Sugar Substitute

Several years ago, my daughter, Molly, and I lost our beloved dog, Sugar, to a wild dash from the side door that lead to a hit-and-run death.  In trying to get over the loss of Sugar, Molly adopted a very nice cat she named Brody, the name an homage to the actor Adrien Brody because of the cat’s rather long nose.  At some point, we cutely called Brody our Sugar substitute.

Fast forward to now.  Somehow, I woke up last Saturday morning with a brand new cat, whom I finally named Roxie because of, well I don’t really know why other than she likes to play cat hockey with errant rocks she finds on my window sill in the middle of the night.

My life was really simple.  Living alone, things stayed where I put them even if I couldn’t remember where that was.  I had the freedom, if not the money, to travel and stay a while.  Vacuuming could wait another six months or so.

And it wasn't that I was lonely.  I have children and grandchildren who love me and even like me most of the time, and friends who put up with me, and interests and pursuits and favorite TV shows.  All the things that make life worth living.

So why a new cat now?  Why the cost and the aggravation and the responsibility, not to mention cat hair everywhere and that catbox smell?  The only reason I can think of is that I’d recently lost my brother, Sandy, not to a quick death under the tires of a Toyota but to a long battle with cancer, a war the cancer won.

So, was it possible that Roxie could become a Sandy substitute?  At first glance, it was iffy.

Whereas Sandy was trim and well groomed, Roxie is fluffy and a bit disheveled. 

Sandy never ever walked over my computer keys while I was trying to type. 

Sandy was quiet and careful not to offend, whereas Roxie raucously meows her opinions about everything (mostly in the middle of the night).   

Roxie bites me; Sandy never did.  The worse thing Sandy ever did to me was to infiltrate my diary when I was fourteen to write in it that he needed a bra more than I did.  

 Sandy was independent, while I have to do EVERYTHING for Roxie.  I have to feed her and give her water and clean out her damned sandbox and lug up her 100 pound bag of litter while she tries to trip me.

But I guess somehow, in spite of all the trouble and probably for all the wrong reasons, I can feel this cat beginning to patch up that big hole in my heart.  She looks as happy as a cat can look when I come home, and she purrs when she feels like it, and I'm fairly certain her escapades will give me something new to write about.  And though there will never be a substitute for my only sibling, someone who knew me from when I was a tiny orange-haired baby and truly loved me in spite of myself, this new cat of mine makes me laugh and gives me someone to talk to in the morning and helps me forget that I am now a brotherless child.

I think Sandy would understand.

The Night of the Screaming Rabbit Babies and Other Tales from a Leaky Vessel

No one has ever accused me of running a tight ship and my failings in that particular realm were never more evident than when I had kids and animals around the house.

The Big Kat used to go around saying that if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. I, in turn, went around saying that he was a jackass, but I now see that I am my own most troublesome problem in many arenas, especially in the arena of loose shippedness.

Night time was the worst as it is well documented that I love my sleep. Many interesting things happened around my house during those eight or nine hours that I was blithely slumbering away. Alarm systems were dismantled from the inside out, cars were pushed out of the garage and down the driveway so I wouldn’t hear them start up, people came and went, and complete teenage dramas were played out as I snoozed in my bed. And it wasn’t because I was such a heavy sleeper, it’s because my kids were just that good.

Years ago, in one of my very few cleaning frenzies ever, I decided to take on Melissa’s room. Next to her bed, she had one of those cardboard tables covered with a cloth that were all the rage of cheapskates in the eighties. I picked up the table to vacuum under it and found a coil of yellow rope and a pair of rubber gloves tucked inside. After severe interrogation, Melissa finally owned up to climbing out of her second-floor window using the rope to rappel down and the gloves to protect her sweet hands. She then told me that she’d definitely learned her lesson as the leaving had been a snap, but the return trip had been pretty tough. I couldn’t help wondering why she hadn’t just taken the batteries out of the alarm system like she usually did.

Although I was relatively laissez faire in parenting my children, my approach with pets veered toward the criminally insane. First of all, I could never pass up the opportunity to take in an animal. During the time my kids were living at home, we had no fewer than four dogs, one bird, three or four hamsters, one rabbit, a myriad of fish, and way too many cats to count. I did draw the line at pythons and any kind of lizard and, for that, I'm quite proud.

It was the actually caring for the animals that caused me to lose my way.

However, let me go on record as stating that I never neglected any animal to the point of perishment (except for maybe the rabbit, but that was never proved), and I never abandoned an animal to the elements (except for that one cat with the truly nasty personality who took up with us). For that cat, I paid Billy and his friend, T.J., (in advance, of course) to take the cat somewhere and drop it off. The cat came back a couple of hours before Billy and T.J. returned with my car. Yeah, I know that wasn’t the right thing to do and that I could be arrested for it these days, but you know what they say about desperate times.

Then there were the few years when we had Sugar, our black pseudo-Lab; Sheba, a cat I’d inherited when her real parents moved back to New Zealand; and Chloe, the cat we’d had forever. Sheba’s real parents, in their cute New Zealander accents, had told me that she was quite the “huntress.” How quaint, I thought.

During that time, I'd taken to leaving a window open in my dining room so the critters could go in and out at their leisure to take care of their business. Yes, that was probably dangerous and no, it didn't do much for my reputation as a stellar hostess. At that point, I'd apparently forgotten Sheba's reputation as a huntress.

There was one particular night when Sheba must have found a rabbit nursery in my back yard. On that night, she brought not one, but two, screaming rabbit babies (one after the other) into my bedroom so that I could share in her pride and maybe even grab a tasty tidbit of tiny cottontail. I could have probably gotten the rabbit babies away from Sheba, but before I could hoist myself out of bed and chase her down, Sugar got into the act, stealing the screaming babies from Sheba and then running through the house with each of them, shaking them until they finally succumbed to little rabbit baby heart attacks.

It got to the point that spring that animal carcasses no longer gave us any pause at all. One Sunday, I came home after being out of town for the weekend. I'd paid Molly (in advance, of course) to clean up while I was gone, and when I arrived, I noted with satisfaction that the house looked pretty good and the kitchen looked fantastic. The dishes had been washed and put away, the sink and stove were clean, and the floor had been mopped - except for the one spot under the kitchen table where a half-eaten dead squirrel lay in repose.

But I never thought about closing the window, even when I found the live snake trying to get out of my front door by wedging itself into the hinged groove. Or maybe it was just attempting to hide itself from that dynamic duo, Sheba and Sugar. Either way, life went on swimmingly in our listing cruise liner until, one day without any warning, the kids and the animals were all gone.

Now I live alone, and, for some reason, it seems kind of quiet around here.

Don't Run this One by the ASPCA

Walking back from the Safeway Store a couple of days ago, I saw two squirrels having sex, which was a first for me. I have to report that they were doing it squirrelly style. When I was finished staring and giggling somewhat maniacally, I started thinking about all the crazy animal stories I have from when our kids were growing up and, come to think of it, even before they were born.

Gary (prior to attaining his Big Kat moniker) and I married in 1971 and lived in Athens while he finished his last year of Pharmacy School at UGA and I taught first grade at a rural school a county or so away. I somehow ended up with a cat (as I tend to do) and brought him home to our small college apartment. All I can say about that particular cat is he was given a name so politically incorrect I can’t write it here, and he turned out to be what I can only call a “pungent pooper”. His tenure in our new family in its tiny space was, therefore, short lived and, before long, I’d given him to one of my students who, hopefully, lived on a farm large enough for no one to notice how bad his @##$ smelled.

When Gary finished Pharmacy School, we moved back to his home town of Warner Robins and, of course, I got another cat. With our new apartment being a step up from our college home, we now had a small patio just past our back door, an area that afforded this new improved cat the luxury of relieving himself outdoors. In order to allow him self-scheduled ingress and egress, we left a window open above our washer and dryer in our small kitchen.

Not long after moving in, we invited Frank, one of Gary's college roommates and our local high school football coach, to bring his new girlfriend over to our apartment for a cookout. In preparation, Gary had opened the sale-priced steaks we'd purchased at the Big Apple supermarket and laid them out on top of the dryer to marinate. A few minutes later, I walked by and noticed one was missing. I'm not going to describe what happened next but I can report that Frank never knew the steak he so enjoyed later that evening had been extricated from the space between the dryer and the wall where the cat had apparently dropped it as he tried to climb out of the window with it, or that it had been washed off to remove any errant lint from its pristine raw beefiness and then re-marinated to its current perfection by the grill master himself.

And then there was Henry. Henry was a beagle we got from who knows where about the same time we purchased our first house. He later moved with us from Warner Robins to Greenville, SC and back again, all the while putting up with about a thousand cats, a bird, a rabbit, several hamsters, and countless fish. As with all free dogs, Henry, during his lifetime, cost us a small fortune in pound bailouts, vet bills, a fence we paid on for years after we’d moved from the house it graced, and the friendship of a couple of neighbors. If I’m remembering correctly, he lived to be around twelve or thirteen and, by the time he hit his twilight years, he was pretty worn out with milky eyes and the need to sleep 23 out of any given 24 hours.

The only exception to Henry's old-age slow-down was when "love came a calling". During the 70’s and 80’s, boy dogs didn’t get neutered like they do now, at least not by us. I guess we thought it was the girl dog owner's responsibility to cover canine birth control.

Henry's final fling wasn’t too long before he died. I remember I was very pregnant with Molly and, somehow, I got the word he was on the prowl yet again. I found him inside a neighbor's fenced-in yard, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to charm a dog in heat. Since the neighbor wasn't home and the gate was locked, I somehow managed to climb the fence in my advanced pregnant state, pick up the horny fool and throw him over the fence, and then climb back over myself.

Cats, during those years, were too numerous to count and I can’t remember most of their names. Skeeter was one of the early ones and, after him, Gary began calling all our cats Keeter, which must have been some kid-generated derivative of the original name. At one point, Billy had a parakeet named Jaws, who lived in the dirtiest cage known to birdkind. One day, Gary went up to Billy’s room and told him to clean the filthy cage. Just a few minutes later, Billy was found nonchalantly reading a Mad Magazine on his bed. The cage was, indeed, somewhat clean, but all the smelly bird excrement from the cage had simply been transferred to Billy’s trash can, which was just inches from his nose at the end of his supine body.

A dirty cage, however, wasn't Jaws' biggest problem. A few months later , our circuit panel went out in our house and it took several days for a new one to be installed. During that time, one of the Keeters must have become somewhat unglued, without electricity for opening his cat food cans, because he attacked Jaws in his cage and tore out all his tail feathers. Billy was much more distraught over his bird's posterior nakedness than he had ever been about his substandard living conditions. Poor Jaws was pretty pitiful himself as he couldn’t sit on his perch with his balance being all off. The most interesting part of this story is that Jaws grew new tail feathers within just a couple of days, leaving the the remorseless Keeter a bit confused and more than a little frustrated.

Next came Spunker, the rabbit. We won Spunker at the county fair and I was stupid enough to actually bring him home. Even though Spunker was supposed to live in a cage on the back porch, the mean little pervert spent a good bit of time in the house, holding us hostage, stealing dog food from the pantry, growling if we got too close, and hippity-hopping into the hall bathroom to watch Gary pee. When he eventually died, mostly of neglect, Gary told us he'd buried him in the woods behind the house, but the kids reported seeing him fling Spunker's stiff body by one of his rabbit ears, sort of like a boomerang, into the wild blue yonder. I guess the good news is that he didn't come back.

The final pet I'll tell about in this too long story was Herschel, the hamster who was named after the great running back for the University of Georgia. Herschel lived for quite a while, long enough for a cleaning lady to quit because he kept looking at her when she cleaned the bathroom. She said it was either the hamster or her and that one of them had to go. She went.

Herschel became lost in the house one time and we couldn’t figure out where he was. One night soon thereafter, I was awakened around 11:30 by God, who told me to go downstairs and watch the Johnny Carson Show. I swear this is how I remember the story. As I was sitting in the den, appreciating Johnny's monologue, I heard a scratching sound from behind the wood paneling. After just the slightest hesitation (remember God was in on this), I got a hammer and pried the paneling from the wall, and out came Herschel, who looked pretty happy for a hamster. He did, however, appear to be a paraplegic, which made sense having fallen through the wall from his upstairs habitat. Herschel lived a while longer after that in his bathroom kingdom, without his cleaning lady, but was never again able to emulate his namesake.

And then the marriage ended, and life changed as the kids, the menagerie, and I moved a couple of blocks away. Before I knew it, however, a whole new group of animals had dropped by to spend time with us.

But that story will be best saved for later.

Doggie Daycare

I'd been planning to post a piece about how hard it is to be a parent these days, but after talking to my friend, Allie, I decided to switch my focus in order to make this point: Raising children in the new millennium is nothing compared to parenting pets.
Allie had stopped by my classroom to tell me she'd spent the previous afternoon filling out the paperwork to try to get her dog, Hank, into Doggie Daycare. She'd first made me promise not to laugh before she imparted that little gem; a promise I immediately broke with paroxysms of gleeful incredulity. What? Dogs now need daycare? Paperwork? Are we talking about the rolled-up paperwork you pop them with when they piddle on the patio? Try? This is possibly the most worrisome part. You now have to TRY to get your dog into something called Doggie Daycare? You mean there are qualifications other than humping the vacuum cleaner and licking their parts?
What makes this so difficult for me to understand is that, when I was growing up, we had a dog until it got run over. Then, we got another dog. Cats were something that slunk around the backyard dragging a sad expired squirrel until one of us kids let them into the house (the cat, not the carcass), only to have them be sent back out when a grown-up got home. My daddy said the only good cat was a dead cat.
Although I do remember that most dogs had rabies tags, which meant someone was taking them somewhere at some point to get some kind of shot, they didn't typically go to the vet unless they had barely survived being run over. In that case, they were begrudgingly thrown into the back of the car for a trip to get sewn up or to have something cut off. There were quite a few three-legged dogs on my street because of the above.
My childhood dog's name was Stubby. (I'm now perplexed about and a little embarrassed to admit this). Although Stubby held pretensions toward being a Cocker Spaniel, he wasn't even close. I can distinctly remember Stubby following me from block to block as we kids roamed the neighborhood in a manner children can no longer pull off. Whenever Stubby, who wasn't particularly bright or well trained, tried to cross a busy street, I would holler, "Stubby, watch out!", which he seldom did. That probably explains why we ended up calling him Stubby.
Back to now. I understand that young couples are getting fancy dogs in order to practice for when they have babies - kind of like a starter child. I'm here to tell you that can backfire. My daughter, Melissa, and her husband were given an English Bulldog for a wedding present by some well-meaning friends and her football fanatic father. Luther von Rufus (aka Sweet Lu) arrived in a crate from Russia (I thought he was supposed to be English) about 48 hours before Melissa took the pregnancy test indicating that her honeymoon was, indeed, a busy and fruitful one. Now, Melissa, Trevor, Miles, Georgia, AND Sweet Lu live in a two-bedroom house in Portland, Oregon. Poor Lu has gone from blithely snoring in a queen-sized bed to dozing with one bulbous eye open anywhere on the floor he can safely hide from Miles.
I began to realize things were changing a few years ago when my youngest, Molly, and I decided to adopt a kitten from the pound. Instead of going in, holding our noses, and pointing, as we'd done with former cats, we were told to pick one, in the comfort of our own home, from an online selection of cute and not so cute felines. After we clicked on the mugshot of the soon-to-be lucky recipient of our benevolence, we were asked to fill out a questionnaire. We should have known we were in trouble at that point. There were lots of items, some of which seemed to be trick questions. For example, we were asked if any of our prior pets had met with unfortunate accidents or, perhaps, an untimely demise. We said "no" as I felt that the statute of limitations had run out on Stubby. Then we were asked if our new cat would be an inside or an outside pet. We answered "outside", mentioning that "all God's creatures need sunlight and fresh air," something we thought would be appreciated, applauded, and approved by do-gooders smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt.
We were wrong. After we were turned down in our attempt to adopt a cat that would probably be put to sleep within the next few days, we learned that pets left to their own devices in the great outdoors invariably just fool around and procreate until they or their offspring find themselves right back at the pound, a life-cycle circumstance steadfastly frowned upon by the SPCA.
Now that I live in Atlanta, I find it to be a great place to experience the absurdity of modern pet ownership. Walking in Piedmont Park is a treat as earnest dog owners pick up poop with biodegradable sani-bags and talk to their pets as if they were errant toddlers. I remember one beautiful Sunday afternoon when I observed a young couple pushing a pram (yes, one of those old-fashioned baby carriages) with a full-grown Mastiff sitting inside. The look on the human faces was a combination of "yes, our baby is beautiful" and "no, you don't have one of these." The look on the dog's face was "yes, I'm embarrassed" and "no, I don't know these people".
So, it seems the days for footloose and fancy free pet parenting are over and the same could be said for the animals themselves. I agree that pets need to be neutered and protected against those diseases that can shorten a life or make it less vibrant, but I question just how important it is for a dog who never leaves its home, daycare, or pram to be inoculated against rattlesnake poisoning.
And what about the freedom my childhood pets had during their short lives in the days before leash laws and health insurance for animals? Would that Mastiff in the pram trade his long careful life for a day of being Stubby? Does the cat in the condo window yearn for a juicy squirrel? Does the German Shepherd dream of Rin Tin Tin-like daring-do, and does the Collie ever hear the call of Timmy thrashing in the well? If Lassie were alive today, the only heroic feat she would have the opportunity to perform would be to retrieve her groomer's spritzer bottle if it fell on the floor of her high-priced salon.
Oh wow. For some reason, ending this thing is making me cry. I guess, in writing about people and their pets (then and now), I've remembered the animals I've loved throughout my life. So, here's to Pat Dog, Stubby, Cleo, Keeter (my ex's name for a myriad of cats), Henry the Benry, Sugar, Sheba, and Chloe.
Okay, I give up. Tell me how to apply for Doggie Daycare and more about that rattlesnake vaccine. I can feel a new pet coming on.