The Fly

Sunday night, there was a fly in our room. This should not be notable.

Larry has lived with us for 16 months now. I can not believe that there has not been a fly in our room before this.

I mention these things because either the fly in our room had wronged Larry in a past life, or Larry has a psychotic break. Those are really the only explanations we can come up with. Larry was obsessed with the fly. Trying to follow it; trying to catch it. At one point, we thought he was going to break his neck on the wall as he tried to leap at the fly on the wall. (Hmm, maybe it wasn’t a real fly, maybe someone was trying to spy on us…)

While I was up, he was able to manage his distress by coming and hiding in the dog bed under my desk. But once I decided to go to bed, he could not settle. Normally, I can him to calm down by getting him under the sheet next to me. (Which was not comfortable- it was quite warm, but I was willing to suffer to get him to calm down.) But it did not work. The fly would buzz overhead and he’d be all a tizzy trying to get out from under the sheet and go after it.

The only thing that seemed able to break his concentration from the fly was when June, who was in the other room, would start barking at something else. Then he’d go join her in a good bark. But each time he came back to our room, it only took moments for him to be all agitated by the fly again.

Finally the fly landed where C could reach it, and it got smacked. And Larry (and I) were able to sleep.

Now, to point out how out of the ordinary this episode was, the next morning, while C was taking the dogs out, Larry decided to sit (placing his black rump in the shade and his white chest in the sun), just inches from the ivy- where there were bees and flies buzzing aplenty. Some even flew directly in front of his nose, and he reacted not at all.

So yeah, whatever it was between that fly on Sunday night and Larry, it was personal.