My parents' dog is named for Kosmo Kramer, from Seinfeld, but it's a name that suits her by how much she doesn't fit it. She's a pretty little skinny dog in between the size of a whippet and an Italian greyhound, with the coat of a yellow lab, with light freckles on her elegant paws. She's skittish about crossing hardwood floors and shy with strangers, and if she decides she's not going somewhere, sometimes the only thing to do is pick her up and take her there. She carries stuffed animals back to her bed. Socks, too, and shoes. If she wants to make friends with you she puts her head down and her paw up. But she has to check you out for awhile before she takes a risk like that.
She's been missing since this afternoon--there are workmen in the house, and she got freaked out, and a door was left open, and now she's somewhere away from home. She's been spotted around the neighborhood, and she has her tags on, but it's raining there, and night has fallen. My parents are worried, and second-guessing themselves.
So I'm asking you, if you're still reading this on your feed, to help out by doing whatever you can to get the lost-dog-found mojo going.
ETA, morning of 5/6/09: She came home!
Showing posts with label A dog's life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A dog's life. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Monday, August 25, 2008
Snake
This is inspired by jo(e)'s latest post, but so loosely and tangentially that it seems silly to put it in the comments there.
At one point in my AT hike, I caught up with my friend Fishdance, who was standing in the middle of the Trail, stock still. (Mo, were you there, too?) There was a large black snake spread all the way across the path several yards ahead. I stopped next to him and we discussed the snake for a second or two. It was big, seriously thick around the middle, and looked perfectly happy to stay there all day. It looked like it had nothing planned at all except to stay there all day. What to do?
Diva Dog, who was usually a little behind me, caught up. We called to her to stop, but it was too late. She passed us in her dog backpack.
Her paw came down on the snake, the pads spreading slightly as if she were stepping on a smooth stone.
The snake's gleaming, muscular body flattened out slightly under her weight.
Her paw came off of the snake.
The snake returned, unchanged and unmoved, to its original shape.
Diva Dog turned and looked back at us, curious about why we were focused on her, why we were stopped, and what we were making all the fuss about. Deciding it was simply her, and delighted at all the attention, she started to move back towards us, still showing no sign at all that she was aware of the snake's presence. Anxious that she not step on the snake again, I stepped across it. We all did. The snake took no action to move out of the way.
Clearly, we had given it no reason to change its plans.
At one point in my AT hike, I caught up with my friend Fishdance, who was standing in the middle of the Trail, stock still. (Mo, were you there, too?) There was a large black snake spread all the way across the path several yards ahead. I stopped next to him and we discussed the snake for a second or two. It was big, seriously thick around the middle, and looked perfectly happy to stay there all day. It looked like it had nothing planned at all except to stay there all day. What to do?
Diva Dog, who was usually a little behind me, caught up. We called to her to stop, but it was too late. She passed us in her dog backpack.
Her paw came down on the snake, the pads spreading slightly as if she were stepping on a smooth stone.
The snake's gleaming, muscular body flattened out slightly under her weight.
Her paw came off of the snake.
The snake returned, unchanged and unmoved, to its original shape.
Diva Dog turned and looked back at us, curious about why we were focused on her, why we were stopped, and what we were making all the fuss about. Deciding it was simply her, and delighted at all the attention, she started to move back towards us, still showing no sign at all that she was aware of the snake's presence. Anxious that she not step on the snake again, I stepped across it. We all did. The snake took no action to move out of the way.
Clearly, we had given it no reason to change its plans.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Allegheny Tuscarora Kittatinny Blue
...and I have been home now for a week without Annoying Dog. I'm not yet recovered from the drive (20 hours of interstates in two days) but I'm getting there. I no longer wake up to barking. I no longer enter the room to barking. I no longer live through an hour of barking before dinnertime. I don't need to do canine hierarchy management when I walk down stairs or through halls.
It has been like the story where the rabbi tells Joseph to bring the cow, the goats, and the chickens into his tiny, tiny house, and then finally tells him to kick them all out. It is so quiet in my house I feel like I'm floating. It feels like we've added several feet to every dimension of every room.
There are only two more days of the Daycare Relocation Carpool to get through, too. I'm hoping that the end of the commute will have a similar effect on time in my life, but somehow I'm not as hopeful.
It has been like the story where the rabbi tells Joseph to bring the cow, the goats, and the chickens into his tiny, tiny house, and then finally tells him to kick them all out. It is so quiet in my house I feel like I'm floating. It feels like we've added several feet to every dimension of every room.
There are only two more days of the Daycare Relocation Carpool to get through, too. I'm hoping that the end of the commute will have a similar effect on time in my life, but somehow I'm not as hopeful.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Blue Kittatinny Tuscarora Allegheny
Things I learned today:
There are double bathroom stalls on the PA Turnpike that have a full-size toilet and a toddler-size one, and a changing table. (Yeah, I thought that was cool, too.)
A person can get very wet under the gas pump awning.
The midwest is closer than I think.
My hair does extraordinary things when it halfway dries during a downpour and then heavy Ohio wind whips it up around and over my head to finish the job.
I can happily listen to The New Pornographers' Challengers cd six times in a row.
There is a family who already loves Annoying Dog and is happy to have her.
It is possible to be so nice to me that I cry.
There are double bathroom stalls on the PA Turnpike that have a full-size toilet and a toddler-size one, and a changing table. (Yeah, I thought that was cool, too.)
A person can get very wet under the gas pump awning.
The midwest is closer than I think.
My hair does extraordinary things when it halfway dries during a downpour and then heavy Ohio wind whips it up around and over my head to finish the job.
I can happily listen to The New Pornographers' Challengers cd six times in a row.
There is a family who already loves Annoying Dog and is happy to have her.
It is possible to be so nice to me that I cry.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
One will spread our ashes round the yard
Home again, finally.
After too much time spent on living room couches or in the car over the last five days, and after far too little time spent paying attention to my own thoughts, I finally squeezed in a late-afternoon walk over in my little patch of woods.
Since the last time I walked there, before we went up to A.'s parents' house, the trees have gone from mostly covered to mostly bare, and the leaves that were up on the branches have settled down on the ground in an inches-thick carpet of gold, red, orange, green. The little shallow creek at the bottom of the woods is covered over with leaves, too; in places it looks like little more than a wet ribbon in the russet groundcover.
I came to the spot where I usually perch on the creek's bank to let my thoughts wander along while the water flows over its shallow bed. The place where I leave the path for my spot lies between the footbridge and the fencing that keeps the erosion-control project safe from wandering feet and paws. It's a favorite place for dogs to get wet, and suddenly I realized what it was that my eyes had just barely been registering without taking in, as I'd made my way down along the path.
Fine, grey dust lying on top of the leaves. Fine and grey, but not uniform in grade or regular in shape. Fine and grey, across the leaves on the side of the creek. On top of the leaves that carpeted the creek itself. Settled on the bottom of the creekbed. As yet completely undisturbed.
I walked along from rock to rock for a few yards, respectfully, carefully. I found more fine, grey dust on the opposite bank of the creek, another place where pawprints are common.
I stood there on the rocks in the creek for a few long minutes and thought of Smartest Dog, whose ashes I spread in the St. Mary's River years before I moved to my house near the woods. I thought of Diva Dog, whose ashes are buried near the gate to our garden, who loved this spot in the creek. I thought of the Iron and Wine song, "Naked As We Came," that made me cry this morning while we were on our way to a shiva visit.
I thought of how much longer it is, forever, with people than with dogs. Decades and decades longer, god willing.
I thought of how little I know of how you get there. To forever.
After too much time spent on living room couches or in the car over the last five days, and after far too little time spent paying attention to my own thoughts, I finally squeezed in a late-afternoon walk over in my little patch of woods.
Since the last time I walked there, before we went up to A.'s parents' house, the trees have gone from mostly covered to mostly bare, and the leaves that were up on the branches have settled down on the ground in an inches-thick carpet of gold, red, orange, green. The little shallow creek at the bottom of the woods is covered over with leaves, too; in places it looks like little more than a wet ribbon in the russet groundcover.
I came to the spot where I usually perch on the creek's bank to let my thoughts wander along while the water flows over its shallow bed. The place where I leave the path for my spot lies between the footbridge and the fencing that keeps the erosion-control project safe from wandering feet and paws. It's a favorite place for dogs to get wet, and suddenly I realized what it was that my eyes had just barely been registering without taking in, as I'd made my way down along the path.
Fine, grey dust lying on top of the leaves. Fine and grey, but not uniform in grade or regular in shape. Fine and grey, across the leaves on the side of the creek. On top of the leaves that carpeted the creek itself. Settled on the bottom of the creekbed. As yet completely undisturbed.
I walked along from rock to rock for a few yards, respectfully, carefully. I found more fine, grey dust on the opposite bank of the creek, another place where pawprints are common.
I stood there on the rocks in the creek for a few long minutes and thought of Smartest Dog, whose ashes I spread in the St. Mary's River years before I moved to my house near the woods. I thought of Diva Dog, whose ashes are buried near the gate to our garden, who loved this spot in the creek. I thought of the Iron and Wine song, "Naked As We Came," that made me cry this morning while we were on our way to a shiva visit.
I thought of how much longer it is, forever, with people than with dogs. Decades and decades longer, god willing.
I thought of how little I know of how you get there. To forever.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Remembering
In Memoriam:
Ilsa, my diva dog
October 8, 1995-August 29, 2006
She died last year on the night before school started.
We scattered some of her ashes earlier this summer down in Southern Maryland, the place of some of her happiest days. Today we buried what we kept--by far most of them--and placed some stones from the St. Mary's River over them, in the shady spot near the gate where she used to lie in the periwinkle so she would be the first one to greet you when you came home.
Z. and I had some talks today about how when you finish crying you feel better. She asked me "Now do you feel happy dat Ilsa dayeed?" A. translated this as: "I know Ilsa died, but are you feeling better now, Mama?"
And actually, seeing those stones when I came through the gate, even though my heart twisted a little, I did feel better. I've missed her waiting for me.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Missing my dog
If you're just coming in now, for this whole story, I recommend you search on the tag "A dog's life," scroll down, and start with the oldest one that comes up. Or just click here and follow the links at the end of each post. Go ahead. It won't take you that long. When you wind up back here you'll know where I'm coming from.
* * * * *
This picture was taken down in Maryland at my parents' weekend house on the weekend before Labor Day of last year. Ilsa, my Diva Dog, was 6 weeks shy of 11 years old. Z. was one week shy of 18 months. 20 minutes after this shot was taken, Ilsa was lying behind me when someone--my mother, I think--asked "what's wrong with Ilsa?" I turned to see her legs were rigid and twitching, her tongue was lolling out, and holding her made no difference at all. Some part of me told another part of me, "this is what a seizure looks like." If you are up to speed on Rhymes with Javelin backstory, you will know that Z. had agonal breathing shortly after birth, was resuscitated and placed on a ventilator for a few hours, and the cause of her collapse was misdiagnosed as seizure. (There, now didn't I type that calmly?) This meant she was in the hospital for a week, and I was emotionally destroyed, and that's actually not putting it too strongly.
Faced with Ilsa's seizure, a part of me froze and another part of me switched into doing what needed to be done. Her brain had failed; during the seizure she was somewhere I couldn't reach her. When she came out of it she went into the house as though she was searching for the cool tiles of the bathroom, sheltering from the lightning in her head, but she went to the wrong side of the house and couldn't find it. I led her back to the tiles, I petted her and gave her all of my attention for the first time since Z.'s birth.
It was the first of several seizures that would reveal the brain tumor that was one of the myriad things that, all unknown to us, had been converging all summer to shut her down that weekend.
Not slowly but suddenly, her body stopped working.
She had been slowing down all summer, but not dramatically. And her last week was a fine one. The mouseyball reappeared for the first time in months, and she was thrilled to be reunited with it. I also inadvertently fulfilled one of her most cherished fantasies by putting up the dog gate while she was by herself in the kitchen and leaving the house for a few hours. Uncle Donor came for a visit that week, and of course we took the dogs with us down to Maryland, perhaps Ilsa's favorite place on the planet. She roamed around with all the other dogs and spent a blissed out afternoon lying under the hammock while my mother patted her. If we'd known how sick she was, she might not have had any of that.
When Ilsa started seizing, we had to find a hospital. In Southern Maryland on a Sunday. The nearest one was a 45-minute highway drive away. A. stayed with Z. and my father, while I held Ilsa in the backseat of my mother's car. When we got her out of the car, as we were pulling open the door, she sank down against me and onto the pavement as though she were melting. Seizing again. The techs came out with a rolling stainless steel cart to bring her back to the examining room and we sat down to wait and wait. I flashed back to the previous time Ilsa had been hospitalized, after a pit bull attacked her--the two waiting rooms are not distinct in my memory. I lost track of the hours. We talked to a vet who was worried about her hydration. He had no explanation for the seizures. As we knew from Z.'s hospitalization, too many things can cause them. Eventually, we had to leave her overnight.
They wanted her to go 24 hours without seizing, but she kept having them so in the end we settled for twelve.
We spent the extra day in Washington, going to the Natural History museum and riding the carousel just so the day wouldn't be all about tragedy. A. and Z. went home in our car, and I borrowed my mother's to drive the 40 minutes back to the animal hospital. I collected Ilsa, who was dazed and suddenly very frail looking, and collected a syringe of valium and two of saline that I would be able to inject into the port they left in her ankle just in case she seized on the trip up.
We stopped once so I could get a sandwich and give her a chance to pee, but after I lifted her out of the car all she wanted to do was lie down. I lifted her back in again. The ride was fast, but still over four hours. As the hours went on, she whimpered and whimpered and whined. God help me, I was impatient with her. I thought she needed to pee, since she hadn't taken the chance when we stopped, but actually she was dying.
I didn't take her home but directly to Penn, the same hospital where I dragged Smartest Dog's lifeless body, the same hospital where Hunter Dog was finally diagnosed with lupus at 11 months. I have, in short, a long history of going into hysterics at this hospital.
They took Ilsa straight from the back seat of the car into emergency. They told me that they didn't think she would have survived the twenty minute ride from there to my house. They found more things wrong than I knew could be wrong with a living organism. She had a tumor in her brain. Her spleen and guts and heart and lungs were all shutting down. Her blood pressure needed to be artificially maintained for her to survive the tests.
They kept her alive til the end of the next day, Tuesday, long enough for us to all come down to the hospital to say goodbye. The impossibly young doctor who was taking care of her was an Aussie owner, and in her way she seemed as upset as we were. A. and Z. said goodbye and left the room, and I held her and kept my hand over her heart and felt her heart beating until it faded away.
She was a good dog.
Coda: Remembering
* * * * *
This picture was taken down in Maryland at my parents' weekend house on the weekend before Labor Day of last year. Ilsa, my Diva Dog, was 6 weeks shy of 11 years old. Z. was one week shy of 18 months. 20 minutes after this shot was taken, Ilsa was lying behind me when someone--my mother, I think--asked "what's wrong with Ilsa?" I turned to see her legs were rigid and twitching, her tongue was lolling out, and holding her made no difference at all. Some part of me told another part of me, "this is what a seizure looks like." If you are up to speed on Rhymes with Javelin backstory, you will know that Z. had agonal breathing shortly after birth, was resuscitated and placed on a ventilator for a few hours, and the cause of her collapse was misdiagnosed as seizure. (There, now didn't I type that calmly?) This meant she was in the hospital for a week, and I was emotionally destroyed, and that's actually not putting it too strongly.
Faced with Ilsa's seizure, a part of me froze and another part of me switched into doing what needed to be done. Her brain had failed; during the seizure she was somewhere I couldn't reach her. When she came out of it she went into the house as though she was searching for the cool tiles of the bathroom, sheltering from the lightning in her head, but she went to the wrong side of the house and couldn't find it. I led her back to the tiles, I petted her and gave her all of my attention for the first time since Z.'s birth.
It was the first of several seizures that would reveal the brain tumor that was one of the myriad things that, all unknown to us, had been converging all summer to shut her down that weekend.
Not slowly but suddenly, her body stopped working.
She had been slowing down all summer, but not dramatically. And her last week was a fine one. The mouseyball reappeared for the first time in months, and she was thrilled to be reunited with it. I also inadvertently fulfilled one of her most cherished fantasies by putting up the dog gate while she was by herself in the kitchen and leaving the house for a few hours. Uncle Donor came for a visit that week, and of course we took the dogs with us down to Maryland, perhaps Ilsa's favorite place on the planet. She roamed around with all the other dogs and spent a blissed out afternoon lying under the hammock while my mother patted her. If we'd known how sick she was, she might not have had any of that.
When Ilsa started seizing, we had to find a hospital. In Southern Maryland on a Sunday. The nearest one was a 45-minute highway drive away. A. stayed with Z. and my father, while I held Ilsa in the backseat of my mother's car. When we got her out of the car, as we were pulling open the door, she sank down against me and onto the pavement as though she were melting. Seizing again. The techs came out with a rolling stainless steel cart to bring her back to the examining room and we sat down to wait and wait. I flashed back to the previous time Ilsa had been hospitalized, after a pit bull attacked her--the two waiting rooms are not distinct in my memory. I lost track of the hours. We talked to a vet who was worried about her hydration. He had no explanation for the seizures. As we knew from Z.'s hospitalization, too many things can cause them. Eventually, we had to leave her overnight.
They wanted her to go 24 hours without seizing, but she kept having them so in the end we settled for twelve.
We spent the extra day in Washington, going to the Natural History museum and riding the carousel just so the day wouldn't be all about tragedy. A. and Z. went home in our car, and I borrowed my mother's to drive the 40 minutes back to the animal hospital. I collected Ilsa, who was dazed and suddenly very frail looking, and collected a syringe of valium and two of saline that I would be able to inject into the port they left in her ankle just in case she seized on the trip up.
We stopped once so I could get a sandwich and give her a chance to pee, but after I lifted her out of the car all she wanted to do was lie down. I lifted her back in again. The ride was fast, but still over four hours. As the hours went on, she whimpered and whimpered and whined. God help me, I was impatient with her. I thought she needed to pee, since she hadn't taken the chance when we stopped, but actually she was dying.
I didn't take her home but directly to Penn, the same hospital where I dragged Smartest Dog's lifeless body, the same hospital where Hunter Dog was finally diagnosed with lupus at 11 months. I have, in short, a long history of going into hysterics at this hospital.
They took Ilsa straight from the back seat of the car into emergency. They told me that they didn't think she would have survived the twenty minute ride from there to my house. They found more things wrong than I knew could be wrong with a living organism. She had a tumor in her brain. Her spleen and guts and heart and lungs were all shutting down. Her blood pressure needed to be artificially maintained for her to survive the tests.
They kept her alive til the end of the next day, Tuesday, long enough for us to all come down to the hospital to say goodbye. The impossibly young doctor who was taking care of her was an Aussie owner, and in her way she seemed as upset as we were. A. and Z. said goodbye and left the room, and I held her and kept my hand over her heart and felt her heart beating until it faded away.
She was a good dog.
Coda: Remembering
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
From 2 to 5; from 2 to 10
When we returned to Philadelphia, Diva Dog and I were a household of two. By the end of her life, we were part of a family of five.
The first addition was Hunter Dog, whose arrival was inevitable from the time of Smartest Dog's death, which instantly converted me to the principle of the emergency back-up dog (a phrase I stole from Dave Barry). This is an idea that I intend to extend at least to emergency back-up offspring and possibly, if A. ever becomes amenable to the idea, to emergency back-up siblings for offspring. (I have personally found it helpful to have more than one sibling.)
This plan had to be delayed a bit because I was unable to have two dogs in either of my downtown apartments, but I was unwilling to go through the misery of a dogless front door again, and I also worried about Diva Dog's adjustment from me being around a lot as a nominally dissertating grad student, to me being around much less as a fully employed high-school teacher. With this in mind, as soon as I had a closing date for my house with a yard in "the neighborhoods" (as everywhere outside of Center City is called in this town), I made arrangements to get pick of the litter that produced Hunter Dog. She joined us shortly after the move.
Diva Dog initially thought Hunter Dog was a good thing, kind of an amusing toy. Then she realized that Hunter Dog should have gone home by now and she got into a huff for a few weeks, but she came out of it. She did make a couple of key mistakes early on: she let puppy Hunter Dog make a game of pouncing on her, and she let her bring the tennis balls back to me. As an adult Hunter Dog was several pounds larger than Diva Dog, and would still jump on Diva Dog's head in moments of excitement, like right before dinner time.
And Hunter Dog became so obsessed with tennis balls that Diva Dog eventually would only get a shot at the ball if she insisted on her turn, stood four feet from you while Hunter Dog eagerly anticipated a long one, and you then pitched one gently and directly at her muzzle. She would snatch it quickly in her mouth and toss it back at your feet, backing up two tiny, impatient half-steps to show how much more attention she deserved and why was Hunter Dog getting it all?
The next expansion to our household came when A. moved in. A. is allergic to dogs, but I was so gone for her that even though I usually go years without touching a vacuum cleaner, I went to the car wash and rendered my car hypoallergenic, and I vacuumed every corner and every piece of upholstery of every room that A. would be in each time I expected her to come over. The dogs were barred from anywhere that A. was. Obligingly, A. acclimated to the dogs over the course of a few months and our halls are once again lightly furred in the corners, though not nearly as much now that Diva Dog is gone. That beautiful, soft coat also shed like the dickens (I fear further description might make some readers begin to sneeze.)
Having a yard, especially a large one, is an invitation to dog-owning laziness, and Hunter Dog has never really been well socialized to other dogs the way Diva Dog had been in the dog park. Hunter Dog much preferred the company of tennis balls. When we were in Madison our yard was devoted to parking spaces and clotheslines, so we would walk them on the sidewalks or drive them to a wonderful dog park on a wetlands off of one of the lakes. Hunter Dog would go anywhere for a ball, including water far beyond her depth, while Diva Dog would wade in exactly to her chest and then stop.
In Madison, she came to disdain tennis balls in favor of smooth, rubber skybounce balls, which were slightly smaller and easier to grip between one's jaws. I found the ultimate Diva Dog toy at my favorite Madison pet store--possibly my favorite anywhere pet store--it was the mouseyball, a tiny soft rubber squeak toy, designed for a cat and perhaps an inch and a half across, allowing for a completely dainty grip between the incisors. It was molded and painted with mouse features and in the brief windows when it wasn't lost under furniture, Diva Dog would buzz with possessive love of the mouseyball. She would take it up and toss it back down on the floor so that she could race after it again. Hunter Dog was savvy enough to understand that this game was not to be interrupted or interfered with.
The final addition to the household was Z., and Z.'s arrival very sadly revealed the dogs to be only dogs. Diva Dog adored my mother and adored Uncle Donor long before either he or I dreamed he might come to have that role in our family. She would present herself in grand, belly-baring obsequy when either of these great humans came to visit, and if they weren't fast enough with their affections she would thump her nose up under their hands just to make sure they got the point.
The birth of the baby meant that both of these greatly adored human satellites would come to the house and completely ignore her. We didn't do a whole lot better ourselves. I wish that I could say that before her death we reached a happy dog-and-child equilibrium, but I think that stage is still a few years off, and will only come after Z. has gained enough authority in the canine world to be able to say "sit" with some oomph in her voice.
But as Z. started walking, she became more interesting, and in Diva Dog's last summe, she would let Z. lie on her and hug her, and she certainly had come to appreciate the spilled food around the kinderzeat, and I think she felt kind of protective about this little mammal with no teeth or claws who roamed around our house.
But just like a firstborn child, a dog you adopt as a single person has to adjust to a lot of splits in your attention. Diva didn't like it. But she was also slowing and slowing down, and especially in her last year, it often suited her to be left to herself on her dog bed. She didn't always want to come to the door when it was time to go out. I thought it was old age, and it was, but old age turns out to be a brutal dilapidation of the body.
Next: Missing my dog
The first addition was Hunter Dog, whose arrival was inevitable from the time of Smartest Dog's death, which instantly converted me to the principle of the emergency back-up dog (a phrase I stole from Dave Barry). This is an idea that I intend to extend at least to emergency back-up offspring and possibly, if A. ever becomes amenable to the idea, to emergency back-up siblings for offspring. (I have personally found it helpful to have more than one sibling.)
This plan had to be delayed a bit because I was unable to have two dogs in either of my downtown apartments, but I was unwilling to go through the misery of a dogless front door again, and I also worried about Diva Dog's adjustment from me being around a lot as a nominally dissertating grad student, to me being around much less as a fully employed high-school teacher. With this in mind, as soon as I had a closing date for my house with a yard in "the neighborhoods" (as everywhere outside of Center City is called in this town), I made arrangements to get pick of the litter that produced Hunter Dog. She joined us shortly after the move.
Diva Dog initially thought Hunter Dog was a good thing, kind of an amusing toy. Then she realized that Hunter Dog should have gone home by now and she got into a huff for a few weeks, but she came out of it. She did make a couple of key mistakes early on: she let puppy Hunter Dog make a game of pouncing on her, and she let her bring the tennis balls back to me. As an adult Hunter Dog was several pounds larger than Diva Dog, and would still jump on Diva Dog's head in moments of excitement, like right before dinner time.
And Hunter Dog became so obsessed with tennis balls that Diva Dog eventually would only get a shot at the ball if she insisted on her turn, stood four feet from you while Hunter Dog eagerly anticipated a long one, and you then pitched one gently and directly at her muzzle. She would snatch it quickly in her mouth and toss it back at your feet, backing up two tiny, impatient half-steps to show how much more attention she deserved and why was Hunter Dog getting it all?
The next expansion to our household came when A. moved in. A. is allergic to dogs, but I was so gone for her that even though I usually go years without touching a vacuum cleaner, I went to the car wash and rendered my car hypoallergenic, and I vacuumed every corner and every piece of upholstery of every room that A. would be in each time I expected her to come over. The dogs were barred from anywhere that A. was. Obligingly, A. acclimated to the dogs over the course of a few months and our halls are once again lightly furred in the corners, though not nearly as much now that Diva Dog is gone. That beautiful, soft coat also shed like the dickens (I fear further description might make some readers begin to sneeze.)
Having a yard, especially a large one, is an invitation to dog-owning laziness, and Hunter Dog has never really been well socialized to other dogs the way Diva Dog had been in the dog park. Hunter Dog much preferred the company of tennis balls. When we were in Madison our yard was devoted to parking spaces and clotheslines, so we would walk them on the sidewalks or drive them to a wonderful dog park on a wetlands off of one of the lakes. Hunter Dog would go anywhere for a ball, including water far beyond her depth, while Diva Dog would wade in exactly to her chest and then stop.
In Madison, she came to disdain tennis balls in favor of smooth, rubber skybounce balls, which were slightly smaller and easier to grip between one's jaws. I found the ultimate Diva Dog toy at my favorite Madison pet store--possibly my favorite anywhere pet store--it was the mouseyball, a tiny soft rubber squeak toy, designed for a cat and perhaps an inch and a half across, allowing for a completely dainty grip between the incisors. It was molded and painted with mouse features and in the brief windows when it wasn't lost under furniture, Diva Dog would buzz with possessive love of the mouseyball. She would take it up and toss it back down on the floor so that she could race after it again. Hunter Dog was savvy enough to understand that this game was not to be interrupted or interfered with.
The final addition to the household was Z., and Z.'s arrival very sadly revealed the dogs to be only dogs. Diva Dog adored my mother and adored Uncle Donor long before either he or I dreamed he might come to have that role in our family. She would present herself in grand, belly-baring obsequy when either of these great humans came to visit, and if they weren't fast enough with their affections she would thump her nose up under their hands just to make sure they got the point.
The birth of the baby meant that both of these greatly adored human satellites would come to the house and completely ignore her. We didn't do a whole lot better ourselves. I wish that I could say that before her death we reached a happy dog-and-child equilibrium, but I think that stage is still a few years off, and will only come after Z. has gained enough authority in the canine world to be able to say "sit" with some oomph in her voice.
But as Z. started walking, she became more interesting, and in Diva Dog's last summe, she would let Z. lie on her and hug her, and she certainly had come to appreciate the spilled food around the kinderzeat, and I think she felt kind of protective about this little mammal with no teeth or claws who roamed around our house.
But just like a firstborn child, a dog you adopt as a single person has to adjust to a lot of splits in your attention. Diva didn't like it. But she was also slowing and slowing down, and especially in her last year, it often suited her to be left to herself on her dog bed. She didn't always want to come to the door when it was time to go out. I thought it was old age, and it was, but old age turns out to be a brutal dilapidation of the body.
Next: Missing my dog
Hiking with the Diva
I had started making plans to hike the Appalachian Trail with Smartest Dog--I still have the Mastercard bill that began with the charge for her backpack and ended with the charge for her cremation. After Diva Dog came, somehow the Trail plans kept receding. First it was about Diva Dog's age--she would be less than a year old the summer I'd planned to go with Smartest Dog, and I didn't want a growing dog carrying a pack or even walking for that long. The next year it was my massage course, which finished in July, months too late to start the Trail. Finally, I committed to do it when Diva Dog was 2 1/2, leaving as soon as the tutoring program could spare me, and planning to return in time to start up again in the Fall.
We trained on short hikes on the trails of Nearby Creek Gorge, and we trained on an overnight with Diva Dog's best Aussie friend and one of his owners, and we went on our own on what turned out to be an overly-ambitious circuit hike in Western PA that very nearly left me trapped in the wilderness when I sprained my achilles' tendon on the second day. I had to hike out on it 13 miles, and then it started raining. It was pretty scary. After dark we finally flagged down a young couple in a pickup truck who drove us back to the ranger's house where I'd parked my car. After I changed into dry clothes, he plied me with ice packs, Kool-Aid, spaghetti, and bitter cucumbers from his garden before letting me begin the drive back across the state--I stopped in the first hotel I came to, more or less shivering. Luckily they took dogs.
That was my first encounter with trail angels, and the first of many rides in pickup trucks that Diva Dog and I would have while hiking--lots of the time, hitching is the only way to get to town, but folks who live along the Trail are used to hikers needing rides, so it's not as dangerous or frustrating as you might think. Still, having her with me made me feel better about doing it, and talking to other hikers, it seemed like young woman-pretty dog was the ideal combination for getting rides. Mostly we were going to get them from pick-up trucks, but in those parts of the country, pick-up trucks are plentiful. Red ones.
I know that having her with me made friendship easier. The first friends we made on the Trail were the Fantastic Four: two sisters and their half-brother and the fiance of one of the sisters, who were hiking with a dog. At the end of the day when all the people were zombified, the two dogs would flop for an hour, then chase each other around the shelter.
My first break from the Trail was for Diva Dog's paws. They got pretty torn up the first week hiking, so we stopped in a little town in N. Georgia that's zoned Heidi for tourist purposes (no, I'm not making this up.) I made her an Epsom salt bath and watched Homicide on the hotel-room TV. We caught up to the Fantastic Four pretty quickly, and we kept passing them and falling behind and passing them again until I got off the trail in Virginia.
I would write about our hiking days in the shelter logs, and M., my eventual human hiking partner, who unbeknownst to me was a few days behind us until we took time off in the Smokies, was reading about us there. (Since hikers communicate via trail register you only know about the people ahead of you and are blind to the people behind you unless you're passed by someone hiking super fast. So hiking behind someone is a little like lurking.)
There are no dogs allowed in the Smokies, so Diva Dog was going to take time off no matter what, but I had to get off to go to my brother's college graduation, which he had arranged as conveniently as I could ask him to--he was at Vanderbilt and his commencement fell right when I needed to deliver Diva Dog to the kennel lady, who gave me a ride across the mountains because she had to drive Diva Dog that way anyhow. She said some racist things about Philadelphia, where she had once lived, and I tried to object without prejudicing her against my dog. Either I was too wimpy or I succeeded because she wound up giving Diva Dog the run of the place with all of her house dogs because she liked her so much.
But M. was hiking behind us, and everyone uses trail names in the registers and Diva Dog's real name was a person name, so M. thought that she was a human hiker until he caught up with me. At the end of the park I waited for the kennel lady to deliver her and I was so excited to see her again. She had a summer haircut that made her look like Audrey Hepburn. She was my movie star dog.
She loved the sun and when we were hiking I resorted to taking the hottest hours of the day off and tying her up in the shade so she couldn't overheat. She learned to drink from my water pack, and she learned how to use gravity to get her pack off when we were going downhill. When we hiked through the herds of feral ponies in Virginia, she circled me on her leash until she had me tied in knots.
You sleep a lot in shelters, three-walled structures with a wooden floor raised above the ground, usually equipped with a steep corrugated roof and a whole lot of places to hang food bags so the mice don't get in, sometimes with a table and benches in front. Our usual arrangement was me in my homemade fleece sleepsack next to a wall, with M. in his sleeping bag on my other side (I have never slept well near strangers, or even my own daughter). At my feet, so she wasn't in the line of other sleeping people: Diva Dog on her super-high-tech, stuffed-with-polyester-and-shredded-mylar, flannel-on-top-and-nylon-on-the-bottom dog blanket from 0rvis. If any hikers objected, I would tie her under the shelter, but that didn't happen real often because mostly people who are happy to be outside and unshowered for weeks on end don't mind a dog on the edge of a space that is, after all, a freestanding sleeping porch.
Sleeping outdoors in the Appalachians taught Diva Dog a healthy terror of thunderstorms. When the thunderstorms rolled in--which could be nightly--Diva Dog would pace and cringe and whine and burrow her way in between us. One of our first nights out--long before M., when it was us and the Fantastic Four and a few others who'd started at the same time--we were in a shelter at the top of a mountain, and everyone had piled in just before the rain hit. It hit hard, and so did the lightning, striking an outcropping of rock maybe twenty feet from the open wall of the shelter. It was as bright as you'd expect, and sounded like loud, loud gunfire, almost a small bomb. We saw rocks zinging off from the spot where it hit. There were other strikes that sounded as close or nearly, but none where I was actually looking at the right place at the right time.
Until the end of her life, Diva Dog firmly believed that the best and safest place to be during thunder was in a tiled bathroom. Perhaps one day someone will do the study to back her up on this.
I could go on and on. I have a lot of stories. I have a lot of pictures. I didn't make it the whole way. I gave it my best shot, but I tore up my feet and our hike ended when I couldn't walk anymore. I had made a deal with myself at the outset that the one thing that would take me off the Trail was a debilitating injury. I was imagining something like a broken ankle or a tree falling on me--these were both things that happened to hikers I knew--not what amounted to fallen arches. But I was using my hiking poles as crutches by the end of every day, and the end of every day came after fewer miles, and I needed more frequent and longer town stops to feel able to keep going. We had jumped up to New England to reach Katahdin, the northern terminus, before it closed for snow. The thing about thru-hiking is that it is a practical exercise in basic algebra: distance = speed x time. Imagine living with that equation every minute of the day. We didn't need to look at the numbers because we knew them by heart, and if we didn't pick up the pace we wouldn't make it, even having skipped 700 miles. Experimentally, I tried doing a day long enough to get us there--just one day and it was over. We were at Killington. We made our way to Rutland. I found a clinic that x-rayed my feet and saw the bone spurs. I found a podiatrist who opened his office for me on a Sunday. He taped my feet, taught me how to do it myself, and sent me home. I couldn't walk for a month.
Hiking the trail was my first stab at blogging, before it was called that. My year, 1998, was the 50th anniversary of the first unsupported thru-hike of the AT (some Boy Scouts with vehicle support may or may not have hiked the whole thing previously). That hike had been made by a WWII vet named Earl Shaeffer, and he'd done the whole thing a time or two since, and 50 years later he was repeating the hike for history's sake. There was a bit of buzz about this, as you might imagine, and one of the more prominent people in AT circles decided to organize 50 hikers to do online journals of their hikes. One of those folks was me, and every time I got to town I mailed my handwritten pages to a volunteer transcriber in Kansas. Those archives are gone now or I'd point you there, but maybe someday when I don't have anything better to do I'll hunt down the loose pages and type them up here. I sort of think, though I can't be certain, that if you were following my hike on that webpage, it listed me and Diva Dog both as hikers.
Next: From 2 to 5; from 2 to 10
We trained on short hikes on the trails of Nearby Creek Gorge, and we trained on an overnight with Diva Dog's best Aussie friend and one of his owners, and we went on our own on what turned out to be an overly-ambitious circuit hike in Western PA that very nearly left me trapped in the wilderness when I sprained my achilles' tendon on the second day. I had to hike out on it 13 miles, and then it started raining. It was pretty scary. After dark we finally flagged down a young couple in a pickup truck who drove us back to the ranger's house where I'd parked my car. After I changed into dry clothes, he plied me with ice packs, Kool-Aid, spaghetti, and bitter cucumbers from his garden before letting me begin the drive back across the state--I stopped in the first hotel I came to, more or less shivering. Luckily they took dogs.
That was my first encounter with trail angels, and the first of many rides in pickup trucks that Diva Dog and I would have while hiking--lots of the time, hitching is the only way to get to town, but folks who live along the Trail are used to hikers needing rides, so it's not as dangerous or frustrating as you might think. Still, having her with me made me feel better about doing it, and talking to other hikers, it seemed like young woman-pretty dog was the ideal combination for getting rides. Mostly we were going to get them from pick-up trucks, but in those parts of the country, pick-up trucks are plentiful. Red ones.
I know that having her with me made friendship easier. The first friends we made on the Trail were the Fantastic Four: two sisters and their half-brother and the fiance of one of the sisters, who were hiking with a dog. At the end of the day when all the people were zombified, the two dogs would flop for an hour, then chase each other around the shelter.
My first break from the Trail was for Diva Dog's paws. They got pretty torn up the first week hiking, so we stopped in a little town in N. Georgia that's zoned Heidi for tourist purposes (no, I'm not making this up.) I made her an Epsom salt bath and watched Homicide on the hotel-room TV. We caught up to the Fantastic Four pretty quickly, and we kept passing them and falling behind and passing them again until I got off the trail in Virginia.
I would write about our hiking days in the shelter logs, and M., my eventual human hiking partner, who unbeknownst to me was a few days behind us until we took time off in the Smokies, was reading about us there. (Since hikers communicate via trail register you only know about the people ahead of you and are blind to the people behind you unless you're passed by someone hiking super fast. So hiking behind someone is a little like lurking.)
There are no dogs allowed in the Smokies, so Diva Dog was going to take time off no matter what, but I had to get off to go to my brother's college graduation, which he had arranged as conveniently as I could ask him to--he was at Vanderbilt and his commencement fell right when I needed to deliver Diva Dog to the kennel lady, who gave me a ride across the mountains because she had to drive Diva Dog that way anyhow. She said some racist things about Philadelphia, where she had once lived, and I tried to object without prejudicing her against my dog. Either I was too wimpy or I succeeded because she wound up giving Diva Dog the run of the place with all of her house dogs because she liked her so much.
But M. was hiking behind us, and everyone uses trail names in the registers and Diva Dog's real name was a person name, so M. thought that she was a human hiker until he caught up with me. At the end of the park I waited for the kennel lady to deliver her and I was so excited to see her again. She had a summer haircut that made her look like Audrey Hepburn. She was my movie star dog.
She loved the sun and when we were hiking I resorted to taking the hottest hours of the day off and tying her up in the shade so she couldn't overheat. She learned to drink from my water pack, and she learned how to use gravity to get her pack off when we were going downhill. When we hiked through the herds of feral ponies in Virginia, she circled me on her leash until she had me tied in knots.
You sleep a lot in shelters, three-walled structures with a wooden floor raised above the ground, usually equipped with a steep corrugated roof and a whole lot of places to hang food bags so the mice don't get in, sometimes with a table and benches in front. Our usual arrangement was me in my homemade fleece sleepsack next to a wall, with M. in his sleeping bag on my other side (I have never slept well near strangers, or even my own daughter). At my feet, so she wasn't in the line of other sleeping people: Diva Dog on her super-high-tech, stuffed-with-polyester-and-shredded-mylar, flannel-on-top-and-nylon-on-the-bottom dog blanket from 0rvis. If any hikers objected, I would tie her under the shelter, but that didn't happen real often because mostly people who are happy to be outside and unshowered for weeks on end don't mind a dog on the edge of a space that is, after all, a freestanding sleeping porch.
Sleeping outdoors in the Appalachians taught Diva Dog a healthy terror of thunderstorms. When the thunderstorms rolled in--which could be nightly--Diva Dog would pace and cringe and whine and burrow her way in between us. One of our first nights out--long before M., when it was us and the Fantastic Four and a few others who'd started at the same time--we were in a shelter at the top of a mountain, and everyone had piled in just before the rain hit. It hit hard, and so did the lightning, striking an outcropping of rock maybe twenty feet from the open wall of the shelter. It was as bright as you'd expect, and sounded like loud, loud gunfire, almost a small bomb. We saw rocks zinging off from the spot where it hit. There were other strikes that sounded as close or nearly, but none where I was actually looking at the right place at the right time.
Until the end of her life, Diva Dog firmly believed that the best and safest place to be during thunder was in a tiled bathroom. Perhaps one day someone will do the study to back her up on this.
I could go on and on. I have a lot of stories. I have a lot of pictures. I didn't make it the whole way. I gave it my best shot, but I tore up my feet and our hike ended when I couldn't walk anymore. I had made a deal with myself at the outset that the one thing that would take me off the Trail was a debilitating injury. I was imagining something like a broken ankle or a tree falling on me--these were both things that happened to hikers I knew--not what amounted to fallen arches. But I was using my hiking poles as crutches by the end of every day, and the end of every day came after fewer miles, and I needed more frequent and longer town stops to feel able to keep going. We had jumped up to New England to reach Katahdin, the northern terminus, before it closed for snow. The thing about thru-hiking is that it is a practical exercise in basic algebra: distance = speed x time. Imagine living with that equation every minute of the day. We didn't need to look at the numbers because we knew them by heart, and if we didn't pick up the pace we wouldn't make it, even having skipped 700 miles. Experimentally, I tried doing a day long enough to get us there--just one day and it was over. We were at Killington. We made our way to Rutland. I found a clinic that x-rayed my feet and saw the bone spurs. I found a podiatrist who opened his office for me on a Sunday. He taped my feet, taught me how to do it myself, and sent me home. I couldn't walk for a month.
Hiking the trail was my first stab at blogging, before it was called that. My year, 1998, was the 50th anniversary of the first unsupported thru-hike of the AT (some Boy Scouts with vehicle support may or may not have hiked the whole thing previously). That hike had been made by a WWII vet named Earl Shaeffer, and he'd done the whole thing a time or two since, and 50 years later he was repeating the hike for history's sake. There was a bit of buzz about this, as you might imagine, and one of the more prominent people in AT circles decided to organize 50 hikers to do online journals of their hikes. One of those folks was me, and every time I got to town I mailed my handwritten pages to a volunteer transcriber in Kansas. Those archives are gone now or I'd point you there, but maybe someday when I don't have anything better to do I'll hunt down the loose pages and type them up here. I sort of think, though I can't be certain, that if you were following my hike on that webpage, it listed me and Diva Dog both as hikers.
Next: From 2 to 5; from 2 to 10
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
A Diva takes the stage
Diva Dog came to me as a puppy after her half-sister, Smartest Dog, died of chocolate poisoning in the Fall of 1995, when she was only 2. I also had Smartest Dog from a puppy, and she had gone with me everywhere and did everything with me. Her death was so shocking that I couldn't catch up with her absence. I did everything I could to avoid walking through my door. To a dog owner, opening a door and finding no dog to greet you is one of the loneliest things there is. When I was out, I stayed out, haunting campus and coffee houses. And when I was in, I stayed in. I watched a lot of television and knit a lot of sweaters.
Diva Dog's litter was already on its way when I called the breeder. She was born three weeks after Smartest Dog died, and came home eight weeks after that. When I collected her, she fit in a shoebox. When I walked her in Stately Victorian Park, she would fall into the edges that kept the mulch neat, and then need to scramble her way back up. Like a newborn person, she had green eyes that turned brown. When, a couple of weeks later, the semester ended and I went home for winter break, my grandfather in Omaha died of a massive heart attack the first night I was home. Having a puppy in the house then was a good thing.
Even though I was mourning my grandpa, with a dog to walk again, I came out of my depression. I started teaching high school in a tutoring program twice a week, an involvement that eventually gave me the resume I needed to find a full-time high school teaching job. I started engaging with people outside of class, something I hadn't managed to do Fall semester. I began planning again for the trail, joining a gym and starting to run. Diva Dog was as much a hindrance as a help on the sidewalk, since she literally stopped traffic. Several times a week, people would pull their cars over to ask me her breed. (Australian Shepherd, of course.)
And Diva Dog made friends of her own! One couple who stopped me on the street got a puppy of their own, and we became friends, walking the puppies together in Judy Garland Park. Diva Dog loved their dog, and if I said a word that rhymed with his name she would run to the window to look for him. She even went on vacation with him once, going up to Vermont with his owners while I stayed home to do something or other. Those old dog park connections resurfaced this Winter when Z. met Digger Boy. That was, of course, months after Diva Dog died--and she had survived all her playmates.
To own a dog is to anticipate bereavement.
Next: Hiking with the Diva
Diva Dog's litter was already on its way when I called the breeder. She was born three weeks after Smartest Dog died, and came home eight weeks after that. When I collected her, she fit in a shoebox. When I walked her in Stately Victorian Park, she would fall into the edges that kept the mulch neat, and then need to scramble her way back up. Like a newborn person, she had green eyes that turned brown. When, a couple of weeks later, the semester ended and I went home for winter break, my grandfather in Omaha died of a massive heart attack the first night I was home. Having a puppy in the house then was a good thing.
Even though I was mourning my grandpa, with a dog to walk again, I came out of my depression. I started teaching high school in a tutoring program twice a week, an involvement that eventually gave me the resume I needed to find a full-time high school teaching job. I started engaging with people outside of class, something I hadn't managed to do Fall semester. I began planning again for the trail, joining a gym and starting to run. Diva Dog was as much a hindrance as a help on the sidewalk, since she literally stopped traffic. Several times a week, people would pull their cars over to ask me her breed. (Australian Shepherd, of course.)
And Diva Dog made friends of her own! One couple who stopped me on the street got a puppy of their own, and we became friends, walking the puppies together in Judy Garland Park. Diva Dog loved their dog, and if I said a word that rhymed with his name she would run to the window to look for him. She even went on vacation with him once, going up to Vermont with his owners while I stayed home to do something or other. Those old dog park connections resurfaced this Winter when Z. met Digger Boy. That was, of course, months after Diva Dog died--and she had survived all her playmates.
To own a dog is to anticipate bereavement.
Next: Hiking with the Diva
Sunday, June 24, 2007
A sad story about Neighbor Dog
Z. stops at the storefront window our neighbor uses as a changing miniature display. Usually it's hedgehogs having picnics or conducting their treestump-house life, but right now both windows into the treestump-house are occupied by pictures of Neighbor Dog, and the miniature ceramic dogs that used to be having a pet parade in the display window on the other side of the street door have all gathered round to look. This is a composite of several conversations Z. and I have had in the week since the display went up. (Of course, we do not use the dogs' blognames when we talk about them.)
Z.: Can you tell me a sad story about Neighbor Dog?
S.: Neighbor Dog used to get so sad he would start howling. Then Hunter Dog and Diva Dog and all the dogs next door would howl, too. And Neighbor Dog would stop howling to listen, and he wouldn't be lonely anymore because he could hear all the other dogs. But Neighbor dog's hearing stopped working--
Z.: His listening broke.
S.: Yes, his listening broke. And then he couldn't hear when the other dogs howled. And so he stopped howling. And then slowly, slowly the rest of his body stopped working. And then he died. And now Neighbor N. and Neighbor M. are very sad.
Z.: And dey will have a party and Neighbor Dog and Diva Dog will come back.
S.: No, sweetie, they won't come back. When someone's body stops working and they die, they don't come back.
Z.: We have a picture of Diva Dog eating a BIG stick. In da woods.
S.: Yes, we do.
Z.: And we can put a Band-Aid on her.
S.: No, when someone is dead then Band-Aids don't help them anymore.
Z.: Hunter Dog and Annoying Dog's bodies still work.
S.: Yes, they still work. And they will work for a long, long time.
Diva Dog died last summer, a sudden two-day decline that began while we were on a long weekend down at my parents' house on the Chesapeake. We haven't been back there since, but we'll be going down there for a week starting Friday, and we'll be scattering her ashes, which have been in a box in the foyer for the past nine months, where they occasionally remind me of their presence by sending sharp spikes into my heart. I'm going to try to get some of the stuff from last summer out on the blog this week and then take a break until we get back. If things turn out to be a little sparse this week it's because I'm working on the drafts.
Next: A Diva takes the stage
Z.: Can you tell me a sad story about Neighbor Dog?
S.: Neighbor Dog used to get so sad he would start howling. Then Hunter Dog and Diva Dog and all the dogs next door would howl, too. And Neighbor Dog would stop howling to listen, and he wouldn't be lonely anymore because he could hear all the other dogs. But Neighbor dog's hearing stopped working--
Z.: His listening broke.
S.: Yes, his listening broke. And then he couldn't hear when the other dogs howled. And so he stopped howling. And then slowly, slowly the rest of his body stopped working. And then he died. And now Neighbor N. and Neighbor M. are very sad.
Z.: And dey will have a party and Neighbor Dog and Diva Dog will come back.
S.: No, sweetie, they won't come back. When someone's body stops working and they die, they don't come back.
Z.: We have a picture of Diva Dog eating a BIG stick. In da woods.
S.: Yes, we do.
Z.: And we can put a Band-Aid on her.
S.: No, when someone is dead then Band-Aids don't help them anymore.
Z.: Hunter Dog and Annoying Dog's bodies still work.
S.: Yes, they still work. And they will work for a long, long time.
Diva Dog died last summer, a sudden two-day decline that began while we were on a long weekend down at my parents' house on the Chesapeake. We haven't been back there since, but we'll be going down there for a week starting Friday, and we'll be scattering her ashes, which have been in a box in the foyer for the past nine months, where they occasionally remind me of their presence by sending sharp spikes into my heart. I'm going to try to get some of the stuff from last summer out on the blog this week and then take a break until we get back. If things turn out to be a little sparse this week it's because I'm working on the drafts.
Next: A Diva takes the stage
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
