“Don’t treat your dog like a person, or he’ll start treating you like a dog,” my grandfather told me once, when I was a child. I can’t remember what I was doing that provoked this warning, probably spoon-feeding one of our dogs, but I do recall hoping, praying, that his words were true. It was my dream to have a dog treat me like another dog. I’m a dog nut. I seem to have been born that way. I carry the fascination around with me the way my retriever-mix, Daphne, carries around an oversized stuffed animal.

She doesn’t know why she does it, she just does. She comes from a long line of dogs that were bred to carry things around. I come from a long line of people who are enchanted by creatures who must carry things or herd things or stalk things for reasons that no longer serve them any purpose.

My great-grandfather bred Welsh Terriers. Here is his favorite, Freshy, surrounded by my mother’s aunts and uncles. My mother is the littlest one, with the boy’s haircut, gazing at Freshy.

Apparently my mother was nipped by Freshy when she was just a toddler. The dog, being a terrier, was feisty and combative. My mother, being a Sullivan, was likewise, so according to family legend, after overcoming her astonishment at having been bitten by a dog, she grabbed her by the leg and bit her right back. After that they were fast friends.

My grandfather – the one who gave me the advice on how to treat dogs – had a champion English Bulldog. My grandmother (his ex), kept Beagles. In this photo I’m petting my grandmother’s Beagle while my grandmother and mother pose on my grandmother’s porch.

Although my grandmother lived for decades after this photo was taken, this was one of the last times I saw her. I don’t remember much about her, but I remember that the dog was called Daisy, and that when she wagged her tail, her whole body wagged. My grandmother was mentally ill and alcoholic and ended up estranged from us. There were no framed photos of her in our house growing up, no calls on Mother’s Day, so, like I said, I mostly remember her dog Daisy. The way her body wagged, her hips and tail a jolly serpentine dance, the way she smelled like wet shoes, the way she followed my grandmother’s every move with doting eyes. This photo is fascinating to me. My father only recently sent it to me, so I’ve been studying it. My grandmother is in a crisp dress and pearls, but her paint-peeling porch is cluttered with mops and brooms. You can see the hasty attempt to make things nice for us, her guests, then the defiant leaving of the mops, as if to say, “it doesn’t matter what you think.” My mother is smiling in a sort of zoned-out fashion. Me, in heaven, adoring Daisy, whom I had only just met.

Here I am on my seventh birthday, when I received my beloved puppy Beau. Notice my sister Meg (the clone of my mother in the earlier photo) and her clandestine attempt to pat Beau. I’m sure I was feeling a little territorial and she had good reason to have her eyes trained on my face.

Beau lived until after I left home for college, and was only one of a number of family dogs we had while I was growing up. Beau was a poodle. He was smart and learned tricks. He bit. He slept in my bed. He humped our drapes. He had a reeking skin condition that caused the fur on his rump to fall out and oozing scabs to form.

I loved him, I loved him, I loved him, but when my friends came over, I locked him in a room and wished he didn’t exist.

Today I received a review of my book, Outtakes From a Marriage from Publisher’s Weekly, which said that I have “an eye for the comedy of manners of the rich and idle.” Well, thank you very much, PW. Now I’ll turn my eye on some of the less idle, like the participants in this past weekend’s Celebration of Young Writers in Washington, Connecticut. It’s an annual event in which famous actors and writers read the works of students ages 5-18. The readers have included Denis, Frank McCourt, Rose Styron, Mia Farrow, Peter Gallagher, Christine Baranski and many others. The event is a fundraiser for the After School Arts Program. Denis hosts the reading every year.

Here he is chatting with the lovely Rose Styron before the event:

We saw Rose again the following evening at the opening night performance of The Country Girl, starring Peter Gallagher, Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand, and directed by Mike Nichols. Such an amazing performance by Peter, and everyone. There was a press line as we entered.

And afterwards, a party at Tavern on The Green. Here’s Denis with Peter Gallagher:

Denis is a little partial to that particular jacket, and that particular shirt, as you can see. If you saw us leaving for the play last night you would have thought I was going to the Oscars (I overdressed as usual, rube that I am) and he was going to a hockey game. I could blog all day about all the wrong outfits I’ve worn to events. Fortunately, I’m usually cut out of the photographs when they appear in print.

I found tennis relatively late in life. I wanted exercise, that’s all, and one day, watching my son take a tennis lesson, I thought, now that looks like a good workout. I thought that since I was pushing forty I would probably never be good enough to play any real tennis but chasing the ball around the court for an hour or two a week might help me tone up a bit.

Well, it’s five years later and I’ve just come from my regular Saturday doubles game. Tomorrow I’ll play in my regular Sunday group. Mondays I play in a clinic, Tuesdays I have a regular doubles game. Thursday I play singles with a friend at noon. Wednesdays and Fridays I have no scheduled tennis but I’ll sub if I’m asked. I’m known in these parts as a bit of a tennis whore, because I’m an easy get as a sub. It’s just that I have the privilege of working at home and having kids old enough to take care of themselves which makes me a little more flexible than many people. If somebody needs a sub they know that I’ll usually drop whatever I’m doing and test the sound barrier speeding to the court. I’m obsessed.

Recently somebody told me that everything you need to know about life could be learned on the tennis court. His point was that one must always be in the moment; don’t be filled with self-loathing because of that point you just botched. Move on. Be honest, do your best, don’t stand there admiring your last shot, get ready for the next. If the court is so wise, I wanted to tell him, why won’t it tell me how to fix my second serve?

Anyway, I thought I might use my blog to share any insights that come my way while playing tennis. Today, it occurred to me that what messes up women in tennis, is our biological tendency to want to look at each other’s faces all the time. I love this book called The Female Brain, by Louann Brizandine, MD. In it she talks about how women and men are neurologically wired quite differently. We women need to bond with each other – it’s a primitive drive that was necessary to protect our offspring. Women like to look at each other’s faces and gauge each other’s emotions all the time.

On the tennis court, for me anyway, this creates a problem. When I am receiving a serve, for example, I find myself standing with knees bent and racket ready, but when the ball comes rocketing into my court, I have to say to myself, “watch it into the racket” because if I don’t, my tendency is to watch my opponent’s face. I have noticed, in mixed doubles, that men don’t do this. Men watch the ball. They have a hunting instinct that makes them want to follow prey and attack it. Women have that too, but the bonding instinct that makes us want to smile at each other all the time can thwart it. Anyway, that’s what I think happens. It sounds much better than the other explanation which is just that I’m a spaz.

I had Oprah on the other day. I just had it on, I wasn’t watching it. Anyway, as they cut away to a commercial, Oprah said, “Coming up, the words no mother wants to hear from her child…” This interested me because I had already heard the words no mother wants to hear from her child. These words are: “Mom, there’s a bat on your pajamas.”

This happened a few summers ago now, but I remember every minute of it like it was yesterday. It was early morning. I was sitting at our dining room table in my pajamas, talking on the phone and writing something down. When Devin came downstairs, I stood up for some reason, still nattering away, and she said, “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

I snapped my fingers and frowned – the universal mother’s sign-language for “shut your trap, I’m on the phone.”

“MOM,” Devin said again, her voice rising now. I looked at her, and that’s when she said THOSE WORDS. She was staring down at my thigh, backing up and stammering, “Mom, there’s a …bat on … your… pajamas!”

Time stood still then. I was staring at Devin, blinking, the phone held to my ear. Later, we would puzzle over my eventual response, which was, “Is .. it … real?” For some reason I was whispering and looking intensely into Devin’s eyes, when I said this. I couldn’t bring myself to look down at my pajamas.

“YES!” Devin screamed, and I then I had to look down and there it was – clinging to my threadbare, paper-thin pajama bottoms – a furry, hideously ugly, maniacally grinning brown bat. He gripped my pajamas with claws that came out of – get this – his wings!. He was grimacing up at me! That’s right, he was leering at me with his half-human/half-pig face and the next thing I knew I was standing at the opposite end of our house shrieking my head off and clinging to Devin, who was also shrieking her head off. In our flight through the house I had somehow managed to brush my cheerful, pug-nosed passenger from my pajamas (and drop the phone) and Devin and I just stood there, clinging to each other, alternately shrieking, laughing and crying.

I’m telling this story now because it’s bat season again. The bats are coming out of hibernation and will soon be darkening the sky around our house every evening. Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea of bats. When we bought our place in Connecticut, we were well aware of the area’s bat population and were pleased that our property was inhabited by so many of these useful creatures. According to an article in the local paper, a single brown bat can devour between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitos in one night. At dusk, Denis and I used to watch them fly out from under the eaves of our old barn and dart about the sky, and we would gaze up at our little mosquito-assassins and smile. In our minds, there was a beautiful symbiosis between the bats and the Learys. We owned the property, but were willing to allow the bats to live on it. In return they would kill all the mosquitoes so that we could sometimes eat our supper outside. We lived under the misconception that there was a mutually understood, unwritten treatise clearly defiining the boundaries of our territories. The bats got the whole outside. The only place off-limits to them was the inside of our house. We knew that bats sometimes carry rabies, but what we didn’t know was that up close, the bat’s creepiness quotient is off the charts, and, like a terrorist, he doesn’t set much store by boundaries. He rules through fear and intimidation and travels about with the smug knowledge that he can go anywhere he damn well pleases. And he does.

NEXT: Bats: Part Two, starring Denis Leary

I love to take pictures while riding Mark. Here we are watching Devin ride Snoopy:

This one shows Mark’s mane at its most ridiculous. It looks like I’m riding a Pomeranian:

Mark is such a versatile horse. You can really take him anywhere. Here we are in Rome above the Spanish Steps:

Viewing the Coliseum:

Okay, I just installed Photoshop Elements and have found a new way to waste time. Now I’m trying to get a shot of Mark on the Red Carpet at last year’s Emmy Awards but I can’t figure out how to cut around his ears.

Meet Mark. I know he looks cuddly, and he is. If you’re not a horseperson, then yes, that is how a horse’s mane is supposed to look. If you are a horseperson, judge not, lest ye be judged. I don’t have time to mess with that mane right now. Mark will be sporting his mullet at least until my book comes out.

Mark has an interesting history. He was born approximately twelve years ago, on the wrong side of a fence. His mother, lacking foresight, chose to lie down next to a fence during her labor. Mark was born and then, when he managed to stand, he was on one side of the fence, and his mom was on the other. Horses are herd animals and the foals “imprint” on their mothers immediately after birth. The mare’s scent, her distinct vocalizations, her gait – the foal absorbs it all, commits it to memory, and then is able to pick her from any number of other mothers in the herd.

It has long been a notion among cowboys and others, that human “imprinting” of a foal can help it get over it’s innate fear of humans. When a foal is born, it’s important to touch him, have him smell you and hopefully he will associate humans with the world in which he finds himself. Unfortunately, many foals choose to be born at night and by the time a human has found him, he has imprinted on the mother and is about as receptive to the human touch as a wild deer.

Mark, however, spent his first night wobbling around in a cold, dark field, hungry and alone, listening to his mother’s frantic whinnies. In the morning when the mare’s owner discovered him, she helped him through the gate to the flank of his desperate mother. So Mark’s first touch was a human touch, and it was a human’s hands that guided him to the warm milk that filled his empty belly and that auspicious beginning made Mark a bit of a human lover.

Now, if you approach our horse field, Mark will come trotting over to meet you. When somebody forgets to close a gate and the horses get loose, Mark gallops down to our house and peers in our windows. Mark is a clown and a coward which makes him my soulmate. We have foxhunted together, competed in hunter paces (a pace is a cross-country race over hunt-field style jumps) and hunter trials. Here we are at the Golden’s Bridge Hunter Trials:

If you’re not a horse person, then what you are seeing is perfect jumping form by horse and rider. If you are a horseperson, give me a break. We were in a field. He was galloping. You can see it’s a drop jump, I had to brace myself against his neck like that…

In 1871 a tunnel was blasted into a small mountain in Washington, CT, to make way for the proposed Shepaug Valley Railroad line. The engineering of the tunnel was overseen by a local explosives expert known as “Glycerin Jack.” I’m writing this in bed and so cannot start searching my house for the book that told me about Glycerin Jack, but I really should because there is another interesting fact about this important person in our town’s history. Apparently, the man passed a tapeworm that was something like thirty feet long (will fact-check length when I find the book). The local doctor kept the tapeworm in a formaldehyde solution in a jar on his desk and all the townspeople came to observe it.

Anyway, the Shepaug Valley Railroad ran from 1872 until 1948. When the train stopped running, the tracks were pulled up, but the flat, packed stonedust bed remains and there is no better place in this area to gallop a horse. The old railroad bed winds above the Shepaug River, through groves of centuries-old trees, alongside the old carriage road, and eventually, after you come around a bend, you see in the distance, this:

The first time I saw this, I was alone, on foot, and I wasn’t sure what exactly I was seeing. When I got a little closer, I saw this:

And then, finally, I was confronted with this:

Every time I approach the tunnel, whether on horseback or on foot, I become a little breathless with fear. First, once you step into the beginning of the blasted out area, before you even enter the cave, the temperature drops about five degrees. And there is sudden silence. The rushing sound of the Shepaug River, which had been a constant white noise, ceases. And the striations of the rock, the way it sweeps up gives the ledge a sense of rapid, upward motion, like a great wave rising up over you. But the most unsettling thing about it – and the reason my horse always balks here – is because there is no light visible at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel curves, so it’s not until you are inside that you are able to see that there’s a way out. A phrase from one of my favorite poems comes to my mind whenever I see the tunnel and it is this:

At the wood’s mouth,
By the cave’s door,
I listened to something
I had heard before.

The poem is “The Lost Son” by Theodore Roethke. It’s a rather long poem about nature and sexual longing and remorse and death and there’s a sort of manic flight pattern and then, at the end, a stillness. The words at the end of this poem are taped above my desk now. I’m in a bit of a creative void (writer’s block), and it feels like the task before me is daunting and dark and Roethke’s words are meant to give me hope:

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

Last fall I began work on a new book and I ran into a little snare right at the beginning. I was describing the campus of a boarding school in September, in Connecticut, and I had all the trees aflame with bright russets and golds and somebody was raking leaves. It was still early in September when I was writing this and it dawned on me that the leaves might still be green well into October. I really had no idea. And I wasn’t quite sure when the first frost usually arrives. So I decided to start a journal to document the local flora and fauna as the seasons change.

I also determined that since there is no better place to observe anything than astride a horse, I would trailer my horse Mark to Steep Rock Land Preserve every day, weather permitting, and that way I could see the exact same landscape as it changed with the season. I kept what I called my Steep Rock Diaries from September until December. Then I had to stop because the trails were too icy for horses. I’ve been hiking in Steep Rock this winter and spring, on and off, but am dying to get back there with Mark. My trailer needs a new tire but is being serviced on Tuesday and then I will start up with the diary again.

I don’t even know where to begin to describe the beauty of Steep Rock. First, there’s the winding Shepaug River that divides the preserve:

That’s my daughter Dev on the trail. There’s an old railroad bed that runs along the river’s edge and it’s great for riding.
In places, the roots of great hemlock trees have wrapped themselves, like tentacles, around the rock outcroppings along the river’s bank. This one appears to be testing the temperature of the water with its root, although you can’t actually see the water in the photo:

So we do this big loop, Mark and I. We go along the railroad bed and cross the river and go up to what they call the “clamshell” and enjoy the views and loop back around and across the river again. We go out in the early mornings and it’s often cold riding along the old railroad bed, but when we cross the river, if the sun is out, it shines down on us and sparkles off the rocks below. Mark always stops in the middle of the river at our crossing place and we stand there for a moment.

The damp, dark smell of river always reminds me of my childhood, of a winding creek that ran behind a house in Michigan that we lived in. My brother and I spent our summer days wading around this creek looking for tadpoles and crayfish and watching muskrats glide just under the water (muskrats are cute, if you’ve never seen one – nothing like regular rats.)

Sitting on my horse, at this point in the Shepaug River where the clear water rushes over the rocks, something always comes over me. The coolness, the washing, rushing sound, the smell of water and fish and wet dirt and something else – loam? Silt? It all makes my head light and my muscles – even my bones – seem to go soft. Everything in me seems to dissolve into the horse and the river below and once, when a Great Blue Heron soared above us on that very spot, Mark and I both stared at it, blinking, blinking into the dazzling sun and then the sky was made blurry by my tears and I thought, there is a God. There is a God. Because the bird seemed so hulking and primitive, yet it flew. And the horse, and the river…

But the thing I love most about Steep Rock, because it thrills me, and terrifies me, is this:

The dark abyss, not my sweet daughter about to enter it. But I will blog about that another day. I’m supposed to be working on a book.

I’ve been cleaning my barn. I can’t stand housecleaning but I find great satisfaction cleaning my barn for some reason, and also cleaning my horses. Yesterday, I washed my horse Mark, and then when he dried and was still as wretched-looking as he was before his bath, I gave him a full body clip.

Clipping a horse is one of those things, like child-bearing, that seems like a great idea when it first occurs to you. Why should I spend hours currying the winter coat off this horse, when I can just clip him, is what I thought yesterday at noon. So, out came the clippers and I set to work. An hour and a half later, I was covered with horse hair, was wading through great drifts of horse hair, my nasal passages were lined with horse hair, and I had only shorn a small clearing on what I now saw as the vast acreage of my horse Mark.

Horse clippers are big heavy things and moving them over a horse’s body again and again starts hurting your arm and then it starts hurting your back. Plus, the clippers get hot and make a loud high-pitched whirring sound that, after two hours, doesn’t go away, even when the clippers are turned off. Plus, horses are stupid. They’d like the thing to be over as quickly as you would but believe that dancing in place is the best way to speed things along. But I did manage to finish his body and left the legs for another day (the day hell freezes over, most likely).

Here’s a before shot:

Here’s the after shot:

Do you want to see the whole horse? Well you’ll have to wait until tomorrow because the photos I took yesterday don’t flatter Mark. He’s not exactly an oil painting, as horses go, and, like Barbra Streisand (and me for that matter), really needs to be photographed from certain angles. Seriously, I adore this horse and can’t show the pictures I took yesterday. But I will show you this guy, whom I found when I lifted a bucket from a corner of my tackroom.

When the amphibians start moving in, it’s time to turn on the dehumidifier. I named him Newt, though I suspect he’s actually a salamander and then put him in the bucket and released him next to our pond.

When I saw Lulu after her hip surgery last Thursday, my first thought was that she was walking quite well for somebody with a new fake hip.

My second thought was, nice gam!.

Her coat is thick and wavy so I had no idea what beautiful musculature the dog possesses. I find that I keep staring at it, though.
I’m just admiring the conformation of an athletic animal, I keep telling myself. But there’s something disturbingly sexy about it. I think the exposed flank combined with the mohawk reminds me of that evil/sexy Last of the Mohicans guy.

This guy:

See what I’m talking about?

I just have to stop thinking about this.

Here she is, poor girl. She has a plush dog bed that she could lie on but has found that lying on the hard floor with her head hanging off the step earns her the most sympathy and pats.