It all started
when I moved in with my sister at 32. I was 32, she 27, but because she’s more
mature and generally better at trivial things like being responsible, finding
gainful employment, doing yard work and not eating double cheeseburgers at 2
a.m., people tend to think she’s older when I start talking about her. Once they meet her, they realize she’s both
younger and cuter, but, as there’s no guarantee anyone reading this knows her,
I wanted to set the record straight right off the bat. Maturity and age are not necessarily equal in
our lives.
It actually
probably started a few years earlier than that, but this is more or less where
I came into it. On the other hand, as
all history is personal, I should begin at the beginning. However, as has been
said more than once, a beginning is a perilous thing, or at least very tricky
to determine.
I wasn’t totally a
stranger to her pets at that time. There
are scattered moments from earlier years.
My senile, fading maternal grandmother resenting “the puppy” because cute,
little, new, present-from-an-ex-boyfriend-Loki took attention away from “her”
dog – the sweet dachapoo with the IQ of a radish who loved her and visited her
at the nursing home and also took umbrage at a new dog’s ingress into our home
that Christmas. It was bad enough that
when her mommy came she brought two more cats, now a puppy came too.
I remember that
same puppy, exhausted from all the love, attention, cuddling and umbrage,
taking refuge by my father’s feet, two shoes the same size she was, away from
the selfsame dachapoo. He was the only
one not paying her an excess of attention, positive or negative and even when a
full-grown 65 pounds and somewhat larger than his shoes, he remained her second
favourite person in the whole world.
I remember Mickey
and Mallory at Christmases as well: Laurel’s
cats, brother and sister named after the characters in Natural Born Killers.
Because of the pet flap in the house, visiting cats tend to get
relegated to basement so that they don’t find themselves lost in the teeming
urban tangle of Thermopolis, Wyoming’s city streets.[1]
Mallory would huddle in her cat house or on anyone who was downstairs watching
TV, Mickey’s face could often be found sticking out of the sleeping bags,
suitcases and soup cans on the shelves in the pantry. Mickey too left the world far too soon, but
at age 13, when my sister moved in with the man she loved[2]
Mallory immediately became queen of the castle, down to Roland figuring out
which nature shows she liked best.[3]
Where do you begin
when they’ve been part of your life all your life more or less – and those
times they haven’t been aren’t really worth counting are they? Nor do they come in discrete sections either,
they tend to overlap and overflow and meld into one another.[4]
Pug, scared of
pretty much everything you could see and several things you couldn’t, but was
willing to fight to be able to lie on your neck and suck your ear while you
slept.
Ebony who survived
sneaking an entire box of fudge off the kitchen table one Christmas and out
into the kennel where it lay empty and snow-covered until the spring thaw.
Who, the reason
for all the electric mats that dotted our house for years as well as the smell
that still makes itself known in the office now and then and who chose my
mother to love and adore despite an initial mutual dislike.
Percy, who was
smarter than all of us, who figured out doorknobs but lacked thumbs and who
decided he had a summer home at the house across the alley once I went off to
college.
Do stories begin
at the beginning of our lives? The
pictures of my first cat Harry lying next to me on a blanket, sucking on my bottle?
Do I start with all those smatterings of from an ever dimmer and more distant
childhood? Harry’s death when I was 10,
probably of feline leukemia before anyone really knew what it was; tailless
Belle (unneutered male cats don’t always take “I’m fixed” for an answer) who
was generally scared of strangers, unerringly making for the laps of my
grandmother and cousin Robert, both inveterate cat haters; Belle watching
impassively while Sylvester, only with us a short time tried to kill a stuffed
rabbit one of us had gotten for Easter.
But where do you
stop starting? Because it could go even
farther back than that. To stories the
parents have told about their own lives, you wind up tracking all the way back
down to wolves breeding into dogs in a single generation for food and a seat by
the fire in a hunting camp and to cats apparently letting themselves be
domesticated in the sands of Egypt.
So, as I said,
this begins, for me, when I moved in with my sister, her dog Loki and cat
Mallory. They were both happy to have me
around, another person to feed pet and play with them. Mallory slept on my bed the first few nights
I was there, establishing ownership upon my person. Loki, though, had some issues expressing
herself.
The first time
Laurel and I went out to a movie or dinner – the backyard was unfenced, and
while there was a kennel setup, we tended to leave her inside when we went out
at night – we came home and she’d chewed up one or more something’s of mine
including taking the head off a Christmas decoration. The second time we went out, I made sure to
put away anything chewable, even to the books I’d been using to pretend to do
research for a still unfinished Ph.D. thesis.
I’d left out a
digital travel alarm clock that I used to try to motivate myself. Or something, like I said, it was a while
back and the thesis never got written.
This hard plastic clock bore tooth prints to the day it died. From the position of my calculator, she’d
made a try at it too.
After I’d been
there a few months, as long as something didn’t resemble one of her stuffed
toys, I could leave it within reach. The
best theory we could come up with was that she’d get restless when left alone
and my possessions, after being in Newfoundland, Canada and then Thermopolis,
Wyoming in the months before I settled with them in Billings, smelled funny and
needed to be chewed on. Somehow, it all
must have merged into the “correct” scent of the home and were only at risk if
they looked like something that might squeak if teeth were sunk into it.
Having very
sporadic employment, (a degree in Folklore is an amazing and versatile thing
that covers fields like English, History, Social Science, the medical
profession and many other things. The
trick is convincing anyone to hire you.
Some of my colleagues are very good at this, for whatever reason, I am
not) I spent a lot of time walking Loki.
This was always an interesting experience as most of her effective
training had been done by two much larger dogs who helped raise her as a puppy,
and while, at 65 pounds, she wasn’t a tiny dog, her tendency to try to prove
her superiority over other dogs did not discriminate as to size. Which left me at least once lying in the dirt
trying to find my glasses while the owner of two mastiff-husky mixes that Loki
had bitten through her mouth harness to attack managed to keep them from eating
her. If I fell on my own, she’d stay by
my side until I got moving again, this concern did not extend to when she was
the cause of my being prone.
Sporadic efforts at training had some degree
of effectiveness, but neither of us was sufficiently good at carrying through –
Laurel was better than I, but she was also the one who went running with her
dog on at least a weekly basis – for it to have the impact we would have liked. Plus, it had all gotten started after she was
3 years old and had some ingrained patterns.
That we probably could have broken if we’d been really consistent.
[1] It is not where Superman
lives and it does actually exist.
[2] Mallory was 13, Laurel was, somewhat, older than that.
[3] Winged Migration.
[4] As I write Molly is chasing
Ichabod around the living room and appealing to me for help every time he gets
too above or too under something for her get to.
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