Thematically speaking: Dogs

When I'm talking to another volunteers house, all I can see is a thick fog. I breathe it in and start to choke. It's not fog. It's smoke. A fire. Burning leaves.

And that's one of the signs of fall here in Armenia. Here in Vanadzor, they burn leaves to get rid of them. I don't always see the fires being tended or watched, though perhaps they are inside, but still keeping an eye on it. Walking back home at night I saw a pile of leaves shivering with an incandescent warmth, burning slowly to ash.

Walking to work the other day I saw the ghost of Zep. Zep is the first dog I owned and dumb as hell. He would always run away, he chewed my blanket my grandmother made me when I was born. So finally we gave him away to some guy that lives on a farm, so he could run free or whatever, and in a week he gets run over buy a pickup truck. It wasn't tragic. The truck was slowly backing out of the driveway and the dog just sits there and gets run over.

My parents made the mistake of not telling us for weeks, so we'd ask to call to 'talk to Zep' or something like that, I dunno, we were kids. But we'd try to call and my parents would say that they must have moved or something. So then they eventually tell us (My sister and I) and we get really mad and really sad and don't ever let our parents live down this lie and bring it up at any opportunity, like this one.

But anyways Zep is named Zep in honor of Led Zeppelin, one of my dad's favorite bands growing up, and oh Zep was black (with a little bit of white on his feet and neck) which is even a further illusion to their song Black Dog. My family don't mess around when naming their pets.

So I've seen this dog multiple times, and it looks exactly like Zep, it's a stray like most dogs here, but I see it up and down the little side road to work every day.

And now this reminds me of something we did on the day of swearing in as PCVs. Maybe I mentioned this before, I'm not sure, but we all got care packages from the people in our Marz (region) of Armenia and when we went up to get it we had to say our pornstar name (The name of your first pet, and the street that you lived on as a kid) but with a twist. This was our Armenian pornstar name. Armenian last names always end in -ian or -yan. This suffix means "son of" and so everyone is the son of somebody else or whatever. Imagine if everyone was named Harrison, Clarkson, Markson, Geraldson . . . yeah. So what you do to get your Armenian pornstar name was to add the suffix -ian or -yan to the end of the last name of our pornstar name. So mine was Zep Saltsmanyan. Zep, my first per, and Saltsman Road was the first place I lived on.

And lastly, walking to work today I saw the cutest puppy. The puppies here are really cute because they aren't afraid of people yet. I wrote humans before but then erased it. I've been playing way to much Left 4 Dead.

But I saw this puppy, and usually Armenians ignore dogs and if they get to close they'll shoo them away or worse. So today the puppy, still not afraid of people, goes prancing after this group of women, and one turns around . . . and gives the little puppy some bread.

Then I saw an Armenian kid, maybe a teenager, come out and start giving the puppy some more bread. What a cute little interaction, and I mean it's a puppy, what did I expect, but either way it was a pleasant surprise, and I'm not sure if I would have seen that in a small village. But I don't live in a small village anymore, so who knows.