When Georgie Met Carly

Georgie met Carly, Carly met Georgie. No, not THAT Carly—not the one who regularly posts comments on The Buddha Diaries. He’s the imposter. He merely BORROWS the real Carly’s name. The real Carly, the one I’m referring to this morning, is, like Georgie, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel—both fine examples of the breed—and they got together for the first time Sunday. A momentous occasion. I would have mentioned it yesterday, but for the fact that it was a day of blog silence.

Anyway, our George was on his best behavior. He did his usual lunge, on first sight of another dog, just to assert his authority. George, being small by nature, has something of a Napoleon complex, and feels the need to display his manliness in such circumstances. Or his male dogliness. But, as he did in short order with Carly, he soon reverted to his usual charming self and Carly proved delightful company. It’s a great breed. Ellie and I have lived with them for twenty years now—three of them in succession, and usually overlapping, though now we have only George. I have known the breed since childhood, and as a teenager, I was not a little besotted with the freckle-faced daughter of a local dignitary who had five of them, a veritable menagerie of Charlies, in their country home in the neighboring village.

Anyway, we mere humans took both these superior Cavaliers for a walk up in the hills by Griffith Park. A great surprise, for Ellie and me, to discover a little paradise there which we had never known about, in thirty-five years of living in this area—an isolated grove of pine trees with a carpet of alpine grass and wildflowers and lovely bursts of sunlight filtering through the branches of the trees. Scattered here and there, great sandstone boulders half-buried in the ground, a wonderful invitation to sit in meditation. So distant, even though so close to the city, you could easily imagine yourself for a moment in Yosemite.

Enough for today. I have had computer woes since six o'clock this morning, including a frustrating half-hour on the telephone with my "service provider." My Internet connection has been unreliable for weeks now, and I'm getting ready to throw the whole damn electronic nightmare in the fish pond. Second thoughts, no: cruelty to fish. Definitely un-Buddhist. Take a breath. Buy a new router. I'm beginning to conclude that the router is the source of all my problems. I'm online now without it, and the problems have disappeared. More later. Or tomorrow... DV, as my mother used to say. (Deo Volente, that is. Latin for "God willing.") If I believed in D...


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