I have spent the last four mornings in an intense training session for a new software tool that our team is using. I won’t try to describe it except that it is very cool and it is right up my alley although I am nowhere near able to say I understand it all. I don’t think I have EVER done organized training at my company before this. Except for a “crucial conversations” thing once long ago. It was excruciatingly awful. This was not.

This is my childhood dog, Tigger. She isn’t really all that old in this pic. This was probably when I was a tween in the 60s and she lived until my sophomore year in college. She was 13 when my parents (rightly) euthanized her. I was driving my grandmother’s 1965 Ford Fairlane to college that fall (I didn’t get to keep it there and was car-less seemingly forever) and my parents said, “Say good-bye to your dog,” as I was getting into the car. This was a surprise but I was okay (as my parents knew I would be).

Tigger was not really a “trick” type dog. She learned a few commands like “sit”. Maybe that was the only one? She was a very smart dog though and the tricks she learned involved how to get along with people. She was bouncy as a puppy (“Tiggers don’t jump, they bounce” – A. A. Milne). She was a very young stray puppy when we “adopted” her and we treated her very well. When she got older, she learned to approach unfamiliar people SLOWLY with her big bushy tail wagging like crazy. “I want you to pet me.” She was usually rewarded. That is to say she would do that on the moominbeach where she was safe with her family (us). At our house in Sault Ste. Siberia, where boys cutting through the yard would sometimes hit her with geography text books, she could be a bit more territorial.

Anyway. This pic is from our driveway in the back of our Superior Street bungalow. It backed out into an alley. The house and garage in the background belonged to our neighbor Green Thumb McGinnis. The white fence bounds the Oberman house across the alley. One of the few Jewish families in town but YES THERE WERE/ARE Jewish people in our little city. I have heard of people from northern Michigan who don’t think any Jewish people live up there. Yes they do.

I walked past that white fence umpteen bazillion times during my childhood. Sometimes dodging the “Wise” (subbing for a Finnish name) family boys (four of them), who were ROCK throwers. (I didn’t complain to The Commander about the rock throwers, knowing she would just tell me to fight my own battles.) At the end of the alley across the street is the Wood house, I would hang a right and head to Laurie’s house in the next block. She was one of my best friends in grade school even though she went to St. Joe’s and I went to Stinkin’ Linkin’, a public school.

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