When I thought about getting a new dog I completely overlooked how fun it would be to liberate a city-dog by turning her into Ms. Nature-dog. She is 4.5 years old but she reacts to rocky arroyos, open space, cows, horses, and wildlife like she is a puppy, seeing them for the first time.
Of course there is some risk in that. There are rattlesnakes, raccoons, coatimundies, and skunks to be careful about. And city-dog or not, she wants to rub into cow poop!
She can get me into such a mood watching her frolic. What a marvelous thing it is see the frantic intensity of the young at play! Think of all the hackneyed things that a nature-lover is supposed to moon and swoon over: sunsets, mountains, Lake Louise. What about Youth itself?
It is redolent of the Gilbert & Sullivan song in The Mikado, "Three little maids from school are we." Notice that I linked to a video that is just sound. When 30 year old singer/actresses try to act like little girls, it just doesn't work -- they are a different animal species, now.
I don't know the musicological jargon for the solo windwind sections of music that scamper for a few seconds between the singing. Scamper indeed. Scamper is the quintessence of the Q.t.𝞹 as she looks up from a digression to see me 50 yards down the trail. She scampers back to me, with joy squirting out her eyeballs and ears.
Music, paintings, photographs, and movies seem most interesting when they lend themselves to a metaphorical interpretation. Perhaps if they have that effect on enough people and on fundamentally important aspects of life, they gradually become classics. Do you think Sullivan thought of that when he wrote this music?
Who knows? Maybe he was in his study and looking through a window at children or dogs disporting in the yard, and he just let it rip.
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