill in hot, full, sun.
Yet, we do it. We slog on trying to lay down tracks of habit, of memory, of trust. No matter what we are training — our children, our dogs, our own stubborn minds — we slog on.
Today, there is certain frenzy to our cultural functioning speed, our ceaseless multitasking, our growing inability to wait for anything.
But, when you’re trying to get something to come to you — whether it’s a dog, your art, prayer, an idea, a love — it takes urging and patience. You can’t just snap your fingers and expect your desire to be at heel beside you.
But work, and it will happen.
And when it does, especially if it’s a Chinese crested powder-puff dog that looks like David Bowie — and this time, you didn’t even have to put frosting on your toes — it will be all that much sweeter.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza- Chavez at grace-notes @comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
