Silky-Threaded Stories

Perfect weather for cosying up inside.

I miss my doggy Lester.

But it's getting easier.

This morning I saw a black and white doggy in next door's garden.  And then I thought I heard him/her crying, so I went outside to see if I could see what I could see.

When I got down to ground level I couldn't see the dog anywhere.  I stood outside for a while, sexed up to the nines in gumboots and dressing gown, the overhead decking shielding me a little from the rain that's been relentlessly falling for the last day or so.

And my fancy (bless her, she's a doll) began spinning a silky-threaded story.  I remembered how almost a year ago Chook-Chook came into my life in exactly the same way, through next door's fence.  And I began weaving a reincarnationary love story where the dog in the garden next door has been dumped, the way that Chook-Chook was (I think) dumped, because this dog is pregnant.  And the reason she has wended her way to the garden next door is because of the love agreement that Lester and I made last week via the ether, where I informed him that if he wishes to return to the earth again as another dogsbody, that I would be most happy to go another round.  And so we take the dog in, and she has babies.  And one of those babies is Lester-and-another.

I do like that story.

I went inside when I couldn't see the dog, all the better to see with from a heightened vantage point.  And there it was, also taking shelter under next-door's decking.  And then I saw a man, in the sexually arousing fluorescent yellow common to workers in any environment that's not in front of a computer.  And he was calling for Buster.  And from my vantage point I got to see the dog and see the man who couldn't see the dog.  And so I was able to direct the man to his dog.

Who, it turns out, was an old boy who was getting rather blind, and who had got out sometime last night. 

And so the man picked him up, and then turned to me with him in his arms and said, "Thanks a lot.  I'm gonna take him home now."

I think that lovely doggy is very much going to enjoy being inside today, warm and cosy and fed.  Just like me.  I have had a few days in a row of being out and about, seeing lovely inspiring people who feed me intellectually, and eating food I really can't afford to be eating (which of course made it even more enjoyable than usual).  And now, being filled up with those interactions, I am so grateful to be home and pottering about in my beautiful solitude that for the next almost-24 hours, there is simply nothing that would remove me from the house (unless it has something possibly to do with chocolate.  And I have a block of Lindt 85% here, so I really can't see that happening).

Goodnight Puppy

Even when the end comes slowly, it still comes by surprise.

Even when you know that there's obviously something wrong - you can't be 14 1/2 doggy years and have lost a quarter of your body weight and have had a possible seizure in the last couple of years and there not be something wrong.  But still, you were okay.  You were old and slowed down, but you still loved to walk, to go in the car, to play with the ball, to cuddle.  Even though a week ago today I was sitting on the couch with you, howling because Helen Razer's cat was put to sleep, and wondering how long it was before it was your turn, I didn't think it would be before the week was out.

I mean,you'd played with the ball that day, right?  And the day after that and the day after that.  We had an episode this week of ball-playing.  And while it wasn't like the ball-playing of your youth, where your exuberance needed abating by a many-times-a-day habit of hitting the ball clear across the yard with a tennis racquet over and over again, you were still able this week to chase it, several times, down the side of a hill, and shriek-bark when you hid it somewhere and then struggled to retrieve it again.  You were still able to walk on Monday evening.

But then Thursday came and with it what we know now was another seizure.  But still, when I debated whether to go to my class on Friday, looking worriedly at your lowered countenance, I was still guessing that you'd attracted another infection, a secondary one from the licking that goes on when your body comes in contact with the wandering jew.  But then Friday night and you still weren't right.  You were spacey and vacant.  You didn't even want to eat the piece of butter chicken I offered you.  Definitely an alarm bell.  And so to the vet, and a 24-hour wait on blood tests hoping that it would be something that could be managed.

But it couldn't, she said.  Things had caught up with you.  You were anaemic to the extent that if a blood transfusion would have given you anything more than a few days, you would have been eligible for it with a couple of marker points to spare.  That was why you'd stopped eating, because it was a choice of eating or breathing, and breathing was starting to prove hard enough.

You were a tough old bugger, though.  Your body had adapted itself to a situation that the vet guessed had been going on for some time.  But then it just couldn't adapt anymore, finally.  As will happen for us all.  But still, still a shock.  Still a big gaping hole where you were.

I slept a vigil on the couch on Saturday night, while you slept on the floor beside me.  Knowing what the morning was going to bring.  Dreading it in a way that you can only dread something that you've been ... well, dreading for years.  Staying in the moment.  Wanting to just be in all the moments that I could with you until then.  And so we shared the night.  When you weren't pacing, that is.  Which was pretty much from 2 am to when you tired at around 8 am.  This sort of behaviour has been going on for quite some time, although you really ramped it up in the last couple of days.  You've been causing a great deal of sleep loss in recent months, and I think now maybe the brain tumour the vet suspects was causing the seizures and the anaemia had something to do with that.  Like an old man with dementia, come 2 am you'd get up and you'd start wandering, not realising that that is the time for sleeping.  I'm sorry for the times when my bad sleep-deprived mood got the better of me.  Of course, now you are gone, the thought that I would do that seems horrifying.  But life is messy, isn't it, and we get sick and struggle and stress, and our eyes cloud over and we find it hard to live every day loving what is in front of us. 

But I'm sorry about getting pissed off at you.  You couldn't help it.  You wouldn't do anything voluntarily to upset me, being of a species that is on a higher evolutionary plane than mine.

I watched you on Saturday night and into Sunday morning.  You were pacing like you were searching for your lost energy.  You were a little confused.  But you could be consoled and pacified by a relentless round of patting.  You would let me pat your chest for a while, and then turn around and let me scratch your back.  On and on, through the night.

I dozed off and on.  At one point I woke up and you were right there, right in my face.  Looking, searching.  You always were a smart doggy.  It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.  Thank you for that.

When you finally left us at 10.40 on Sunday morning, there were five people crowded into the vet's surgery.  That shows what sort of a dog you were.  You had a sort of quiet dignity about you, as if you were thinking about things.  You were always top dog no matter what group of dogs you were in.  The sort of innate authority that would be nice to be seen in our new Prime Minister.  You were a dog who changed us.  You did.  Like your granddaddy said, you were the one who taught us the lessons.

Oh, fuck, this hurts an awful lot.  But still, it was worth it.  And it was easy to let you go in the end because it's not like it is when you're a bounding energetic dog of four, or eight, or ten, full of vigour, where the thought of having you put to sleep is ridiculous.  The only thing that could override the dread of seeing you slip away was the desire to end your suffering.

It was easy to let you go.  It's proving a little more difficult to keep you let go.

Truly ruly, Mr Naughty, while I dozed on Saturday night, wishing for an end to this so that I could sleep, so that it would be over, but wanting it never to end, I was thinking about how I felt about us, Once in a Lifetime Dog.  And I thought that though I can't know for certain, I've got an idea that the pleasure and the love were shared equally between us.  But the honour ~ that has been all mine.

Goodnight my Puppy.  Thanks for walking the road with me for 13 1/2 years.

Some Days ...

Some days, you just feel your age.

Some days you are up all night, throwing up in four different spaces, unchewed hunks of bone covered in a soup of slime.  When you get up in the morning others clean up after you while you look mournfully at them.  But you bear it all with doggy dignity.  Not for you ego pricks, but you like to make it outside when you can.  You do, when you are not outright misbehaving, like to obey the rules.

Some days you wake up after a bad night and all your joints ache from the walk the day before.  Some days your old bones don't warm you.

Those days you follow her around the house.  Every time she gets up, you get up too, and follow her to wherever she is going.  She velcroes some extra padding on you, the coat reserved for days when it freezes outside, but you don't make the connection and you lie under the desk at her feet.  You try to climb up onto Chair, who is now living next to the computer, but your doggy coat clunks you up, and there you stand, half in Chair, half out, until she lifts you off and you just lie where you are, on the floor, while she cuts dream collage bits out of magazines and says things to you that you can't hear anymore because you're deaf.

Those days are not the ones you like best.  You like the days like yesterday, where you walked, and you played with the people, and you ate bones, and barked rudely at everybody when they did not do what you wanted.

But defining days as one better than the other is artistic licence on your pet's part.  You do not live there.  You are blessedly removed from anything other than here.

Here, you can bear the bad days with doggy grace. 

It Ain't Easy ...

... getting clean.

Sometimes you don't even notice it till it's upon you.  Or part of you notices it, other parts are numb to it or in denial.  The old tapes, the old demons, the old patterns.  They jump on the back of something opportunistic and before you know it they've rushed at you and stolen your breath, their teeth bared, kid's nightmare teeth, stealing your thunder.  If you didn't know any better you'd stay right there in their jaws, believing the landscape.

The still small voice that is in the silence, that is in the midst of all music, that golden thread, you can't see it at these times.  All you can hear is the deafening roar of the old school, the feelings-without-words, the numbness, the powerlessness that is life-as-you-knew-it.  

It could almost fool you that it's real.

There's nothing to it but to go through it.  You resist this with every ounce of you, even though you know there is no other way.  There is no god coming to take it away;  the only way is right through the centre of it.

It would never make a Hollywood movie.   Or a Pente sermon.

But out the other side, if you can tear your eyes away from the giant jaws, there is peace out that other side.  There is right action and peace and space.  You know it.  You've been there before.

All it takes is mindfulness and courage.  

The more you sit in the middle of your own worst nightmares, the more you begin to understand the oneness of everything, the paper tigerness of your worst fears, the freedom that lies out the other side.  A chink, a crack to walk through, out through the other side.

Part of you doesn't even believe it's going to happen.  Part of you knows that of course it will.

Very little is linear round here :)  

Some Things Are Worth Barking At, Some Not

I thought I was in the Matrix for a split second earlier. Lester and I got out for a walk after this afternoon's rain, into clean-smelling air. He was sniffing good smells and licking the grass at the same time. I hope this is because he likes the taste of water droplets on grass rather than the more sinister idea that he likes licking the urine of the dogs he's just been smelling. Who can say, with a dog's taste? They're a tad different to mine. He stopped to take big, long draughts of rainwater, fresh from the sky in the gutters. Whenever he wanted he stopped and had a wee on something green. I tell ya, it's a free dog's life.

Before we left for our walk, the stupid dribbling black chihuahua with a bell around its neck came into our yard. It is fascinated by and terrified of Lester. It stares at him, runs when he goes near it, and runs from the sound of my voice. The chinhuaha's pet, an elderly Asian lady with no English, followed the sound of the bell into our yard and after a whistle the dog came trotting. She put it in a small child's stroller.

Lester and I began walking down the driveway and she followed. "Isn't it beautiful now it's sunny!" I called out. She didn't have a clue what I was saying but words are not necessary when you're making small talk, I find. She nodded and smiled.

We walked to the new IGA just around the corner and bought dog food and yoghurt, Lindt 85% chocolate and a litre of milk. The woman gave me $1.05 change which I carried in my hand, having no pockets in my trackies and having already strapped my heavier-than-before backpack onto my back. We walked past the life-size bronze sculptures of Aussie Rules local icons Dougie Hawkins and Teddy Whitten that stand outside the local pub. Lester barked at them as he always does, whether on foot or in car. The other week he nipped at Dougie's foot but he declined to do that this time. Earlier he had barked at a white plastic bag that had flapped itself up against the chain link fence of the local primary school. Lester barks at the giant white horse outside the Whitehorse City Council in Nunawading. Cows in paddocks are an extra special exotic barking delicacy. I think he thinks they are giant dogs.

After we passed Dougie and Ted we rounded the corner of the housing commission flats and I flung the $1 coin and 5 cent piece into a gap in the fence where three or four palings had come loose, along with a prayer that some little kid who was young enough to get a thrill out of finding a gold coin on the ground would find it in his playtime.

We passed an elderly Asian man with a jeep and two sandy coloured chihuahas. He was putting junk mail from the jeep into the letterboxes of the commission flats. Neither dog had a bell; one barked at Lester as we passed. Lester was too busy sniffing and the chihuahuas too small to disdain a response.

We continued walking, round the shabby streets of my neighbourhood back to home. On Darnley Street, smart people had planted different sorts of succulents in their front yard, plants that thrive on the drought conditions that are Australian living. Such strange, odd and curious shapes. I am liking them more and more.

We continued on and walked past the street that runs parallel to mine. There was the elderly Asian lady with her stroller again, with the dribbling black chihuahua in it. We waved as we passed each other.

The next street was mine. As we turned right to go into it, an elderly Asian man was crossing the road. He had a jeep full of junk mail and a sandy coloured chihuahua. For a millionth of a second I felt my brain stop and get ready to glitch out on the influx. But it was a different man. The single dog proved it, Mr Anderson.

We rounded the corner into our street. When we looked back, the chihuahua was standing at the foot of our street, staring down at Lester. It barked. Lester was too busy licking water droplets off the grass to bother responding.

In rather more attractive surrounds, Lester at the Olinda Arboretum

Death-Row Dogs

Apart from the people he scares when he shrieks at their dogs when we drive past them on the street, my doggy is a well-liked and well-behaved boy. (Well, notwithstanding the Indian guys in the house on my block who are scared of him but want to like him, if only they could overcome their fear). At doggy changeover the other night, Mark and I were saying that Lester has had the most wonderful sort of a life.

Still, I think it's the life that any doggy should have.

Lester was a pound dog. When we went to the Keysborough Animal Shelter to get a pooch, he was one of the dogs we were shown. Had been on death row twice but the vet had seen potential in him and taken him off again in hope.

He'd been at the shelter for three months by the time we saw him in 2000. We took him out of his concrete pen and into the grassy closed off area reserved for getting to know a dog a bit better. Took him off his leash and oooh, yeah. Had a bit of nuts about him, that's for sure.

He was a bit of a risk, I guess. And we were warned; he had a fair bit of energy. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. He was maybe not the best sort of dog for people who'd never had one before, they suggested. But that was okay. We were dog lovers, had both had dogs all our lives. We could take him on. We had a tennis raquet and a big backyard when walks were not possible. It was doable.

He wasn't trained, no. Not in anything. Not in how to be in a car, so Mark had to sit in the back with him on the way home. Not in how to sit. Not in how to not eat Mark's dinner. Not in how to walk on a leash. Not in how to not eat Mark's shoe, nor to not shit inside. Not in how the wrongness of removing a pillow from inside, taking it outside and ripping it up so that the shredded feathers inside cascaded all over the backyard.

"We've got the wrong dog" I groaned at the end of the weekend.

But that's the last time I ever said that. All he needed was some training, some loving, some walking. He was very teachable. And he's had a very good doggy life since then.

I cry every time the Pal dog food ad comes on. The dog in the concrete shelter looking woefully at the people who wouldn't buy him. There is something wrong, I suppose, that I tear up more quickly at abandoned and unhoused dogs than I do at stories involving humans.

They're just so unconditional, dogs, that's all. There's a purity about them that is hidden in humans.

Still, I think humans, in our individual concrete shelters of our own selves, are just as lovable to God as dogs are to us. Despite our horrid evil shitnesses. Despite the evil that is committed by evil people on other evil people. Despite the bloody mess that is the world as we know it.

The human race is designed and destined for green fields. I do so believe that. In ages to come. Not just for the people who get it right, who are white, male and Christian. I do not think God will stop until the last person has allowed him to love them into life. The cross whispers that in this age. Perhaps it will scream it in the next.

Next time I get a dog, I think I might get me two :)

This is how it starts. You hear the kitteh a few days ago. It is meowing outside one of your lounge room windows. It is meowing at whatever is under the house. When you go outside, and lie on the ground, feeling all of your years, you see a pair of eyes shining back at you once your eyes adjust to the dark ... no, two sets of eyes. Are these the parents of the kitteh? One of them is black. You wonder if it's the same one you see running across your yard several times a week.

But this little tacker, you haven't seen before. You're not much of a guesser of kitteh ages, having only ever owned one cat in your adult life. Your family had cats when you were younger, but you can't remember much about them. The most you remember is being forced to cohabit with a snobby snotty half-Persian who you did not like because she would not purr and snuggle and do puss-like things with you the way the other kittehs you had when you were a child did. But you would hazard this little puss is about 12 weeks old. Maybe even younger. It's a pritteh kitteh. Grey and white fur with blue eyes. Maybe it belongs to the houseful of kittehs that live about 5 doors down, and it's now forgotten its way home. You and Lester met the Mummy of those kittehs a week or so ago. She ran towards Lester flat stick and whatcked him across the nose with her paw as he approached. Just so he knew not to mess with her kittens, which were all lolling around the front yard, about six of them. He didn't learn anything from it, unfortunately. Indeed, last time you drove past the house he barked very loudly. Just so she knows he didn't take her attack on board.

Maybe this kitteh belongs there. You dont know. But it's the second day it's been hanging around. And so you feel sorry for it, you know? You leave it a couple of small pieces of shredded cheese on the front step. Not particurly good for cats, you know. So half an hour later you open the cupboard, open the tin of sardines, and put some of them in a plastic container and leave them out near the opening where you last saw the kitteh crawl out from under the house. They are gone the next time you look 10 minutes later.

Kitteh runs away every time you call it. It is curious though, and peeks inside when you leave the door open, walks right in for a few seconds but then bolts when it sees you lying on the couch. But again, an hour later, it does it again. You can see it wants to come to you but it can't override its instincts. Maybe you shouldn't feed the kitteh anymore. Maybe tonight was just to give it some chow in case it hasn't eaten for a few days and is hungry. Because you don't want to encourage it, even though you really want to encourage it. Because there is no problem indulging in this sort of behaviour when Lester is at Mark's, but Lester will at some point return.

Funny, you've been entertaining the notion over the past few months of getting a cat. You just haven't been able to work out a death-proof method to ascertain whether the meeting would be a mutually life enhancing one. How do you determine whether your dog would not eat your kitteh? Would not mistake it for an overgrown hairy mouse? Because God knows, when you had a mouse infestation when you lived in Footscray, he went nuts. Came into his own. You didn't believe he could move so fast, but some long dormant instincts of some doggish ancestry came to the fore and he hunted those poor mice down. Masterfully. But you don't like to think of those memories. It was gross.

So yes. Maybe that first meal needs to be how it stops.

Shame, though. It's real cute :)