My dog almost never barks. Thankfully, Grace is not a neurotic dustmop yapping incessantly at the slightest noise. The exception may be on our walks. There's plenty of plaintive yips when we spot our friends the squirrels. They skip just out of reach of the leash and wave their tails. Grace squeaks and hops around on her rear legs, pawing at the air like a rearing horse. There's one particular squirrel in our neighborhood -- an albino with pinkish eyes and a full brush of a white tail -- that tempts her upside down from up the tree trunk, chittering.

On our morning walk two days ago, Grace collapsed. She wouldn't stand and lay looking up at me. When I made her get up, she wobbled and collapsed again. I scooped her up from underneath and jogged her back home where I immediately called the vet.

It was nothing serious. Her knee was swollen, he said. I didn't know dogs even had knees, but since she seemed to be doing better by the time of the appointment, I turned down the anti-inflammatories he could prescribe.

"You don't have to leave, you know," said my trick. His dog is curled in a corner, its jowls flopping as it snores. It's some kind of an exotic breed that's highly sensitive: Its fur is molting, riddled with pinkish sores.
"I need to check on Grace," I say.
"'kay. It was fun," his full attention is on the tivo.

I hate that word, trick, but I don't know what else to call him. He drives a convertible and has an apartment full of weights, but on sunlit days seems to prefer watching TV with the blinds drawn. He looks like a chubby distant relative of Mel Gibson but he sounds like George Bush. Weaponsh of Mash Deshtruktn. He's been fiddling with the remotes. "I'm taping 'Charliesh Angels' for the next time yer over."

Lucy Liu kicks some sheeriush butt, you know.

When I lived in Muncie, Indiana, I had an apartment with a plate glass window that overlooked a university's playing fields. When the wind stirred up, that window quietly clattered. Miles across the plain and out of my sight, there must have been a railroad; omnipresent were the rumblings from trains. You could especially hear them deep at night and I'd sometimes wake to hear the drawn out chord of a train whistle. I loved it when a storm approached. I would lie in bed and listen to the grasses whisking and the window sending Morse code.

When I've woken up here lately, I have sometimes sensed something at the bedside and the filtered amber from the street reflects the glint of an eye. When Grace knows that I'm awake, she starts a kind of whistling-wheeze that intensifies when I reach to pat her skull. The curtains hang still and the crickets are deafening but I know a storm is approaching; dogs can tell.