Along Came Molly

Named for the patron saint of field artillery, Molly Pitcher came to us in May of 2004, a few months after I found gainful employment – or at least the next best thing – at a glass and door company in Tacoma, WA.  Well, technically in Tacoma, being an international company, they were located in the Port of Tacoma, which was five minutes from my house, the commute being the best thing about the job. 

    Working customer service for a less-than-excellent wage while being screamed at by end-users and home store employees due to company policies that involved not having a quality product, not having that product on time and lying about why we didn’t have that product on time was not the best time of my life or a terrific use of my Master’s Degree in Folklore.  I happen to think teaching or researching or doing museum or archival work or any number of other things would be a great use of my MA, but the trick with a Folklore degree is convincing other people of that.  And there is where I suck.

    And did I mention the number of liberal arts degrees per square foot in WA?  Only once?  Well, there are many.  So, despite the fact that I can actually entrance a classroom, make the middle ages interesting by telling the Legend of the Wandering Jew, the Wild Hunt, and Pope Joan and tying those to present events, actually convincing people who don’t know me that I’d be good it is something else entirely.  I saw on the net today that someone’s started submitting his resume as giant candy bar wrappers.  Maybe I should have done mine on vellum. 

    Not that I could afford vellum.  Or parchment.  Or groceries, because I kept putting things like car repairs, medical bills, books, books, books, DVDs, food, knick knacks and other necessities on credit cards.  Ok, I bought a lot of crap that I couldn’t really justify and am still paying for and will be paying for into my next life on credit cards because all of my income was going to pay off the credit cards because I kept having jobs that didn’t pay and didn’t have health insurance and putting medical bills and car repairs – the advantage to driving an ’89 Toyota is that nobody wants to steal it, the disadvantage is that it’s an ’89 Toyota – on my credit cards.[1]

    Anywho, the point of the crappy job was that it did offer health insurance and a modicum of paid vacation and holidays and meant that I could devote myself to finding a job I wanted rather than just finding any job, which is what my time since arriving in WA had been spent doing.  Well, that and fixing holes in the fence, making sure Loki didn’t caryr the dead squirrel she found in the yard into the house and with Laurel trying to learn the ins and outs of our new locale. 

    We also got a name for ourselves with the neighbours.  We walked Loki most nights and she retained her obstreperous habits around other dogs in the land of cul-de-sacs[2] but they got used to that.  What led to the smiling and waving from neighbours and random drivers was Ichabod.  Who generally insisted on walking with us.  Either a little ahead or a little behind, but noticeably with.  Mallory often came too.  I guess there are worse things to be known for. 

    Like not actually being able to keep the dogs behind the six-foot wooden fence.

Laurel has always been much better at people and work than I.  Skill, native talent, whatever, she was settling in and on the fast-track to running half of Western State Hospital.  Not on the fast-track to making anywhere close to the money she should be for what she does and how well she does it, but you can’t have everything. 

    One of the things she’s good at is making friends.  One of the friends is the kind of person I hate:  Taking a Ph.D. while working full time and doing well at both as in addition keeping her marriage to an active-duty serviceman going.  The longest relationship I’ve ever had with a person of the opposite sex has only lasted about six months and, willingly or not, I shed friendships like reptiles do skin.  People who can manage all of these things make me sick.

    The one thing this friend couldn’t handle while doing everything she was doing and having a husband who was only around part-time was the dog he got at the pound to keep her company. 

    Unfortunately for my self-image, this speaks more to her being sane than it does to a lack of ability. She’s probably part Italian Greyhound, part blonde Labrador.  With all the energy of both.  Or several. 

    Laurel’s friend had what amounted to two full-time jobs and an unfenced yard.  She was going to have to take the dog back to the pound.  We couldn’t stand that.

    When we met Molly she was six months old.  I honestly can’t remember if I came home to the sight of a savaged couch and cat bed with stuffing in three dimensions before she knocked me down the stairs, and then repeated the action running up to see why I was cursing and crying – 9 years later my coccyx still hurts at times -- or after.  I think we got a note from Mallory threatening to move out if we brought anything else home.

    Molly came into our lives knowing how to sit, lie down, shake and ask to go outside.  She rapidly learned how, in addition to eating the couch, to open the sliding glass door in from the back yard, track mud across the dining room, living room, up the stairs, into a bedroom, leap on top of whomever she was stalking and run back the way she’d come, cleaning off the last of the mud as she went.

    Laurel rapidly learned that it was cheaper to buy a carpet shampooer than to keep renting one.  And the effect was only temporary regardless.

    We also learned that a six-foot high fence didn’t actually pose a challenge.  And that Loki was perfectly capable of clawing her way through a fence she couldn’t go over. 

    We came home one night to discover that our next door neighbour had not only broken into our backyard to get the dogs back in – Molly could not be caught, but would follow Loki who knew a friendly guy when she saw one – but had fixed the board Loki had “removed” to allow them egress.  She never did this kind of thing before Molly came along.

    The really fun night was the one that had me kneeling in the dark nailing a stop-gap with scrap wood over a big hole next to the garage[3] and Laurel driving around the area where she ran the dogs – I will try to comment on her insanity as little as possible – calling for them.  Molly reappeared while I was nailing and swearing and Laurel found Loki en route so all ended well. 

    And I had time on my ½ hour lunch break to come home and make sure the dogs were still in the yard.  Or discover that we had to buy more lattice to nail up in yet another place Molly had found to get over the fence. 

    We usually found out she’d gone over because she’d meet me in the driveway when I got home, so she wasn’t running off.  She just seemed to enjoy having control over her environment. 

    Or giving us heartattacks.

    By the time I moved out of the house in 2011, better than ¾ of the ½ acre of fencing was topped up by lattice.  Including the section that went into the neighbour’s yard.  The nice man who repaired our fence died and another nice man moved into.  How nice I learned when he told me a story. 

    Dennis had no pets, but was very friendly to all of ours.  Including not getting upset at Ichabod’s fondness for his flower garden.  It was apparently balanced by watching a cat do the standard cat thing of walking a few feet and falling over.  Then rolling around on his back in the wet grass after a rain.  However, the story was not about my cat and went something like this:

    “I kept finding dog crap in my yard.”  Which was fenced on all sides, so this was kind of a surprise.  “I’d had my daughter’s dog over so I thought maybe I just hadn’t got everything cleaned up, but it kept showing up.  Then one day I looked out my back door and there was Molly trotting across my yard.  She saw me, gave me this look like ‘What are you doing here?’ and jumped over the fence back into your yard.”

    That’s not the kind of thing you notice happening unless you see it.  I just thought we were having really efficient walks.  When I left her in the house while I went to buy more lattice, she jumped into the kitchen sink and took down the blinds at that window.  By this time she was five and we’d thought she would be settling down.

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[1] Did I mention that almost everyone I know who’s bought a new house has had the heater go out the first time they turned it on in the winter?  At least once one of the repair guys showed us how to work the gas fireplace we could get the house into the low 60s (and Mallory discovered the altar at which she worshipped).

[2] The best way to describe the area of Spanaway, WA that we lived in was as a descending spiral of cul-de-sacs.  Which is even more confusing than it sounds: To get there from one direction you turned right off a mainish street.  And turned right.  And turned right.  And turned right.  And, if memory serves, turned right once or twice more.  You had to turn right on the 2^nd 192^nd, not the first.  And there were people just down the road from us who shared fences with people that they would have actually had to go a mile around to knock on their front door.  Our yard backed on a private road that was infested with teenagers who rode up and down and up and down and up and down and up and.... in later years it went on so much that dogs actually stopped barking.  Lovely house though, big yard if you want to make an offer. 

[3] Speaking from long experience, this is probably the hardest place to nail up boards.  Especially in the dark.  Beneath the outside light that refused to stay on for any length of time no matter the age of the bulb.