Our next-door neighbors have three Rottweilers. These dogs, they are very much loved by one of their owners, who tells me in on sentence that they are "very good dogs, very good dogs", and in the next sentence about how her family is replacing floors and furniture that the dogs ruined. The other family members are much more muted in their praise.
The dogs are not muted. The dogs bark a lot. We can often hear them through the walls; we also hear them barking for long stretches when they are let out into the back patio, next to our back patio. When I was teaching via zoom during the pandemic, my students in Shanghai asked, "do you have a dog?", and I had to explain that, yes, I do, but what they were hearing was the dogs next door. My husband and I hear the dogs barking, and we say to each other, "there go the very good dogs!".
Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the US, wrote a poem about listening to a Beethoven sonata while a neighbor dog barked, and how the sounds merged . . . so sometimes I will tell people nearby that the Rottweilers are singing to me.
One day when my young friend G came over, we remarked on the noise that the dogs were making. I told G that the dogs were singing, and wondered aloud to myself what song they might be performing for us. G confidently replied "Somewhere over the rainbow", which, now that he'd said it, I guess I could kind of hear. For a week or so after that, I would wander around the house and intermittently hear the next-door dogs breaking into their tribute to Judy Garland. The next time that G came over, he declared confidently that the song they were singing was now "Jingle Bells", and I guess that kind of made sense, too. It was only July, but true musicians start rehearsing for the Christmas season early, I'm told.
And, just because it's so good, let me share the Billy Collins poem.
Billy Collins
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
We also had a musical neighbor dog. The poor dear was apparently home alone, with me upstairs from it, all day and it functioned perfectly as a doggy metronome. You could set a beat by it. I felt so bad for him, I didn't understand how his throat wasn't sore after 13 hours of barking every week day.
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