As many of you who read this blog already know, we had a very sad event happen this week. My family said goodbye to our super-ancient, super-beloved, super-bizarre poodle Abebi. Such an event could never be well timed, but it happened to coincide this week with incompetence and interference on behalf of the principal at the school where we work, frustration with Malian friends and money, and the spectacularly ill-timed arrival of my somewhat insane host sister Toutou from Mopti. It also doesn't help that most Malians (with good reason) would look at me like I was absolutely insane if I explained to them that the reason for my pensiveness and frequent watery eyes was the death of my dog. In fact, in a country where 1 in 5 children don't make it to the age of five I feel a little guilty being sad over this. But I am very sad, and so would like to commemorate the dog Neal so aptly describes as “beautifully bizarre” in this blog.
Abebi, as some of you know, means “we asked for her and she came to us.” And ask for her we did. Actually, it was more of a sustained begging campaign on the part of Beth (my sister) and I that involved pleading, taking care of stuffed dogs, and reading every book in the elementary school library dog section and memorizing obscure facts about rare breeds (that last one was mostly me). When we finally got her, she was the cutest small, neurotic beast in the world. I distinctly remember her sitting between Beth and I on the back seat coming over the Fremont bridge taking her home. We briefly considered naming her Hannah (I think dad also suggested yellow-jacket-butt) which would have been far too ordinary a name for such a strange and wonderful creature.
In her earlier years Bebi endured a lot of schemes we/I designed to test her intelligence, agility, etc. Perhaps the most unusual of these was the time I decided I would try to teach her to read with a series of flashcards I made. I did succeed in making her piddle when shown the “yellow” flashcard, but as anyone who knew young Abebi can tell you, she probably would have done that anyway. I'm still unclear as to how my years of dog research had not taught me that she was colorblind anyway.
What Abebi loved most of all (apart from cheese) was being outdoors with her family, rolling in disgusting-smelling things, chasing animals, and trotting along with her attractive bandanas. While people on the trail would often exclaim “A hiking poodle!” with surprise and amusement, Abebi certainly never let her breeds reputation define her. The few times the groomer put bows in her hair, she ate them.
Her favorite place was probably our yurt, and she was with us from the pre-yurt camping trips (when she chased a deer so far I thought she'd never come back), to the first winter trip (when we all slept in our coats and her water bowl froze every night right next to the wood stove), to the later trips when she mostly dozed on her bed and trotted around.
She was always the strangest beast, Neal wanted me to add her adorable later habit of sprinting full speed around the kitchen every time she came in from outside before resuming behavior appropriate to a dog of her age. So I just wanted to say, rest in peace Abebi, you will always be the one and only staaanker.
On a much happier note, one of the main things getting me through this week (apart from Neal being lovely and a great outing for Chinese food with our friends Stephanie and Pierce), has been my fantastic niece Asu. Here she is making her, “you did NOT just do that/I will begin screaming now” face.
She is the new kid since I was here before and when I first arrived she cried every time she saw me. Once we made peace, we hung out quite a lot, but I've been consistently worried about her since we got here. She is apparently just over a year old (people were telling me her birthday was in December but actually it is apparently October), but she is quite small, almost never smiled, and usually seemed listless and uninterested in anything going on.
This week it is like she is a new baby. She smiles and giggles and toddles at speeds previously unknown. It is so amazing. Her only downside is that she is often alarmingly slimy and that, although I am so excited about her newfound appetite, her faster toddling speeds mean she is increasingly good at getting her tiny, germ-infested hands into our food before we can stop her. But thanks Asu, for making a crappy week a whole lot better.
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