Barley

For all my efforts to give Barley a full and interesting life, there is no denying that she spends a great deal of time waiting. She hovers in the early afternoon when she anticipates that she's due a walk. Her stomach marks the hour for dinner like clockwork, and she'll gently remind me if it seems I might need reminding. For the most part, however, she appears to simply take for granted that I must be waiting for that same event to occur. Not resentful, not impatient, but vigilant. Something is coming after this, in just a little longer, a little longer...

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I try to avoid letting Barley drink from standing pools of water, mostly out of an abundance of caution. I recognize that, if some fresh rainwater gathers on a shady, sleepy sidewalk, there's probably not much harm in Barley wetting her whistle, but my prior experiences of living in urban environments makes it hard for me to shake the memory of such pools being rainbow-slick with visible films of motor oil. In this particular instance, the day was hot, a sprinkler head had broken, and water was bubbling forth in real time as if from a natural spring, so I relaxed my ordinary paranoia and let her shed some heat with an infusion of delicious Underwater Cool.

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The summer months are the only period during the year that Barley really needs a semi-regular bath. While not a stinky dog even on the worst of days, she can develop a little bit of aura after a week of heat-wave weather, a scent that's just characterful enough that it would be within the bounds of good taste to freshen her up for the benefits of a sensitive guest to my office. So, too, does my car seem most in need of some intervention during these months, in which much of the local flora (particulars the many trees) tries its luck and unloads pollen into the air. For both, the coming of the rains provides a tasteful freshening up at regular enough intervals to keep them pleasing to the senses.

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There is a slice of time in the photo-record of Barley's adventures in which the images, while digital, have a kind of grain that feels unnatural in an era of surprisingly powerful phone cameras. Its trademark is an even scattering of dark motes, as if the photo had received a very light dusting of soot from a passing chimneysweep's broom. During this period of time, my phone of many years had given up the ghost: It was never not hot to the touch, and (despite multiple battery replacements) could no longer hold a charge for more than a couple hours. So, as a stopgap, my phone company provided me what I thought of as the Pity Phone: a burner in all but name, retailing at around $30, whose CPU was so underpowered that it needed to run a comically toybox custom fork of Android. The phone had a camera, as all modern smart phones do. Nevertheless, the combination of the cheapest sensor money can buy and a puny CPU with no spare clock cycles to gussy up a noisy image resulted in photography that was literally the least one could do: Simultaneously blurrier and crunchier than you would want, a look so distinctive it effectively becomes its own data-moshed aesthetic.

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