Bon-Bon The Dog Experiences River Madness

Previously, in the rich inner life of Bon-Bon the dog:

From 2020, “Meet Bon-Bon. He’s a genius, he’s Saint Anthony, he loves to be very awake at 4 in the morning, he is absolutely terrified of outside but is bold as brass about chewing my laptop cord.”

From 2022, Things kids in my neighborhood have said to me about my dogs. “[Busting out of the school line] I know these dogs! [Pointing at the wrong dog] That one’s Gogo and that one’s Bon-Bon. I’ve seen these dogs before. [To companion] You haven’t met them yet but I see them all the time. I know these dogs.”

From 2024, “If I choose to feed them a morsel of chicken, they develop a condition I have come to call chicken madness: For up to fifteen minutes afterwards, they will parade up and down the length of the apartment, tails bright like war-banners, occasionally crawling underneath the bed and flinging themselves out from underneath like a successful initiate in the Orphic mysteries; of course, this is procedure is accompanied the entire time by the most boisterous and relentless shouting imaginable. “I have had chicken,” they seem to say, “and now the knowledge of chicken lives in me; no one had better try to tell me anything ever again.”

From 2024, The coward soul of Bon-Bon the dog triumphs. “If ever there were a trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere, whose Faith does not shine equal to arm itself from Fear, Bon-Bon is such a trembler. His life has been soft as butter from the day of his birth to this. He toils not, neither does he spin; the greatest exertion life has ever required from him has been to occasionally take a ride in the car.”

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This week, we’ll be taking a detailed look at the total breakdown of order and civility as a result of Bon-Bon the dog’s “river madness,” but first, some recommendations:

• The 19th-century travel diaries of Sir Francis Ronalds:

I think I have been very indulgent to you in passing over such an immense length of time without any grumpings. The fact is that my life has been quite as monotonous as if I were at home. I get up not very early in the Morning, breakfast, paint clouds (if there are any), go to mass (sometimes, particularly on Sundays, by way of distinguishing the end of the week from the middle and for other little affairs which it is not necessary to detail), read or lounge at Booksellers, dress, Walk in the Villa Reale, or make a little mineralogical excursion, or an excursion of observation amongst the Natives, dine at a Trattoria with a General de Gourbillon (whose acquaintance I made soon after the loss of my Irish friends), go to St Carlo's or the Fondo (where I fall in love about twice a week with Dardanelli) or to the Accademie dei Nobili (where the newly arrived Squirrels get me by the Button to know what is to be seen at Naples), go home, go to bed, go to sleep, dream of England and of you.

But I beg your pardon for all this egotism, I sat down with the intention of telling you about the Miracle…

• If you liked A Very English Scandal, the 2021 Hugh Grant/Ben Whishaw series about the Thorpe affair, you can now watch the 1988 Gary Oldman/Alan Bates We Think The World Of You, based on J.R. Ackerley’s book of the same name for free on YouTube, if you’re looking for dark comedies about gay men treating dogs badly in order to get back at their ex-lovers (WTTWOY’s tagline is “A forbidden triangle that’s loaded with laughs, love and heavy petting,” which should let you know what you’re in for).

• If you’re not interested in bleak humor about violence towards animals, might I recommend Ackerley’s memoir, My Father and Myself, instead?

“I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919. Nearly a quarter of a century may seem rather procrastinatory for making up one’s mind, but I expect that the longer such rites are postponed the less indispensable they appear and that, as the years rolled by, my parents gradually forgot the anomaly of their situation. My Aunt Bunny, my mother’s younger sister, maintained that they would never have been married at all and I should still be a bastard like my dead brother if she had not intervened for the second time.”

• Some good advice from Farm Progress: “Get off the interstate, slow down”; “Why possible seed oil ban would be recipe for trouble for farmers”; “Volunteers are secret of every successful county fair”

Last summer we moved from Brooklyn to central Michigan, and the older of our two dogs, Bon-Bon, exhibited a near-complete personality change after coming into possession of a backyard. At the time, I noted that Gogo, the smaller dog, with a face like a tennis ball with a mouth cut into it, “is the same everywhere. He bounces and howls and makes constant demands regardless of circumstance. But the Bon-Bon of a Michigan backyard is an entirely different animal to the Bon-Bon of a Brooklyn apartment.