Ruffly Speaking

fluent, let me add that two no-show exhibitors had enraged all the other Bedlington people except Morris Lamb by breaking the major, but that Morris hadn’t been more than slightly miffed. Morris was as competitive as any other terrier person, but he liked winning so much that, as long as he won something, he didn’t particularly care what it was. If his bitch had taken first place in the Silly Dog Trick contest at a K-9 fun fest, he’d probably have been delighted.
    Dog world relationships like mine with Morris are a little hard to explain to someone like Rita. For instance, any real dog person understands that since Janet Switzer is Rowdy’s breeder, she is thereby my own blood relative, but Rita misses the critical point: If it weren’t for Janet, Rowdy wouldn’t exist, and if Rowdy didn’t exist, I would be a person altogether different from who I am. Rita also fails to grasp why the act of entering even one dog in one show or obedience trial is tantamount to slicing open your palm and clasping the identically incised hands of every other person who has ever shown a dog. But it’s a fact. We’re blood brothers and sisters, like it or not; sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t.
    “Morris wasn’t a close friend of mine,” I explained, “but everyone knew him.” When I say everyone, I mean everyone-everyone, which is to say, those of us with the; scarred palms. “Rita, you knew who Morris Lamb was. Winer and Lamb. In the Square?”
    Cambridge must have one bookstore for every ten or twelve pairs of human eyes: The Harvard Coop, The MIT Coop, WordsWorth, Mandrake, Reading International, the Starr, the Book Case, McIntyre and Moore, specialty stores, Grolier, Kate’s, Schoenhof’s, Pandemonium, the; Globe for travel books, and zillions of other bookstores,; including Winer &. Lamb—new and used cookbooks and a café, too.
    Rita switched to her professional mode; her face and voice went dead neutral. “You’re a, uh, valued customer? You bought cookbooks?” (And how long is it that you’ve been Napoleon, Miss Winter?)
    My cooking consists mainly of picking up pizza from Emma’s, which is on Huron Avenue, only about a ten-minute walk from where I live—Appleton and Concord —and has what must be the thinnest, crispiest crust and most compulsively delicious sauce this side of Sicily. Except in the North End, Boston’s Little Italy, practically all the pizza around here is that thick-crust Greek stuff,
    not that I have anything against Greeks, but, look, do Italians go around selling moussaka?
    I said, “I go to Winer and Lamb because of the dogs,” thus in four simple words explaining—well, everything. “In good weather, when they have the little tables out on the sidewalk, you can sit there with your dogs, and they bring out your coffee, so you don’t have to worry about what to do with the dogs while you go in to get it. Speaking of which, more?”
    Rita threw me a glance of suspicion. “Is this decaf?”
    “Of course not. I’m a writer.”
    “Do you have any Perrier?”
    “Poland Spring?” I’m from Maine, not France. Rita isn’t from France, either. Maybe she assumes that Perrier is the name of a side street off Madison Avenue where water bubbles out of the concrete.
    “Sure,” she said.
    When I’d poured and handed her the glass of water, I went on about Winer & Lamb. “So dogs are sort of allowed. Morris Lamb was a dog person.” I made a connection. “Rita, that’s why the dog was at his funeral. It didn’t belong to the priest. It was one of Morris’s Bedlingtons. Cute, right? Like a little lamb.”
    “What?”
    “Like a little lamb,” I repeated.
    Rita still looked mystified.
    “A lamb. A baby sheep,” I persisted.
    “No, it didn’t look like a lamb. It looked like a dog.”
    “Well, then, it wasn’t a Bedlington.” True. Morris, in fact, used to refer to Jennie and Nelson as “my little flock.” The deliberate similarity results from painstaking grooming. Morris’s dogs always looked fabulous. He didn’t groom them himself, either, so his grooming bills must have been astronomical, not to mention what he must’ve Paid his handler, plus entry fees, and all the rest. Except for Doug Winer, who was Morris’s partner in both senses of the word, Morris didn’t have anyone but Nelson and Jennie, and he’d inherited the proceeds from some family cutlery business in New Jersey, so he had tons of money. “That’s too bad,” I added. “Morris