By BENSON HEWITT
I am going to take a break from writing about ancient weddings and keep you up to speed on our dog, Pixie. Let me remind you again of her pedigree, or, rather, lack of it. She is not a purebred anything, although she may have some imperial blood surging through her veins.
A smidgeon of her blood, we were told, is Pekinese and Wikipedia expressly states that that particular breed was favoured by the Chinese Imperial Court, and that the name refers to the City of Beijing where the Forbidden City resides. What else would one want, one wonders? And certainly the source is reliable and impeccable. She has some ‘papers’ I do believe. (Someone one once told me, no doubt to impress, that her dog had ‘all his papers’.) Pixie’s on a first name basis with a reputable groomer here, and a top-notch veterinarian, who doesn’t come cheap. (Or is that cheaply?) But let me back track, or even go off on a tangent for a minute or so.
Remember when there was a time when some Fogo Islanders went ‘in the bay’ for the winter. My father sometimes talked of doing so but never seemed to get around to it. I believed that it was a kind of lotus land, in that there were trees as tall as houses (which I didn’t believe), rabbits came knocking on your door in time to be cooked for dinner, and in some places ‘in the bay’ there was even no school. You must be asking where all this is leading.
Well, I vowed when I was about 10 or so there were several things I was going to have when I grew up; one, was that I would get someone to dig a well close to my house, (note that I wasn’t going to dig it myself) and the other was that a toilet would be attached to my house. But mainly, my chief desire was that I was going to go ‘in the bay’ every winter. Sadly, it’s only in the past few years that I have achieved my ambition of ‘going in the bay for the winter’; the only slight difference is that my ‘going into the bay’ is to Peterborough, Ontario.
There are a few similarities, and one being that some of the trees around here are actually taller than houses. Another is that I do have an ‘indoor’ toilet. My ‘tilt’ is close to a rather large walking trail, and every day rain or shine, snow or hail (and we get all that here!) I take my dog, Pixie, for her daily walk and toilet around 10 in the morning in this park.
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