Writing

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Complaining

I read through my last several blog posts and a lot of them are whiny and lamenting. Seems when I want to complain, I come to the blog. Poor blog. I know some others with blogs and they appear to have settled on themes. One is giving travel advice. The other is posting hiking and gardening photos. My concept of random thoughts on everything and nothing has become too random in this world where marketing is supreme. I need to FOCUS so it’s clear what my brand is. I can tell you, my brand is having no brand. I do most of my writing on a private site where I can work on it and make it better. This is left for tidbits like this that arise after going online to the library and trying to find something, anything to read that isn’t just drivel. In a world where laissez faire capitalism is so normalized that the population refuses to rebel against it, we are left with dregs, and the book world is no different. There is too much bad content and I’m adding to it.

Cue the overwrought bass…

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Family

(I found writing I wrote in 1993-1994). There is a lot. It fills an inches thick notebook. I would like to transcribe it here, but suspect I won’t get much of it. This is one of the pieces from that collection.)

When I was 10 my parents finally introduced me to Justin. I had heard the name behind cupped hands for as long as I could remember, but whenever I said, “Who is Justin?” they just said, “Oh, no one you’ll ever meet.”

So when one sunny afternoon my father sat me down on our flowered, early-American couch, the last thing I expected him to ask was, “How would you like to meet Justin, honey?”

My eyes glazed over and I nodded. Okay.

“Who is he?”

My dad took my had carefully and held it in his lap. “Justin is your older brother.”

Well, that floored me. I’d been an overindulged only child for 10 years. And now out of the blue came this long heard of, never told about Justin.

My dad explained that he lived in an institution in the country. He was coming to visit us for a week while his room was remodeled. And that was where Mom and Dad went every Sunday afternoon while I was forced to play with the six-year-old runt next door.

“Okay,” I said. “When will he be here?”

Dad looked at his watch. “Any time.”

“And where will he sleep?”

“In the guest room.”

Oh, okay.

Ten minutes later I heard the rubble rubble of the diesel Mercedes engine outside. I peeped out the flimsy curtain to see Mom opening the passenger door and gently taking the hand of a guy. He looked old to me, at least high school age. Ancient. He had on brown trousers and a white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt. His hair was dark blonde like mine and he had green eyes. He shuffled when he walked and smiled broadly at Mom. I opened the front door as they came up the walk.

“Hello, honey. This is Justin.”

I stared hard at him.

“Helwo dare. Mine name is Justin.”

He stuck out his hand. I took it. He walked past me and into the foyer. He picked up the receiver of the old telephone in the hall and listened to it before letting it plop on the table. He walked into the dining room with Mom. Dad and I followed discreetly. He went to the china cabinet and opened the door. He took out a plate and put it on the table and closed the door.

“Do you think he remembers?” Mom asked Dad.

“I do,” he told her matter of factly.

Justin then walked the hall and into the lower bathroom. He opened all the cabinets and left them open. He peered below the sink and reached in. He took out two pads, the kind my Mom did something with. He took the stickers off and put the pads on his face.

I laughed. Dad turned red and Mom gently removed them from Justin’s face.

“No toys?” he asked.

“No,” Mom and Dad said in unison.

He then moved to leave. We all backed out of his way. He smiled and moved out into the living room. He squatted in front of the t.v.

“On?” he inquired.

“Oh no, not now. Later, okay?” Mom told him.

He stood and shuffled toward the bookcase. He took down a book, looked at it, and then threw it on the floor. He took another, looked at it, and threw it on the floor. He did this to about ten books before Dad asked him what he was doing.

“Reading,” he said.

What was this? I couldn’t even touch those books. They were rare.

“Justin,” I said. “Want to see my room?”

He dropped the book he held and said, “Okay!”

I took his hand and led him toward the stairs. I looked at Dad for okay. He smiled, so we headed up.

What a mistake. I realized my bed was filled with water after he smeared my own tube of lipstick on my mirror, put my underwear on his head after examining my bureau drawers, and putting my teddy bear under his shirt like he was pregnant.

3-10-1993

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Ancestral Story

(I found writing I wrote in 1993-1994). There is a lot. It fills an inches thick notebook. I would like to transcribe it here, but suspect I won’t get much of it. This is one of the pieces from that collection.)

I had an uncle who lived so many years ago and so many generations back that I don’t even know what year he was born in. His name was Cavell and he was a Danish Viking. He lived in a small castle along a fjord that drained into the sea. All of the people that lived along that bank were terrified because he reigned on fear.

Along he would come in his 30 foot long boat with skulls on the prow of the dead princes he had murdered. All the peasants ran in fear when the nose of it showed on the horizon. They’d grab their pots and pans and children and the one cow and sheep and hide in the thickets that sprung up out of the rocks.

Cavell would land wherever he saw chimney smoke and march ashore swinging the femur of a giraffe he’d hunted on a trip down to Africa. People never could quite believe tales of people with skin so black you could only see their teeth at night, but they dared not speak their doubts while Cavell was about. He’d take a couple of them and clonk their heads together and steal the shoes off their feet, if they wore shoes.

When he raided the houses he always took any metal he could find. That’s why the peasants would take their pots with them into the hills. Cavell had steered his boat across the great ocean and told of brown people that lived there who melted rock in giant fires and made pots. Well Cavell had decided he was going to do the same thing, only he was going to use it for a jail to put all the people he hated into.

On his raids he would also steal the women and take them back to his castle. He would force them to stay there and at first they would hate him, but after a while grew fond and never wanted to leave. They all fought jealously for his attention and scrubbed his castle till it shone to please him.

He also had a passel of children that grew up to be his deckmates on his boat and help him go into the surrounding countryside and steal land from other Vikings. His reputation was known far and wide and travelers steered clear of the area where he lived.

He had a friend that followed him around — an old man named Ellsworth. He had one eye and limped from being stabbed in the toe by a yellow man from the far east where they’d traveled. No one really quite believed that either, but they did have lots of jewels and rugs and as I said before, no one argued with Cavell, or Ellsworth either, for that matter.

Cavell also had a stable with many giant horses. He brought them from the kingdoms in the far south near the Mediterranean and east into the desserts. Some of these weren’t as large, but were so fleet of foot no other horses in the land could catch them.

Cavell died at about the age of 46. That was old back then. He got an infection in his pinky finger from an insect bite in a far away land below the far away land. It spread all over his body and he died.

3-10-1993

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Minivans and the MCIoltS

I have a theory about minivans. If true, we all need to be aware of this, and take public safety measures as a prophylactic against the possible harm caused by minivans.

Essentially, my theory is thus: There is a secret portal within a minivan that allows the minivan to attach itself to the driver’s brain and causes the minivan to take over. This is called the Minivan Central Intelligence (or lack thereof) System (a.k.a. MCIoltS). In taking over, the minivan is able to drive drastically slower than the speed limit, to drive 3 mph over any speed bump, to turn off all signaling devices, to brake unnecessarily in the middle of lanes during forward moving traffic, to stop at on ramps rather than merge, and to change lanes into any vehicle in the minivan’s blind spot, thereby causing the driver of the vehicle in the blind spot to swerve wildly, brake suddenly, or to speed up dangerously in order to avoid being smashed by the minivan. The MCIoltS within the minivan does not seem to be set up to cause the minivan to drive carefully, cautiously, and in a manner least likely to cause damage to itself. Rather, it seems hell bent on ensuring that the minivan and its passengers will come to swift harm.

It is for these reasons that it is imperative that we investigate further to determine how exactly the MCIoltS hijacks the brains of drivers, with the goal of either disabling the MCIoltS, or we may need to remove minivans from all roadways immediately. MCIoltS is a public safety hazard.

In the meantime, all drivers should be aware when encountering minivans that the driver may not, and indeed is likely not, in control of the minivan. The MCIoltS is driving the minivan and will be wreaking havoc on the roadways. Other drivers should proceed with caution to ensure their own safety and the safety of their passengers.

It is also possible that there is a fundamentalist version of the MCIoltS that causes the driver and passengers of minivans to sing hymns loudly and to leave religious tracts as tips in drive-through windows. This is less harmful, but may cause the minivan driver and passenger to give up their own autonomy even outside the minivan, which is certainly problematic. It might not be a safety issue, but it is arguably a form of slavery.

If in fact there is no MCIoltS, we need to figure out what is going on to cause drivers of minivans to lose their minds while driving.

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Ha, Indeed

Discover insights about your posts! I can give them some insights: no one reads them and I rarely post them anymore. I’m at that point where the kicking in the ribs has left me not really trying to get up anymore, and writing requires one to be upright. I’m not skilled enough to write lying on my side in a heap. If I felt perky enough to roll over on my belly and prop myself up on my elbows, I could probably muster something, but even that is too much effort. I did try an anti-curse spell. Either it didn’t work or I wasn’t cursed. I tend to think it was the former.

So yeah. Not writing so much.

There were a few flurries of writing in the spring and summer. Not on this blog, but on writing I’ve been working on. I even wrote a 6000 word essay in under two hours. But somehow worry about paying the bills makes it so I can’t write and since worry about paying the bills is a 24 hour endeavor, I can’t write. The two go hand in hand.

The only reason this got written, this pithy, expressive piece with so much promise (HA!) is because I read an article about audiobook readers and wanted to write a comment on it. It made me log into wordpress and then since I was in wordpress I saw my stats and the exhortation that I could “Discover insights about [my] posts!” and then that led to this. Isn’t it helpful to know the path I took leading to this, you one reader who might find it someday? Insights into the mind of a blob.

Ha, indeed.

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Thanksgiving Sonnet

Our family renamed Thanksgiving “Indigenous Murdering Day.” I know. We are snarky. Yet really, the true origin story of this holiday isn’t pretty. However, I do think it is a good idea to be thankful and to have a day to put emphasis on this. Unfortunately, the consequence for the planet is a lot of death, especially for turkeys.

Our turkeys are lucky. They are happy and healthy, albeit a little muddy (the poultry pen has gotten really wet in the last few weeks). There is a dry house to go into, but the turkeys would rather roost in the trees even if they get rained on. Silly turkeys! They are free to roam our property, but they like to stay close to home and to us. Feeding time is their favorite. I have to give Clove a little pile of his own while I feed everyone else, otherwise he is climbing on my feet and into my lap and acts like a little greedy monster!

They are truly wonderful creatures. They’re smart and fun. They follow us around and pip at us while we work. When I ride my horse down in the pasture arena next to their pen, they come wait by the fence and pip at me while they dig in the soil for grubs.

Every year I post the sonnet I wrote back in a college poetry class about turkey genocide on this day. I think last year was the first year I didn’t post it. I didn’t forget this year. In the past, I tried to find different words to make the syllabic setup for a sonnet exact, but I haven’t been able to without losing the meaning. I would also like to provide, to those who are interested, the link to a wonderful documentary about turkeys called My Life as a Turkey. It is a fascinating story about a man who lived with some turkeys. It’s well worth your time. View it HERE.

And now, without further ado, here it is the turkey genocide day sonnet:

Thanksgiving Sonnet
Perspiring hormones, Tom Turkey stares with one sad eye at a crumbling chimney tower belching death in putrid smoke, blackening holiday skies. Annihilating light.

Bodies, bones. None remain unfrozen. With elaborate precision he’s taken apart; neck, gizzards tied in a bag between his ribs, head ground neatly into pink hot dog slabs.

Holiday skies are crowded with turkey souls, ascending to heaven like deflated balloons.

Turkey

Pepper peeking around the gutter I was installing.

Turkey

Clove says, “Hello!”

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Mountain Climbing

I am beginning to think about shutting down my blog. I started it at a very different time in my life. I have since climbed many mountains, and have fallen off many steep cliffs. And while I remember what life was like in the foothills, wind blowing my hair about, cheeks rosy from exertion, these eyes are not those naive eyes of yesteryear. I am another person. Back then, I discovered that when I wrote for an audience, I found a voice. The words poured forth from my fingers and brain. I couldn’t get enough. Then, as the mountains grew steeper and more treacherous, it became more and more difficult to find that voice. For a long time it was time that kept me from writing here.

Now it is something different. I no longer have any desire for an audience. Sometimes when a person climbs many mountains, and they fall off many cliffs, clinging to the edges with a lone finger, barely hanging on, each breath a tremor that could make them tumble to their death on the stones below, pieces of them don’t make it. Parts of them are not able to climb up onto that ledge when they manage to find their way back onto their path. In my case, I lost whatever part of my ego felt the need for an audience.

And so, here I am. When I write, I don’t want to share it with the world. I write for myself. When I write for an audience, I feel such an urge to censor that the writing becomes stilted and confined. I don’t like stilted and confined. It does not agree with me.

I have until October to make this decision. It is then that the annual renewal is due. I am mulling it over. I shall see.

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I’m a Naked Nun

Writing is a habit, and I’ve lost my habit. I’m a naked nun. I still have the thoughts I want to write, I just don’t write them. Many circumstances have contributed to this state of affairs: a baby who is now a small child (and heading into being a medium child), a teenager with activities and no driver’s license (but a bus pass, thank goodness) two jobs, two horses (and dogs, cats, and rabbits), a smartphone with Solitaire on it, my own house, a garden (a rather large garden), and books, always so many books (although that never stopped me before I lost the habit).

So here I am, habit-less and not really sure how to get it back because the external circumstances that make finding time to rebuild the habit still remain. Solitaire is easy to ditch, but not so much the rest and some of it I don’t want to ditch (priorities, you know).

Maybe it’s timing. I’ll just have to find the right time and hope I don’t die before that happens, because I do love writing. It is an outlet. It helps me to clarify my thoughts, even in fiction. It’s self satisfying. The urge can be overwhelming when the muse wants out. But it’s like exercise sometimes, and even though I know it’s good for me, and even though I know I’ll feel better after doing it, after slogging through the other tasks I must attend to, and performing the tasks I love attending to, it’s hard to muster the initiative to begin when bed beckons. Plus there is the matter of insomnia, my constant companion. She makes all tasks a slog, even those I love, except sleep. When I urge her to leave, she becomes morose and recalcitrant. How can you want to leave me? she inquires. “Oh, darling,” I reply, “Ours is a love-hate relationship; you love me, and I hate you.”

At this point I will keep it in my sights to build the habit again. I had a bit of trouble finding that verb, build. I typed get into, then erased it. Then I typed work at, and erased it. Build works. I’ll work to build the habit again sometime soon. For now, Oliver my poodle is lying on my shoulder snoring. Isabel has her warm legs pressed against mine, and George is curled near my feet. Insomnia visited for two hours in the wee hours this a.m., and the thought of hunkering down and going back to sleep wins.

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Why I’m not Voting and Counterpunch

I was apparently a part of a whirlwind of discussion, and didn’t even know about it. I submitted my essay on Why I’m not Voting to Counterpunch. The next day or the day after I started getting emails through my work website and on this site discussing the article. Someone mentioned it was on Counterpunch. I still never heard from them. Then a couple of days after that, someone told me it was gone. Weird. I searched the internets and it was taken down.

Then a close friend of mine explained the issue. These are her words describing the situation:

“They pulled it because of some vitriolic allegations made on Facebook by a couple of overzealous people claiming to be champions for the fight against plagiarism.

CounterPunch has refused to publish Mark E. Smith’s writing in the past (apparently election boycotting wasn’t as popular to them a few years ago and has grown in popularity because of the current candidates). Most of what Mark writes on this subject he considers “copyleft” material, meaning he wants the information disseminated and he doesn’t care if people use the concepts he’s developed over the years as their own, as long as they truly understand them. The message is far more important to him than who gets credit. Actually, in many cases when writers have cited him as their source, their articles have not been published because Mark has been blacklisted by pro-voting publishers (including many who consider themselves to be radical left publications).

Here is what Mark had to say about the charge of plagiarism regarding my essay:

“Truth is, I’m sure I didn’t originate the idea of voting as consent. Anarchists have been opposed to voting for ages and have many valid reasons, but I hadn’t been aware of all of them because I wasn’t an anarchist. But that is one of their reasons, because if they oppose the state, they don’t participate in the state’s rituals as it would indicate acceptance of the state. I don’t think I had any really new ideas, I just put things together that I had learned. Mostly I put together many of the arguments I had used against political operatives over the years.

Anyway, the whole thing about plagiarism, copyrights, and property rights is part of the disease of capitalism. It doesn’t work. I remember when writers would submit their books to publishers and collect hundreds of rejection slips before getting published, if they ever did. Now people just publish themselves on Kindle and there’s no heartache involved.”

In addition, Mark Smith posted this on his website:

“Lara read my article “You’ve Got to Stop Voting,” and discussed it at length with a friend of mine. She decided to write an article herself and I think she has done a good job of propagating, updating, and clarifying my ideas, and adding her own thoughts and experiences. I hope her article is widely read, as I believe it will appeal to people who wouldn’t read Fubar. Although Lara sometimes uses my words, this is not plagiarism or theft. I have expressly granted blanket permission for anyone to repost my writing with or without attribution. It is impossible to steal what was given to you.”

So for those of you have asked, that’s the story as I know it. To date, Counterpunch has not contacted me. It never told me it published the piece. It never told me it took it down. It never responded to my inquiry asking what was up or explaining my side of things. Essentially, I guess in the world of Counterpunch, I’m just the person who wrote it and therefore require no participation in the matter.

I agree with Mark. I think the ideas need to be out there and we should not worry about who they belong to. Yes, this blog has a Creative Commons license, so I ask that people link back to me if I’m quoted, but as far as the ideas in this or other essays I’ve posted here, spread the word. I wouldn’t mind at all if more people agreed.

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Compression

My brain feels as if it has lost the capacity to write. In the lack of practice, I have lost an ease that allowed me to sit and compose and produce something of substance within a rather short amount of time. Having gone from being compressed most moments to actually having some freedom of time, I have not adapted. My brain doesn’t get it. It’s like something that has been squished into a package for so long it retains the shape long after the package has gone. I’ve gone hiking several times, went on a 3-day backpacking trip, have been riding really regularly and reading actually quite a lot, and still the brain is only gradually unscrunching itself. It’s not sure what to do. I suppose I’ll have to get into practice again. Perhaps if I write tidbits like this one I’ll get there. As it is, right now I just want to brush my teeth and crawl into bed with my three dogs.

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Dear Mr. Outside Magazine Editor

Dear Mr. Outside Editor,

Here’s a concept: Don’t put some teaser on the front of your magazine and then Oops! forget to put a table of contents into your magazine so the person reading the front of the magazine can’t find the article. Even going page by page, which was annoying and made me not want to read your magazine because it was so controlling, I still could not find the article teased on the front cover. Since the issue in question was an “Encyclopedia” I thought perhaps that I missed the point and that I was supposed to go to the “Encyclopedia” to find the article (this in spite of the fact that the article in question could not really have been about gear). Nope. Not there. The teaser in question was “Why Aren’t Millenials Buying Trail Mix.” Trail mix is not in the index to the encyclopedia. Millenials? Nope. (I suppose Millenials really aren’t gear, now are they? (Although I am pretty sure I could make the case that they are or that some of them could be.)) in any case, I still haven’t found it. Still annoyed.

As a reader, it is annoying to:

1. Read a magazine where the table of contents is 30 pages into the magazine, thereby requiring we page through 30 pages of ads and nonsense to get to the content;
2. Read a magazine that hides page numbers when they do bother to publish tables of contents so that again, we have to page through stupid ads to get to the content in the table of contents;
3. Read a teaser on the front of the magazine that is either a) not really there (which appears to be the case in this issue), or b) isn’t really what the teaser led us to believe it was (really annoying).

Since I am ranting about this and rather on a roll, I thought I would include all of these annoyances for you to consider when being a big shot editor. When these annoyances occur, I throw the magazine away (well, recycle it). I am not wasting my time paging through ads that thwart my effort to get to the content for which I bought the magazine. I will not let the advertisers win in this manner. You might have gotten me to purchase the magazine, but since the primary driver of budgets at magazines is ad content, and since advertisers choose magazines because those ads cause the readers to go buy their stuff, it follows that if I don’t read the ads and I don’t buy the stuff that eventually it will all trickle down and you won’t get any ad revenue when I throw my magazine away. SO…may I kindly suggest you make your magazine palatable to readers who actually like to READ your magazine (I happen to be one of those people who reads nearly every single article in a magazine when I am not so irritated by getting to the article that I can’t access it) and stop making your magazine mostly palatable to advertisers? Hmm? Do you think you can do this?

I’m going to give this issue one more chance. I’ll thumb through it one more time in search of the elusive article on why Millenials do not eat trail mix, and if I am not able to find it on this perusal I shall dump this issue in the trash (recycling). Too bad for me, I won’t get to find out what gear you got paid the most to say is the greatest…er, what gear you think I should go buy.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Lara Gardner

Post Script: After sending this letter to Outside Magazine, I received a response back from the editors asking if they could use a line or two from my letter in their online letters. (I gave them permission, but I have no control over whether they will make me look like an ass in their choice of words from my letter.)

In any case, I asked where in the magazine I could find why Millenials don’t buy trail mix, because I had not been able to find it. The editor responded that it was in the encyclopedia under “Y – Youth: The Young and the Tentless” (Outside Magazine, Aug 2015, p. 92). As a commenter to this blog post noted, “the entry explains that very few people under 35 are participating in outdoor sports, beyond a day hike or pitching a tent in the backyard. There is, however, no mention of trail mix whatsoever, nor is there mention of food of any type in the entry.”

Yep. The teaser on the front of the magazine is just that, a teaser, and it is therefore even more annoying.

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Oh Boy!

Oh, boy! 10 readers today. I keep waiting for the day I reach 100,000 total reads. I’m close; less than a thousand to go, and all I want to do is shut this thing down. I don’t write anymore, not really, and especially not on this blog. My posts get shorter and shorter. I used to write pages and pages. Now it’s a paragraph here and there every few weeks. I don’t have any real urge to communicate my thoughts to other people. I don’t care what people think of me. I never thought of myself as egoist, but in having lost the desire to write for an audience, I have realized that I was somewhat of an egoist. Maybe not in a blatant self-promoting sort of way, but it was there. I came up with excuses for my need for an audience. Artists paint for an audience. Dancers dance for one. Why shouldn’t I want to write for one? Not sure, but whatever itch I had has been scratched. Maybe it’s the futility of it all, knowing full well that in the scheme of things I’m the spot on the ass of the flea on the back of the hair on the dog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. But it’s more than that. Something shifted and I really do not desire an audience at all, so really, what is the point of this? There isn’t one. I’ll reach 100,000 views and I won’t even give a shit.

Blogging has changed significantly since I started this. It was more fun back then. People actually communicated with one another via blogs. I met some cool people who commented on my blog and I read and commented on theirs. Now it’s all facebookified, with “likes” and “following,” which is just another marketing tool. I really can’t stand it.

It has passed its prime. Maybe I’ll wait until I pass that mythical 100,000 views, then shut the whole thing down. We shall see.

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Maybe Pre-Dawn

My mind fills with so many thoughts I want to write down, need to write down, but then I’m sitting in the car or on the way to work or bathing the child or running or grocery shopping and then it’s the end of the day and I have not played my cello or practiced my language lesson, and most certainly I have not written down those thoughts and then they just fritter away. The difference between a real writer and me is that they find the time, make the time, take the time to sit and write the thoughts. I’m filled with story ideas, then consider the prospect of finding the time to write them and my mind nearly implodes. I don’t want to be this, but I feel nearly powerless to change it. Holiday season almost makes it worse. I don’t watch television and I wonder how anyone could have time to do so, even if there were something on that I would want to see, which there isn’t. I do read and read and read and read, in bits and snippets and pieces. Sometimes the New Yorker is folded open to an article for weeks until I finally finish it…Ah, it’s done. I could write during that time if I could get into the focus and get it done as quickly as I can with reading. Then I run across nights like tonight where the small child falls asleep early and the older child is entertaining herself and I could actually do it, could actually focus on writing, but I’m so out of practice I don’t even know where to begin, and so I end up here, jotting down nonsense and going nowhere. I have got to carve time for this, got to find some way to make it a habit again, but I just don’t know how or when. Maybe pre-dawn. That might work.

I can imagine getting to the end of my life and looking back and seeing all the time I could have done it but didn’t. Or living through a near-death experience and seeing those frittered moments. In this, I see the forest and not the trees, quite the opposite of how I am usually. I also used to be able to drop into focus immediately. I haven’t been able to do this for years now, not since I was pregnant with Isabel. That pregnancy sucked out my brains and they never came back. Isabel is extremely bright, maybe she got them.

Today I got some chocolates from another lawyer in my community. It was a little 6-pack of See’s. The funny thing is that it arrived in a box 16″ x 10″ filled to the brim with packing peanuts. All that to send a bitty box of chocolates. Silliness.

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Changing the Name

I no longer want my blog to be Lara Gardner’s Weblog. I want a new name. I don’t want it to be my name anymore. I am going to change it.

I have lost my writing habit, and writing is a habit. The more habitual one is in it, the easier it is to answer the call of the discipline of writing. All of my habits came crashing to a halt the day Ava died and I have been struggling to regain them. I ran religiously every other day and it’s been like moving through cement to reform that habit. This was the first week since her death I was able to do it as before. I would regularly cook a soup on the weekend, ensuring lunches to last the week long. I’ve cooked three since her death, one this week. On and on, daily life changed and I haven’t been able to solidly regain my footing. I keep thinking of her. She comes to me at odd moments. I think of that exact minute and force my mind away.

But this wasn’t to be a post about Ava dying. It is about wanting to change the name of my blog. There are many reasons for this. Too many acquaintances think it is who I am, and it’s not, and this frustrates me. Perhaps if its name is not mine, this will lessen. Also its purpose has shifted. It used to catch the random bits, force me to build and maintain the writing habit, but I’ve moved that habit on to specific projects. It also began as a need to work through life’s lessons, a place I would mull over what I was experiencing and work out what it all meant. Over time, my boundaries shifted and I no longer desired to put most of those thoughts in a public sphere. Most of those posts have been made private and I keep a journal for them that is not on the internet. Finally, I’m bored with it. It isn’t what it was. It used to be a redesign gave it a charge when it felt sloggy, but this doesn’t work any longer either.

It might go through several incarnations. I can’t say for sure. All I know is that the name will change. Soon.

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Autumn — Chapter 17

Read Autumn — Chapter 16

The day Autumn died, I woke up and did not immediately know this would be the day. She was lying in the living room, half on the hardwood floors and halfway on the rug. She barely looked up to acknowledge my entering the room, a sure sign something was off, but she had been listless for days because of the unusual heat.

The night before, she had been so hot. So hot that after I removed her from the tiles on the bathroom floor and placed her in a cold bath, the place where her tummy had been touching the floor remained warm for hours. Literally hours. A sick and dreadful feeling filled my stomach when I walked into that bathroom so long after putting her in that bath and could feel the warmth in the floor where she had been.

The heat of those summer days finished her off, I have no doubt of it. She could not withstand the hundred degree temperatures. The last few days before she died, I would come home and find her inert with exhaustion. She would not move. Her stomach would feel like an iron. I would then run a bath of cool water and lay her in it. This perked her up because she needed that cooling off. I don’t know whether her body was incapable of regulating its temperature anymore. The diabetes did so much else to her body; I could see it killing her thermometer too.

That morning, she was lying there and I didn’t immediately register how badly she was doing. I began to get ready for work, roused Milla out of bed, was busily doing my thing, when I made a horrific discovery.

Neon green ooze had leaked of Autumn. It looked like she had peed and was lying in it, but it was not yellow. The color was not anything I had seen from a living thing before, the color of a summer lime popsicle. My entire body went cold upon seeing that ooze. I carefully cleaned it up and moved Autumn into the kitchen. She was more listless than ever. She could barely stand. My throat was tight. It was beginning to dawn that she would not reach her twelfth birthday.

What was that, the desire for her to reach another birthday? All along while dealing with this wretched disease, I had wanted her to reach another birthday. After her initial diabetic episode, I was not sure she would ever reach her eleventh birthday. Then it was Christmas. Then I began to think maybe she would just keep living through a few birthdays, just looking like a skeleton.

I realize now she was gradually worsening, but having her there with me every day I did not notice the decline. Up until three weeks before her death she still liked chasing things. She couldn’t see while she was chasing things, so we had to accommodate, but she still liked doing it. She even seemed to enjoy looking for the ball or stick or toy she could not see.

That’s the trouble with living with a degenerative disease; you don’t notice the degeneration because you’re so busy managing it. And when the good days completely outweigh the bad, which Autumn’s did, it is easy to forget that the one you’re taking care of is on her way out of this world.

And for some reason I had arbitrarily decided that Autumn had to make it to August 16 and her twelfth birthday. It was like that day could save her somehow, even though I knew in my gut it was not true.

While lying in the kitchen, more neon green ooze came out and she just laid in it. It was this that made it clear to me that Autumn was finally really dying. I gave her an insulin shot. I tried to feed her, but she would not eat. She would not even eat wet food. More dread. More tightening in the throat and drying in the mouth.

I knew.

I debated taking her to work with me, initially deciding against it. Then as I bustled about, fitting into the routine that made forgetting easier for the moment, I realized that if I did not take her to work with me I would not see her this last day and I could not do that.

I worried about the office, whether anyone would care that I dragged in my skeleton dog. I worried about her needing to go potty. I finally decided to bring a towel and tell anyone who cared that this child of mine, my first baby I picked out the day she was born, was dying and if that person was heartless enough to tell me to take her away I would tell them to go to hell, but no one did. No one said a word. If I hadn’t had clients, I would not have gone, but I’ve figured out working on my own that I am the only backup, the biggest drawback to self-employment.  The clients who came to see me that day were extremely sympathetic.  One woman who came in shared a similar story of losing her own beloved pet.

I still have the bowl Autumn drank from the day she died. I cannot bear to put it back in the office kitchen. The day I returned to the office after she died I bawled when I saw that bowl. I had heard people speak of feeling “raw” and I now know what they meant. I felt absolutely exposed those first days after she was gone, like nothing was protecting me. Vulnerable. Words I had heard and sort of experienced, but not like this. No, this was worse.

Watching someone gradually die is the epitome of the expression a blessing and a curse. You are blessed with having your loved one there with you, but you are cursed with their disease. One minute you are wishing they would just finally go, the next minute you are thrashing yourself for the thought, the guilt a cloak you wear constantly. When they finally go, those moments creep up on you, those moments when you had ardently wished the afflicted would die, and you curse yourself, wondering whether your wishes contributed to their demise, knowing intellectually this is not possible, then reasoning emotionally that perhaps the dying one felt your anger and this brought their death sooner. Guilt:  a horrible, ugly poison.

I know guilt is not one of the traditional stages of grieving, but they ought to add it to the list for those of us who have lived with someone who has a degenerative illness. It has to be there for all of us. I cannot imagine anyone being a one-hundred percent perfect nurse to a degenerative patient, and those moments when you are not perfect come back to haunt you. Maybe only a little bit, but they are there. I like to think I’m an emotionally healthy person. I’ve managed to talk myself out of those moments, but they came up nonetheless and they can be brutal during the first days after the loved one dies. Like little bits of acid spray on the raw wound of grief.

Mostly though, I remember Autumn with tenderness and affection. Her body was so decrepit in the end, such a mess. A few months after her death, I watched a video I took of her two weeks before that day and her body was an emaciated skeleton. So sad. I took the video that morning because I thought that was her last day, rather than the day she actually died.

Throughout her life Autumn followed me wherever I would go, no matter how trivial or short the trip. Going into the kitchen for a glass of water?  There was Autumn, at my side. Going for a short visit to the toilet?  Autumn would rise from wherever she had been lying, follow me in, sighing heavily as she laid down next to me, then rising again thirty seconds later to follow me back to wherever I had been.

On that last day, when work was over, I picked Milla up from school and we headed south out of town for Dr. Fletcher’s in Albany. Debbie and Robert maintained a phone link, planning to be there for me in the end. I called Dr. Fletcher as well, to let him know we were on our way.

It was a warm day, hot and yellow. Autumn lay on the front seat, curled up. I kept petting her and sobbing. During those moments I kept thinking to myself that in an hour and a half, she would not be there anymore, that I would drive home without her, that I would never see her again. Ever. The finality was like a cement brick to the head. I could barely drive through my tears.

When Autumn was little and she rode in the car with me, she would lay her head across my forearm as I held the gear shift. As we drove, I placed my arm on the seat next to her and she rested her head there, our last moment a microcosm of our life together, our last hour.

The sun was still fairly high when we arrived at Dr. Fletcher’s near 6:00 that evening. The air outside the car was hot, so I left Autumn in the air-conditioning while I went inside to let Dr. Fletcher know that we had arrived. Debbie and Robert had already arrived and were waiting for us.

It’s odd. Since that evening, I’ve had many moments of extreme stress where my body felt like it could barely handle taking another step, but my mind knew it had to and forced it to keep going, but that night I had not experienced anything like that in my life before, and it felt overwhelming, that forcing myself to go when I did not want to.

I returned to the car and carefully lifted Autumn from the seat. I held her close and walked over to a grassy spot next to the parking lot. She was so light, barely fur and bones. I held her closely in my lap. She did not lift her head or try to walk around as she had the many times she’d been there before. I just held her, and pet her, and told her how much I loved her. Milla crouched at my side, her hand on Autumn’s neck. Autumn had been a part of her life since birth. Debbie and Robert stood next to us, and Robert snapped a couple of photos.

Dr. Fletcher held a large syringe filled with pink liquid as he walked from his office and across the lot to us. He did not say anything, he just walked up and put the needle in her forearm, then whispered to me to talk to her.

She died almost immediately. I pictured her spirit fleeing that prison of a body, flying off into the ether, she left so fast.

Earlier that year, my mom had to put her dog to sleep. It took him several minutes to die. Autumn died so quickly, it just seemed like an escape. I truly imagined her flying away.

Dr. Fletcher helped me to place her body in the wooden box I had brought to bury her in. It’s a strange experience, carrying a box with you to hold the body of someone who is alive when you start out, but whom you know will be dead, so you carry a place to put them when it’s over.

I buried her in Debbie’s back yard. I wanted her in a place I knew I could come to for as long as I lived. I wrapped her in a special blanket and covered her with a shirt of mine. She looked curled up, like she was sleeping. I have seen a dead human once; that person did not look asleep to me, but very dead. Autumn was not like this. I know it sounds almost trite, but she just looked peaceful, resting. Useful words to describe how it is.

It took a long time to dig the hole, longer than I expected, plus it was hot and the ground was really hard. I had to pick with a pickaxe, then dig with a shovel, then pick again. It was after dark by the time the digging was complete.

Before I lowered the box into the hole, I opened it, and pet and kissed Autumn goodbye, even though she was not really there. I knew once she went into the ground, I would never, ever see her body again. Months later I would imagine losing control and going there, digging up the grave, and opening the box, just so that the last time I saw her wouldn’t have to be.

I found a perfect chunk of stone to place at the head of her grave. I surrounded it with bricks. A couple of weeks later, I came back and planted flowers all over the spot, a floral island in Debbie and Robert’s weedy back landscape.

When I visited the grave the following spring ten months later, the yard was full of wild and brown grass and weeds. Yet Autumn’s grave was covered with green, a grass that was a foot taller than the rest of the grass in the yard. It was a soft, green rhombus, Autumn’s little bed in the middle of the field.

Epilogue
Autumn’s was the first major death in my life that I actually remember.  My grandma died when I was two, and apparently I missed her, but obviously a death at that age is nothing like death as an adult, or even as an older child.  The only other death I have experienced since Autumn is Robert’s, which broke my heart.  He died five years after she did, nearly to the day, of complications due to kidney failure.

Having now experienced the death of a close human, I can honestly say that Autumn’s loss was no less for me.  I grieved her closely for years.  Eight months after she died, I wrote in my journal that I was still mourning:

I ask myself why this grief can return so fresh eight months after her death. Then I realize that if she had been human, no one would begrudge my feeling this way, and I’m questioning the depth of my feelings because she was a dog.

I sat on the floor last evening near the couch and thought of Autumn and realized again that she will never be here. Ever. I hate the finality of that. I hate missing her so much. I hate the way it makes my heart hurt. I hate that I’m not allowed to feel this much pain because she is a dog and not a human. I loved her so much. I loved her more than any human until Milla was born. She was my first child. Of course I grieve. And I should not question that it has been eight months, or that she was a dog.

The idea for a book about her life tickled my brain shortly after she left me, and so I wrote down my memories of her death and illness while the pain was still fresh so I would not forget.  Then I had to put the book aside.  I could not write about her as a puppy without crying so profusely that I could not continue. Every so often I would remember something and take a note:  Don’t forget this about her! the note would read, whether it was the way she hopped up and down when I toweled her dry after a bath, or how she liked to hunt beetles.  Autumn, killer of domestic bugs.

Autumn’s death was the first in a series of life events that nearly brought me to my knees, metaphorically speaking.  Sad but true, the timing of her death in relation to everything else was actually fortuitous.  Things went rather south with Bjorn once he entered a new relationship, and we suffered a rather protracted court battle for the better part of a year.  During that time, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Bjorn’s new partner filed a bar complaint against me that lasted nearly a year.  The area of law I practice changed laws and my earnings plummeted to zero.  Rather than lose the lovely little house into which I had poured so much of my energy, I sold it shortly before the economy crashed.

I am not so sure I could have managed Autumn’s illness while handling so many difficulties of my own.  Yet perhaps I underestimate myself. It is amazing what one can endure when one has to, simply by placing one foot in front of the other, from one day to the next.  Perhaps too, in living with her various degenerative ailments, I acquired the discipline necessary to meet further challenges.

Two months before Autumn died, I adopted an older greyhound.  Her name was Edna, and surprisingly, she was a source of comfort in the months after Autumn’s death.  She came to us having spent the bulk of her life in a kennel on racetracks.  She had raced eight times and failed miserably at it, whereupon she was turned into a breeding dog.  Edna had no idea how to traverse stairs or eat anything but kibble in a bowl.  Teaching her these things and watching her make new discoveries was an utter delight.  She brought us joy during those sorrowful days after Autumn’s death.

In April 2009 Molly suffered a severe seizure. The seizure was horrible.  When I woke to her twisted body writhing on the floor, her eyes rolling in two different directions, feces and urine everywhere, I thought for sure she was dead.  But she did not die.  Three hours later, to the surprise of everyone who had seen her, especially the vet, Molly was 95% better.  And she stayed better.  The vet warned me that more seizures were to come, that she likely had a brain tumor and would continue to seize until one of them killed her, but that never happened.  She never had another seizure.

Then four months later, Molly seemed to deteriorate before our eyes.  She fell down the stairs to my boyfriend’s basement.  She had been having difficulty with stability on slippery floors for some time and those stairs were covered in linoleum.  She stopped wanting to eat.  We thought maybe hard kibble was bothering her so we bought wet food for her.  Molly gobbled that up like a starving beast and we thought things would improve, only the next day she did not want to eat wet food either.  We fed her some by hand and she ate that, but the next day she wanted even less.  Two days later when we took her outside to go to the bathroom, she slipped and fell going up the back porch steps, and the next day when she went out to go to the bathroom, she urinated, then lay in it.  Clearly something was dreadfully wrong.  My dear, sweet, fastidious dog would never go anywhere near her urine if she could help it.  We bathed her and I made an appointment with our vet.

Molly died the next morning.  The vet said she had a large tumor in her spleen that had burst and her belly was full of blood.  She said we could operate to remove the tumor, but Molly would likely not survive any surgery — there would have been no benefit in trying to save her life.  She was fourteen years old.  Her body was old and worn out.  Trying to keep her alive would have been selfish and cruel.

I am so blessed this creature was a part of my life for almost twelve years.  She was always there, quietly in the background.  Molly loved a lot of people.  She was always so excited to see my mom or my good friends.  She loved my boyfriend and enjoyed his company, following him around the house for a snack or to have her rear end scratched.  She took a bit of time to warm up to a person, almost like she was sizing them up to determine whether they were worth her friendship.  Yet once she decided she liked you, she always liked you and would remember someone after months or even years of an absence.

Upon hearing of her death, a close friend of mine said to me, “She was such a good friend and such a polite and gentle dog.  What a blessing to have had her for so long – she loved you all dearly.”  These words were simply true.  I am grateful Molly came to us. In her quiet way she was a fixture in my life for over a decade.  Of the hundreds of dogs I could have chosen from the humane society that cold, winter day, I am so thankful I chose her.

In winter of 2009 I moved to New York.  I had been telling Milla for months that after school let out for the summer, I would get her a small dog of her own.  During the school year, we would prowl shelters and pet stores, seeing what was out there, looking for a new friend.

One afternoon in April, we stopped in a dog store after going out to a movie.  While there, a small, impish, white maltipoo greeted me with enthusiasm and delight.  She climbed up on the railing to the display area, hanging over the bars begging me to pet her.  She was utterly charming.

The store owners brought the little dog into a fenced area in the middle of the store so we could play with her.  Milla and I sat and enjoyed her company for a half an hour before she wore herself out and settled in for a nap.  As we rose to leave, I reached over the bars and lay my hand on her side.  Something traveled between us in that moment.  I felt her entire body relax beneath my fingers. She sighed and stretched her legs.

After we left I could not get the little dog out of my head.  She was ridiculously expensive and I had determined we would be adopting a shelter dog.  However, I kept thinking of her and early the next morning, which was Easter, I decided that I would call the pet store.  If they were open, I would offer them less than half their asking price for her, the same price I would pay to adopt a dog in New York.  If they accepted, I would go and get her. I called the store, they were open, and they accepted my price immediately.  Milla and I rode the subway north to Washington Heights and brought her home with us. I named her Ava.

I fell immediately in love with this delightful creature.  There are some just dog things, such as the way they trot in front of you with their ears back, heading where you’re heading, that I adore in this dog of mine.  I love how wherever I go in the house she follows me, like Autumn did.  It was one of the hardest things to lose when she died.

Ava also has her own unique quirks that I specially love about her.  She sits on my feet.  If I am in a place and standing and talking or sitting and talking to someone else, she perches on my foot.  She will do this when I am saying goodbye to Milla as she leaves the house to go do something and I am staying home.  Ava sits there on my foot, as if to say I am staying here with her.  You go have fun.  We will be here when you get back. Then as I move into the house to do whatever, she follows me.

She likes to sit on the corner of my bed look out the window or watch me while I’m sitting at my desk.  She hovers with her paws over the edge of the bed frame, her head rested on them, looking at me.

Ava makes distinct faces all her own.  The most common is what I call her happy face, her mouth slightly open, tongue out, eyes bright, often one ear cocked.  She’ll turn her head slightly as if to ask Do you want to play? In these moments I stop what I’m doing and play with her.

In the morning, when she wakes up, she has the most incredible bed head.  Her eyes are all sleepy, her hairs all akimbo.  She’ll crawl to the top of the bed, as if the effort is more than she can bear, then sigh and relax as we snuggle and pet her.

Later, wild dog comes out, chasing bears and fozzies, rattling them mightily from side to side until they are dead.  Sometimes she brings them to us and requests that we throw them.  We do, because watching her little sheep butt run away to get them is one of life’s greatest joys.  She does not like these stuffed creatures to see anything.  Within a half an hour of getting a new stuffed toy she removes its eyes.  Perhaps she does not want it to see her remove all its innards piece by piece.  More likely she loves that the pieces are hard and fun to chew.

After Ava has a bath she runs through the house like she’s on fire, ears back, bolting from room to room. What is that, dogs running after baths?  I understand their desire to rub themselves dry on the floor, but the running around after, I wonder why.  Almost every dog I have ever owned has gone running after getting a bath.  However, none of them have run like Ava does.  The others have all just gone for their run to dive into their rubs.  This one just runs like a bat out of hell from room to room, then comes and stares at me with the happy face, tongue lolling out, eyes bright. Then off she goes again to make another round.  It’s hilarious.

Ava isn’t thrilled with the bath itself.  She is actually one of the more obnoxious dogs I have had to bathe.  It’s a good thing she is small and easy to hold down because she really hates it and tries to escape.  Yet she is intrigued by the bathtub, or rather, people showering or bathing.  When Milla takes a shower, it is a guarantee that Ava will be in the bathroom standing on the edge of the tub, peeking around the shower curtain, her little sheep butt wagging its mini tail.  When either of us bathe, she comes and stands and looks in.  Maybe she is curious why we would want to do something so hideously awful.  Or perhaps she just wants our company.  Maybe it’s a little of both.

Ava truly loves to snuggle.  She is thrilled at her ability to jump on the bed.  She could not always do it by herself, but she grew and figured it out, and now seems to take great pleasure in both jumping on and jumping off. I can jump on the bed!  I can jump off the bed!  See?  I launch myself many feet past the bed!  Aren’t I skilled?

She will jump on the bed if I am lying there and come and lie across my neck and sigh.  She’s my little doggie stole.  She’ll snuggle there a while and get kisses from me, and strokes and rubs.  She knows I do not like her to lick me.  She does not even try anymore.  My ex-boyfriend lets her kiss him — I think it’s gross — but Ava knows he doesn’t mind so she licks him all over.  The only time she licks me is when I get out of the shower.  She will come in and lick the water off of my feet  until I dry them.

This dog makes me happy.  That’s the simple fact of it.  She came along when I was very sad.  There were so many reasons, many of them huge, for my sadness.  One the biggest was grief over the loss of the dogs who had lived with me.  I would have dreams about them, dreams they were still alive or still lived with me.  Vivid dreams.  Then this little dog came to live with me and I suddenly felt the desire to laugh again.  I laugh every day living with her.  She’s a happy, wonderful little spirit.  Frankly, I’m completely smitten.

Years and years ago, I may not have even been out of my teens, I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.  I don’t remember much of it at all.  I read it because it was a bestseller, and I don’t even recall its premise beyond the title.

However, I remember one thing vividly.  Peck argued that humans can never really love a dog, or any other animal, because to love as he defined it requires reciprocation in kind.  My feelings in response to his position are unchanged:  I wholeheartedly disagree.  Life is full of different kinds of love.  Some loves are equally reciprocal, usually with the person we choose as a mate, but also with certain friends or even family members.  By Peck’s definition, I could not truly love an infant or a small child or someone who does not love me back in the same way and with the same articulation.

What a limiting view of human capacity.  I absolutely loved my dog.  It did not matter that her adoration of me was different.  My love for her was there, and it still is.  Autumn was a gift and I will love her forever.  She helped to teach me selflessness.  She brought me joy.  She increased my humanity.  For this and so much more, I will be forever grateful.

Autumn

Autumn's Last Day

Autumn’s Last Day

by

Autumn — Chapter 16

Read Autumn — Chapter 15

I awoke one morning in early July 2005 and rose to give Autumn her shot. I called out her name, but she did not come. She was not at my bedside, and she was not anywhere in my room. She would usually get up to greet me and get her shot and food, because food was her favorite part of the day. I looked everywhere and was getting kind of frantic looking for her. Had she somehow gotten out again and I didn’t know it? I checked both doors, then headed towards the dog door to look out at the run. It was then that I saw she was lying in a heap of blankets on the back porch. I stood looking at her, my fist to my mouth, whispering, “Oh no, oh no, oh no. Not this. Not now. Oh, baby.” Funny, I had always pictured discovering her and running to her side, but I could not move.

“Autumn?” I queried. She remained still. Her ear stood on end. The light was the low, not quite sunny light of early morning in mid-summer. She was in a shadow. I stood back and could not move towards her. I was afraid she had died.

“Autumn,” I said. “Baby?”

I finally stepped forward and thought perhaps her ear had moved. Once I was within a couple of feet of her prostrate form, I could see that she was vibrating ever so slightly. I could see her breaths coming slowly, raggedly.

I knelt at her side and carefully touched her head. She was warm. Too warm. Her body vibrated, humming all over, like electricity was turned on inside her skin. Her eyes were glassy, staring at nothing. I was dry.

“Oh, baby. My baby.” I held her and stroked her, thoughts running through my head. What should I do? Who should I call?

I went into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed Bjorn’s number at work. He answered and I could not speak. I could not emit a squeak. My voice would not come. I could not tell him what was wrong. Tears clouded my vision. The words were stuck.

He kept asking what was wrong. I finally managed to say, “It’s not Milla.” I meant that nothing was wrong with Milla.

He got the message because he said, “I know.”

I sobbed and finally told him that it was Autumn. After he told me this was probably for the best, I realized I had chosen the wrong person to call. Why him? Why on earth did I call him? I think on some level I wanted the closeness we never really had, wanted him to care about my grief and pain. During this crisis, I had a moment of absolute clarity when I realized that he would never be that person for me, ever.

I briefly told him what was going on, then got off the phone as fast as I could. I left a message at Dr. Fletcher’s office. Then I wondered, who do I call? I can’t call my mom; she won’t be a comfort either. I couldn’t call her.

Debbie. I realized then that Debbie was who I should have called all along. When I heard her answer the phone, I did not have to say anything. She knew it was me and she knew why I was calling her. There is a reason she is my best friend.

She asked for specifics. I told her how Autumn was. I told her I thought she would have to be put to sleep. I told her that I did not have any way to avoid my workday and would have to take her to Dr. Fletcher’s that evening because I could not get out of my work commitments. In spite of the fact I adored Dr. Horner, Ken was my friend, and I wanted him to be the one to put Autumn to sleep when the time came.

Debbie told me to keep her posted and stated that she and Robert would be there for me. She told me to let her know when I was coming down and when they needed to meet me there.

I was so grateful for her kindness and her calm. She put me at ease. As I spoke to her, I had filled Autumn’s syringe with insulin and given her a shot. I had given her some food. After the shot, she lifted her head and actually looked at me. Apparently the insulin had some effect, and quickly, because she was noticeably perkier than she had been.

It turned out to be a false alarm. Autumn gradually improved throughout the day and by the time afternoon rolled around and I could drive her down to the vet’s, Autumn had perked up significantly and was back to where she had been before the coma episode of that morning.

Dr. Fletcher patted her and gave her some string cheese. He always carried a can of the stuff to help keep pets happy in his office. Autumn gobbled at it.

“She’s not ready yet,” Dr. Fletcher said to me, patting her. I could see that. As prostrate as she had been that morning, she was back to her old self now.

We caught up on our news. Dr. Fletcher told me again that I should go to vet school, that I could have both law and veterinary degrees. We laughed together for a few more minutes before we turned to go.

“You’ve got some time,” he stated. “Not a lot, but some. Maybe a couple of weeks.”

Oh, I thought. Only a couple of weeks? I hoped with all my heart she would hold on just a little longer.

by

Autumn — Chapter 15

Read Autumn — Chapter 14

In spring of 2003, I graduated from law school. I studied for and completed the bar exam. After taking the test but before getting the results, I was hired by a law firm. Whether I would keep the job was contingent upon my having passed the bar. The firm was in NE Portland, a forty minute drive from our country suburb house in the middle of nowhere.

The reality of consequences was gradually squeezing me into the accepting that some decisions can impact a life for a long time. Less than three years earlier, during my first term in law school, I discovered with a panic that perhaps I had made a grave error. Yet the cost of that error was already well over ten-thousand dollars. If I quit, I would have to repay that sum, and if I wasn’t practicing law, how would I do that? And so I soldiered on.

My dismay grew the remainder of that year. However, second year was an improvement, and I began to believe perhaps the error was not so disastrous as I first thought. By graduation and beyond, I had returned to my original assessment, that I should never have gone to law school. Only after completion I was much further in debt, and much more discomposed. While I loved the academic rigor of law school, I was not enamored of the practice of law. I began to see the entire enterprise as one magnificent, horrendously expensive mistake.

Simultaneously, I was coming to terms with personal consequences as well. I knew three months after meeting Bjorn that we were not the most suitable pair. We were simply completely different. We could spend forty-five minutes arguing a point, only to discover we were arguing the same side. I was extremely energetic, always on the move, and constantly trying new things. Bjorn took life at a slower pace. He preferred hanging out at home and watching sports on television to buzzing around to various events. When we bought the first house, even though it was brand new, I wanted to dive in and start new projects, fixing it up. Bjorn liked it fine the way it was. About our only real connection was the love we jointly shared for our daughter.

Life was forcing me to take a good, hard look at the choices I had made, often on the fly, and determine whether a course correction was in order. I was driving nearly 45 minutes in one direction to my job. I didn’t hate the job, but I didn’t love it either, and making that commute seemed not worth it. I was living in a house and neighborhood with others who did not share my values, my politics, or much of anything except real estate. And sadly, I knew I was no longer in love with the father of my child, and nor was he in love with me. House linked to career linked to relationship, a concatenation of choices was leading me down the path to misery. Change was in order.

Bjorn and I had discussed ending our relationship several times over the course of a year. Early in the pre-dawn hours of the new year, after leaving a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house in Salem, the two of us were rehashing the menu from the evening as we drove along the winding country roads in the dark.

I was always the health nut, eliminating high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oil years before it became commonplace to do so. Bjorn liked junk food and fast food, and didn’t feel bad about it or any need to eat any differently. The party food had been mostly junk food and I was lamenting the lack of healthy snacks. I was also hungry.

“If you would just eat the junk, there wouldn’t be a problem,” Bjorn informed me, driving down the blackened, curved highway under the cold, winter moon and low, shredded clouds.

“I don’t have a problem,” I retorted. “We are just different. This is what I have been saying for months now. This is just one of many reasons why I do not think we are good together or for each other.” The passenger seat where I sat was reclined back, nearly touching the car seat holding a sleeping Milla. I slumped there, trying to make myself comfortable.

Bjorn didn’t say anything for a long time, such a long time in fact that I began almost to doze off. Then out of the silence he said, “You’re right.”

And with that, we ended our relationship of five and a half years.

Even though we were no longer a couple, neither of us immediately moved out and on. We had recently decided to sell the country suburb house and move into Portland. We had been looking for a house together, and I simply switched and began looking for a house on my own. Bjorn had been working as an engineer, but wanted to move into another area of engineering entirely, an area in which he was unlikely to find employment in the Portland area. He had begun sending out resumes to companies in other cities.

I wanted an old house, preferably a bungalow. I had been looking and looking, but this was the beginning of the housing bubble and prices were starting to get really steep. It was still possible to find affordable houses, but they usually came with another sort of price in that they were further out, in a less desirable neighborhood, or needed a lot of work. If it needed work, that was fine with me. I relished the opportunity. I was less willing to live further out, and I would not even consider some of the more troublesome neighborhoods because it would be just me and Milla living there. We had the dogs, but there was only so much they could do, and I didn’t want them to get hurt either. Often a neighborhood looked fine on the outside, but Portland had been experiencing an influx of Russian and Mexican gangs. No thanks.

After only a few weeks of searching, I found my house. Built in 1920, it needed tons of cosmetic work, but was structurally quite sound. With a few changes, the house would be perfect for us. It also had a lovely, floral back yard, as well as a side yard already fenced and lined with bark chips for the dogs. The support beams under the eaves were carved with loops and bows. This house was charming and perfect, so I bought it.

I had major plans for renovating and started immediately, before we even moved in. Bjorn moved to the house as well, and the two of us demolished the kitchen. It was the only place in the house that was truly awful. The counters were covered with tiny brown tiles that had not been installed properly. There was more grout than tile and each swipe of a sponge brought up a handful of dust, dirt, and goo.

In the four and a half years I lived in that house, I made many changes:  I installed an entirely new kitchen, put in a new kitchen window with rising double panes, to replace the former single-paned window that did not open at all, a travesty in a kitchen. I replaced the floors in the kitchen with new tiles. I removed the ugly, industrial grey tile in the bathroom, covering the floor with small, square white tiles. I removed a wall in the second room that opened into a small room with no real purpose, creating one giant bedroom. In that larger room, I installed a closet and discovered space above the stairs in the wall and turned it into a cupboard, using period knobs for the doors. I built a wall along the far side of the bigger second room, then opened a door into the master bedroom, creating a walk-in closet in a room that formerly had no closet at all.

While making the place for the door, I discovered newspapers from 1925 under the wallpaper advertising “Paris Frocks for Only $25.99!” I moved the front door from the master bedroom back into the living room where it belonged. I designed and installed built-in bookshelves in the living room, matching the woodwork at the base and along the top edge with the woodwork throughout the house. I painted the entire interior of the house with many lovely colors. I replaced all the light fixtures with period fixtures, and replaced a couple of windows that were no longer functional.

I also removed the jungle that covered the front of the house and built a rock wall, then covered everything in flowers. This was quite a chore as there was a 75-foot tall camellia bush that was so close to the house, it hung over the roof. I advertised the bush for free to anyone who would come and remove it. Two men arrived with a trailer and tools and excavated it over the course of a week, before driving it away on a flatbed trailer. There were also many scrubby azaleas who found new homes via the internet. For some reason, someone had installed sheep fencing in the front yard between the camellia and the maple tree near the sidewalk. Twisted and rusting, it was covered in ivy that used the sheep fencing as a ladder to higher reaches in the trees. All of it I removed and replaced with grass and smaller shrubs and flowers. I built a rock wall along the sidewalk, dragging the stones in three carloads from a rock quarry nearby.

Every job was done with the period of the house in mind, and in the end, it was charming and engaging. It was the perfect project. I did not have the money to hire contractors for most of the work, and therefore I did it all myself. I hired an electrician to replace the wiring and update that, and my dad installed the new bathtub fixtures and the front door, but everything else was done with my own two hands. It was a lot of work, but I loved that house and loved the end result.

Four months after I bought the house, Bjorn was offered a job in Florida doing exactly the kind of engineering he wanted, designing medical implants. Within three weeks of the job offer, he packed his truck and set off, leaving me alone with our daughter and the dogs.

On the one hand, I was relieved to let go of the tension between us. On the other, life became much more difficult. First there was the house. Even though it was a project of love, it was still a lot of work, especially for a full-time, working single mother. Milla was attending kindergarten and would go to aftercare there after school. Because of the hours at aftercare, I had to cut back one hour per day at the office, leaving at 5 instead of 6. This did not change my workload, only the hours I sat in the office doing it. In spite of the fact that the workload remained unchanged, the firm cut my pay, which I could barely afford.

I was also now the only person available to ensure Autumn was given her daily insulin shots twice every day. No matter where I was in the evening, I had to plan to ensure Autumn was medicated. I chose 7:15 as the time for these shots because it was early enough in the morning that I had not yet left for work, late enough that it would not be horrible to wake up to on the weekend, and early enough in the evenings that I could still do something after.

At times, I would take her with me in the car if I had to be somewhere and could not be home to give her a shot, a cooler in tow for the insulin, which had to be refrigerated. I also had to be careful not to shake the bottle because this could cause the insulin to become unstable and unusable.

In spite of the difficulties, we managed and forged a comfortable routine. Six months after Bjorn moved away, I left the firm and started my own practice. This brought its own stresses, but it was still easier setting my own time and getting work done at odd hours. I was freed up to attend more events at Milla’s school during the day, and it gave me much more flexibility for dealing with Autumn.

Over the next year, we settled into our lives with Bjorn far away and working at my new practice. I worked on the house on weekends and some afternoons during the week.

I took both dogs out of the house nearly every day. We lived near a dog park with a wide field where the dogs could run without leashes. Even on wet days, I would go and let them romp in the muddy grass, then wipe their paws before having them ride in the back of the car to home.

Autumn couldn’t get up into the car by herself, so I would lift her and get her situated. She would ride, watching the world go by, tongue lolling, ears perked, her happy face on. She loved car rides. Molly didn’t mind the car, but she preferred curling up in the corner or on the back seat.

Autumn actually didn’t seem to notice the poking of the needle into the skin at the back of her neck anymore. Every shot was followed immediately by food and she soon figured out that my shuffling around in the refrigerator door meant food was soon to be had, so she would wait right at my heels, eyes up, perky and expectant, waiting for that shot.

Needles. The funny thing about giving a shot is that the first few times you do it, it’s terrifying to think of the pain it’s inflicting. After you’ve given fifty shots, then a hundred, then several hundred, you can do it in your sleep. I suppose it’s like that for anything new. There is just something rather odd about doing something that becomes so familiar that is actually poking into another living body.

I will never forget those little orange tipped needles. I bought them in bulk from various pharmacy stores. I got to know where the deals were. The shocking thing was the difference in price from one store to the next, for the exact same needles of the same brand. It gave me some insight into what diabetics or others with chronic medical conditions face every day. The same box of needles would be ten dollars less than the cost somewhere else. The cheapest I found were about $17 for a hundred needles (they had to be thrown away after each use), but I found places that sold them for $33 for an identical box. I had the benefit of being strong and fit, so driving to another store where I knew the needles were cheaper was a fairly simple proposition. I could see how a mostly housebound senior would have a lot of difficulty shopping around.

After administering shots to Autumn twice daily for over a year, giving the shots became mundane and completely routine. On weekend mornings, I would wake up, stumble to the kitchen, roll the bottle in my hands, pull the shot, give it to her, feed her, and head back to bed, all in about three minutes flat. I don’t think I even really woke up. All the dogs knew the wake-up time, and if for some reason there was no alarm and I failed to awaken, one of them was guaranteed to rouse me from sleep.

One morning on a Saturday, I staggered into the kitchen, pulled the shot, and the phone rang. I squinted at the caller id, wondering sluggishly who would call at 7 a.m.on a Saturday. There was no way I could read the screen. I am ridiculously farsighted and my eyes were full of sleep.

I answered the call. It was Officer So-and-So from the Milwaukie Police Department. Did I have a golden colored dog? I informed him that I did, looking blindly around the kitchen for the neck I’d planned to shove a needle into not thirty seconds previously.

The officer went on to say that a yellow dog had been seen “wandering in a daze” down the road. She looked lost and starving. He responded to the call and found my number on her collar. He offered to bring her to me.

I explained that she had diabetes and that this was why she was so thin, that I had no idea she was out, that she was an escape artist of the highest order, and that I would be most grateful if he returned her to me. And please, I begged, don’t feed her anything.

Five minutes later, Autumn walked in the door, that diabetic-glazed look in her eye. I poked the shot into her neck, barely glancing down, I had done it so many times. I talked to the officer for ten more minutes, telling him Autumn’s story and about her magical ability to get out of the yard, and thanked him profusely as he drove off. I did not mention that I had failed to replace her underground fence collar after her bath the previous evening.

I was grateful Autumn was back, but I was really glad I did not get a “Dog at Large” ticket. Those can be expensive. I knew. Autumn had given them to me before. Even though the dog yard was fenced with underground wiring, it did not guard against escapes out the front or back doors, and I lived with a 5-year-old who had a habit of running out without making sure the latch had clicked. Autumn knew this and followed Milla around, waiting for any opportunity to slip out the door.

I was also extremely grateful he had not given her any food. On one occasion when Autumn escaped, a well-meaning yet misguided neighbor fed her two huge bowls of food before she keeled over in the woman’s kitchen. Why she waited to call me until after giving my dog a meal I’ll never know. Maybe she thought I was starving her on purpose or something, as if someone who was careful enough to tag a dog would be careless enough not to feed it.

In any case, when I went to retrieve Autumn from the neighbor’s house, the lady started to scold me for letting my dog get so thin, but I cut her off and explained that she had a chronic illness and that the food she gave her could have killed her, which is why she had keeled over.

I wanted to scream, “Why would you feed someone else’s dog, you idiot?” but did not. She didn’t know, and she thought she was helping. I used my glucose monitor to check Autumn’s blood. I ran the test, gave her an insulin shot, and she was back to normal within a half an hour. After that incident I went to the pet store and bought a tag that read, “I have a disease. DO NOT FEED ME!”

The glucose meter was a godsend and really the only part of all the illness-related activities Autumn endured that she seemed really to abhor. Other than testing urine, it was the best way for me to get a reading on Autumn’s insulin levels, especially if she had broken into the trash cupboard and found something to eat, or escaped and gotten something.

We had a strict food routine in the house whereby any food-based garbage went into the compost bucket, which was kept on a high shelf with a lid. When it was full it went into the compost bin out back, away from the dog area. The rest of our waste was separated into two containers, one for trash and the other for recycling. Autumn loved to get into the trash version and lick through whatever was in there, such as butter wrappers or soiled plastic wrap. Once the new cabinets were installed in the kitchen, I put in a double-garbage-can rack, placing the recycling in the front bin, and the trash in the back. There was a childproof latch on the door. When that was closed and the trash in the back, she was not able to get into it. However, Milla had a knack for leaving the door open and the whole thing pulled out. Autumn would then remove the can from the rack and go through whatever was inside.

One time shortly after we moved in, I arrived home to discover that Autumn had gnawed through the bottom corner of one of the kitchen boxes sitting stacked and unpacked on the kitchen floor. She had discovered all the dry good baking items and ate them. Molly had joined in on that escapade. I caught her because I discovered powdered sugar on her ears and muzzle. Naughty things.

Another time both dogs managed to get onto the table and eat a pan of chocolate cake.  I had heard the warnings that chocolate supposedly killed dogs, but this simply was not the case.  I read somewhere that it was only dogs who had an allergy that had to worry about eating it, but who wants to be the person making this discovery the first time?  It makes sense to keep the chocolate away just in case your dog is the one who is allergic.

However, potential life-threatening allergies did not stop my dogs from climbing on the table and eating an entire chocolate cake.  When Dan and I lived at his parent’s, Murphee climbed onto the island in the kitchen and ate a pan of brownies.  In all cases the worst thing that happened was the dogs came away with some really nasty gas, and we no longer had any dessert.  Apparently none of them suffered from chocolate allergy.

The glucose meter was a big help for these non-diabetic dog food eating sprees. However, in order to use the meter, I had to obtain a drop of Autumn’s blood. One end of the meter had a sharp lancet with which to pierce her skin. At the other end of the meter was a test strip onto which I smeared the blood to obtain a glucose reading. Autumn hated the pricking part. There was not any part of her body where it was easy to get a blood sample, mainly because she was furry. Only her lips and the pads of her paws were bare. The lips had to hurt; she yelped whenever I tried drawing blood from them, the skin was so thin and soft. But the pads of her paws were thick and extremely difficult to pierce enough to get blood. When I was able to poke them hard enough, it usually caused way more bleeding than was necessary for the meter, and this made her cry out as well. Digging that deep into the pads was painful. For this reason I only used the test when I knew she had eaten something she should not have. In addition the test strips were really expensive, so I didn’t want to use them up quickly. Humans would use the meters daily, because they could control their levels fairly precisely with diet. Autumn could only eat her prescription diabetic dog food, so it wasn’t necessary to monitor all the time.

Autumn was always so patient with the medical interventions she had to endure, but the lancets and subsequent rubbings were the one procedure for which she refused to sit still or comply. She would pull away and yelp, making it that much more difficult to get blood. But she was a dog – as much as I told her it would all be over soon, she just couldn’t get it. Sometimes I would be frustrated because she had gotten into something and made a huge mess, and then wouldn’t sit still so I could check her blood.

“If you wouldn’t get into anything, I wouldn’t have to do this,” I would scold, obviously more for my benefit than for hers.

I would read the meter and if the levels were high, give her more insulin. On occasion, the meter simply read HI, in its blocky digital letters. This meant her glucose levels were so high, they were off the chart, and insulin was required immediately.

Within a few months after her diagnosis, I noticed tiny white flecks in Autumn’s eyes. The flecks increased as the weeks progressed. I went online and discovered that Autumn was developing diabetic cataracts, a condition that is extremely common. I read somewhere that 75% of dogs with diabetes develop cataracts, and that their presence did not necessarily imply glucose levels were not under control.

In a normal eye, the lens is round, clear, and hard. It is connected by fibers that move so the eye can focus. It is enclosed in a capsule and gets fluids from the eye. The lens does not have its own blood supply. One of the fluids the lens absorbs is glucose. If there is too much glucose, the excess is converted into the sugars sorbitol and fructose. Sorbitol and fructose pull water into the lens which makes the lens cloudy, and a cataract is formed.

Some dogs develop complete cataracts fairly quickly after their diagnosis. Autumn’s developed slowly in comparison to some of the stories I read, and her cataracts were never completely solidly white; they were slightly less opaque than that. However, a year after the diagnosis, she could not really see. She would tilt her head and look at me as if she were peeking out the side of her eye, trying to see around the cataract. A couple of times she ran into the doorframe around the back door, but she quickly adapted and learned where her world was at. I could have had the vet perform surgeries to remove the cataracts, but we discussed it and ruled it out. The cost was over $1000 per eye, and the average life span of a dog with diabetes is two years from diagnosis. Even if Autumn lived another three years, the result did not justify the expense or the upheaval of a surgery. Blind dogs adapt quite well to living without sight, and Autumn was no exception.

After Autumn had been living with diabetes for nearly two years, she was almost completely blind, but she was lively. I would take her to the dog park and throw frisbees and sticks for her. I would set her up, touching her muzzle with whatever I was throwing, then guiding her head in the direction of my toss. Autumn would head out and look until she found what I’d thrown. Her sense of smell was fully intact, and she would find anything, no matter how far I had thrown it, as long as I pointed her in the right direction. She loved the game, turning and running right back to me to throw again, in that familiar trot she had inherited from Cody. She wore out easily though, and would lie down to shred the stick after only three or four passes letting me know she had had enough.

Read Autumn — Chapter 16

by

Autumn — Chapter 14

Read Autumn — Chapter 13

I remember the color of the light in the room the night Autumn first tried to jump on my bed and failed, golden yellow, soft, and warm. It was late and we were getting ready for bed. I was already in bed, reading. Autumn usually came and asked if she could lie at the foot of the bed. In the middle of the night, she did not ask, just jumped up on the bed, curling up at our feet, or coming to the head where even in sleep I would lift the covers for her to clamber to the bottom near my feet. But in the evenings, she pretended to ask before coming up.

That night, Milla was snuggled next to me in the warm down comforter. I was sitting upright, my book propped on my knees. Autumn came over and made an attempt to jump on the bed. She could not make it. She tried again. Foiled again. Finally I arose and put her on the bed. Must be her hips, I thought, and thought nothing more of it.

Over the next several days, she appeared to gradually deteriorate before our eyes. As October closed and November opened, she lost weight and strength. She seemed also to have another bladder infection and drank water excessively.

With interstitial cystitis, Autumn always drank more than the other dogs. I thought this was what was going on, that she was having an exceptionally bad bout of interstitial cystitis, and it was causing her to lose weight, but I thought she should still go to the vet. Again. I made the necessary appointment and three weeks after her first failed attempt to jump on the bed, I took her in to see the doctor.

She had lost seventeen pounds. I could tell the vet was very worried. He wanted to run a number of tests, but thought cancer might be the cause. He could see no other major possibility for the dramatic decline in weight. There was the possibility of diabetes mellitus, he suggested, but I thought this unlikely because she had tested negative for it before. Cushing’s also, but this had also been negative. He offered to run a battery of blood tests to start. If the results from the first set of tests were negative, he would run a second set. Then a third. We would continue testing until we figured out what was happening.

I handed Autumn’s leash to the doctor so he could take her back to the lab. She was not happy and leaned her head towards me, pulling the leash away from the doctor. I pet her head and kissed her and told her everything would be fine. She kept pulling towards me as the doctor led her away. How many times in her life had I watched her disappear behind a door in a veterinarian’s office? How many times did watching the scene cause my heart to constrict and tears of anguish to form behind my eyes? It did not matter how often I had experienced this, my heart always ached as she was led away from me.

I sat in the sterile waiting room of the doctor’s office, staring at the mismatched tiles beneath my shoes. I liked this doctor. He was not Dr. Fletcher, but no one could be him to me. Yet this doctor was kind and honest, and he explained things to me as if I had a brain. The biggest problem with the clinic was that it was in a town about fifteen miles from our home, so trips there were a bit out of the way.

In the waiting area was a giant cage with three kittens in it. Milla was thrilled with these kittens and played with them as we waited. A fat, orange, office cat came through and asked to be petted. It was not very friendly though, and scratched if you rubbed it too long, so Milla left it in favor of the kittens.

Milla ran through the lobby, her blonde curls bouncing, babbling and telling me about the babies. One of the kittens was a light grey color, its fur almost bluish. “See the blue kitty?” she asked me, pointing to it.

“That kitty is blue!” I responded, reaching out to give her a hug. She let me snuggle her for only a moment before running off to the other side of the counter, searching again for the scratching cat.

A half hour later, the door through which the doctor had taken Autumn swung open and the doctor stepped through. His diagnosis was quick:  Autumn had diabetes mellitus.

Diabetes mellitus, also known as impaired glucose homeostasis, is a group of metabolic disorders with one common manifestation:  hyperglycemia. Chronic hyperglycemia causes damage to the eyes, kidneys, nerves, heart and blood vessels. It is a horrible disease and because of the manner in which it keeps the patient from absorbing food, causes gradual starvation. It results from defects in insulin secretion, or action, or both.

The disease was first identified in the ancient world as a disease associated with “sweet urine” and excessive muscle loss. The elevated levels of blood glucose cause the glucose to build up in the urine. Blood glucose levels are normally controlled by insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, which lowers the blood glucose level. When the blood glucose elevates (for example, after eating food), insulin is released from the pancreas to normalize the glucose level. In patients with diabetes, the absence or insufficient production of insulin causes hyperglycemia. Basically, diabetics have too many sugars in their blood and no way to filter them out. It is a chronic medical condition, meaning that although it can be controlled, it lasts a lifetime. And Autumn had it. Little did I realize how much this diagnosis would drastically change our lives.

Years after all of this, I came to believe that the medical problems Autumn experienced arose from problems with her adrenal glands.  At the time Autumn was alive, no one really knew what caused interstitial cystitis, but I’ve learned that recent research shows a link to adrenal malfunction. All along the doctors thought she had Cushing’s disease, although she never tested positive for it. And diabetes is one of the symptoms of a long-term Cushing’s dog. Considering Cushing’s is an adrenal malfunction and Autumn’s diseases were all manifestations of adrenal malfunction, I think it’s a safe assumption that this gland did not work properly for her, or else hers was covered in tumors, causing it to keep from doing its job.

The doctor started Autumn on low doses of insulin twice daily. He also wanted us to change her food to a prescription version for diabetics.

“What about her IC?” I queried?

“IC won’t kill her,” he answered. “Diabetes can and will. You will want to do everything you can to lengthen her life span and make her as comfortable as possible during that time. If she eats the wrong food, she could get really sick because she her body cannot filter out the sugars. This can cause all kinds of problems, from blindness to heart failure.”

I got it. Autumn would have to eat what she had to in order to survive the diabetes, IC be damned.

At first, it was somewhat of a struggle to settle into the routine of taking care of a diabetic dog. It took several trips to the vet to get her insulin levels right. We had started her on one type of dog food that she would not eat, probably because it tasted like sawdust, and kind of looked like it too. None of the dogs would eat it. I tried a couple of other brands before I found something she would eat. All of these dog foods were prescription foods and exorbitantly expensive. It was frustrating to buy a bag of dog food that cost nearly one-hundred dollars for a twenty pound bag, only to have every canine in our house turn its nose up at it.

I also had to concern myself with the ingredients of whatever dog food because certain of them would trigger IC episodes. Even though diabetes trumped IC in determining what would land on Autumn’s plate, that didn’t mean I would choose the worst of them and end up causing her unnecessary pain.

It was a struggle to figure out how to manage the diabetes. Because she would not eat most of the foods I would buy, Autumn would either tear down the house getting into trash or escape and go eat someone else’s. This led to several diabetic episodes where Autumn would escape, then wander home, glassy-eyed and practically catatonic.

At the time of her diagnosis, we were living in the country suburb where all the houses looked exactly the same. Shortly after purchasing the house, we installed landscaping and whatnot for the side and back yards. While doing this, we decided to add a sprinkler system to the entire property. Then we fenced a special side yard just for the dogs. Ever since we owned Poppy we had used dog doors to allow the dogs to go out to relieve themselves. These had proved to be a godsend when Autumn starting having bladder troubles. If there was a chance she could make it outside, she certainly tried.

In the new house, we installed dog doors into the garage and out to the doggy yard. This yard ran the entire length of the house, and was fenced on two sides by cedar plank fencing five feet tall. We then installed chain link fencing between the dog yard and our back yard. We placed river rock up the length of one side of the yard, and grass on the other, with paver bricks between the two and along the base of all the fences. The bricks under the fences were fixed into place with cement. Our thinking was that this would prevent Autumn from being able to dig out and under the fence. We thought the cedar planks, placed side by side, would prevent her from squeezing out. Same with the chain link. Basically, this fence was a dog fortress from which we believed she would never escape.

We were wrong. First, Autumn removed the boards from the cedar plank fencing. We nailed it back up and then nailed boards along the base on the outside. She then removed a corner of the chain link fence. This blew our minds. Her teeth in front were all broken in half from ripping off boards and fencing. Once we repaired that hole, she started in on the brick pavers under the fences.

This was the last straw. After Autumn tore a hole in the pavers and cedar fencing, escaping into the neighborhood and getting into someone’s trash, then coming home stoned on blood sugar, I had had enough. I immediately got into my car, drove to the pet store, and bought an underground electric fence, the kind with collars that shocked the dog if it went near it.

For years I had resisted these kinds of containment systems. I thought they were cruel, shocking the poor dog in the neck, but this was ridiculous. A shock was less traumatic than being smashed by a car.

We installed our fence and sent the dogs out into the yard. We set the range on the wire to two feet. This meant that four feet out from the fence, the collar would start beeping. As the dogs moved closer to the wire, the beeping became louder and faster, more insistent. Then, at two feet out from the wire, the collar gave them a shock.

It worked. It worked so amazingly well, I wished I had installed it years earlier. After two or three shocks, all the dogs stopped going near the fence the second they heard the beeps. Autumn would go to the faster beeps, but then she would stop. She was no dummy.

I no longer thought the fences were cruel. It kept my dog contained and out of the way of cars and other dangers lurking about in the big, bad world. It also kept her from getting out and into food that would cause her to get sicker.

All of the other dogs gradually figured out where the line of the fence was at and never even waited for the beep. They stayed away. When I bought a new house less than a year later, I installed the fence in the dog run area there, and it worked then too, to the point that neither of the other dogs needed to wear the shock collar when they went outside.

It was never this way with Autumn. If she did not wear that collar, she escaped, no exceptions. But she did respect the collar and would not risk shocking herself to get out of the yard ever again.

One major plus to managing the fence situation was that I was able to stabilize Autumn’s insulin injections. Once her blood sugar stopped fluctuating because her food intake was controlled, it was easier to figure out where it needed to be and to maintain its levels.

One rainy Sunday afternoon several months after her diagnosis, but before we installed the underground fence, Autumn escaped and got into something, causing a diabetic episode. These episodes scared me. Autumn would return from wherever she had run off to, listless, her eyes staring off into space. I called it her sugar coma.

It was bound to happen that Autumn would get into something on a day when the vet was not open. She didn’t schedule her medical issues around the hours our vet was working. The result was that I ended up driving her into Portland to a corporate vet’s office in a national pet store chain. I had resisted these offices because I fundamentally disagreed with many of their policies. They tried to sell nearly everyone “prevention plans,” claiming the services cost less with the plan, but they charged more for those services in the first place, and seemed only to ensure the corporation would line its pockets on a regular basis, especially since as a large buyer, it most likely got discounts on many of the products. I also knew from my few vet friends that the wages paid to vets were low and the hours unstable. Overall, as is typical in many such conglomerates, profit drove its motives above all else, and I didn’t like that.

That said, the nice thing about such offices is that they are open many more hours than most smaller establishments. The vet we had been going to was open on Saturday, but not on Sunday. If we needed care on Sunday, they directed us to the emergency vet clinics in downtown Portland or downtown Salem, as they had when we thought Autumn’s stomach was twisted. It was one thing to pay an exorbitant price for such a visit at 3 in the morning, it was quite another in the middle of the day on a Sunday.

I dragged Autumn in to have her hooked up to an IV and get her blood sugars stabilized. After running all the tests, the clinic didn’t even bother trying to sell me their plan. They knew they would make way more money on me just based on Autumn’s many problems.

Yet I loved the doctor. His name was Dr. Horner and he was the closest thing to Dr. Fletcher I had found yet. Because I had read so much medical literature, and spent many hours discussing these issues with Dr. Fletcher, I was well versed in a lot of what was going on with Autumn metabolically. Dr. Horner seemed to sense this, and discussed her case with me at a precise, technical level. He was also extremely kind, and gentle with my dog. Over the years I have taken many animals to see Dr. Horner, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a rat, or a dog, or a lizard, he is always compassionate in his handling of animals.

While I had a good working relationship with the vet we had been using, his office was fifteen miles southwest of our house, towards Salem in a town called Woodburn. Not much later, I moved to Portland, and the new house was even further from the doctor in Woodburn. Once we moved, it was easy to slip into using Dr. Horner as our primary vet rather than the office that was so far away.

Read Autumn — Chapter 15

by

The Land of the Frogs

Once upon a time there was a lovely maiden who lived….

I am not a maiden.

What?

I am not a maiden. A maiden is a virginal unmarried girl, and while I have no desire to share the more intimate features of my life with you, I can say without equivocation that although I am not married, I am most definitely not a maiden.

Oh. Okay. Well then, once upon a time, there was a lovely damsel who lived…

Again with the virgins! What is up with you? I’m not a damsel either. A damsel is the same thing as a maiden. For pity’s sake! Can’t you get it right? I’m not terribly unhappy that you are calling me lovely. That’s actually quite nice. But the maidens and the damsels and all that. It doesn’t really detract from the story to know I’ve been living my life and have met a few fellows on the way, now does it?

Oh I suppose not. May I continue with my story now?

Okay. Sure. Go ahead. Thanks.

Once upon a time, there was a lovely broad who lived…

What?!?!?!? Broad? Are you joking?

Yes, actually I am. I just wanted to see if you were listening.

I am listening! Do you think I would have stopped you twice already if I was not paying attention? What would give you such an idea? Sheesh!

I don’t know. I’ll continue. Once upon a time there was a lovely lady who lived in a land where the males were frogs. These frogs weren’t the sort you could kiss and they would turn into princes either, they were actual frogs.

Okay. You have to be kidding. Why would I want to live with a bunch of frogs if none of them could turn into princes? What is that all about? I mean, a girl has some taste, you know.

Well the moral was going to be about falling in love for all the right reasons, like integrity, honesty, personality, etcetera, regardless of what the fellow looked like.

That’s all fine and good, but what is supposed to get me in the door? If the guy is froggy, how am I supposed to be attracted to him to discover all these magnificent inner qualities? What about biology? There has to be some reason we developed beauty to ensure the procreation of the species.

This may be true. However, could you allow that if all the men looked like frogs than that is what the women would know and they would find certain of the frogs attractive?

Hmmm. That’s an interesting proposition. Why don’t you continue with your story and I’ll think on it a bit.

That would be good, thanks. Most kind of you. I would like to get past the second or third line, if that is possible.

Sarcastic?

A bit. I continue. So the lady lived in a land where the men appeared as frogs. She had met a few of them and had relationships. But none of the relationships ever seemed to work out. As a younger woman, the most common reason for the failure of her relationships was that the frogs were mostly interested in jumping in the sack. I’m not talking about sex here, but an actual game where the frogs jumped around in sacks.

Okay. That’s dumb.

You’re interrupting.

But it’s stupid. The frogs wanted to jump in the sack and this was an actual game the frogs played? Come on! At least make the thing somewhat plausible. You’ve already got all these guys looking like frogs, which requires we suspend some belief as it is. Now you want us to buy into your pathetic attempt at a pun?

Fine. So the real reason most of her relatonships failed was the frogs wanted to have sex with her because she was gorgeous. There. Does that make you feel better?

Well at least it is more realistic, at least the part about the frogs wanting to have sex.

Is it, now? At least it shows you were right about the whole maiden/damsel thing.

Of course I was. Wait. Are you making me sound like some kind of sex maniac or something because I had sex with frogs who didn’t want anything more than a piece of ass?

That wasn’t my intention.

Well it came off that way.

May I continue?

Yes, certainly.

So as I said, by NO FAULT of the lady, most of the wretched frogs she met in her twenties were only after a roll in the hay and were not interested in a serious relationship based on honesty and communication.

There’s another reason I couldn’t have been a maiden/damsel.

You’re interrupting again. But what are you talking about?

You implied in that last bit that I’m no longer in my twenties. This would mean I’m in my thirties, or yikes! even my forties, God forbid. I would not think a maiden/damsel would be in her thirties or forties.

You’re probably right. The maiden/damsel would be sixteen. There. Are you happy now? Can we please continue? Okay, good. By the time our heroine had passed her twenties, she had been in a few longer-term relationships, but as was previously implied, the frogs involved were not particularly interested in much more than getting laid and watching sports on television. Oh, she’d gone out with a frog in a band and he didn’t watch much television between their acts of wanton lust, but instead spent his time playing gigs with the band and fending off groupies.

You know about him? Yeah, he was hot. Frogs in bands are trouble, let me just tell you that. Okay. Stop rolling your eyes. Go on.

Time rolled on and as she entered her thirties, the relationship failure rate seemed to increase, but for different reasons. The frogs she was meeting had figured out that ladies wanted frogs who were interested in more than sex, so they had learned to play the game of the interested pursuer. They could have long conversations. They could discuss politics and rhetoric, and were quite able to expound on the necessities and drawbacks of the women’s movement. They knew how to give excellent massages, and were quite adept at assuring women that they were interested in something far more meaningful than simple sex could ever provide.

Man, isn’t that the truth.

Come again?

That’s the truth. I’m telling you, I run through the list of guys I’ve been with in the last few years and all of them are fairly remarkable when it comes to talking the talk. They rope you in, slowly and carefully. It’s like they can wait for the big payoff. They don’t jump in, slam, bam, thank you ma’am. They build to a crescendo, that crescendo being them getting laid if they can pull it off.

I know it’s the truth. I’m telling the story, remember?

Oh right. Sorry again.

Thank you. As I was saying, our heroine kept meeting frogs who seemed to be interested in a real relationship based on mutual trust, communication, and all that. Unfortunately, each time things became serious, the frogs would hop off into the ponds and hide under their lily pads, never to be heard from again. This always caught the lady by surprise. One day the frog would be discussing a shared future of dreams and aspirations, the next day he would be gone.

The first few times this happened, the lady was extremely distressed. What in the world is going on here? Where did he go? What happened? She would discuss the disappearances ad nausem with her friends. None of them could figure it out. It just seemed to make no sense. Why would the frogs act like they wanted a long-term relationship then disappear as soon as it seemed likely? Over time, the lady came to expect the disappearances. She was slower to show interest, waiting to see if the frog would hop away at the first sign of real intimacy. She stopped having sex with the frogs unless sex was all she wanted. She…

Oh good. I didn’t want it to sound like I was always so serious. Okay, okay! Put down your eyebrows. I’m listening.

Right. Carrying on then. Our heroine began paying attention and recognized the signs sooner. The runaway frogs were consistent in their reasons for relationships failing. Most of them were unwilling to acknowledge their own shortcomings, but could gloss this over in such a way that at first it appeared they were quite introspective and self-deprecating. They could discuss in great depth their concerns for a previous lover’s issues concerning self-esteem or family dysfunction. They were able to articulate in some detail the meaning behind an ex-girlfriend’s struggles with her weight or body image.

Unfortunately, when the same magnifying glass was turned towards them, the frogs were unable or unwilling to see or discuss their own need for growth. If our heroine observed that perhaps they might deflect any questions on their own development with humor or pointed out during a disagreement that the frog had an amazing ability to find fault with others without acknowledging any responsibility of his own, the frog ran off and jumped in a pond without so much as a backward glance.

She began to realize that the frogs also had a way of projecting their own fears onto her. If they were terrified of expressing anger, for instance, they would claim she was too angry as they peeked out from beneath their lily pads. “Why did you cuss at that driver? How dare you glare at the rude clerk? What is the matter with you, lady? You must have an anger problem!” If they were terrified of expressing affection, they would claim she was too willing to affect in public. “Why would you kiss me here?” the frog would ask. “Are you trying to make people think you want me to be a prince?” Such statements dumbfounded the lady. What in the world were these frogs thinking?

My, that is distressing.

What is distressing?

These frogs you are talking about. They are all so, I don’t know, pitiful somehow. And you haven’t mentioned all the work I’ve done on myself to become a better and stronger person. Don’t you think our readers would like to hear about that?

I’m sure they would, but I thought such things were implicit. Would it make you happier if I mentioned that after each failed attempt you would do a self-analysis to figure out what you learned and how to do things differently next time?

Yes, that would be good. And mention I spent some time with a therapist. Let them know I’m not trying to make this all the frogs’ fault. That would not be the honest thing to do.

Okay. Our heroine went to a therapist and ascertained she was not suffering from any major mental illness. There. Does that make you feel better?

Not exactly, but go on. I want to hear what happens.

Finally, after one particularly heart-wrenching breakup, our heroine decided that it was perhaps best to swear off frogs for a while. Maybe I could take up dressmaking, she thought. Or drums. That’s it. I’ll take up drums. She began banging on the drums at all hours of the day and night. This did not please her neighbors, so she took up rock collecting and underwater floral arranging instead. These were peaceful activities and kept her mind somewhat occupied. However, with time, our heroine grew increasingly bored. Her extra room was filled with rocks of all sorts and her fingers had become rather wrinkly from all the underwater floral arranging she had done.

Excuse me.

Now what? I was on a roll.

Can I ask you something? How come you keep calling me “our heroine.” How come you don’t give me a name?

Because I was trying to keep everyone from developing a preconceived notion of who you are.

I’m me. Why would anyone preconceive about that?

Well the readers don’t know you yet. To them you are just our heroine. Give them a name and they will associate you with every Cinderella or Jennifer they know.

I just thought I should have a name, that’s all.

Being nominally anonymous allows the readers to apply your lessons to all women. Wouldn’t you like that? Plus heroines have a particular aura to them, wouldn’t you agree? There is an implicit beauty in their being a heroine.

That’s a nice thought. I wouldn’t mind being beautiful.

You are beautiful dear, on the inside and the out.

You are so kind.

Thank you. May I continue?

Please do.

One night the lady and a friend went out to view art. They found a place where painters and sculpters and various artists of all sorts had gathered together and were displaying various pieces of their work. As she meandered from one piece of art to another, she noticed a particularly hunky frog following her. She pointed him out to her friend. Do you see him? she asked? Doesn’t it look like he’s following me? Her friend allowed that it did indeed appear as if he were following her. To test her hypothesis, our heroine veered off to view a particularly large, phallic sculpture. She stared at it with consternation. What in the world, she wondered, would inspire someone to carve a giant penis? Wishful thinking?

“It’s hopeful, isn’t it?” a voice next to her asked. She glanced over and noticed the hunky following frog. He had marvelous, bulgy blue eyes and hair that begged for fingers to comb through its soft tendrils. She was amazed a frog could have such fantastic hair. He also had several very attractive red spots on his shoulders.

Yes, she answered, I suppose it has a bit of hope about it. Real dreaming. Sometimes you have to wonder. She noticed that his hands were large, his fingernails trimmed and clean, his skin a warm green.

“Hopeful and silly. I wonder why this kind of thing is still given credence, like it has something unique to say. Like we haven’t all seen such ambitious desperate attempts in the past, even at some high school art show. If I make a sculpture of a giant penis, I will be daring.” He looked directly at her as he spoke, his attention completely engaged. It was hypnotizing.

Yes, pushing the boundaries.

“Unique like everyone else making giant penises.”

Exactly.

Their banter went on for some time. Our heroine discovered that her friend had met an acquaintance and the two were chatting amiably. Following frog continued to follow her, all the while making witty observations about different pieces of art. He took…

So what, is this where she meets someone and falls in love? Because it looks like that is where your heading, and since I’m not in love and haven’t fallen in love, I’m kind of confused. I mean, I know who you are talking about, but it didn’t go anywhere you know.

Are you planning to allow me to finish the story? I know what happens. You know what happens. But no one else does.

Okay, fine. If you want to go through the whole thing, go ahead. Tell them how he came over to my house. Tell them how we had a grand time goofing off but did nothing more than kiss for a while. Then tell them how he didn’t call for several days and didn’t pursue me any further. Then perhaps you can explain why he is any different than any of the others and why we should be spending this much time on him.

Well he was different from the others. When you decided to let him know you were genuinely interested, he responded, didn’t he? And when you finally starting hanging out, the two of you didn’t have any long drawn out conversations about your relationship. You didn’t discuss your future with him. You also had sex with him pretty quickly. And that sex, oooh boy! Twice, sometimes three times a day. It was truly remarkable, his capacity and stamina. Do you forget that you had some difficulty walking normally on certain occasions?

Oh, I know. I remember. Yes, that part was different. But the end result wasn’t. He didn’t fall madly in love with me. I probably could have fallen in love with him, but he wouldn’t have given me a chance to do that. He wanted to have fun. He wanted to have sex. I knew this going in. To expect any more or want any more would have been foolish. And there were his problems with self confidence, and his periodic silent treatments. I guess I just don’t understand why he’s getting more detail than the others.

Because, dear, he is interesting. He is quite funny and absolutely brilliant.

Well, artists often are. And he’s definitely an artist. He’s actually making a living at it, and you can’t say that of many artists.

And he didn’t run and hide under his lily pad. He was fun. I just thought perhaps people would like to hear about your watching movies together, laughing like fiends, going on bizarre roadtrips, and boinking like rabbits. All the other frogs were so, I don’t know, serious. They were much too boring.

I know, I know. Unfortunately, I’m still too cynical about the whole thing. He still opted to go his own way and leave me to mine. And although we didn’t have the little “talk,” I know he was terrified to death of our relationship turning into anything more serious. If you want to know the truth, frankly I’m sick of frogs.

Yes, I know. Perhaps it would be better to tell a different story, the one where you travel the world and have many adventures.

I would like that.

Okay, that is what we’ll do. For now, we’ll leave off frogs. I can see your point. They are a bit pathetic, aren’t they? We’ll focus on your traveling adventures. Maybe you can meet some other species besides frogs, some species that might actually turn into a prince.

I won’t hold my breath.

Me either.

So our heroine traveled the world and met many fascinating people and adventures and lived happily ever after. The End.

That was great.

You liked it?

I did. Thanks a bunch. You painted me in a positive light, I think.

I hope so. I aim to please. Good luck to you.

Thanks, you too.

(This is a piece of fiction.  Any resemblance to any human or frog, living or not, is perhaps likely considering the author’s brain is composed of actual experiences.  However, this is a completely fictional story.  This story is not intended to be seen as a replica of the author’s life.)

by

Autumn — Chapter 13

Read Autumn — Chapter 12

I have always ridden and trained horses. Horses and dogs seem to go together like peas and carrots, as Forrest’s mama would say. While attending the University of Oregon, I worked at an international hunter-jumper stable for a few years. Later, after we moved to Portland, when Milla was a baby and before I started law school, I worked at another big sporthorse barn in a suburb south of Portland.

While there, I befriended a woman named Lori who owned a small home-building company. The majority of her clients were wealthy, mostly conservative people, who dreamed of owning small farms and estates, the sort who usually hired someone else to perform all the work required on the farm.

Lori was a dear woman, somewhat doddering, but genuinely kind. She owned several Shelties and a lovely house on the lake in Lake Oswego, one of Oregon’s wealthiest towns. She owned a small thoroughbred at the barn where I was working and, when I left the barn, we remained friends. She hired me on occasion to help her organize her house or straighten up. Extremely generous, she usually paid me much more than the job warranted, as well as lunch.

We had been living in the farmhouse in West Linn for two years when Lori suggested we start looking for our own house to buy. Bjorn and I did not think we would be able to get into anything, but Lori thought we ought to try, and so we began looking for a house to buy.

It was Lori’s advice to buy a house as far from town as we could stand, built new or within the last five years. We did not take our lifestyle into account whatsoever when we took her advice. This advice may have served older, moneyed clientele, but it was not the best choice for young, liberal, professionals, as we were. I had always felt too far from Portland’s center, even when we were only a few miles away. Yet both of us were too giddy with the idea of home-ownership to allow something like reality interfere with our plans. We got pre-approval for a first-time home buyer program and started looking.

At first, the likelihood of our locating a house as suggested by Lori appeared dim. Part of the issue I think was that we were looking in the suburbs where Lori was used to building homes, which were all the places where the residents had higher than average incomes. After suffering one disappointment after another, we finally found a development thirty-two miles outside of downtown we could afford. We chose our lot, which in spite of our foolishness in the purchase on so many levels, was in a truly lovely location next to some older coniferous trees and a wetland. Years after we moved on these trees were chopped down to make way for more ugly houses, and for many other reasons it was for the best we moved on, but the trees were there while we were, and softened the blow of a truly bad decision.

I began having twitches of misgivings while the house was being built, but was still able to quell them by choosing light fixtures and countertops. I was in my final year of law school and fully in the throes of “bore you to death,” the final refrain in the saying about law school that first year scares you to death, second year works you to death, and third year bores you to death. I had figured it out, how to pull the law from opinions, how to hunt down statutes and legislative history, figured out what mattered and what did not. I was truly sick of it. But I still had work to do and after the house was built, it was exhausting to drive home from the campus that was nearly downtown out to the sticks where we now resided.

The length of the drive was an even tighter twist of the screw in that the road to our new home was two lanes and hilly. Although drivers were given free rein to drive 55 miles per hour, most of them chose speeds closer to 35. Because of the hills and curves, passing was a death sentence. This meant that our drives were an extra fifteen or twenty minutes longer than they needed to be.

What a mistake. We were living in a country suburb. As is often the case in these developments, it was named for what it had been: Big Meadow.  The meadow was gone and in its place were Stepford houses in limited shapes and sizes, with perfectly manicured lawns and neutral paint, as required by the unrelenting neighborhood regulations.  I quickly realized I was better suited to living close to downtown, near young, creative, liberal types.  I needed a house to fix up, and since ours was brand new, there wasn’t a lot to do to it. We gave the house our love, built a fence and a dog run, but we simply did not fit in. The neighbors brought us proselytizing literature on a weekly basis. Every visit to the store provided an invitation to our auto windshield to attend a local church play. We were one of only a handful of families who recycled. Basically, were major sore thumbs.

Our immediate next door neighbors were especially different from us. The main thing about them that I remember is that on periodic afternoons the woman of the house had her teenage sons out in the yard and driveway with square-nosed shovels to search for garter snakes to kill. She did not want them anywhere near her home. Since her house backed up to the edge of what had been the big meadow the neighborhood obliterated, garter snakes were frequently in evidence.  After her sons killed a sufficient number of garter snakes, she would spread poison all over her yard to kill insects. She would kill the harmless garter snakes that would have eaten the insects and chose instead to cover her yard in toxic chemicals. Insane.

Within months of the purchase, I was completely sorry and realized what a huge mistake the house purchase had been, but we were there and I knew there was no way I was going to convince Bjorn to move any time soon, so I made the best of it.

As was the case in every place I lived from the time Autumn was about five years old, she quickly figured out the neighborhood. She would roam around for a while then return home, barking her two short woofs to be let in. One nice thing about the development being unfinished was that there were not many houses in yet, and there was open land behind our house for her to run around in. I had to watch her diet closely because certain foods could cause her bladder to go haywire, but in spite of my dislike of the neighborhood, Autumn was very happy there.

The only dog in our family who wasn’t as happy as she could have been was Molly. Once we moved, Autumn and Poppy decided they were a gang of two and would gang up on Molly. Poppy especially was becoming rather aggressive towards her. Coupled with her extensive skin problems, her fixed unwillingness to figure out potty training, and her increasing nastiness towards Molly, I was actually beginning to think I should find her another home. This was an eventuality I had never previously considered, that I would send a dog away, but things were getting out of hand.

One afternoon during the dogs’ feeding, Poppy scarfed up her chicken and rice, then trotted over to Molly to see if she could steal some of her food. Keeping her head low over her bowl, Molly raised her lip, showing her teeth. This was as much as Molly ever did in aggression to anyone, human or dog, and it was always when she thought someone was going to take her food. She had learned that I was allowed to remove her dish, but no such rule applied to Poppy, not as far as Molly was concerned.

Poppy ignored Molly’s warning, and stuck her head in Molly’s food. Molly growled and Poppy lunged for her. The two dogs started brawling, rolling together across the floor. Poppy was attacking Molly, and Molly was trying to defend and get away.

I quickly grabbed Milla and yelled for Bjorn, who was in the garage. When Bjorn opened the garage door, Molly saw the potential escape and darted through, Poppy hanging from her neck. Autumn followed, barking and fired up by the violence. Bjorn ran after them, fearful of being bitten. The two dogs snarled and knashed, Autumn barked and barked, blood appeared in spatters on the garage floor. Molly tried to escape under the car, but this made the situation worse because she was too big to move underneath the vehicle, while Poppy, small and wiry, had full advantage.

Finally Bjorn grabbed the garden hose and sprayed under the car. Molly lay in a heap, whining and yipping in terror as Poppy bolted off. Bjorn chased her and tossed her into the kennel on the side of the house with Autumn. I set Milla down and crawled under the edge to try and coax Molly out. She was obviously hurt. I told Bjorn to go grab my purse and keys. He installed Milla into her carseat as Molly finally crawled towards me on her tummy. She stopped whimpering, but her paw was bleeding badly and she had a tear in the edge of the skin next to her eye.

“Poor baby,” I crooned. “Come here, Molly. Come to me, sweet one.” I petted her and held her. She stopped shaking and I put her into the car and drove her to the vet.

Poppy broke Molly’s foot that day. We did not seek immediately to find Poppy a new home; I thought it would be difficult given her skin condition. A year and a half later, after she had attacked Molly twice more, I decided enough was enough, and I was going to actively try to find her somewhere else to live.

We were living in the new house I purchased in Portland. There was a neighbor who walked her wire-haired Jack Russell down the sidewalk in front of my house nearly every day. Narrow and stoop-shouldered, with white hair and glasses that slid down her nose as she spoke, she would stop to talk and criticize while I worked in my yard, informing me that “People who owned other dogs should not own Jacks,” referring to Jack Russell terriers. She also said that “People with large dogs should not have small ones.” These pieces of wisdom were offered in response to my telling her about Poppy’s attacks on Molly. I thought her ideas were somewhat strange, but what could I say to her strange ideas? I just listened, nodded, and continued raking, or weeding, or whatever else I was up to.

I found this woman’s perspective on Jack Russells somewhat entertaining, especially considering my interaction with another Jack Russell named Jackie. When Bjorn and I had lived in West Linn, someone had offered to give us another Jack Russell.  We were well into many of Poppy’s behavior issues at this point, and crazy busy to boot, so we weren’t terribly thrilled at the prospect.  However, the person who told us about the dog said she was being housed in a tiny kennel in someone’s garage and tranquilized 24 hours a day.  We investigated and discovered the story was true.

The people who owned Jackie worked full-time and lived in a rather small house with a tiny back yard, but they had purchased a Great Dane and a Jack Russell terrier.  Obviously, foresight is not a requirement when one acquires a dog, otherwise how can one account for the canine choices in this family with so little room and no time?  The Great Dane was managing the situation, but Jackie needed more exercise and more room.  Instead of giving it to her, they kept her locked up and drugged.  After several months of this, they finally decided they should find her another home, whereupon we heard about her and decided we would bring her home with us with the sole purpose of finding her a more suitable home.

It did not take many calls for my friend Noelle to claim Jackie, before we even picked her up.  This was a fortuitous circumstance, and we genuinely hoped it would improve Jackie’s lot in life.  After visiting Jackie one evening, we made arrangements to bring her to our house later in the week and for Noelle to pick her up that day.

The afternoon we brought Jackie to our house was warm and sunny.  The people who gave her to us had ceased their drug administration. We lived at the farmhouse in West Linn at the time, and we were looking forward to letting her run drug free in the fenced field behind our house.  Nancy Reagan would have been so proud.

When we pulled up in the driveway, we opened the door to go inside, and Jackie darted out of the car and down the street.  Bewildered at the speedy escape, we backed out of the driveway and drove around for the next two hours, looking for her.  We finally gave up and called Jackie’s previous owners.  Jackie was still wearing her old tags.  If someone found her, they could call them, and they would call us.

Within two hours we received a call from the state police.  They had gotten our number from Jackie’s previous owners, and wanted to bring her to us.  Five minutes later, a patrol car pulled up at our house.  Jackie had been discovered sitting on a log, floating down the Willamette River, several miles upstream from our house.  We never heard the details of how she had been rescued, but this river is massive and swift, and we lived upstream from a rather large waterfall. Jackie was a lucky little dog.  Unfortunately, we were not terribly sad to see her go when Noelle came by our house to pick her up later that evening.  Our neighbor at the new house was right, perhaps some people should not own Jacks.

Not long after we moved into the new house, Poppy disappeared from our fenced dog run in the backyard. There was no evidence of escape, and Autumn was still there, a sure sign the fence was intact; if Poppy could have escaped, Autumn would have been gone as well. It seemed someone had taken Poppy right out of our yard. The dogs had free access to the house and dog run while we were at work, and if someone wanted to, they could have taken her.

The day after Poppy’s disappearance, but before I had posted any of the signs I printed on my computer that said MISSING DOG, I was in the front yard of my house when the white-haired woman walked by with her dog.

“I haven’t seen Poppy out here lately,” she stated, matter-of-factly. “Did you find her another home?”

“No,” I answered, “She is gone. Someone took her from our yard.”

“Oh, well that’s too bad, but you know, people with other dogs shouldn’t own Jacks.”

“Well,” I answered, “I hope whoever has her knows she has a skin condition and gets her the shots she requires and feeds her foods that don’t make her itch.” I said this while looking directly at her, knowing full well she was the one who had taken our dog, because no one else knew yet she was missing.

“Oh, I’m sure they will,” she said, walking off. “I have little doubt of it.”

We never saw Poppy again. The woman had done me a favor, but I was not happy about the sneaky and thieving way she had gone about it. Milla especially was upset to have her little dog gone without so much as a goodbye.

Molly healed from her broken foot and we began feeding the dogs in separate rooms. Molly and Autumn got to eat in the house, on opposite sides of the island in the kitchen, while Poppy ate in the garage. It was the least she could do having hurt Molly.

In spite of the fact Autumn was dining on a smorgasbord of ground turkey, rice, and some disgusting vitamin goo that looked and smelled exactly like blood, she continued to escape and eat trash at the neighbors’ houses whenever she got the chance.

One night, I arrived home late from a law school class that ended at 10. It was nearly 11 by the time I dragged my lumbering book bag into the house. Everyone was asleep. I made myself a bowl of cereal and was just sitting down to eat it and read a magazine before bed when I noticed Autumn lying near the glass back door. She did not look well.

It was not unusual for the dogs to skip greeting me when I arrived home late, so I had not noticed her when I came in. She was glassy-eyed and bloated. She belched every few minutes, and was passing horribly smelly gas, and she seemed to be in pain, holding her head down, with her legs spread at unnatural widths from her body. The worst part though, was that her stomach was extremely swollen. It looked as if she had ingested a soccer ball or something, her abdomen was so distended.

I went into our spare room and logged on to the computer, and entered the symptoms into google. All of the responses came back with “gastric dilatation,” and “twisted stomach,” and “gastric torsion.” One even said simply “bloat in dogs.”

I immediately called our vet’s office. The answering service told us to contact the emergency vet in Salem. I called the emergency vet who confirmed that the symptoms did indeed sound like gastric torsion, and that we should bring Autumn in immediately. Every site I had looked at said the diagnosis was a virtual death sentence.

Terrified, I awakened Bjorn and told him what was going on. He dressed and we loaded Milla and Autumn into the car for the forty minute drive into Salem. Because it was nearly midnight, the drive didn’t take quite that long, simply because we did not have to follow any extra slow drivers.

We slipped into the darkened parking lot of the emergency vet just over a half hour later. The building looked deserted, in spite of the fluorescent lights glowing through the opaque windows. A sign at the door told us to ring a bell. We waited in the cold, Bjorn carrying Autumn, and me carrying Milla over my shoulder. A tech responded to the buzzing and pushed open the door. It felt like we were being ushered into a science fiction spaceship. The lights above hummed continuously but the building was deafeningly quiet because the lobby was completely empty. I’m sure during the day the room was abuzz with activity, but not at that hour. The tech took Autumn from my arms and carried her into a small examining room, the three of us following closely on her heels.

“We will take her back and get an x-ray,” said the tech. “Then the vet will look them over and come out to let you know what we find.” Her voice was grim.

Less than five minutes later the vet came into the room to let us know her plan.

“We will take x-rays. From the way she is presenting, it certainly appears to be torsion, but we can’t be sure without the films.” Gastric torsion is a life-threatening condition whereby a dog’s stomach becomes twisted on its axis, causing the contents of the stomach to become trapped. The stomach then distends because it is twisted and the gas cannot escape. It is extremely painful and if left untreated, the dog will die quickly.

She went on to explain that if Autumn had torsion, her options were limited. We could try surgery, and if she had surgery, there was a strong likelihood this would happen again and again until it killed her. She said she was going to take x-rays first to determine what was going on, but she was fairly certain Autumn was suffering from torsion.

Bjorn and I said nothing. We waited and waited in the sterile, fluorescent waiting room. I was tiring of spending time in these cold, unwelcoming spaces. So much time waiting for tests on this dog I loved like a child. The chairs were never comfortable and on the few occasions televisions were left on, I was even more miserable. I hate television, with its unrelenting noise, flashing, and commercials. The two of us took turns holding Milla as she slept, warm and sweaty on our shoulders.

Forty-five minutes later, the veterinarian came out to talk to us, and asked us to come into the examination room. There was an x-ray on the illuminated x-ray sign.

The vet was calm as she said, “Autumn doesn’t have a twisted stomach. It appears that she got into something that has expanded, causing her extreme discomfort, but the stomach is not at all twisted, and is in exactly the right place. I suspect that as soon as whatever she ate passes through, she will be just fine. I administered a stool softener to help move things along, and gave her an injection of painkiller to aid with pain.”

I was so relieved, but it was after 2 in the morning and I was thoroughly exhausted, both from the emotional turmoil of the situation, as well as lack of sleep. I was grateful that once again my dog was okay, theoretically anyway. The visit cost nearly $300, but we wouldn’t be wondering where to bury my dog anytime soon. Every time we ended up in a veterinarian’s office for another Autumn medical catastrophe, I wondered where that place would be. Every time I asked, would this visit be the one that ended it all?

As Bjorn drove, I sat quietly in the passenger seat, hunkered down low, the chair reclined back touching Milla’s car seat, Autumn curled at my feet.

I was not the sort who prayed, but as we slid through the dark towards home, I sent out a silent prayer, hoping that this problem would be the last, that this visit would be the end to constant medical conditions, and issues, and investigations, and expense, that there would not be more waiting in yet another sterile room.

All the way home, I was grateful she was still with me, but I was fervent in my hope that this time would be the last. Perhaps I did not pray enough, or asked too late, because a positive answer to this prayer was simply not to be.

Read Autumn — Chapter 14

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Autumn — Chapter 12

Read Autumn — Chapter 11

Summers in the West Linn house were extremely pleasant. The enormous cherry tree in the front yard kept the house nearly fully shaded. There were windows covering two entire walls in the living room, and a full corner of our bedroom. A large picture window opened onto the dining room. In warm months, we opened all these windows, allowing a gentle breeze to move throughout the rooms. In combination with the shade of the cherry tree, the effect was comfortable and gratifying.

Because of the grandfather clause allowing livestock on the property, we owned two ducks and had brought my old, childhood, bay pony named Lady to the house from my parent’s. Swaybacked and ancient, she kept the grass behind the house mowed and blackberry vines in check. I set up a hammock between two trees in the backyard, and would lie between them with a book while Milla roamed the yard with the dogs and Lady.

I was lying in this hammock the afternoon of Autumn’s bladder scope, waiting for the call from the vet telling us to come and bring her home and, I hoped, some diagnosis.

Finally, at about three in the afternoon, the specialist’s office called to say Autumn was ready to go home. The receptionist informed me that the specialist would call me to discuss the case.

I gathered up my book and hefted myself out of the hammock, pulled Milla from the sandbox, wiping sand from her hands and knees, and headed through the house and out to the car. The specialist’s office was in another Portland suburb, about twenty minutes from our house.

When I arrived at the specialist’s office, Autumn was woozy, but none the worse for wear from her experience. The office told me the specialist would call me later with the results. Seriously? Dang, this was taking a long time.

On the drive home, my mobile phone rang. I plugged in my corded headphones and answered. It was the specialist.

“Your dog’s bladder looked like world war three,” she told me soberly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The inside of her bladder wall was a mess. I cleaned some off some of the loose tissue, so she should not have any further bleeding.”

She went on to say that there wasn’t a lot of information out there about why this happened. The doctor didn’t know the exact cause of Autumn’s troubles. She said in cases like this, it was believed that stress brought it on. Antibiotics would not help, and actually could make it worse, so she wanted me to stop giving Autumn antibiotics. The good news was that there was no evidence of cancer, and no indication that anything was going on that would kill her. The bad news was there wasn’t much more that she could tell me, and there was not a lot that could be done.

I thanked her and hung up the phone, then called Dr. Fletcher and left him a message, and called Debbie and Bjorn. I was so relieved that the diagnosis wasn’t death.

Over the next several years, Autumn had several other similar such bleeding bladder episodes, and they all occurred when she was stressed, even when the stress was good. One such incident occurred when I took Milla and the dogs for a weekend at the beach. We rented an oceanfront motel cabin with a hot tub in the room.

Autumn adored the beach. She would run herself ragged, chase sea birds, and gambol and play in the edge of the ocean. Most of the places we liked to visit along the Oregon coast were located at the mouths of creeks or streams emptying into the sea. Autumn would race back and forth through these waterways, soaking herself and anyone nearby.

In spite of the fact that Autumn loved the beach, her bladder issue came back with full force while we were there. Luckily the motel room was covered in synthetic wood flooring, making it easy to clean her accidents, but I could not take her anywhere in the car, and liberally covered the seats with towels before heading home in case she leaked blood or urine. I gave Autumn one of the painkillers prescribed by the vet because the episodes were painful, and simply waited for it to pass.

A couple of years after Autumn was scoped, and after many bleeding bladder episodes, I was visiting my mom’s house. My mom is something of a magazine addict, and keeps dozens of them around the house and in the bathroom at any given time.

While there, I picked up a Lady’s Home Journal and thumbed through it when one of the headlines caught my eye. It said something like “Bladder Problems Nearly Ended my Life,” or some such thing so dramatic. I read through the article and became increasingly excited.

The author of the article had experienced what seemed to be bladder infection after bladder infection. The infections were extremely painful, and grew worse, not better, with antibiotics. She often leaked blood. Nothing helped, and as time wore on, she lost her job and was in nearly constant pain. After years of struggle and torment, a doctor scoped her bladder and saw that the inside was shredded, exactly as the vet had described Autumn’s. It was only after all of this that the woman was diagnosed with a condition called interstitial cystitis, often called IC.

Finally, I too had a name for Autumn’s condition.

The article said that there was no cure for IC. In some cases in humans surgery could remove some of the damage to the bladder wall, but these surgeries were rare, and I knew in Autumn’s case we could probably never afford it, even if it were possible. It also stated that the best way to maintain the condition was through diet. Certain foods were triggers that could make the condition worse. And, as I had already determined from trial and error, stress was one of the biggest culprits in causing an episode.

The article referenced a website for humans suffering from IC. Later that evening after I returned home, I found the site and read everything there, and then searched further, thrilled to have found something that matched Autumn’s situation exactly. I also discovered what I had been figuring out by accident: bland foods were best, as was minimizing stress.

I called Dr. Fletcher and told him what I found and how. He knew of IC because he said it was common in cats. He had recently read a journal article about it, and reiterated that diet was the best means of maintenance. He also pointed out that studies showed that the binders in commercially prepared foods were one of the worst things for Autumn to eat, and suggested I look at natural foods to help with her disorder.

After reading everything I could get my hands on about IC and talking to Dr. Fletcher, I began purchasing 10 pound tubes of ground turkey and 20 pound bags of rice and cooking Autumn’s dinner every night. We had experimented with this diet before in an effort to calm Poppy’s skin problems, but it had not helped. However, I was willing to try it if it would help Autumn to feel better. Everything I read about IC said the episodes were very painful. I could only imagine how this felt for an animal who could not describe for me how she was feeling.

Of all the discoveries I made when Autumn was ill, the revelation that her bladder issue had a name and diagnosis was the most gratifying. Finally I had a name for the condition. Finally I had a list of triggers that made it worse. Finally, though nominal, I had some sense of how to manage it. I could actually make a difference and help her live more comfortably. This made all our lives more manageable in the long run. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but now I understood Autumn’s issues and was able to control things for the most part, which was a huge relief.

Read Autumn — Chapter 13

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Autumn — Chapter 11

Read Autumn — Chapter 10

Autumn was seven years old when she began having bladder infections. Always fanatically clean and unwilling to wet inside, she began peeing uncontrollably wherever she happened to be standing when the urge overcame her. We had purchased a dog door insert for the sliding glass door to the backyard, so none of the animals ever had to wait to go potty. Autumn couldn’t even make it to the door. She would get up from wherever she was lying and head for the pet door, then stop and squat, trying to urinate. There would be a dribble, and nothing more. I could see the fur on her back end quivering as she strained to urinate, feeling the pressure, but getting no result.

I took her to the vet’s office near our duplex. Unlike Dr. Fletcher, when this vet would examine Autumn, a technician would take her from me in the lobby and do something with her in the back room. Autumn never liked this. She would pull towards me on her leash as she was led away. The doctors were kind though, and always explained things thoroughly to me.

The vet ran a culture on Autumn’s urine and prescribed antibiotics. She would get somewhat better on the antibiotics, but then the infection would recur as soon as the course ran. I would take her back to the vet, get another culture, get more antibiotics. This went on for several months.

Finally, frustrated, I told the doctor we needed to do something more drastic. The vet decided that we should give Autumn some very powerful antibiotics and work to kill the bacteria once and for all. After the course had run, she seemed better, and did well for several months.

There was a great deal of stress going on in Autumn’s life at this time. Actually, there was a great deal of stress in all of our lives. I had begun my first term in law school, Bjorn was completing his final year of his engineering program, and we got another dog:  a Jack Russell terrier we named Poppy.

Bjorn had always wanted a Jack Russell. I saw this dog advertised somewhere and chose her for his birthday. She was living in a small cage in a man’s nearly empty apartment in Gresham. Another dog was in a cage next to Poppy’s. There were urine stains under the cages because he left them there to do their business. It seemed he left them there all the time. If I could have, I would have taken both of the dogs, just to get them away from the man.

The entire time Poppy lived with us, she suffered severe skin infections. She would get fungal infections in her ears that required oozy medications. After she scratched herself bloody, I had the vet run allergy tests, and it turned out she was allergic to about ten different things, several grasses among them. We lived in the Willamette Valley, the grass capital of the world. Not a great place for a dog allergic to several varieties of grasses. Considering all the problems she had, I wondered if the man who sold her to us had bred her in some inbred puppy mill or something. We had not requested her papers, although he offered to get them for us for an additional price. Since we planned to spay Poppy and keep her as a pet, her papers were meaningless, but I wondered later if we could have seen the issues coming if we had known her breeding.

When I got Molly, Autumn was not pleased. She saw the acquisition as a betrayal and competed constantly for my attention. When Poppy came along, however, Autumn enjoyed her new friend. The two of them ganged up on Molly and had a grand time doing it. Molly seemed to suffer more stress over the transition than Autumn did. However, being Molly, she didn’t act out, but spent more time under the bed.

While this was going on, we moved from the duplex to that lovely little farmhouse on two acres in the middle of the suburb.

Autumn loved it. We fenced in about a half an acre in an attempt to provide the dogs with a large place to play and also to attempt to keep Autumn from running off.

All of the dogs seemed to really enjoy this new arrangement. We would let them out in the yard and they would wander around sniffing the bases of the trees, marking each other’s urine, and chasing squirrels.

In spite of the fabulous new digs, Autumn managed to get out and disappear for a couple of hours every week. Ever since she was a puppy living near the field in Tennessee, if she had the chance to go wandering, she would take it. Most of the places we lived had fences so secure that her escapes were not much of an issue. She would return from her adventure and bark at the door to be let in.

Escape was easier at the house in West Linn. Autumn would take off, often for a couple of hours, then back she would be at the door, barking to be let in. We diligently searched the fence for signs of escape, and repaired any areas that looked like possibilities, yet she managed to get out again. Of course.

For a while Autumn did quite well. There were no bladder infections and she seemed happy. Then Poppy starting causing trouble, urinating on the furniture and getting into things and chewing. I almost wondered if Poppy was ruined for potty training because she had been left to pee in the same kennel where she slept for the first nine months of her life.

One evening, Bjorn was in the kitchen cooking, and I was playing with Milla on the floor in the living room. Autumn and Molly were lying on the floor next to me when Poppy jumped up on our nubbly, brown love seat, squatted, and peed. I screeched and jumped up, grabbed her, and tossed her out the back door. The other dogs sniffed the spot, then Molly slunk off and hid, while Autumn looked at me quizzically. Luckily, the love seat was new and came with a cleaning warranty, so we were able to have the urine taken care of, but this was the sort of thing Poppy would do.

Unfortunately, there was no way to lock up just Poppy and leave the other dogs with a way to get out to go potty, so all three had to stay on the porch when we were away to keep Poppy from destroying the house in our absence.

Autumn hated this. After locking them on the back porch, Autumn would bark and bark, venting her frustration. Once she thought I was gone, she would settle down, but soon after the dogs had to start staying on the back porch, Autumn got another bladder infection.

I did not realize it at the time, but I know now that the stress of staying on the porch when she had previously had the run of the house contributed to her getting another infection. And as in the past, it took several courses and a final strong dose of antibiotics to get rid of the infection.

I will never forget the moment one sunny afternoon a few months after she had been off the antibiotics when I let Autumn out to go potty in the front yard, and she peed a stream of deep red blood, contrasting brightly with her fluffy blonde pantaloons. I learned the true meaning of my own blood running cold. I felt my face blanch, and it was as if the world stood still for a brief moment as I questioned whether this was really happening.

I went over and sought to examine the place on the ground where Autumn had peed. The spot was a mix of scrubby grass and hard packed earth. I could not see anything. I called Autumn to me. She seemed to be fine except for the desperate urge to urinate. She continued trying, although nothing came out. Whenever she managed a little, there were chunks of bloody tissue in it. It was gross and terrifying. I thought for sure my little dog was dying.

Heart pounding and choking back sobs, I called the vet. She said to bring Autumn in right away. I grabbed a towel and covered the front seat with it so if she bled again, none would get on the upholstery. I gathered the baby, diaper bag, my purse, and the dog, and we loaded into our compact, green car.

Driving to the vet’s office, I tried to hold back tears, little hiccuping sobs kept escaping my mouth. What if Autumn had cancer? What if she was going to die? Milla sat in the back seat, her eyes wide. She knew something was not right.

We arrived at the vet’s office. The technician wanted to try and get a sample of the bloody urine, so we led Autumn around out front in the strip of grass between the parking lot and the road, hoping she would try to pee. She made several attempts, to no avail. We were ready to give up when she urinated, and some small bloody chunks came out as well.

After the technician took Autumn into the back examination room, the doctor came out to discuss what steps would be taken.

“There are several possible prognoses,” she said. “It could be cancer, but this is unlikely, given the overall symptoms. It could be that she ingested some rat poison. Rat poison causes animals to bleed out. Is there any chance Autumn got into some rat poison?” she asked me.

Anything was possible. Autumn escaped all the time. She also ate anything and everything. I had tried to teach her “Leave it” when it came to food, but this had only ever worked when I was standing right above her, forcing her to leave something alone. She would sit with her head up at an angle, her eyes cast down at whatever food item I was forbidding, a gleam in her eye, licking her chops, hoping against hope I would give in and let her have it.

“Well, we will run the test for that and if she did ingest rat poison, we can take steps to alleviate any harm if we have caught it in time.”

“Okay,” I answered, unsure and worried. There was more. I could tell. The doctor had that anticipatory look about her.

“The other big possibility, and this really matches her history, is Cushing’s disease.”

Cushing’s disease? I had never heard of it. The main symptoms were increased water consumption (check), increased urination (check), accidents in previously fastidious dogs (check), increased appetite (well, Autumn was always hungry, or so it seemed), stealing food (same as hungry), a bloated tummy (check), a dull coat (not so much), and exercise intolerance, lethargy, general or hind-leg weakness (check, check, check).

I was dumbfounded. This described my dog nearly exactly, and actually illustrated parts of her that had been showing up for years, but I had overlooked. She was only a few years old when she began to refuse running with me. Could that have been the beginning of Cushing’s and I did not know it? The vet told me there were other symptoms that also showed up, but these were often the most obvious features. She said it is usually either the increased water intake and urination, or the coat changes which prompt an owner to have their dog examined by a veterinarian, because Cushing’s dogs don’t suddenly become dramatically ill. It is also much more difficult to ignore a dog that is peeing on everything, eating trash, and losing its hair.

The bad news was that Cushing’s was notoriously difficult to diagnose because there were many false negatives. In addition, the medication to treat it was prohibitively expensive. She told me we would rule out everything else first, then look at doing the primary test for Cushing’s. She also thought Autumn should have a scope of her bladder to see what was causing the bleeding.

“How much would that cost?” I queried.

“About 750 dollars,” she responded.

Oh my holy Christ! 750 dollars! There was no way we could afford that, but it seemed necessary to rule out bladder cancer and to try and figure out what was going on in there, because Cushing’s wouldn’t cause bladder bleeding, even if it did seem like all the symptoms fit my dog.

After much hand-wringing and consternation, Bjorn and I conversed and decided we would approach our friends Debbie and Robert for a loan.

I met Debbie when I began working at Oregon State. Poker-faced with a constant smile reminiscent of the Cheshire cat, Debbie worked as a graduate assistant at the university. I worked as a general office assistant. She and I hit it off nearly immediately. We shared the same ridiculous sense of humor, and could entertain one another for hours repeating the lines of simpletons in movies or pretending to dance the river dance. Bjorn and Robert would shake their heads in consternation as the two of us spent hours on the phone laughing until our sides hurt and tears ran down our faces at basically nothing at all. Most of what we found hilarious would cause most people to wonder whether we should be incarcerated in a mental institution.

Debbie and I also shared an interest in politics.  We could spend hours discussing whatever was happening politically in the world.  Debbie was the first person I called the morning the twin towers burned.  We sobbed together, realizing the world would never be the same again.

Because Debbie became my very best friend in the entire world and she shared her life with Robert, Robert became a friend as well, and later my de facto father. I never knew my biological father, and was certainly never close to my step-father. In a sense, I had no father figure really, certainly no one had ever filled those shoes for me, so after the birth of Milla, Robert stepped in and took the job.

While I was pregnant, I decided Debbie was the person I wanted there with me as my support. Robert drove most of the time, and on the night before Milla’s birth, when we called them at 3 in the morning to let them know her arrival was imminent, Robert drove. The birthing center where Milla was born provided birthing “suites,” much like hotel rooms. Robert plunked himself down on a couch to wait for Debbie. Debbie took care of me, and Robert managed Bjorn and kept him company.

In the end, both of them were present at Milla’s birth, and forever after, she was Robert’s heart. He loved that child like she was his own. For the rest of his life, whenever he had the opportunity, Robert would tell the story of Milla’s birth and how, after the doctor plopped her up on my belly, he could see her tiny, quivering cleft chin. He then turned his head slightly and saw an identical chin, only slightly bigger, quivering on me.

Robert loved telling that story, and he utterly adored my daughter. Robert also cared for me in his own way, fighting with me when he thought I was being “dumber than a bag of hammers” (his words), or I thought he was being a “stubborn pain in the ass” (mine).

The two also thoroughly understood my love of Autumn and Molly. Debbie has a human child, and Debbie and Robert lived with the previously mentioned cat named Misty whom they loved completely. They cared for our dogs while we were in the hospital after Milla’s birth. They also welcomed our dogs whenever we visited their house. And they knew I would not have considered having Autumn euthanized for the medical issues she was experiencing unless it were the only option.

Between the two of them, Bjorn and I found emotional support often lacking in our own parents. We would have done anything for them, and in this time of need, they provided us with a loan so Autumn could have the tests deemed necessary by the veterinarian. We paid them back a few months later after Bjorn graduated and received a signing bonus at his new job, but if we hadn’t gotten that loan, I’m not sure what we would have done.

And so the tests were begun. After all the blood work and examination on the day she peed blood, nothing was found or conclusive. Rat poison was ruled out, and surprisingly, so was a bladder infection. There wasn’t any bladder infection bacteria in her urine, once they were able to obtain a sample. They also tested for diabetes mellitus, but that was negative as well. Also, based on the blood tests, cancer was unlikely, but the vet wanted to wait for the results of the scope to rule it out completely.

The vet’s office helped us to schedule the bladder scope at the specialist’s office. They also scheduled the Cushing’s disease test, which required that Autumn fast for twelve hours, then come in and leave a blood sample. She had to stay at the vet’s office all day for the Cushing’s test because first the doctor would inject her with a substance called dexamethasone, which was a synthetic steroid. She would then take blood samples four and eight hours later. In a normal dog, the body would recognize the steroid and suppress cortisol. Cushing’s dogs would not suppress the cortisol because their feedback loop was messed up.

After making all the schedules, I gathered Autumn into the car with the baby. She had stopped urinating blood because the doctor had given her something to relax the muscle walls in her bladder. The vet had also dosed her up on antibiotics, as she had the last time Autumn had a bladder infection, even though there had been no signs of that type of bacteria. The heavy antibiotic doses had worked in the past, so she figured we should do it again.

I called Debbie and Robert, and described everything we had experienced so far, all the tests, all the speculation. Then I called Dr. Fletcher and discussed what was happening with him. He asked me to keep him posted and let him know if we came up with a diagnosis.

I wasn’t as scared as I had been before because everything described to me so far could be managed, but I could hardly wait for the bladder scope that was scheduled for the following week. I was hopeful it would provide some clarity into what was going on.

Read Autumn — Chapter 12

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Autumn — Chapter 10

Read Autumn — Chapter 9

The spring Milla was born, we decided to move to Portland. Living in Corvallis had worn thin for me. It was too small and too far from the activities we enjoyed. I liked bigger cities and had mainly stayed in Corvallis because first Dan, then Bjorn attended university there. Bjorn had grown up in a suburb of Portland, and during a visit shortly after Milla’s birth, we realized we could move.

I remember clearly the moment it occurred to me that we could leave Corvallis and live somewhere else. We were driving along in the car in Portland near Bjorn’s childhood home. I was a passenger in the back seat next to the baby (because I was always a passenger in the back seat next to the baby), and as we slid past orchards and neighborhoods, the idea we could actually leave where we were and go somewhere else popped into my head, and I said to Bjorn, “Let’s move. Let’s move up here now.”

Milla wasn’t even yet a month old, but I wanted a change, wanted out of Corvallis with its memories and limitations. Bjorn had one year left towards his engineering degree, and I was planning to apply to law school. We held a garage sale, packed a moving van, and headed north. Autumn was six years old.

We started out renting a room in Bjorn’s dad’s house, but this proved unsatisfactory nearly immediately. I had learned the hard way what living with family can do to a relationship, and within a month we had rented our own apartment on the third floor of a complex that had been, only months before, a filbert orchard. There were still filbert orchards across from our apartment, and we taught the dogs to run out the door, down three flights of stairs, and out across the median to the trees to do their business.

In spite of the fact the apartment was rather small, near Christmas the year we moved in, my brother Derek asked if he could stay with us for a short time while he looked for a place to live.  He had been living with our parents in Jefferson, a town about sixty miles south of Portland.

For years, Derek had struggled with drug addiction.  He would go to treatment, move out on his own and get a job, then for various reasons end up back living with our parents and near the people who always helped him get into trouble.  This cycle had run through about four times at this point.

At the time Derek wanted to live with us, he had been back to our parent’s, and we all believed that if he could just get away from the area, he would have a better chance at success in beating his addictions.

Bjorn and I discussed whether to allow Derek to stay with us.  Bjorn actually didn’t have any problems with it, but I was worried if we allowed him to stay, we would have a difficult time getting him to leave.  Unless he did something awful, I didn’t want to have to call the police simply to get him to move on.

We finally decided that we would allow him to stay, but with certain limitations.  Namely he had to get a job and he could not stay with us longer than two weeks.  We also did not want his girlfriend to live there.  Neither of us I liked her very  much, but we did not tell Derek this.  Even if we had loved her, we simply did not have the room.

Derek moved in. We let him sleep on the couch and keep his belongings in Milla’s room because she slept with us in our bed.  Nearly immediately, he was able to secure a job during the swing shift, so we didn’t see him very much except in the late morning before he left for work.  One afternoon when he did not have to work, I took him over to the management office to help him fill out an application for an apartment of his own.

For Christmas, I invited my parents and my sister and her family to our house for Christmas.  The apartment was tiny, but I had decided after Milla’s birth that we were not going to do the usual holiday run-around anymore.  On Christmases past, we would drive to my parent’s, then Bjorn’s dad’s, then his mom’s family, and often to my sister’s, or some other version of it.  No one ever came our way.  I did not want my baby to spend her holidays driving all over the place.

We pulled out the leaves to the table and made room for everyone. The kitchen was not large, but it served its purpose, helping us to serve dinner to eleven.  Once the family was satiated, we all opened gifts, our families left for home, and I straightened up the mess.

For years I had gone to the movies on Christmas day, me and many others.  Apparently Hollywood figured out this trick because movies started opening on Christmas, which was great since we saw a lot of movies and frequently needed new choices.  During movies, I would breastfeed Milla and she would fall asleep in my arms.  Derek was with us so we all bundled up and headed out to the car and off to see a show.

Three hours later when we arrived home, things were not in order.  We had only opened gifts for my family and one another, but there were still many gifts left for Bjorn’s family and for our friends.  The wrappings to most of these gifts were now spread throughout the house.  Little pieces of ribbon, bows, wet wrapping paper, and tags lay everywhere, in the living room, across the rug in the dining room, down the hall, and in both bedrooms. The cork stopper to a jar of nuts was half shredded, bits of cork speckling the carpet.  Pieces of candy cane were littered everywhere, the chunks obviously sucked on because they were coagulated in their plastic wrap.  A thorough mess.

Normally if we had arrived to a scene like this, Autumn would be standing happily in the middle of it, tongue out with some incriminating evidence on her muzzle, and Molly would be hiding, but both dogs just stood there, looking at us.

“What in the world is going on?” I asked them sternly, knowing of course there would be no response.  “Did you eat our gifts?”

Looking further, we discovered several food items in the hall and in our bedroom.  It did not look like much was eaten, but they had certainly seemed to have had a party opening all the presents and spreading them all over the place.

“What in the world were you thinking?” I hollered?  “Why did you do this?  Do you really think I want to clean up a mess like this on Christmas?”  They ignored me.  Neither of them seemed in any way concerned, which for Molly was completely strange.

I began picking up the pieces and pulling the presents together to rewrap.  Bjorn and Derek took the dogs out on our patio to keep them from getting into anything else.

It wasn’t until years later, after Derek had been to rehab a couple of more times, and long after Bjorn and I were no longer a couple, that I learned the real truth of what happened that night.

Apparently my brother had hidden in his backpack a rather large, brownie-sized cake of hashish.  When the four of us returned home to the mini Christmas disaster that night, Derek quickly realized what was up.  His bag was askew, the pocket in the front of the bag where the hashish had been stashed wide open.  The hashish had been wrapped in aluminum foil with a sticker on the front that read Acapulco Gold!  This foil was lying smashed and spitty in a pile on the cream-colored carpet, the Acapulco Gold! label torn in half.

Derek immediately pulled Bjorn aside and told him he thought the dogs had eaten his hashish.  The two of them dragged the dogs to the patio to confirm their suspicions.  Apparently what I failed to notice was that our dogs’ pupils were the size of platters and rimmed in red.  The reason neither dog had reacted in any way to my tirade was that they were both completely stoned.

When I heard the story, so long into the future, I laughed, recalling the picture of both dogs baked and confused.  I can only imagine how it must have been from their perspective, discovering Christmas goodies while they were high on hashish.

Yet Derek and Bjorn were right that I would have blown a gasket if I had known at the time. Even later, the implications were not lost on me.  Derek had kept drugs in our apartment, and had done so with our small daughter there.  She was mobile by then, crawling about and getting into things.  He assured me the stuff had been zipped up tight in his bag, and that Milla would never have been able to find them, but his concealment had not been enough to keep our dogs from making their discovery.  They were very lucky they didn’t get sick.

Ultimately, Derek fulfilled his end of the bargain.  He moved into his own apartment in the complex and got a job.  His story then continued on its own trajectory.

Meanwhile, Bjorn and I were both ready to move less than a year later.  The apartment was so tiny and located in a suburb that seemed designed to stop all drivers at every traffic signal, which drove me crazy. It was also too far from the university where Bjorn attended classes and the law school where I planned to attend classes a year later. I wanted more than an apartment. I wanted a yard where the dogs and baby could play. I wanted space, and not to be able to hear our neighbors arguing.  Bjorn, nearly 6’7″ in height, wanted room to stretch his legs without banging them on another wall. And so, less than a year after moving north to Portland, we moved again into a high-ceilinged duplex with a rambling yard. An ancient oak shaded half the yard and kept our home cool.

I loved that duplex. Too bad there were drug dealers in the park next to it. We could hear shouts and shots and all sorts of unmentionables there, at all hours of the day and night, which frightened me somewhat, considering the blonde, curly sprite living with us. The dogs also barked at all hours, warning off interlopers, causing us all to jump as we studied and played.

Finally, after witnessing a police officer throw a half naked woman and several baggies filled with white powder across the hood of his patrol car, cuffing her and tossing her carelessly into his backseat, we decided that it might be best to move on yet again.  During the years Bjorn and I were together, we had a knack for moving into places that suited one need and not another.

Our next choice was the perfect little farmhouse. Charming and comfortable, the house was yellow with white trim, and sat on two acres in the middle of one of Oregon’s wealthiest suburbs. The acreage was grandfathered, allowing us to keep livestock, so we fenced it and brought home my old childhood pony, as well as some ducks. We could have stayed there forever. Unfortunately, the little house was a rental and the manager a son who was waiting with bated breath for his mother to pass so he could develop the property, which he did not long after we moved out. There was a five-story cherry tree in the front yard, which was promptly chopped down, along with the house, in his zealous desire to destroy the land and fill his greedy hands with cash.

Our next place was our first purchase and horribly ill-suited for us, too far from town, and too much suburban sameness, block after block. In purchasing this house, Bjorn and I took the advice of a well-meaning, but misguided friend who assisted us in making the purchase. It was only years later after Bjorn and I broke up that I finally bought a house that was suitable to me. We learn with age that which we will no longer tolerate.

However, at the time we chose the duplex, we were a long way from buying our own home. Bjorn was in his last year of school and I was in my first of law school. We both worked and studied and parented our child. The duplex was spacious and shared only a small wall with our quiet neighbors. Built in the sixties, it had sloping, vaulted ceilings and two bathrooms. After the dinky, third-floor walk-up, this was paradise!

During our move from the apartment to the duplex, I saw a sign over the mailboxes at the apartment complex advertising a free cat. According to the sign, the cat liked children and other pets.

Milla and I headed over to visit the prospective cat. The apartment was on the third floor. The people who owned the cat ran a daycare service out of their home. The lady of the house wanted to find the cat a new home because her husband would not allow the cat to come into the house, and he had therefore been living on the balcony for his entire short life. She had gotten him from the humane society when he was a kitten. Except for a few visits with the daycare children where he was dressed in doll clothes and pushed around in a stroller, he had spent eleven months living on a 3 by 6 balcony with one other cat. His name was Friday and we fell in love with him on the spot.

For the rest of his life, Friday adored us. I swear he was grateful to his bones we had released him from the prison of that godforsaken balcony and the daycare children dressing him up in baby clothes.

Autumn had never been a big cat chaser. There had been cats living at the apartment complex in Tennessee and in every neighborhood we had lived in since. She and Molly were both nonplussed by the newest member of the family. After some initial sniffing, the three all ignored one another.

I suppose after Milla, as far as the dogs were concerned, any new family members were acceptable. The two of them had both settled into life with a tiny person running around. First she was a lump they could sniff and mostly ignore, but then she began moving about and carrying food with her, and suddenly she was a much more interesting prospect.

They also relished her diapers. Their’s was a disgusting and foul habit, this desire to eat diapers. No matter what steps we took to keep used diapers away from them, they would somehow manage to get into them and eat them. This would be followed by yellowish turds filled with chewed up plastic and diaper innards.

We had purchased for Milla’s room a widget called a Diaper Genie. The thing had a weird hole in its top through which one placed a used diaper. The diaper would slide through a convoluted plastic contraption and into the bowels of the Genie. A door on the front of the Genie allowed access into the bag which held the diapers. Its point was to ensure that the smell of the diapers did not escape into the room where the Genie was placed.

Both our dogs could open that Diaper Genie and get the diapers out. We would come home from wherever we had been to discover diaper shreds, baby shit, and pieces of soiled diaper spread from one end of Milla’s room to the other. Molly, of course, would be hiding in our bedroom under the bed because, in spite of her biological urge to eat diapers, she knew that our discovery of them would result in lots of hollering and hand-wringing, and this terrified her half to death. Autumn would sit among the diapers, her tongue lolling, breath smelling foul and wrong, wondering where she could find some more.

We attempted to avoid this problem by placing the Diaper Genie into the closet in Milla’s room. To no avail. Autumn was always a clever getter into things, and she would simply open the closet and proceed to dismantle the Genie in there instead.

Finally, I went and purchased an industrial strength, outdoor garbage can, the kind with a lid and bungee cords for closing. We put the Diaper Genie in this, put the whole contraption in the closet and, as long as we remembered to keep Milla’s bedroom door shut, the closet door shut, and the lid on the industrial garbage can securely fastened, we could avoid diaper catastrophes. It was also imperative that we remove the filled bag from the diaper genie to the outdoor garbage can once it was full. On a couple of occasions Bjorn left the full bag on the floor in the bedroom, which may as well have been a giant, flashing invitation to the dogs to come in and have a diaper smorgasbord at their pleasure. It only took a couple of misses on this one for Bjorn never to make that mistake again.

Milla celebrated her first birthday at the duplex.  I invited our family and our closest friends to a little garden party.  I baked a cake that looked like a caterpillar and covered it with fondant.  I sat up half the night stringing together green and yellow, construction paper, daisy chains, which I hung all over the kitchen and living room.  Clearly, Autumn’s birthday parties were just a warmup.

Within weeks of her first birthday, Milla walked across the living room.  She had been cruising for a while, walking everywhere as long as her hands held a couch, the wall, or some other support.  Then one afternoon while holding a marbly green, plastic ball, she took off and walked twelve steps across the room.  It was as if the ball were her support.

Once she began walking, she kept going, and only became faster.  Up to this point, the dogs were interested in her usually only when she sat in her high chair.  Both Milla and the dogs had discovered that the high chair could be quite fun.  Milla would toss whatever food item she happened to be consuming, and then laugh hysterically as the dogs pounced on it like starving lunatics.  Occasionally this would cause arguments between the dogs, which only made Milla laugh more.  First lessons in cause and effect.

During her crawling phase, when things became a little too silent, I would often discover her on all fours, both hands in the dog water dish.  She was also quite fond of making dog food soup, mixing together whatever food stuffs were left in the dogs’ dish with their water.  I kept the dishes on a place mat in the kitchen, and after these escapades, the floor around and under the mat would usually be a watery mess.  Autumn especially loved eating the soupy mixture, and would wait to one side while Milla mixed it for her, then dive in as soon as the baby crawled off to explore elsewhere.

When Milla began to walk, she also began to carry different food items with her.  I usually put her in her high chair to eat, but sometimes, especially if I was busy trying to study or straighten the house, I would pour some cereal in a little dish for her to carry around, or give her a cracker.

One night I sat at the kitchen table studying.  Milla had finished her dinner, but was wandering around with a sandwich in her hand.  Molly was hiding under the dining room table, doing her best to remain as unobtrusive as possible.  Autumn, of course, was following Milla, trying to get the sandwich she held in her hand.  Milla kept telling her “No!” and holding the sandwich up, trying to keep it out of Autumn’s reach.

Finally, frustrated at her inability to get the food, Autumn jumped up and tried to grab the sandwich, snapping at it, shoving Milla backward into the cupboard.  Autumn tried again to snatch the sandwich, but she got Milla’s cheek instead, high up, underneath her eye.

Milla cried out in pain.  I jumped up and raced over to her, shouting, “Autumn!”  Autumn ducked and backed up as I gathered Milla into my arms, sobbing.  Bjorn raced into the kitchen, screaming “Autumn” in a loud and ferocious voice.  He grabbed her by the ruff of her neck and threw her across the room.

“I could kill that dog!” he shouted.

“Leave her alone,” I screamed.  Milla wailed.  “She was trying to get the sandwich.  It was an accident.”

“I don’t care if it was a fucking accident,” Bjorn raged.  “She bit my daughter in the face!”

“It wasn’t on purpose.  She just wanted the sandwich,” I answered.  Milla hugged me and sobbed in my arms.  I grabbed a washcloth and set her on the counter to investigate the damage.

“Go get some antiseptic cream,” I instructed Bjorn, hoping that a project would separate him from his anger.  He stalked out of the room to go search for the medicine.

I wet the washcloth and gently rinsed Milla’s face.  She had suffered a small scratch under her right eye.  Thank goodness the bite was on her cheek and not her eye.

I looked around to see where Autumn was at.  She was cowering in the corner near the glass back door.

“Autumn, it’s okay,” I cooed to her.  “I know it was an accident.”  She was trembling.  I opened the back door and let her out.  From wherever she had been hiding, Molly came running and scooted out past me as well.  Neither dog was comfortable with yelling and violence.

Milla calmed down.  I swabbed some ointment on her small wound and then took her into the bedroom to nurse.  She was none the worse for wear, but Bjorn was still quite angry, and never forgave Autumn for this bite.  For days he told anyone who would listen that he should have killed my dog.  Eventually his anger wore down, but I made took extra care with Milla and food to ensure nothing like this event ever happened again.

Read Autumn — Chapter 11

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Autumn — Chapter 9

Read Autumn — Chapter 8

Despite the fact that Dan and I had spent almost two years in couples counseling, the combination of marrying young and living with family had taken its toll on our marriage. As is often the case, there was also a strain between my desire to start a family and Dan’s desire to wait. As his final year at the university wound down, we decided our marriage was over.

We had moved from the apartment to a tiny little house with a small yard, a minuscule garden, and a park nearby for the dogs to run and play. Dan moved out of this little house and back into his parent’s, but would visit with Autumn every so often. He had been offered a job in California, and I think he knew that after he left, he might not see her again.

I remained in Corvallis with Autumn after Dan moved away. Over the next year, I dated a few different men, and eventually met another man named Bjorn. Without intending to quite so soon, our relationship became much more serious than we intended when I discovered I was pregnant. While I was concerned about an impending pregnancy with a man I had only known a few short months, I was also delighted. I had wanted a baby with Dan, but he had not wanted to start a family while he was still in college. Bjorn had two years left before graduation, but when I informed him I was pregnant, he was as excited as I was.

How does one explain circumstances about which one is certain to be judged by a segment of the population? I wasn’t as circumspect as I could have been. I certainly could have made choices that to some would have seemed wiser. Yet I have no regrets; once the seed of my child was planted, I would not have changed a thing that could have arrived at a different result. I knew three months into the pregnancy that I would have ended the relationship with Bjorn sooner rather than later – we were completely incompatible in many ways. But after my baby was born, and even before when she was a minuscule mass of cells clinging to the inside of my body, there was no way I could imagine my life without her.

The months I was pregnant were emotional, both up and down. In retrospect, I realized I was mourning the loss of my marriage and the friendship I had carried for over seven years, while I was simultaneously intoxicated with the joy of expecting a new baby. It was a paradoxical place.

Prior to my pregnancy and after Autumn had decided she was no longer interested in going for runs with me, I would take Molly running or roller-blading, then take both dogs to the park near my house to run and play. When the weather was warm, I would take Autumn swimming. She was extremely healthy. After having spent several years swimming in the summers, she no longer displayed any signs of hip dysplasia. She was quite active, and though not as lithe as Molly, she was definitely athletic and capable. After I became pregnant, I stayed active, walking both dogs, roller-blading and running with Molly for as long as the pregnancy would allow, and riding horses well into my sixth month. The dogs enjoyed the exercise. As the year wore down from fall to winter, we all settled in, expectant and waiting for the enormous change due in spring.

Both of the dogs were big shedders. In spite of the fact that I vacuumed at least every three days, there were always puffles of fur in the corners, under the furniture, and in my bedding. I would joke that I could collect this fur and make a pillow out of it, there was so much.

Bjorn and I had moved into an apartment together. The little house I lived in first with Dan, then by myself was simply too small for our family. As the time grew nearer for our baby to arrive, I began nesting in earnest, cleaning and vacuuming. As my due date loomed, I became nearly frantic with the desire to move about, wishing I could run or ride my bike as I had before the pregnancy.

I awakened the first morning of May and wanted to get out of the house, in spite of the fact that I had expanded beyond any notion of comfort. I had heard that walking could help bring on labor so I was headed out. I grabbed my purse, keys, and the dogs and jumped into the car, Bjorn trailing. The local kennel club was sponsoring a pet day fair. At the fair, hawkers sold kerchiefs, dog toys, leashes, and other assorted canine goods. We wandered for a couple of hours, until my hips could no longer tolerate my weight and the heat. It was a warm day for early spring.

We spent the rest of the day out and about, doing our best to encourage baby’s arrival. It must have worked, because shortly before midnight, my contractions began and increased. At 12:24 p.m. on May 2, 1999, Milla Elina was born.

The two of us had arranged with my best friend Debbie and her husband Robert to take care of our dogs while I was in the hospital having the baby. They were parents to a kitty named Misty and completely understood the relationship I had with my dogs – as far as we all were concerned, the dogs were surrogate children and could not be left to fend for themselves for two or three days.

In spite of the love I felt for Autumn and Molly, I was unprepared for the tsunami level of emotion I felt toward my infant daughter. It was all consuming. I suppose this connection is nature’s way of ensuring the survival of the species. I was in such love, such infatuation, such complete adoration for my child, I could not understand why everyone wasn’t having babies. I walked around for weeks staring at everyone thinking, “You were someone’s baby! Someone loved you like this!” Only later as the hormones wore off did I understand intellectually that some people never feel like I did, but I could never understand it in my heart. I loved my child with my whole body, mind, and spirit.

When I came home from the hospital after giving birth to Milla, Autumn kept trying to get up in my lap, to get near me, but I was afraid she would hurt the baby. I had sworn before giving birth that I would not become one of those people whose dogs disappeared into the background, forgotten and forlorn, but during the first few days home, I did just that. Once we were used to having the baby around and had settled into a routine, I shifted back and Autumn became part of my attention circle again, but I’m sure the first couple of weeks were very hard for her. I imagine in some ways this is how it is for older children when a new baby is born, especially when they are very close together in age. There were fifteen months between my sister and me, and when Milla was fifteen months old, I could not fathom bringing home another infant. She was still very much a baby. People do it, but it must be hard.

Bjorn and I decided that Milla would sleep with us. We bought a pillow with a curve in it and placed her between us on the queen bed. Those first nights were difficult, mainly because little Milla kept getting dog hair in her nose, making it hard for her to breathe. In spite of all my cleaning, there were still dog hairs in the bed, and they would stick to Milla’s little nostrils, causing her to sneeze and cry. I had thought we could manage allowing the dogs to sleep on the floor next to the bed, but that first night they kept trying to get on the bed and get near me. Bjorn would yell and shove them hard onto the floor.

It pains me now to know that I did not do more to stop him. I felt so exhausted and physically worn out. It breaks my heart that I let him treat both of my dogs that way and especially Autumn. I can only imagine what it must have been like for her. She had lived with me her entire life, nearly six years, and this man who had arrived less than a year previously yelled at her and often hit her and at first I stood by and let it happen, too spent to do anything about it. And here was this new baby, taking all my attention, and causing her more grief. It’s not something I can really reconcile in my mind; I wish I had done more for her, prepared better, done something different, but I did not. Thinking of it still gives me a hard spot in the pit of my stomach.

After the first night, I decided to thoroughly clean and vacuum the bedroom. There was so much dog hair, even though I vacuumed nearly daily. It was in the crevices along the wall, behind the bed, in the covers, under the sheets. I took the bed apart completely, unmoored it from its frame, and vacuumed everything from the mattresses, to the carpets, to the window sills. I washed the sheets and bedding, and dusted all the floorboards.

Once the bed was rebuilt, remade, and the room completely hair free, I put up two baby gates in the hall between the bedroom door and the rest of the house. The dogs hovered around the outside gate, wanting in, whining and moaning. I have a photograph from that time, of the two dogs lying out there with pained expressions on their faces, wishing and hoping that they could come back to bed with me.

Keeping the dogs out of the bed made sleeping much easier for the humans, and much more difficult for the dogs. Autumn had never been ostracized before. It was terrible for her. She began to act seriously depressed. I was so involved with the baby, I did not have the energy to give to her, and her heart was broken. She kept trying to get close to me and I kept pushing her away because I did not want her to hurt Milla.

I would sit on the couch trying to nurse (something that was not going well) and Autumn would attempt to jump up next to me. I would halfheartedly tell her to get down, then Bjorn would yell at her. I eventually succumbed and allowed Autumn to lie next to me on the couch while Milla suckled. She curled into a little ball and snuggled as close as she could get. What kind of person had I turned into that I let this happen? My only pathetic excuse was new parenthood and all the that goes with it.

We did eventually get into the groove of parenting. Milla grew and after only a couple of months, the dogs were allowed back in the bedroom and back in our bed. It made for crowded sleeping, but everyone was more content.

Read Autumn — Chapter 10

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Autumn — Chapter 8

Read Autumn — Chapter 7

Life moved on. We settled into our routines; I would drive to Eugene five days a week, while Dan drove into Corvallis. I was further along in school and was able to take fewer classes, so I took a part-time job in the evenings at a video store. I was also a member of the university equestrian team, and would travel to horse shows in California every few weeks. Dan was a sports official, so depending which sport was going during whatever season we were in, he would often be out officiating games. Autumn spent most of her time with me, although occasionally I left her home as well.

Basically, as a newly married couple, the two of us were not spending a whole lot of time together. We also experienced tension living with Dan’s parents. Dan often felt conflicted between my expectations for the marriage, and the expectations of his parents. I often felt like his parents treated him like a child even though he was a grown and married man. Dan, stuck in the middle, would often just leave the house and not return until late.

After nearly two years and many tense arguments, I finally realized that we needed to find our own place to live. I was graduating, and we decided it would be easier for us if we lived in Corvallis near OSU where Dan went to school. He was studying engineering and living near the university would give Dan easier access to study groups and the library.

Since I was the more particular of the two of us, I searched for an apartment we could afford that wasn’t too close to the parties and college nightlife. Neither of us were into that and Dan needed somewhere he could study. We also required a yard or patio so Autumn could go out.

We finally located a place not too far from campus and moved there in late spring of 1996. When we announced to Dan’s parents that we were moving, I think they were as relieved as we were. They wanted to do some more work on their basement, and convert the apartment area into a rec room for themselves. Overall, it was the best move for everyone. Dan and I had started marriage counseling and the counselor also supported the move.

The new apartment was located near some hills and a park. Every morning I would rise and go for a run, winding up through the hills, taking Autumn with me. I also took her swimming in a number of creeks nearby when the weather was tolerable. The running helped her to maintain the muscle development when she wasn’t able to swim. As long as she was exercising, she did not have any soreness in her back end.

Rain was heavy one morning as I set out on my run, my sneakers slapping the wet pavement, spraying my socks and legs. Autumn had never minded the rain, but on this particular morning, she was hesitant and lagging behind. Wanting to finish the run quickly and get out of the weather, I pulled her along. Finally, she just stopped, causing me to nearly trip and fall. I turned to look at her thinking maybe she needed to go potty, but she just stood there, drenched and looking forlorn.

“Autumn, what is going on?” I asked, shouting over the loud water falling around us. She just stood there, sides heaving, as if the effort of it all was too much to bear in the downpour.

“Okay. If you want to go back, let’s go back,” I said, realizing that the run was over and turned back toward the apartment. She followed me easily once she knew we were headed home.

The following day after pulling on my running clothes and shoes, I headed outside to run. It was still raining. I tried anyway to take Autumn with me, but she would not budge beyond our front patio. I took her inside and she curled up under the covers with Dan who was still slumbering. Oh well. I figured when the rain abated, I would take her with me again.

But something had changed in her. She never wanted to go running with me again. I don’t know if it was the weather, or if her hips bothered her or what. She had not been acting sore, but for the rest of her life, I could take her for walks, but I was never able to take her for a run with me again.

Shortly after moving into our new apartment, I started working full time at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Dan had another year to complete at the university, and Autumn had to be left home every day by herself. I would eat lunch at the apartment, but I worried she might be lonely all day, although she never developed any of the habits dogs often exhibit when they are unhappy at being left by themselves. In spite of the fact that she seemed to be tolerating the time by herself just fine, I began to think that maybe we should get another dog. It wasn’t that one I day I decided absolutely that we would do so. It was more a vague sense that if the right dog came along, getting one would be helpful.

Even before I considered adding a dog to our family, I was always one to troll the humane society or other shelters. I liked visiting the homeless pets, petting them, giving them treats. I had been donating money to the humane society for years and fully supported animal adoption. I considered myself an ideal owner; any animal that lived with me would be a full member of the family, receive top of the line care, and lots of love.

One Sunday in December 1996, I drove up to Salem to visit the humane society there. It was the biggest animal shelter in our part of the state, and I loved the idea of browsing through all the animals. I was not sure what kind of a dog I wanted, but I knew I did not want a brand new puppy, and also that I wanted a female.

As I entered the lobby at the humane society, I could see through a window in the door into the kennels where the dogs were housed. I waited my turn, then checked in at the desk in the main lobby. They explained their procedures – if I was interested in a dog I should note the number on the kennel, then return to the front desk where they would set me up in a room to meet the animal.

I entered the kennel. The door and walls between the kennel and the lobby must have been built well because while the lobby had been fairly quiet, the kennels were bedlam. The floors and walls were cement, which caused the barks to echo and flow around my ears and head. There were rows and rows of kennels, and all of them were filled with dogs. Each kennel was surrounded on three sides by grey brick walls with a chain link gate in the front.

I wandered up and down the aisles, looking into the kennels. There were so many dogs to choose from. There were lots of brand new puppies, and most of them had signs on their cages indicating they were already adopted. Some of the dogs stood patiently at the gates, others stayed on their blanket at the back, others jumped and pawed at the chain link, barking and hollering. Because it was a Sunday, there were many potential doggie parents milling about looking for dogs.

I stopped at a few cages. Every dog seemed sweet. I read later that the society handled them to ensure they were well socialized before adopting them out. I wandered up and down the aisles, occasionally stopping to pet one and say hello. One dog in particular caught my eye.  She was about the same size as Autumn, but mostly black, almost like Autumn’s photo negative. Where Autumn was brown, this dog was black. Where Autumn’s points and eyebrows were dark brown, this dog’s were beige. She sat quietly in front of the fence. I went over and started to pet her. She looked at the floor, but leaned into the fence of the kennel so I could pet her ears. She was extremely thin, so thin I could count all of her ribs and see her hip bones.

This dog had curved front paws. There was no obvious bend like an L. Rather, her paws simply curved like the bottom of a U.  Later when Autumn contracted diabetes and her body began to gradually starve, her paws began to curve too and I learned that curved paws were caused by muscle degeneration due to starvation. However, that day in the humane society I did not know that the reason this dog’s paws were curved was because she had been starving. The sign on her kennel read QUEENIE. Her breed was listed as a Doberman mix.  I did not believe her to be a Doberman.  Her colors might have been vaguely reminiscent, but nothing else about her resembled that breed.

I pet her for a bit, then moved on to look around some more. I would wander up and down the aisles then return to the kennel with Queenie. Other visitors would stop at various kennels, but no one else stopped at Queenie’s. I kept going back. She would look up at me, then look at the floor, then look back up at me. I decided to take her number to the front desk for a visit.

I was allowed to take Queenie out into a back yard to walk her around and to spend time visiting to see whether she would be a good match in our home. She was thoroughly unobtrusive and mild.  She sat next to me and walked quietly beside me as we strolled through the yard. I asked her if she wanted to live with me.  She just looked at me, then looked away, then looked back again at me. The way she would shyly glance up, then look away, then up again won my heart. I decided right then that this was the dog I wanted to take home.

The workers at the humane society told me that Queenie had been found wandering the streets of Salem three weeks prior. The day I chose her, she was extremely thin.  I could count each of her ribs and she had those curved paws I did not know signified atrophied muscles from malnourishment.  If she was in this shape after three weeks, I can only imagine how thin she had been upon arrival.

Prior to that day, Autumn had lived with us as our child. She slept in our bed. She ate the best dog food. She received top of the line vet care.  She was a priority in our lives. I cannot imagine an animal more loved and cared for. Yet the humane society in Salem would not let me adopt Queenie because the house we lived in was rented and did not have a fence. Also even if our house had met the required standards, Dan and Autumn would have had to come in to meet her before we could take her home.  Even though I had owned another dog and cared for her in that house for over a year, the people there determined it was not good enough. No wonder so many animals can’t find homes. If someone like me could not adopt a dog, I did not see how anyone could.

I hugged Queenie and left the facility completely dejected. I wanted her. I knew she would fit well with our little family. I had to find a way to bring her home.

Knowing the criteria that had kept me from adopting Queenie, I set out to find a friend who would “kidnap” her for me.  I had no qualms about the fraud I intended to perpetrate.  The shelter she was at was not a no-kill shelter.  I could not bear the thought that someone might never adopt her and she would be euthanized.  She was such a gentle, sweet creature.

I ran through a list of possible co-conspirators, and at first I came up blank.  My first thought was Dan, but I had listed him on the application form.  If there were any way to cross reference our names, he would be found.  His name was quite unusual.

I considered my friends Lily and Janae, but they were both students and there was no way they could adopt.  Both of them lived in dorms.

While I was mulling it over, fortuitously, my phone rang.  It was my uncle, John.  My mother had been the oldest of five brothers and a sister.  John was four years her junior and while he shared common facial features, the similarities stopped there.  Where my mom was short and petite, my uncle was tall and broad-shouldered.  He used to be a body-builder and it showed.  John also had been injured in an accident and had lost an eye.  Because of this he always wore mirrored, aviator sun-glasses. When my sister and I were little, we loved looking at John’s one glass eye.  He would tell us stories about taking it out and scaring people with it.  Simultaneously titillated and terrified, we would scream, then beg for him to tell us more.  I think he loved delighting us with his tales.

John had recently moved nearby and was calling me to ask me something about my mom.  I answered his question, then told him about Queenie, and that I was looking for someone who could go in and adopt her for me.

“I could do it.  If you pay me the adoption fee, I’ll make up some story and go in and get her for you.”  John was actually the perfect choice.  He felt the same way about dogs as I did.  Sadly, he had recently lost his own little blue shepherd after she was hit by a car.  He would be happy to help me adopt Queenie.

Elated, I relayed all the details that had derailed my own adoption, including the lack of fence, renting, and that I would have had to bring Autumn back in to visit.  I was never concerned about that requirement, I was simply suffering from a bad case of instant gratification, and I had no desire to drive the thirty-five miles one-way to Corvallis, then back to Salem the following day if I could help it.

“I’ve got it,” he told me.  “I will go there right now and try to get her for you.” I was so pleased! Perhaps Queenie would be coming home with me after all.

I drove home to Corvallis, keeping the phone nearby for the rest of the afternoon.  I waited and waited for him to call me.  I took Autumn for a walk and cleaned the house.  Dan arrived home from class and I told him what was going on.  He was skeptical, but figured it would all work out.  We were scheduled to eat dinner at his parent’s that evening, and late in the afternoon, we drove over there

During the drive, John called to inform me that he had Queenie and wanted to know where we should meet.  I gave him directions to a park near Dan’s parent’s house. I had thought it best if Autumn met Queenie at a neutral location so neither dog would feel threatened, Autumn by the interloper, and Queenie by the top dog who had been in place long before her arrival. We did not want to do anything to further traumatize Molly, or to unnecessarily upset Autumn.

After I hung up the phone, I clapped my hands in joy.  Queenie was ours!

When John arrived at the park, I climbed out of the car with Autumn.  John handed me Queenie’s leash and Dan held Autumn. We let Autumn go because we knew she would come if we called her.  The two dogs sniffed one another all over. Then Queenie laid down, snuffling her nose in the grass while Autumn ran off to find a stick.

“That was uneventful,” I said to Dan, smiling.

“It’s a good thing,” he informed me. “What would we have done if they hadn’t liked each other?”

“I knew they would be fine when I met Queenie,” I told him. “She has a very unassuming personality.  They might not be the best of friends, but they are neither one the sort to fight.”

The story my uncle had told the humane society in order to secure the adoption was convoluted and long. He had gone back and visited Queenie, then came back and asked to fill out an adoption application. During the meeting, he told them he owned his own house with a fenced yard. He said he had a motherless little boy who wanted a dog.  As expected, he was informed that he could not take the dog until the little boy had visited.  He countered with the creation of a sob story whereby the two had owned a dog since before his boy was born, that this dog had recently died, and that after the death of his mother, the loss of the dog was devastating. His little boy was desperately sad and missed this dog more than anything. Queenie looked like that dog and he wanted to surprise his little boy.

“I even cried a little,” he told us.

They couldn’t resist his tears.  Thankfully, the humane society people did not question why a motherless child was not with his father and accepted his story, allowing John to make the adoption.  There was something comical about this enormous man crying just so he could adopt Queenie for me.

The month was January and the air frigid, plus John needed to get home for the evening.  I thanked him profusely and gave him a hug.  I also reimbursed him for the cost of the adoption.  Since the two dogs were so nonplussed by one another, we called the dogs and helped them into our car, then headed over to Dan’s parent’s house as John drove off.

That evening as we sat at the dinner table, Queenie lay under the table near my feet.  Murphee had been as disinterested in her as Autumn.  Both of these two were more concerned with waiting to see if any of us inadvertently dropped some food from the table as we ate our dinner.

As we sat there, Dan’s mom stated that Queenie did not look like a Queenie.

“You should change her name,” she informed me.

“No kidding,” I agreed.  “Queenie is a pointy name.  This dog isn’t pointy, she’s sweet. I knew the second I saw that sign that if I adopted her, that name would go.  It doesn’t suit her at all.”

“I think you should call her Molly,” said Dan’s mom.

“That name certainly seems to fit her,” I agreed again.  “She really does look like a sweet Molly girl.

“Molly,” I said to her.  “Do you want to be called Molly?” she just lay there sniffing the air, noticing the food for the first time.

As part of the agreement to adopt, I had to pay the humane society a rather large fee. It was claimed that most of the fee was to pay for a certificate to spay Molly.  The humane society where she was adopted was in Marion County. Before our adoption fell through, I had been assured that I could use the certificate at a vet in Benton, the county where I lived.

A few days after Molly came home, I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Fletcher to have her spayed. However, his receptionist informed me that unfortunately, the certificates for spaying were not good in our county.  Even though I loved Dr. Fletcher, I thought I should at least get to use the certificates, so I called around to some other vets and was given the same story, the certificates could not be used.  Because I was not going to get to use the certificate anyway, I scheduled the appointment with Dr. Fletcher. He decided he would honor the certificate even though he would not be reimbursed for the work by the humane society. Basically he would be performing the operation for nothing.

Two days later I took Molly in to be spayed. She held her head low, afraid of the vet’s office, but went along willingly.  That was Molly. There were many situations where she was afraid, but she would trust me and go along if I was there. She was like this her entire life.

A couple of hours after dropping Molly off, I received a phone call from Dr. Fletcher’s office letting me know her surgery was complete.  When I arrived at the office, Dr. Fletcher came out to talk to me. It turned out that when he opened Molly’s abdomen, she had already been spayed. He sewed her back up and called me to come and bring her home. He said because the humane society told me she needed to be spayed, it had not occurred to him to question it before performing the surgery.

As I stated before, prior to this I made all of my charitable donations to the humane society.  I wanted to help the organization so it could help animals.  However, after my experience trying to adopt Molly, after the experience with the spaying certificate I was told would work and then did not, and finally the fact they hadn’t even realized she was already spayed and making her undergo an unnecessary procedure, I stopped donating to them.  It has been my unfortunate experience, then and since, that there are many people who work in the animal adoption industry who seem to have the attitude that they are the only people good enough to care for animals. I absolutely understand and support taking steps to keep animals out of bad homes or laboratories.  Yet when organizations that claim their purposes are to serve animals, to keep them from being euthanized, and to find them decent homes, they should not make it impossible for a good owner to adopt a pet. Unfortunately, because of the holier than thou attitude at some facilities, this is exactly what happens.

When she first came to live with us, Molly was skittish, but she loved me and trusted me right away. From the beginning Molly knew certain words and was terrified of them.  Her entire life if I said “vacuum” she would go and hide. In the early days, she was genuinely frightened. In later years she would go and sit on the back porch or in the closet when the vacuum came out. She could not stand the thing. She also knew cuss words and would go and hide even if they were spoken in a sentence full of other words. For instance, I could say I’m going to go and dump the damn garbage and she would go hide. It was like a parlor trick, her knowledge of naughty words. I often wondered what happened to her in her early days to instill such a fear.

Molly loved sleeping on the bed, but years after this, once I owned three dogs and a cat, and had a child, we decided that the bed was too crowded so the dogs were relegated to beds on the floor.  Every so often, Molly would slip quietly onto the bed and lie there as still as possible hoping I would not boot her to the floor. Most times I let her stay; she was not obtrusive.

Dr. Fletcher, examined Molly’s teeth very closely the month I brought her home and told me he was 95% certain she was just under two and a half years old. This would have put her birth around September 1994.  A lot could happen in that time and I will never know what.  In addition to her fear of cuss words and vacuums, she was terrified of loud men, arguments of any kind, and she knew sit, stay, and come. It was obvious she had lived with someone, but who knows what her life was like exactly. She did not like being in trouble, and her perception of trouble had a higher threshold than most of us.

During Autumn’s last years, Autumn would get into the trash and try to eat things she wasn’t allowed to because of her illness.  I would come home to Autumn wagging her tail and Molly sitting in the corner hiding. Simply based on Molly’s body language, I knew Autumn had done something naughty. I know some animal behaviorists would say that Molly was reacting to my reaction, that she had no way to know Autumn had done something wrong, but this explanation does not satisfy. Molly would be reacting to Autumn’s behavior before I even knew what had happened, so there was no way for me to react to it. Molly just knew, garbage spread around meant I would be irritated.

Molly was also extremely fastidious. She would hold potty for hours and hours rather than go in the house.  A few years after she came to live with us, we lived in a 1930’s farmhouse with a full basement. There was no door on that basement so we put a gate at the top of the stairs. The top of the stairs opened onto an enclosed back porch.  When we were gone, we would leave the dogs on this back porch.

One day I came home to discover Molly on the top stair to the basement. “How did you get over the gate?” I asked her. She wagged her tail.  I went down into the basement to discover Molly had gone potty in the farthest corner of the basement. Rather than potty on the back porch Molly had jumped over the gate landing on stairs and gone down and as far away as possible to do it. That’s how she was.

Autumn was not thrilled by the interloper, especially considering I had been her person for the four years comprising her entire life. However, she grudgingly accepted Molly into the pack once she determined she was not going anywhere. For the rest of their lives the two basically ignored each other.  Later when we adopted Poppy, Autumn and Poppy became good friends, and later after that, Autumn and Edna seemed to like one another as well. But Autumn and Molly never did.  They acted like the other did not exist. About once a year they would get into a nasty quarrel and one or the other of the two would end up with a bloody bite. I may have found Autumn a companion in Molly so that she would not be lonely during the day, but my objective in finding her a friend failed wholeheartedly.

Read Autumn — Chapter 9

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Autumn — Chapter 7

Read Autumn — Chapter 6

In November 1994 my parents called me and asked for my help getting a dog for my brother Derek.  For years he had pined for a Rottweiler.  Every chance he got, he would go to breeders or shelters to look at Rottweilers and swore he would get one of his own someday.

Derek’s birthday is November 7.  For his 15th birthday our parents decided they would buy Derek his own dog as a combination birthday and Christmas gift.  This was before the internet had taken hold for such purchases, and even after it became more ubiquitous, my parents never really used it anyway.

To make their purchase, my parents relied primarily on the classified ads in the newspaper.  There was a pet section in the classifieds.  It was usually two or three columns long.  Breeders would advertise puppies for sale.  Over several weeks, my parents contacted several breeders, and through this process, they ultimately chose a puppy who would be ready to go home right at Christmastime.  The breeder was located in Portland, an hour north of my parent’s house.  They asked if Dan and I would drive up and get the dog and bring him home the day after Christmas.  Of course we agreed.

The night we drove to get the puppy was rainy and dark.  Visibility was difficult.  We were following the directions the breeder had given my mom, and as is often the case when one gets information third-hand, the directions were not easy to follow. Combined with the terrible weather, we had difficulty locating the house where the breeder lived.  Finally we called my mom who gave us the number for the breeder.  We contacted him and he directed us to his house, two blocks from the street we had been circling for twenty minutes.

The breeder’s house was a simple 1950s ranch, with low eaves and small windows. The home was cheery and clean however, and festively decorated for the holidays.  The puppies were kept in their own bedroom, but were running loose when we arrived.

As soon as we stepped in out of the rain, we were mauled by a wriggling black mass of six puppies.  They wiggled and writhed and jumped all over our feet.  Dan and I squatted to pet them.  One puppy in particular was desperate for our attention.  His fur was shiny, thick, and black.  He had orange eyebrows, and an orange throat and belly.  His tail had been docked, and he wagged his stump as he clambered over his siblings and into my lap so he could lick my face.  I held him against me, smelling his sweet puppy breath.  The breeder stood off to one side smiling.

“That’s your dog,” he stated, matter-of-factly, hands on his hips.  The man was slightly balding with a comb-over, his short-sleeved, oxford shirt tucked into his trousers.  “it is like he knew you were coming to get him tonight or something.”  He grinned at us as he said this.

The dog did indeed seem particularly excited by our visit. The others were playful, but within minutes of our arrival, they dispersed to cause mischief elsewhere in the house.  Our puppy, or rather, Derek’s puppy, hung close, trying to lick our faces and sniff our shoes.  We always thought Autumn’s paws were large, but she turned out to be a mid-sized model.  In comparison, this puppy’s paws were enormous.  There would be no mistake that this dog would be massive.

The breeder spent several minutes showing us his papers and introducing us to his mother and father, both of whom were on site.  He came from a long line of German dogs.  His grandparents were all still in Germany.  We could see from the papers that he did not have any inbreeding, which I thought was unusual for a purebred.  Many of the thoroughbred horses I knew had at least some crossing with cousins.  Years after this I adopted a greyhound who had several cousins who showed up in the lines of both her parents.

The puppy’s bloodlines mattered little to me; I knew he would be neutered eventually.  But I also knew Derek cared, and actually so did my parents.  His breeding was a primary factor in my parent’s choice of this dog over other Rottweilers they looked at.

A half an hour later we were back on the road, the lumbering fur ball asleep on my lap.  Our visit had worn him out.  Before we left, the breeder had spent a few more minutes describing his diet and medical history.  He had noted all this information on a sheet he attached to his registration papers.

For this trip, we opted to leave Autumn at my parent’s house.  We did not want her to overwhelm the puppy on the long drive home.  We called my parents to let them know we were on our way.  The plan was that our dad would take Derek into town shortly before our arrival, then return a short time later to the best gift he had ever received.

As is often the case, because we were not searching for our destination, the ride home seemed shorter than the drive up.  As we wound up my parent’s mile-long driveway, the puppy sat up and yawned, then stretched.  He was so cute.

We could hear Autumn barking as we exited our car.  I knew this bark — it said I know your car and you’re my mom and I want you!

Holding the puppy close to my chest, we dodged raindrops and raced into the house.  Shedding water left and right, we burst through the door, pulling our wet coats from our heads, plopping the puppy to the floor.  Autumn shut up long enough to give the puppy a sniff before she dashed over to me, shoving her nose into my crotch and wriggling and woofing in delight at my return.

Dogs.  No matter where we have been or for how long, they are always so happy to see us.  This must be one of the top reasons people love having them around.  Where else do we get such complete adoration on all levels, simply for being ourselves?

The puppy was sniffing around, looking like he wanted to pee.  I recognized the circling and sniffing.  It could also have been that this was a new place, with lots of new smells, but rather than take a chance, I scooped him up and headed back out onto the porch to see if he would go.  Autumn followed.  She lowered her head and ducked into the rain, squatted, peed, and jumped back under cover.  The puppy watched her, and then followed to squat and pee in the same spot.

One advantage to a mile-long driveway is that those at the top of the driveway can see visitors coming several minutes before they arrive, should they choose to look.  In this manner we saw the headlights to my dad’s truck and were able to settle in the house with the lights low in order not to give anything away. The plan was to just let the puppy roam, and see how long it took Derek to notice him.

We hovered in the living room.  Autumn lay at my feet.  The puppy had lain on the floor near a window and was snuffling in the carpet.

The back door slammed, and my brother called out, “Hello?”

“We are in here,” I said.  Autumn stood, barked once, and went to greet Derek before returning to my side.

Derek walked into the living room, my dad close behind.  He stood there for a minute, then his eyes grew large.

“Oh,” was all he said, before he walked over and kneeled by the puppy, pulling him up into his lap.  The puppy licked at his chin.  Derek, always averse to spit or other bodily fluids, leaned his head back to avoid the tongue washing. My parents smiled like schoolchildren who had successfully pulled a prank.

Only a few times in my life since he has grown have I seen my brother cry, but he had tears in his eyes as he sat and held his gargantuan puppy.

Derek named his dog Kaine after another Kaine in his ancestry.  Within months he weighed over 100 pounds. Like his forebears, he loved herding cattle and rambling around our parent’s farm.  Like Ferdinand the bull, Kaine would lumber down into their fields, then lie down and watch the world, his nose twitching, occasionally chomping at a fly as it buzzed overhead.

He was extremely smart, and learned quickly.  One of the rules in my parent’s house was that dogs were not allowed on the furniture. Autumn was occasionally allowed to get up on the couch, and periodically attempted to thwart my parent’s rule.

One afternoon while we were visiting, Derek was in his bedroom. I sat in the living room with the dogs, and Autumn jumped up next to me on the couch.  Kaine immediately ran into Derek’s room and woofed.

“What do you want?” Derek asked him.  Kaine woofed again, then turned and bustled out of the room before returning to woof yet again.  It seemed to Derek that Kaine wanted him to follow.  He stood and Kaine turned to walk out of the room, looking back to ensure Derek was behind him.  Kaine entered the living room, trotted over to Autumn, turned to Derek and woofed.  Autumn was on the couch, and this was against the rules!  Derek and I laughed and laughed.  I asked Autumn to get off the couch and lie on the floor.  This seemed to satisfy Kaine.  He circled and lay down in the corner, sighing. All was well with the world again.

Derek was fifteen years old when Kaine came to live with him.  Within a few years, Derek moved in and out of my parent’s house several times. He was never able to move anywhere that allowed a dog of Kaine’s size, or there would be silly breed restrictions that forbade tenants keeping Rottweilers.  For this reason, he lived his life at my parent’s house.

In addition, the summer of his seventeenth year, Derek began a decade-long struggle with drug addiction, a horrible, life-siphoning disease.  When he was using, he didn’t care about anyone or anything, and could be cruel.  Kaine sensed this and avoided him during those times.  When Derek was clean, Kaine was his loyal follower.

The result of this was that ultimately, Kaine adopted my mom as his person.  Although he had been purchased as Derek’s, a piece of paper is meaningless to a dog.  He decided who was his person, and although Derek was near the top, along with me and my dad, my mom was his choice.  She was the person he would follow from room to room, if only for even a few moments.  At some point, Kaine decided that this meant my dad could not hug my mother.  He would bark furiously and shove his head between the two of them.  They would laugh and separate, but unfortunately, this seemed only to reinforce the behavior.

Kaine also never seemed to understand that he was bigger than a miniature pony.  Derek held him in his lap when he was a puppy, and when he grew up, he still wanted to sit on one of us.  If we sat down where he could reach us, he would come over and climb in our lap, whether or not he was invited.

Kaine’s biggest shortcoming was his tongue. It was a constant battle to keep him from licking our faces, our hands, our legs if we were wearing skirts or shorts.  His licking drove Derek to distraction.  He absolutely hated spit of any kind, and would shout “Stop licking!” at Kaine when his tongue dared slip past his lips onto Derek’s skin, which happened all the time.  Kaine was almost pathologically incapable of stopping, in spite of Derek’s ire.  After a scolding, Kaine would turn his head to the floor, but his eyes would stay on Derek, as if to say, “Ooh, I’m so sorry, but I can’t help it.  Now can I lick you again?”

At about age 8, Kaine began to show signs he was unwell.  He would be struck still by debilitating fatigue and weakness in his back and legs, lying in a lethargy for hours.  Frightened by this behavior, my mom took him to Dr. Fletcher for tests.  It turned out that Kaine had Addison’s disease, a serious health complication whereby a dog does not produce enough cortisol.  Interestingly enough, it was the exact opposite condition of Cushing’s, the disease I believe Autumn suffered, although she never tested positive for it.

Addison’s is treatable through periodic cortisone tablets.  Kaine was prescribed cortisone to take when he began displaying Addison’s symptoms.  However, as with any steroid, the cortisone could cause side-effects, including long-term problems, so the drug had to be given sparingly.  Near the end of his life, Kaine was taking his medication daily. Without it, he would quickly relapse into dreadful lethargy and pain.  He would whimper if made to move, and he would not eat.

In February 2005, Kaine gave up eating and lay in a corner.  Nothing could coax him to take food or to move.  For two weeks, he worsened, showing interest in nothing, least of all the will to live.  My mom did not want to believe that he was dying.  I know her heart was broken; she loved Kaine like her own child.

Finally though, on President’s Day, my mom called me and asked if I would contact Dr. Fletcher and ask him to come to the house.  I spoke to him and he arranged to meet me there that evening.

The night was cold and clear, diaphanous clouds floated high in the sky.  I could see an exact half moon through the gauzy altocumulus formations.  Kaine lay on a blanket in a darkened room in the basement of the house my parents were building.  His sides heaved, and he did not look up as we entered.  My mom was so upset, she could barely speak.  Dr. Fletcher spoke quietly to Kaine, feeling his glands, running his hands along his prostrate form.

“He’s done,” he informed us.  “It’s time for him to go.”

My mom just stood there, tears on her cheeks. She could not bear to lose her friend.  She asked me to stay with him.  Dr. Fletcher opened his small toolbox and pulled out a syringe, filling it with a clear, pink liquid.  Kaine’s breathing was irregular and ragged.

“Talk to him,” he whispered to me. “Tell him it’s okay.  Tell him you love him and that he can leave now.” Dr. Fletcher administered the shot.

I leaned over Kaine and held his large, head in my hand, kissing his face and whispering to him as Dr. Fletcher had instructed.  Milla sat next to me, kneeling.

“It’s okay, boy,” I said. “We love you.  We will miss you.”

Gradually, over the next several minutes, Kaine’s breathing evened out and slowed.  It was not obvious when he stopped.  His breaths became slower and shallower until they could not be detected.  Every few moments, Dr. Fletcher would check his forearm for a pulse.  Eventually, he said, “He’s gone.”  My mother turned wordlessly and headed upstairs.

Read Autumn — Chapter 8

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Autumn — Chapter 6

Read Autumn — Chapter 5 here.

The fall after we returned to the west coast, I attended the University of Oregon in Eugene. Four days a week, I drove south 45 miles to campus. Autumn would lie in the passenger’s seat, her forearm over the console and across my elbow. There were some lectures where it simply was not possible to take her with me, and for those Autumn would wait for me in the car. For the smaller classes, Autumn would attend, lying under the desk at my feet. She was so well-behaved, many people were not even aware she was there.

As was often the case if the weather was dry and the grassy fields were not too muddy, as I walked along with Autumn on her leash, I would find sticks for Autumn to fetch. I would toss the stick, Autumn would chase it and bring it back to me, and so it went.

One afternoon while doing this, I tossed the stick and was waiting for Autumn to return to me when I noticed another student taking off his belt and wrapping it around his dog’s neck. The dog had no collar or leash. Autumn ran back to me with her stick and as she did so, an officer walked up to me to give me a ticket.

“You are going to give me a ticket for letting my dog chase a stick, when she is wearing a collar and leash, is properly licensed, and comes when called, yet that guy over there doesn’t even have a collar on his dog and you aren’t going to give one to him?” I asked incredulously. “You must be kidding!”

He wasn’t. He handed me the ticket and walked off. I must have looked an easy target, or at least a responsible one who would probably show up in court and pay the damn thing. I did go to the court date and did pay the ticket, but I let the judge know exactly what happened and he reduced the fine. Going to court for such an infraction required that one license their dog. Giving me a ticket ensured the officer had won half the battle, and Mr. Belt Collar likely wouldn’t have shown up. I was easy revenue, at least for that first infraction. I never threw the stick for Autumn anywhere near campus again unless I made sure there weren’t any officers lurking about with nothing better to do than extort money from a reliable income source.

About a month after her first birthday, Autumn took the AKC Canine Good Citizen Test. I did not know anything about the test before I signed up for it. Somehow, I had heard about a dog carnival at a park in our town. The carnival was to have booths selling dog paraphernalia, dog games, agility, and other dog-related activities. In those days, I always sought out anything dog. Autumn loved playing games and I thought she would really like agility because she was light and built well for it, plus she was extremely well behaved.

The day of the carnival was cloudy, and although rain seemed likely, it did not seem imminent. The two of us headed over to the park in my green Mazda. Autumn wore an orange scarf around her neck and sat in the front seat, as she always did when there was only one of us in the car with her. I had purchased a harness that I clipped to the seatbelt so if we got into an accident, she would not go flying through the windshield. As we drove up, she looked around at all the dogs, ears attentive, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.

Autumn stayed close to my heel as we walked through the various booths and activities. I bought her a new yellow scarf with pink polka dots on it. After meandering about for a half an hour or so, the two of us headed over to the agility course.

Agility is one of the few dog competitions in the United States where the breed of the dog does not matter. It is comprised of a series of obstacles such as tunnels, fences for jumping, teeter-totters, and other events requiring agility in the dog.

As we worked the course, Autumn wore what I considered her doggy happy face. With her mouth slightly open, her tongue out, and eyes bright, she looked like she was smiling. She would look at me, then walk up a ramp to a bridge five feet off the ground. She would look at me, then walk across the bridge. She would look at me then enter a tunnel. Throughout the activities, I would point to something and Autumn would follow. She loved this!

After the agility, we wandered around the carnival some more, when we came upon a table and fenced area. A sign at the table indicated that this was the place for dogs to try and pass the American Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen test. Oh, what was this? It sounded fun.

I asked one of the ladies sitting at the table what it was. She told me that the Canine Good Citizen test is designed to reward dogs who have good manners at home and in the community.  The Canine Good Citizen test is comprised of ten “tests” that the dog and handler must complete in order to receive certification that the dog is a good citizen. In order to receive a certificate, Autumn would have to complete all ten tests. Would I like to try?

Well, of course! I paid the small entry fee for Autumn and we waited our turn. We looked over the requirements as we stood off to the side until our names were called.

The first test required the dog to allow a friendly stranger to approach it and speak to the handler in a natural, everyday situation. The second test required the dog to allow a friendly stranger to touch it while it is out with its handler. The third test required the dog to welcome being groomed and examined. It also required the dog to permit someone, such as a veterinarian, groomer or friend of the owner, to do so.

The fourth test would demonstrate that the handler was in control of the dog. The dog’s position during this test could leave no doubt that the dog was attentive to the handler and responding to the handler’s movements and changes of direction.

The fifth test showed that the dog would move about politely in pedestrian traffic and remain under control in public places. The sixth test demonstrated that the dog had training, would respond to the handler’s commands to sit and down, and would remain in the place commanded by the handler. Test seven required the dog to come when called by the handler.

The eighth test showed that the dog would behave politely around other dogs. Test nine demonstrated that the dog was at all times confident when faced with common distracting situations such as joggers or something being rolled by on a dolly.

The final test required the dog to be left with a trusted person, and that it would maintain training and good manners when it was left. The owner would then leave the dog’s sight for three minutes, and the dog was supposed to remain calm and behave.

After quickly skimming through the list of requirements, I was confident that Autumn could complete all of them. This would be fun!

After waiting for several minutes, it was our turn to begin. The evaluator explained the rules of the test, which included the rule that the dog could not relieve itself during the exam. Funny rule, I thought.

We began the exercises. Each time, Autumn passed. The only test I thought we might have trouble with was number ten, the final exercise. I was not sure whether Autumn would remain quiet after I asked her to lie down and then went to hide behind a tree for three minutes. During the test, I peeked around the tree to see what she was doing. Autumn was lying still, her head alert, looking toward where I had walked. She did not get up, and she did not make a peep. After three minutes had expired, the evaluator came and got me from behind the tree.

“Your dog passed,” he said. “Congratulations.” He smiled as he handed Autumn’s leash to me, leading me over to retrieve our certificate.

“Thank you,” I answered him.

“You know, your dog, she is completely devoted to you,” the evaluator said, looking down at Autumn as he spoke.

“Really?” I asked. I always thought Autumn loved me too, but it was pleasing to hear it from someone else. “How can you tell?”

“Watch her,” he answered. “Every other step she takes she is looking at you to see where you are, what you want her to do. You can always tell a well-trained dog and one that completely loves its owner when it keeps checking in with its owner like that.”

I beamed. I knew Autumn was my best friend, my dog child. I loved her as much as she loved me, and it showed.

Years later when the internet was much more ubiquitous than it was at the time Autumn took the CGC test, I looked it up and discovered that some dogs train for years to pass the test and never pass, and that it is a real honor and achievement to receive the Canine Good Citizen certificate. My little dog had passed it on her first try.

Not only was Autumn good at the tests required by the Canine Good Citizen test, she had managed to learn a lot of tricks.  I have read arguments by people that humans should not force dogs to perform tricks, that it undermines their dogness or something.

Yet such assertions ignore certain aspects of canine character, namely that some dogs like Autumn truly seem to enjoy performing these feats of skill.  There was no force involved.  Most of the tricks she learned because we were goofing around and she figured out that certain actions resulted in a reaction from me, which she sought. Many times Autumn would come to me and perform a trick when there was no food around.  Usually she just wanted my attention, and it worked: she got it.

Autumn performed all the usual manner of dog tricks, such as shaking or giving five.  She would shake with her right paw and give five with her left.  She also sat up on command, balancing on her haunches, her paws curled on her chest.  Sitting up was one activity she absolutely came up with on her own.  I never held her and taught her sit up, she just started doing it when she wanted something.

Autumn’s best activity by far was playing dead.  I would pull out my finger pistol, aim it at her, fire, and cry, “Bang!”  Autumn would slump over on her side like a dead dog.  Sometimes she would lift her head and look at me with one eye.  I’d cock the gun and shoot again.  Her head would fall with a thump and she would lie there until I told her to get up.

Mornings before I left for school, I would spend a couple of hours studying at my desk.  Most of the time, Autumn would come and lie at my feet, dozing until I packed up and left for school. As was her habit her entire life, if I left my desk for even a moment to use the bathroom or to get a glass of water, she would follow me, no matter how brief the interruption.  I would stand and head into the bathroom or kitchen.  Autumn would pull herself to her feet, follow me into whatever room, and lie down beside me sighing heavily, her tags clanking on the floor.  A minute later when I headed back to my desk she would rise again and follow, lying again at my feet. This is how she behaved most of the time.

Other times, she woke up ready to play, and she would make every effort engage my attention.  Usually this meant digging through her basket to locate the toy of her choice, then dropping it in my lap or on my feet.  I would kick the toy or toss it, trying to focus on my work, but this only encouraged her to try harder. She would bring the toy back and drop it again and again until I either ignored her or stopped working to play for real.

If I ignored her, she would then increase her efforts, bringing in the big gun: the rope. Autumn’s rope consisted of two thick cotton ropes, one red, one white, woven around one another and through a hard piece of red rubber. First, she would bring the rope to me as she had with the other objects, dropping it in my lap or at my feet. When this failed to elicit a response, she would pounce on the rope and shake it vigorously, whacking me in the shins with the piece of rubber.

“Ow!” I would holler. “Stop whacking me with the damn rope!”

Autumn would stop and pant, eyes bright and tail swinging. If she was feeling especially fresh, she would lower her front end, holding the rope and shaking it, growling.

“I’m going to pummel you again if you won’t play with me!” she seemed to say, brandishing the rope like a club, ready to bludgeon me again if I failed to join in her play.  Unless I was under a serious deadline crunch, this usually worked. It was hard to resist someone so determined to have fun.

That fall I purchased a sewing machine. As my first project, I decided to sew Autumn a little coat. I purchased a red, green, and cream colored fabric. I lined it in red and trimmed it with green piping. Autumn looked smart in the coat, its colors complementary with her creamy tan fur.

I also sewed Autumn a Halloween costume. Using bright, color-filled fabric, I sewed a ruffled clown collar, and ruffles for each of her paws. I also made a ruffle to go on her tail, but every time she wagged, which was frequent, the ruffle went flying.

On Halloween, we dressed her in the costume, and I painted colorful circles on her fur with washable fur paint from the pet store.  I encircled one eye in blue, the other in red.  Dan dressed in a clown costume as well, and I dressed as a ringmaster, using my riding breeches, coat, and boots. We made quite the festive trio as we handed out goodies to trick-or-treaters.

The children loved Autumn. Always a fan of anyone who would play with her, Autumn wagged her tail and snuffled the visitors at our door as we handed out candy. The way she sniffed at their various Halloween bags, I think she hoped someone might offer her a treat.

Later that evening we all went over to Dan’s parent’s for a small party.  We brought along our fur paint and covered Murphee in colorful circles as well.  We may not have been frightening in the traditional sense, but I think some of the other guests thought we were pretty scary to go to such lengths in dressing up our dog.

Not all of my friends shared my canine enthusiasm. Elizabeth, a friend I had known for years, lived with her husband and son in Eugene, south of us by about forty-five minutes.

On occasion, Elizabeth would ask me to watch her four-year-old son. I would drive to their house, Autumn beside me on the seat. I spent one cloudy Sunday afternoon babysitting for Elizabeth while she and her husband went out for a few hours. They owned a beagle named Lucy.  I always liked Lucy, but Elizabeth thought she had neurotic tendencies. I never saw these tendencies, but was assured they did exist.

I arrived for my babysitting and spent the afternoon playing with Elizabeth’s son and the two dogs.  Later in the day it began to rain, and we spent the rest of our time together playing in the house.  Near evening, Elizabeth and her husband arrived home.  Her son had fallen asleep next to me on the couch where I sat watching a movie.  The two dogs were sleeping on the floor until they arrived home, but once they came through the door, bedlam ensued as both dogs barked enthusiastic welcomes.  I gathered my things, rounded up Autumn, and headed home.

A month later, Elizabeth called and asked if I could watch her son again.  I checked my calendar and agreed, noting the details in my day planner.

Elizabeth paused for a moment, as if she wanted to say something, then said, “Would you please not bring Autumn with you?”

“Um,” I answered, “Okay.  I won’t bring her in the house, but I want her with me, so I will keep her in the car.  it is a long way away and I don’t like going that far alone.”

Elizabeth said that was fine, we said our goodbyes, and got off the phone.  I didn’t say anything at the time, we had known each other for years and it wasn’t worth a disagreement, but the request irritated me. I didn’t so much mind not bringing Autumn in the house, but I was, after all, helping them out; allowing the dog to visit seemed a small concession for the assistance.

I knew though, that Elizabeth’s husband was picky about cleanliness, pickier even than I (Which is saying a lot because I’m pretty particular in that regard. It is one of the reasons my dog got baths every few days).  It was only years later after their divorce that I understood some of the difficulties going on in their marriage, and I’m glad I didn’t make an issue out of it at the time.

Read Autumn — Chapter 7 here

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Autumn — Chapter 5

Read Autumn — Chapter 4

Autumn shared her birthday with anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, August 16. I found it remarkable that decades after the man’s death, the date was still so publicly memorialized. Ah, the cult of celebrity. While many lamented the day, we were going to celebrate.

In hindsight, I realize that some of the way I cared for my dog was a little over the top, but I loved her. I did not have any children. To both Dan and me, Autumn was our child.  I had many friends with dogs, our parents had dogs, and having a party meant we could invite the dogs, but also see our friends and family. After a year across the country we welcomed this opportunity.

Just as with any birthday party, I sent out invitations to the party to be held in the park near our house. I purchased gifts and wrapped them  I bought food, made Autumn a dog food cake, and bought a human cake as well. I also got several balloons. We had celebrated Dan’s birthday when Autumn was five months old. At that celebration, Autumn was thrilled with balloons. She would pounce on them and pop them with her nose. I don’t know how she did it; balloons frighten me, especially near my face.

The day of the party was sun-kissed and warm. The park where the party was to be held was six blocks from our house.  I loaded the cakes, food, party favors, and gifts into a wagon and lumbered down to the park to reserve a table. Because of the season, tables were a rare commodity, and one had to arrive early to get one. Autumn was excited by the presents. She kept sniffing in the wagon and trying to remove the packages. I made her wait, pulling her from the toys and asking her to heel.

In spite of the fact that the purported reason for the party was Autumn’s birthday, nearly all the guests we invited showed up to see us, many without their dogs. Both sets of parents, Dan’s grandma, and a half dozen friends arrived to celebrate Autumn’s birth.  I played Frisbee with my friends while Dan and his played a mini version of softball.  Autumn ran back and forth between both activities, alternately chasing the softball, the Frisbee, or other dogs. Murphee hovered at our feet, willing us to throw balls for her.

When the time came to open gifts, Autumn tore into them. She loved presents. She had discovered at Christmastime that presents meant treats and toys. In fact, for every Christmas for the rest of her life we had to be careful about what gifts were placed under the tree. Even if they weren’t hers, if they contained something she liked, she would root around and find them, tearing off the wrapping to see what was inside. My heart swelled watching her; she was so dear to me and obviously enjoyed her presents.

None of the other dogs were really interested in the cake. They weren’t much interested in Autumn or one another either. Like toddlers at a first birthday party, they were in it for themselves. All the dogs were given treats, and all were allowed to share in the cake, so they went home happy.

I celebrated birthdays for Autumn for the first few years of her life, then we got Molly, and later Milla was born, but for the time, they were a fun way to get together with friends and enjoy our canine friends.

That fall, Autumn started limping after long days at the park or after I took her running with me. It got to be that my runs were take the dog out for a drag rather than taking the dog out for a run. After some months like this, we decided to take Autumn to the vet to find out what was going on.

Since we had arrived back in Oregon, I had taken Autumn to a veterinarian’s office near our house. I had a lot in common with the veterinarian there. His name was Dr. Ken Fletcher, and over time, we became friends.

I adore Dr. Fletcher. After him (who wanted me to go to vet school, and still does in spite of having chosen to go to law school), no other vet could compare. Dr. Ken treated me like a partner in my pet’s care. He told me honestly what I could do myself and what I should let the vet do. He told me how much things cost the vet and what was just junk profit. Basically, he gave me credit for having a brain and for being able to do some things on my own as a collaborator in my pets’ health care. He was not a director who acted as if I could not possibly understand the intricate undertaking of a shot or even more complex aspects of veterinary medicine. He was my partner, and he treated me as someone capable of managing my pets’ health.

When Autumn started having hip problems, Dr. Ken referred me to a specialist in Eugene named Dr. Barclay Slocum. Dr. Slocum was considered the top hip dysplasia doctor in the United States. He had developed the technique used to replace failing hips in dogs, and had performed the surgery on hundreds, if not thousands of dogs.

Dan and I made the drive south to meet Dr. Slocum and to look at Autumn’s hips. Dr. Fletcher had explained to us that if Autumn did indeed have hip dysplasia, the cost would run into the thousands of dollars. We were apprehensive because we knew if she did have the problem, we would not be able to afford to fix it, and we doubted our parents would lend us the money.

Dr. Slocum’s clinic was slick and professional. There was a room with a glass window where we could watch as they anesthetized our dog and took the x-rays of her pelvis. Autumn had to be asleep because they would lay her on her back and press her pelvis open, which would be difficult and painful if she were awake.

An unassuming man with careful bedside manner, Dr. Slocum spent some time with us explaining what would happen that day, as well as what would follow. During our conversation, an assistant came and took Autumn away. She was apprehensive, turning to look back at Dan and me as she was led into the other room. Tears welled behind my eyes. She looked so vulnerable and frightened.

Watching as the technicians worked on Autumn while she was anesthetized was heartbreaking. She lay on her back, her head tilted, her tongue pulled out to one side with a tube protruding from her mouth and throat. My chest tightened in apprehension; she was so still, and with her tongue out, she looked dead. Dan decided to wait in the other room, unable to bear watching, but I could not leave her. I held my fist to my lips, watching as she lay there, prostrate. She looked dead. It killed me.

The tests revealed that Autumn did indeed have hip dysplasia. Not only did she have the disorder, she had one of the most severe cases the doctor had seen. He explained that the hip sockets were supposed to be round so they would hold the head of the femur at the joint. Autumn’s were flat. Every step she took, her femur rotated back and forth across the flat plain of her pelvic bone.

Dr. Slocum displayed Autumn’s x-rays for us to see. The image looked like a Rorschach blot. As the doctor pointed out to us what the hips were supposed to look like, it was obvious that Autumn’s were a mess.

The cost to perform the surgery was several thousands of dollars. In addition, recovery would take nearly a year, as first one hip had to be replaced, then recovery, then the second hip.

We waited for Autumn to wake up from her anesthesia. She cried and yipped, kicking her feet. Both of us pet her and held her even though the technician had assured us that such behavior was normal when anesthesia was wearing off. It still scared me; she sounded in pain. Once she was up and awake again, at least somewhat, the technicians took her vital signs and pronounced her ready to go. Leaving the clinic and driving north to home, Dan and I were heartbroken. We knew it would be difficult to come up with the money, not while we were both full-time students, and working minimally. We were also really worried about the intensity of the surgery and the recovery time. Autumn would essentially be out of commission for a year. I held her in my lap and stroked the fur on her head. I loved this dog.

Once we arrived home, I made an appointment with Dr. Fletcher to go over the results. A week later, Dan and I met with him to discuss what to do.

“You know,” Dr. Fletcher informed me, as we sat with him in his office, stroking Autumn’s bunny soft ears as he spoke, “There is research out now that suggests that sometimes the best thing to do with dogs like Autumn is to wait and see.”

I raised my eyebrows at him and looked at Dan. This seemed to be an odd approach.

“I know it sounds strange, but you won’t lose anything by waiting. Her hips are what they are and the bones are not going to change shape for the worse. Basically you strengthen Autumn’s muscles by taking her swimming,” he said. “There isn’t any impact and over time, the stronger muscles keep the head of the bone in place where the socket can’t.”

It was worth a try. We couldn’t afford the surgery, and even if our parents were to lend us the money, the surgery would have meant Autumn would have to stay in a kennel for months, and then allowed gradual exercise for a year. I could not see putting her through that.

In the end we decided to try Dr. Fletcher’s approach, not only because of the cost of the surgery, but also because of the length of recovery, and we could change our minds if her situation worsened. Primarily it came down to the impact it would have on her quality of life during the prime of her youth. We just couldn’t do that to her.

I began walking Autumn down to the park near our house where a medium-sized creek ran into the swift Willamette River. Up the creek a half mile or so, there were several swimming holes that were ideal for taking a dog. They were off the main path where people liked to congregate, and Autumn loved the water, probably more than anything other than eating. She would jump in any puddle, any pool, any lake, any river. Basically if it was wet, she wanted to be in it. Since the diagnosis came in the middle of the summer, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Nearly every day I took Autumn out to swim. At first, she tired pretty quickly, but as she became fitter, she could swim for a couple of hours without tiring. She would chase any stick, no matter where we threw it, and retrieve it. We would toss colored balls or frisbees into the water and tell her which one to get. Always smart and attuned to our body language, she quickly figured out which was the green ball or the red frisbee, and would swim out to wherever to bring them back to us.

One scorching summer, in an effort to escape the heat vibrating off the cement and buildings in the city, I took Autumn along with my friends Debbie and Robert, and we drove out into the countryside.  As we wound out into the hills, the air became cooler and more tolerable.  We came upon a rocky stream, and pulled over to wet our feet.

Autumn jumped from the truck and scurried down the embankment straight into the water.  We followed more gingerly, seeking to protect our ankles and backsides from a fall down the gravely ridge.

The edge of the stream was covered in lumpy, grey river rocks.  Another fifteen feet in from the bank, trees hung low.  The water was runoff from the nearby Cascade mountains.  Even in late August, the water remained icy cool.  Logs littered the bank, evidence of winter storms and raging water, days when the stream was not nearly so docile.

I was wearing a bathing suit under my t-shirt and shorts, and quickly stripped down before wading midstream to my waist.  Debbie and Robert simply waded out in their clothes.  At its middle, the stream was about four feet deep, and fifteen feet across.

On days such as this, it was as if Autumn had been reincarnated from a fish.  She swam and swam, lapping and biting at stream bubbles, her legs churning under the water.  I would throw sticks for her, she would calculate where the stick would arrive as the water moved rapidly downstream, and meet the stick before it passed her.  On the few occasions the stick made it past before she reached it, she would swim faster, chasing it like a mad beaver determined to create a dam. Debbie and Robert laughed at Autumn and her water antics.  She was obviously having fun.

After tossing sticks for a bit, I sat down on one of the logs in a sunbeam to dry and warm my legs.  Autumn dragged herself out of the water and shook vigorously, sending droplets every which way.  She then bounded over to me and grasped a rock from the pile at my feet, picking it up and tossing it in my lap.

“Ow!” I exclaimed.  That hurt!  “I will throw rocks for you, but don’t hit me with them.”  I stood and chose a rock for Autumn to chase, locating one the size of a plum.  Autumn danced at my feet, barking.  Throw it! She seemed to say.

I tossed the stone into the river.  Autumn turned and hurled herself into the water, dove beneath the surface, then reappeared nearly immediately, a rock in her jaws.

Debbie, Robert, and I stared at one another.

“Do you think it is the same rock?” I asked.

“No,” Robert answered in his baritone, grumbly voice.  “She just found a rock.”

“But it looks like the same rock,” I stated, and Debbie nodded, agreeing with me.

“Let’s throw in another one and see if she gets it,” I said, already choosing a rock.  I looked at it closely to see whether we could identify it as the same rock, then threw it into the water.  Autumn had dropped the original rock at my feet and turned to race back into the water after the second one.  She plunged into the water, disappeared for a moment, then popped up a moment later, swam to shore and dropped the rock at my feet.  She didn’t even shake off the water, but stood dripping expectantly, waiting for another throw.

I examined the sopping stone at my feet.  There was no way I could tell if it was the same rock and told Debbie and Robert as much.

Robert pulled a pocket knife from one of the many pockets covering the overalls he wore, his default uniform regardless of the weather or occasion.

“We can use this to mark the rock, then we can tell if it is the same one,” he said as he picked up a rock and carved a long groove into pale grey surface.  He then dunked it in the water to see whether the mark was still visible.  It was.

Robert handed the rock to me and I threw it out into the water.  Autumn zoomed in after it.

Moments later she dropped the marked rock at my feet.  Amazing.

We played this game for a while, then I went out into the water with her.  I wanted to see what she looked like under the water as she retrieved.

Robert found and marked a rock, tossed it, and just as the rock pierced the surface of the water, I held my breath and went under.  I could see the rock as it slowed dramatically and settled onto the floor of the creek bed.  I also saw Autumn watching the rock as it landed.  She kept her eyes open underwater so she could pick the correct stone!  The dog loved water, there was no denying it.

In time, it became apparent that swimming was ideal for Autumn’s hip problems. Gradually she stopped having episodes of pain and limping. Over the years as she aged and developed other health issues, I was only able to take her swimming a couple of times a year, but she never experienced problems with her hips again. Dr. Fletcher still uses her story as an example to patients who come to him with dysplasia dogs as proof that surgery may not always be necessary.

Read Autumn — Chapter 6

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Autumn — Chapter 4

Read Autumn — Chapter 3

After a year, Dan and I were ready to go home. We were still homesick, and also the school I was going to was extremely expensive and not all the programs were as good as had been advertised when I applied. Dan had finally met the requirements for residency to obtain in-state tuition at the University of Tennessee, but we were both tired of the differences, and missed Oregon and our families. We wanted neighbors who would not look at us as if we were aliens. We longed for our friends.

Though we had not told our families, the two of us had gone to a justice of the peace in December and gotten married. The main reason we did this was because Dan could not qualify for financial aid based on his parent’s income and assets, yet they could not afford to pay for his university studies. After the marriage, we announced to the family that we were engaged and that we would be getting married the following summer. No one seemed surprised. Only Dan’s grandma seemed pensive at the scheme, believing we were still too young for marriage. We ignored her portentous concern, especially since the deed had already been done.

When Dan’s parents called to tell us they would allow us to live in their basement apartment for no rent if we stayed in Oregon after the wedding, we did not even think about it, agreeing immediately. I would attend the University of Oregon in Eugene, Dan would go to Oregon State in Corvallis, and we would live in Albany with his parents.

In retrospect, the decision to live with Dan’s parents probably sealed the fate of our marriage, but at the time, it seemed like the perfect solution. Living with Dan’s parents would not matter to financial aid since we were married, and paying no rent would allow us to go to school without having to work full-time. Considering I had worked full-time for my first two years of college, this part was especially appealing.

Once school let out for the summer, we set about selling all the furniture we had acquired during our year on the east coast, and boxing and shipping our belongings back to Oregon. This part was easy. Our biggest concern about the move was the drive back home in a car without air conditioning. We were leaving in late June, driving across the bottom half of the United States, and it was going to be hot. We also wanted to bring as much with us as we could manage to save on shipping costs.

Once we figured out how we were going to pack the car, the only room left for Autumn was at our feet in the passenger’s seat. This wasn’t going to be fun for either the passenger or the dog, but we were so happy to be heading home, we did not care. When we were ready to go, we got up at dawn and drove away, stopping only for breakfast since all our cookware was gone.

We drove straight for 25 hours into Albuquerque, New Mexico. Dan drove all of it.  He was so eager to get home he flew, breaking speed laws in five states. By the time we hit New Mexico, we were all exhausted and the heat was overwhelming. We arrived at noon and decided our best plan for the remainder of the trip was to sleep during the day and drive at night. We crossed Arizona in the dark, then drove north through Nevada during the early part of the day. The temperatures were staggering, near 120 degrees Fahrenheit, yet we had no complaints, gratified that the warmth was dry heat. After the dripping east coast humidity, we were fine with arid wind blowing in our faces.

Autumn managed the trip well. She was used to riding in the car, and since it was so warm, content to curl like a caterpillar, nose to tail on the floorboards. I was the passenger for most of the trip, propping my legs on the dash or in the edge of the yawning window.

When we finally arrived back in Oregon, we were exhausted, but happy. After the tawny deserts, Oregon was lush and verdant in early June. Driving north on I-5, the mountains were corpulent and green. Trite but true, there is no place like home.

Dan’s parents lived in a stucco, Pepto Bismol pink bungalow. Squat and square, from the outside the house didn’t look very big, but was actually quite spacious. They had renovated part of the basement and rented it out to some of Dan’s friends. This space was to be our new home. We would have our own entrance at the back if we chose to use it, or we could go through the house. We would share the upstairs kitchen.

Dan’s parents had a dog of their own, a black and white Border Collie named Murphee. To call Murphee neurotic would be an understatement. Typical of her breed, she wanted to herd all the time. She would skulk around, head parallel to the ground, a tennis ball gripped in her jaws. If she saw a human, she would drop the ball, then stop and stare intensely at it, her brown eyes occasionally flicking up to see whether the human was going to make a move to take the ball and throw it.

Autumn had not turned out to be the enormous beast we all predicted based on Maude and her paws. At just under a year old, she was only about twenty-five pounds. By the time she was six months old, it was clear to us that she was Cody’s daughter and not Jasper’s. Having spent many hours in the presence of the two potential fathers, we had witnessed Cody’s mannerisms in Autumn since she was quite small. Her trot especially was identical to his, their gaits like a Standardbred, front legs straight out in front as they moved. Cody was a very small Border Collie. I found it amazing he had managed to impregnate Maude, but such are the miracles of the animal kingdom.

Murphee, two years older than Autumn, was not much bigger, although she was much more filled out and thicker. Autumn was as tall as she would ever be, but still looked like a lanky dog teenager, with long narrow legs and a slim body. The two were destined to be nearly the same size, although Murphee was always heftier. Autumn’s fur was much softer than Murphee’s. Murphee’s hair was wiry and course. I often called Autumn “bunny ears” because of the blissful softness of the fur on her ears. All her life, rubbing those ears would bring me comfort.

We settled into the basement apartment. The space was open like a loft, only it was mostly underground. There were windows at the tops of the walls on both the east and west sides of the house, so we always had outdoor light. We set up the space like rooms, our bedroom at one end, an office in the middle, and the living room at the other end.

During Autumn’s entire life we had kept pet rats. She was used to them and was careful around them, having been bitten in the nose by our rat Shasta when she was only three months old. Sometimes if we were lounging on the bed or couch and holding a rat, Autumn would want to play with it or sniff it, but mostly she just left them alone.

Murphee, however, was entranced with our rats to the point of obsession. She would stare at the rats like they were tennis balls or sheep. If they were out when she was nearby, she would nose them roughly. I was certain that given chance, she would have eaten one of the rats. Because of this, we left the door to our apartment and the rest of the basement closed. Dan’s parents also used the other portion of the basement for laundry, and I wanted to maintain some semblance of privacy.

We kept the rats in a cage on top of a dresser in the “office” portion of our apartment. The dresser was one I had purchased used as an 11-year-old and refinished. One afternoon, I returned from my day at school to discover that Murphee, in her efforts to get to the rats, had scratched deep gouges all along the top of the dresser.

I was furious. Murphee was not supposed to be in our apartment, and she sure as hell wasn’t supposed to ruin my dresser.

After this, whenever Murphee would come down to whine at the door because she wanted to get to our rats, I would say, “Murphee, get out of here!” in a sharp voice. She would whine and claw until I either chased her away or took her back upstairs.

“Murphee, leave!” I would shout.

Over time, Autumn learned that “Murphee, leave!” meant that I did not want Murphee downstairs. She would growl a warning at the door. Because her growl sounded so fierce, we started saying the phrase when Autumn was terrorizing one of her stuffed animals. “Get Murphee!” we would growl, “Murphee, go away!” Autumn would shake the stuffed thing to death, growling like a crazed fiend, spittle splattering everything in her mock fury.

Over the years, even long after we had moved away from Murphee and the basement, saying the words, “Murphee, go away!” would turn Autumn into a crazy frenzy. I taught her a hand signal to go with the words. I would hold my arm down to my side and shake my hand really hard up and down, saying the phrase. Autumn learned that when I did this, she was to act like a crazy dog. When I stopped, she would stop abruptly. My thinking was that if anyone ever grabbed me around the body and arms, I could still make the hand signal so Autumn would act nuts, hopefully scaring the attacker away.

A few years later, I called into a radio program where the hosts gave out prizes for doing silly pet tricks on the air. “Murphee,” I hissed. “Go away!” Autumn snarled and shook. I stopped the movement. Autumn went silent. I made the movement again and she turned into a raving lunatic. I stopped and so did she. We won a DVD for our efforts.

Sometimes Murphee’s neurotic herding had unintended consequences. Dan was close friends with the two guys, Steve and Brian, who had rented the apartment from his parents for two years before we moved into it. They were a typical group of guys who had known one another since childhood. They liked hanging out and drinking beers, playing sports, and telling each other dirty jokes.

For Steve’s birthday the summer after we moved into the apartment, we decided to get him a crass, pornographic toy in addition to his real gift. After searching the local triple X store, we settled on a plastic labia. It barely resembled its intended design. The thing was baby mouse pink, with brown painted on the plastic to look like hair. There were also several nylon hairs that had been added for effect and a tube of plastic in the middle. It was hard to believe whoever designed the thing ever intended it to be anything except a joke.

We wrapped the toy in wrapping paper and gave it to Steve at his party, which was being held at our house. Dan’s parents had a fine backyard for entertaining, and we often invited Steve and Brian over for events like this one.

Steve opened the gag gift and reacted as we expected he would, with laughter and revulsion. The thing was perfectly hideous. The guys began tossing it back and forth between themselves. Murphee, as was the case anytime anything was thrown that she might catch, started tracking the thing in her Border Collie way, head low, one foot slightly in front of the other, never once taking her eyes from her prey.

Laughing hysterically, we threw it for her to fetch. She ran it down, retrieved it, then dropped it at Steve’s feet, staring at it rapturously. Over and over, we played this game, laughing until our sides hurt and tears ran down our faces.

In the house, we heard Dan’s parents come home. Murphee picked up the thing and ran into the house. We waited to see what would happen. A couple of minutes later, Dan’s mom and dad walked onto the back porch.

“We walked into the house,” Dan’s mom informed us, “And Murphee brought us this wonderful gift.”

She held the thing up for us all to see. “Can anyone explain why our dog is carrying around a plastic vagina?”

Read Autumn — Chapter 5

by

Autumn — Chapter 3

Read Autumn — Chapter 2

Our lives were extremely busy.  Dan had his job and was waiting to attend school until he had lived in the state for a year so he could pay in-state tuition at the University of Tennessee in Johnson City.  Dan worked the day shift, which began at 6 a.m.  His workplace was about 45 minutes from our apartment.  He car pooled for most of that distance, but we had to drive to meet his car pool at a location twenty minutes from where we lived.  We owned only one car, so Dan’s work hours meant that I had to get up and drive him to meet his ride.

Every morning in the pre-dawn, before it was even light, Dan would rouse me from bed when he had to leave. Without changing out of my pajamas, I would pick up Autumn and carry her to the car where I would fall immediately asleep. Once we arrived at the vacant, eerie parking lot in the middle of nowhere – and it really was in the middle of nowhere, a parking lot plopped in the middle of some farmer’s field – Dan would kiss us goodbye and leave us to get into the car of one of his coworkers.

I would clamber into the driver’s seat, Autumn on my lap, her head across my arm as I held the stick shift. When we returned home, I would climb into bed and Autumn would nestle under my arm, burrowing under the warm covers. It was the only time she wanted to sleep in the bed, preferring the floor under the couch for the main part of her sleep.  Autumn began what became a lifelong habit when she snuggled together with me in the bed. She would lie with her head across my neck.  Her fur was so soft, it was like wearing a warm fur stole. Two hours after returning from dropping Dan at his ride, I would rise for classes and Autumn would stay in bed until we were ready to leave.

I loved life at this time.  I was so naive and confident.  I thought I had everything all figured out.  I spent my twenties believing I knew it all; that I was invincible.  Oh, I knew there were facts of which I was not aware, other countries and places to discover.  But I thought I was pretty on top of things when it came to fearlessness, strength, and inner knowledge.  How little I knew, how much pain I had to experience to figure out just how clueless I really was, but that was years away.

In spite of my sophomoric confidence, I did know that I would love my child when I had one, but this did not stop me from loving Autumn with every bit as much devotion.  Watching her and experiencing her was pure glee.  My heart would fill up, and I would feel my chest tighten loving her.  When I had my human child, I truly experienced parental selflessness when, days after her birth, I realized my ego had to go and she had to become my center.  Until I had Milla though, Autumn was my child. Everything she did brought me delight.  I adored her.

Every couple of days Autumn would go out to run and play in the creek down the hill, regardless of the weather.  This meant that she was often muddy or wet when she came into the house. If only her paws were wet, she would stand at the door and wait while we wiped her feet.

“Towel,” I would say to her, picking it up when she arrived at the door, begging to be let in.  She would stand and lift each paw until all four were dried and wiped of mud.

If she was a real mess, I would carry her in the towel to the bathroom for a bath. Autumn loved baths, and would jump in, waiting for the warm water.  Sometimes she even snuck past the shower curtain and jumped in while we were showering.

When she was done with her bath, she would shake off in the tub with the curtain closed, then jump out onto the mat to wait for her toweling off.  As I rubbed her fur all over, scrubbing her face and behind her ears, she would wiggle, hopping her back end up and down and side to side, shoving her butt into the towel for a good scratching.  After she dried, the hairs on her rear became fluffy, white pantaloons.

I had been taking French and Political Science from a wonderful professor from Rome named Dr. Riviello.  He had a lilting and appealing accent, and taught with brilliant clarity and depth.

Dr. Riviello loved Autumn.  He too had a dog he considered his child, a Dachshund named Baci.  The two of us would talk endlessly about our wonderful dogs.  He was the only professor who allowed Autumn free roam of his classroom.  She would lie quietly under my desk as I worked.  Together we commiserated over our love for our dogs.

During first semester, Dr. Riviello invited me to apply to an honor’s program in political science. There would be an intensive history course studying the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, beginning with Hitler’s birth. The course would culminate with a study during May term in spring at the University of Munich. We would attend seminars in english three times a week with leaders in various aspects of political science. Our lectures would be in the late afternoon, allowing us to explore the city and surrounding areas during the day. We were also to take day trips into various places such as Berchtesgaden in the Alps, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a Bavarian village where Christmas is experienced all year round.

I applied to the program and was accepted. I was exhilarated at the thought of returning to Germany. I had lived in Hamburg for a short time in 1990. This time I would be staying in Munich. While I was excited to be going, I did not want to leave my little dog. I knew she would not understand. The two of us spent every waking minute together. When she wasn’t with me, she was with Dan. While I was in Europe, Autumn would have to stay alone while he worked. My stomach turned at the thought of her anxiety and fear at being left alone for long periods for the first time in her life.

To help acclimate Autumn to the change that would be coming, I started leaving her at home periodically. At first, she was a wreck. She chewed up several of my shoes and stuffed animals. I scolded her, but the scolds were half-hearted.

After several weeks, Autumn seemed to adjust to staying by herself. Our neighbors never complained about barking or whining, so we assumed she was okay.

In the days leading up to my departure, I left piles of clothing and traveling items around, organized according to my own system. Autumn would root through the clothes, then roll on them. I would chase her off, scolding. Moments later, she would be back in another pile, knocking it aside and mashing the carefully folded clothes.

Like a mother leaving her children, I filled my wallet with photos of Autumn before departure. I wanted to bring her image to mind at a moment’s notice. I also thought that at eight months of age, she would likely change dramatically in the time that I was gone. I was right about that. When I left she still looked like a puppy. When I arrived home she looked like a lanky pre-teen dog.

The day finally arrived for me to leave to go to Germany. We took Autumn to the airport with us. I held her the entire way, trying not to cry. I was excited to be going, but I was going to miss my baby. At the airport I kissed her goodbye and flew across the ocean.

Upon landing, I immediately called to check in and to let Dan know we had arrived safely. He told me Autumn had been sniffing all over the apartment, and that he was sure she was looking for me. She only finally settled down when he went to bed.

I asked him to put the phone to Autumn’s ear so I could say hello to her.

“Hello, Autumn,” I spoke into the phone. “Brown, Brown? How are you puppy? Are you okay? Mommy loves you.”

Dan came back on the phone. He said Autumn had cocked her head to the side, looked quizzically at the phone, then jumped down and started sniffing at the back door. Apparently the sound of my voice was confusing to her, so we decided that I would not talk to her like that again.

Professor Riviello also missed his dog Baci. I took Autumn’s photo everywhere I went and showed it to anyone who would look. My professor would show his as well, and the conversation among many of the other students would turn again and again to our perceived bizarre behavior. Some of the students on the trip had never been outside of the small town where the college was located. It seemed to me that they had a pretty narrow perception of acceptable behavior. They certainly considered our dog nostalgia as completely eccentric. They just did not understand. We both thought leaving our dogs was worse than leaving our partners; yet our partners could speak to us on the phone and knew where we were. Our dogs did not.

The weeks passed quickly. The lectures were fascinating, and I was having an amazing time. Too soon, however, the term was over and we were headed back home. Dan knew when I would be arriving. I told him to be sure and bring Autumn.

“Of course,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t leave her home for this!” I knew it, but I just missed my dog so much, I did not want to wait one second longer than necessary to see her.

Even though these were the days before major airport security when loved ones could meet their travelers at the gate, Dan had to wait outside because of Autumn. I raced through the airport, through customs and baggage before heading out into the warm spring afternoon.

Dan was parked at the curb, waiting with a lanky puppy on a leash. She had grown since I had seen her last. She looked like a teenage dog, and less like a little puppy.

I kneeled and called out, “Autumn!” She turned and looked at me, then squatted on the sidewalk and urinated. Oh, my little baby. We knew in that moment that my leaving had most definitely had had an impact on her. She must have thought I would never return, yet here I was.

She ran to me and jumped on my lap as I knelt next to her. She licked my face and arms and chest, her entire body writhing with her tail. Her mommy was home!

Read Autumn — Chapter 4

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Autumn — Chapter 2

Read Autumn — Chapter 1

Autumn ran. She would start at one end of the field near our apartment and run to the other end of the field, turn around, and run back. Down to the creek! Through the water! Under the fence! Across the field! Back through the fence! It was like she was a study in the personification of prepositional phrases.

I could stand and watch her run like that for over an hour. I checked out a video camera from my college and videotaped her running. We made copies and sent them home to our families.

“Did you like the movies?” I would ask, hopeful. “Isn’t Autumn adorable?”

“Well,” came the invariable response, “It would be nice if there was more of you two in them and less of the dog.” But why would they want that? She was our baby.

Every day I would let Autumn out to play in the fields behind our house. She would go and play in the creek or chase cows. The cows didn’t really run. They would stand in a herd, heads down, looking at the dog playing in their midst, snorting and weaving their lumbering heads back and forth.

After she had played a while I would call out, “Brown Brown!” the nickname I pulled from nowhere and a term of endearment I used for her the rest of her life. I could lean out over the deck railing and see her in the field below.

“Brown Brown!” I would call. “Autumn!” Autumn would stop whatever she was doing and race up the hill, around the apartment building, up the stairs, and across the deck to me, tongue lolling and panting in happiness.

Life with our puppy was like most people’s lives with puppies. Autumn had a penchant for chewing, particularly our favorite shoes. Probably because we wore them more frequently and they smelled more like us, she gravitated to the shoes we wore most often. Several shoes were destroyed in the cause of raising our puppy to a dog.

We owned one of those fake-wood finish particle board entertainment centers. It lived in the living room and housed our television, VCR, movies, photos, books, and some small knick-knacks. One of the items on the shelf was a small, fuzzy bear with a shiny, green ribbon around its neck that I had purchased in a gift shop somewhere along our drive from Oregon. It sat on the bottom shelf under the television in front of a row of books.

Autumn loved it. She wanted this bear more than any other forbidden item in our home. I would come into the room and discover Autumn, a brown lump between her jaws.

“Autumn!” I would bark, making my voice deep as our dog training book recommended for scolding. “Drop that!”

Autumn would slink down, dropping the bear onto the carpet. She would look to the left and right, avoiding my fierce gaze.

This went on for several weeks. One afternoon, I was lying on the carpet with Autumn, holding her on my belly and snuggling her. I looked over at the bear. Autumn loved sucking on that bear, and I loved her so much, I decided she could have it. I reached out and removed the bear from the shelf, placing it on the ground in front of her nose.

“Here, baby,” I said while setting the bear down. “You can have it.”

At first, Autumn just looked at me. She had been told over and over that the bear was not hers, yet here I was offering it up. Finally, after some coaxing, she took the bear and started sucking on it. As was her usual m.o., after she sucked on it long enough to loosen the fabric, she tore a hole in it and ripped out its guts, leaving puffles of stuffing all over the apartment. Such was the fate of stuffed animals in our household.

For the holidays, we made an appointment and took Autumn in to JC Penney for a family photo. Dan and I dressed in our Christmas clothes and looked like complete dorks. Autumn looked flashy in her Christmas ribbon and bell. The photo I have from that day is of her in a Christmas box, the two of us grinning behind her as if we’d just opened a gift to find a lanky puppy inside. Her tongue is lolling and her eyes are shining. She looks so pleased to be alive.

Autumn traveled with me wherever I went. When classes began in the fall, I took her to school with me. Some professors did not mind the puppy who laid at my feet during lectures. There was a main campus with a central courtyard, and across the street from the main campus there was a long row of buildings that housed the English and Political Science departments, the rooms I frequented most. Generally, the professors in the buildings away from the central campus were the most willing to allow a dog to attend classes.

One afternoon when it was still hot, I left Autumn in the car with the windows rolled halfway down. I had a meeting with a professor in the political science department. Five minutes into my meeting, I heard shouting in the hall and a woof. Uh oh!

I ran into the hall to see a couple of women chasing Autumn down the hall away from me.

“Autumn!” I called to her. She skidded to a stop and turned towards my voice, then she gamboled towards me, her paws slipping on the linoleum. The two students almost ran into her and each other.

“Your dog crawled through the window,” said one of the women.

“It’s not safe,” the other scolded. “You should have left her tied up at home.” Was she nuts? I would never leave my dog “tied up at home.”

“She came in to find me,” I explained. “Next time I will bring her with me or close the windows further.” I was rather surprised that Autumn had escaped. The windows were only open about five inches, but apparently that was enough for my little dog to wriggle through.

“You better,” said the woman. “She could get killed on the highway.” I blanched at the thought and cuddled Autumn close to my chest. I would do anything to protect my puppy.

Not long after that, I was walking Autumn with me on her leash. I had been reading the Barbara Woodhouse book No Bad Dogs and working with chain training Autumn. She was a quick learner and had taken to leash training easily. She seemed to enjoy walking beside me, and would look up at me every few steps as we sauntered along.

By this time, Dan and I were both experiencing fairly extreme culture shock, as well as homesickness. We had been in Bristol about four months, and were constantly amazed how different it was from our home state.  I think part of the problem was our assumption that because the town was in the United States, it would be pretty much the same as where we had grown up, in Oregon.  This presumption was an error on our part.  I had lived in other countries, but moving to those places, I had expected radical differences.  Dan and I had not considered that living in our new town would be almost like moving to another country entirely.  The food, the politics, the religion, the dialect, and more were all quite unlike what we were used to.  It was a completely different culture.

One of our biggest adjustments to Bristol was the cigarette smoking. Tobacco was still a thriving cash crop in Virginia and Tennessee. Smoking was allowed in grocery stores. The non-smoking section in restaurants often comprised only three or four tables, usually in a place with no ventilation, making the fact of the section being non-smoking something of a joke.

There was also a major difference in how local people treated their animals. Sure, there were people in the part of Oregon we were from who tied their dogs out, but it was the exception rather than the rule. In Bristol and the towns near it, we saw dogs tied outside homes everywhere. During that winter, there was a cold spell where temperatures dropped below zero degrees Fahrenheit, and all of the local newscasters urged people to bring their animals in for a couple of nights because of the cold.  It simply was not the norm to do so.  In our apartment complex, the other tenants were shocked and surprised that we kept Autumn in the house with us, and told us as much. We also had a pet rat, which was nearly unheard of.

Another major difference between Bristol, and indeed the whole east coast it seemed, was the rain. In Oregon, we would get occasional downpours, but for the most part, it drizzled most of the year. In contrast, the rain on the east coast would arrive suddenly and fill every available space with running, rushing, swirling water. The drainage systems were different as well, with fewer ditches and runoffs for the water. The result was that when it rained, there would often be small floods. The creek down the hill from our apartment was especially inclined to overflow its banks during these rainstorms.

Across the parking lot from our apartment, there were three mobile homes that the owner of the property also rented out. One of them kept a doghouse about twenty feet from his door, down the hill in the field towards the creek. There were two dogs tied to the doghouse – a frighteningly skinny hound and one of her older puppies. She had given birth in the summer when we first moved in. Gradually all the other puppies had been sold off or given away. The landlord had told us the dogs were supposedly some fancy hunting breed, but you could not tell by looking at them, at least if their care was any indication. They were both sacks of bones and covered in fleas and dirt. The soil in the area was a reddish clay that turned almost sandy when it was dry. Flecks of it filled their fur, giving them both a reddish tinge.

One night in late fall, it began raining like crazy. Huge, splattery drops came down by the bucketful, drenching everything within seconds. We could see the dogs standing in the rapidly rising water. The puppy especially was having a tough time because the water rose nearly to his neck.

Dan and I ran through the dark, first to the apartments, then from one mobile home to another asking who owned the dogs. Everyone said they did not know, but thought they belonged to the mobile home closest to the animals. We banged on the flimsy door. No one answered. We could hear a television over the pounding rain and the lights were on, so we banged again, both of us soaked to the bone. Finally, a man came to the door, eyeing us suspiciously. He was wearing a tattered flannel shirt and dirty, baggy pants. His hair stuck up all over his head, his chin covered in sparse hairs. His cheek was filled with tobacco, with some brown spittle clinging to the hairs at the edge of his mouth.

“Are those your dogs?” I shouted over the deafening rain, pointing to the two sodden creatures down the hill.

“Yeah, so?” he sneered at me.

“That puppy, he’s going to drown,” I turned and pointed at the dog. “See? The water is already up to his neck. And it’s really cold.”

“That water ain’t agoin’ a hurt it,” the man snarled at me, slamming the door in my face. I looked at Dan.  Now what? The dog was tied to a leash only maybe three feet long. There was no way he could survive if the water rose even a couple of more inches.

Without even discussing it, Dan and I ran and untied the dogs. We could not see taking them into our house. The apartment was so small and the dogs so filthy and wet, they would probably have ruined the carpet, and we could not afford to be evicted. Instead we took them up the hill to a small shed that was built on stilts about three feet above the ground. We tied them to one of the stilts under the building.

I stayed with the dogs while Dan ran back to the house to get them some food. The puppy was shivering so hard, I was afraid he was going to have some kind of an attack or something. He was pure black, bone skinny and his fur covered in mud, but he had kind, brown eyes and looked up at me as if to thank me for getting him out of the mass of running water.

Dan returned with two heaping bowls of food. The dogs gulped the food down so fast, we were worried it would make them sick, but after the bowls were empty, they just wagged their tails and came towards us, cowering and wriggling, rolling over to show their bellies. We pet them and rubbed their ears, pleased the dogs were okay.

When we got back into the house, we called Jeannie and told her about the dogs. She lived with three other women, all of them dog lovers.

“We are going to come and get them,” she told us. “I don’t care if they arrest us. That man should be shot for animal abuse.”

“He probably won’t even notice they are gone,” I told her. “We never see him have anything to do with them. And the mom dog is so thin, you could put your fingers between her ribs.”

The next morning, the dogs were not there. Jeannie told me that she and her roommates had come and taken them both away. Sadly, the puppy later died. He had a case of canine leukemia and was too far gone to save. The mom dog, though, grew to be fat and happy. The girls had her spayed and found her a new home.

The man in the trailer never said a word to us. He did not ask if we knew what happened to the dogs, and didn’t get any other dogs while were living there.

Read Autumn — Chapter 3

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Autumn — Chapter 1

July 19, 2005
As I write, Autumn is lying on the floor beside the desk in my office. She is dying. Her body is shutting down. We have an appointment with the vet this evening. I keep thinking it will be like the last few times I thought she was done, but she is so much more DONE now.

It reminds me of getting ready to give birth. I would feel the Braxton Hicks contractions, and they would hurt, but they were nothing like the real thing. Autumn has had some bad moments, moments that made me drive her down to Dr. Fletcher, only to have us sent home – thank God, a reprieve – but this is it, the real thing. Her life will be over; mine will start something different. I am looking forward to some of the differences, but I would take all the bad just to have her in my life, have her the way she’s been until recently.

She barks too much. She gets into trash and takes food she shouldn’t. But she’s also my shadow and my friend. She loves me with a devotion I do not deserve. All of her life, she has followed me wherever I go. She is my guardian angel. She will be gone too soon.

Chapter 1

Pigs danced in sequins and cowboy hats, corpulent tubes in clothing, their mistress equally as lovely, with cowgirl boots and a twang.  As our send off to college, we were watching pigs dancing.  Was this for real?

I wanted to go to school in the south.  Yes, there would be writing and riding, my two very favorite things, but the real allure was that the school was in the southern hemisphere.  What the hell was I thinking?

My boyfriend wasn’t coming for writing, riding, or the south. He was following me.  What the hell was he thinking?

As part of our goodbye, his parents planned a party and invited all of our closest friends and family. They insinuated that they had planned an incredible surprise.  Dan and I were certain it was air-conditioning for our car. We were crossing the country in July and the car had none. This seemed like the perfect gift to us.

We were wrong. As we sat in the cool midday sun watching the pigs crossing mini bridges wearing mini skirts and fringe, Dan and I eyed one another, despairing that we had not purchased the air conditioner ourselves.  The pigs had certainly been a surprise, just not what we expected.

The following day, the car loaded with everything that had not already been shipped, we waved goodbye to our family and prayed to one another that the drive would not roast us alive.  But really, we were not worried. We were excited about the upcoming journey, and I was all the more so because I knew, deep in my bones, that I would get a dog. I saw her sitting in the front seat of my car, going everywhere with me. I felt her presence there on the seat beside me. I had no doubt that she would exist. Driving across country, I brought it up several times that my top priority upon arrival would be finding a dog.

“Don’t you think we should think about jobs and things first?” Dan would ask.

“We can look for jobs with a dog, or we can look for both at the same time,” I replied, undeterred. “Plus I will have the work study job at the barn already, so I can look for a dog while you look for work.” Dan did not look convinced, but did not argue with me.

Once we reached Bristol, the town that lay on the border of Virginia and Tennessee, finding a dog remained my top priority. Dan had not yet experienced my enthusiasm. I think he really did not want to get a dog and thought having one would be a hassle.

I was adamant though, and I told anyone who would listen that I was going to get a dog. This proved to be a fruitful tactic. Jeannie, one of my new coworkers at the horse stable, had a roommate with a pregnant dog. She offered me one of the puppies when they were born. She warned me though, that the puppies were likely to be very large dogs, as Maude, the mother, was a beast.

“She is half mastiff,” she informed me, pushing the broom up the aisle. “Half lab, half mastiff, we think,” she added.

“I don’t care if it’s a big dog,” I told Jeannie, helping her to scoop the sweepings into a dust pan. Dan, at the stable with me to help out until he found gainful employment, only shook his head.

“We can at least look!” I exclaimed to him.

I told Jeanne that I wanted to investigate the so-called beast, but that I would likely take a puppy anyway.

The apartment we lived in was not large, by any stretch of the imagination. I marvel now, that we had managed to locate and rent an apartment across country in those pre-internet days. I had somehow figured out the name of the local paper and subscribed, then located the apartment through the classified ads. Over several telephone calls with the landlord, we rented it, sight unseen.

Considering how we procured the apartment, it really wasn’t as awful as it could have been, but it wasn’t that great either. It was out of town about five miles, lying nearly on the border of Virginia and Tennessee. We were on the Tennessee side of the line, but could actually throw gravel into Virginia, we were that close to the state border.

The owner and landlord had turned an old shop into eight apartments, four on each end of the building, two on top and two on the bottom. He did not have much imagination in using the space, and each apartment was designed like a single-wide mobile home. Our apartment was on the second floor. We climbed stairs to a wide deck we shared with our neighbors and entered through a sliding glass door that opened into the dining room and kitchen on the left, and living room on the right. A narrow hall ran the length of the apartment up the right side of the building, with a bathroom and bedroom opening to the left of the hallway. Our bedroom was at the end of the hall, its width that of the apartment. The walls were covered in mobile home wallboard, the fake wood kind with brown stripes. The place was carpeted in pure 1970s gold shag. I could not complain, however; there was a washer and dryer in the bathroom.

The landlord’s own actual mobile home sat up near the street. Our apartments and the parking lot next to them were in the field behind his trailer. Beyond our building were pastures full of cows and deciduous trees. A bubbling brook ran through the field next to the fence separating our field from the cow pasture. While the apartment was rather small, there was a lot of space outside, which reduced my concern about the size of whatever dog we obtained.

Dan continued to advise me to wait, and continued to insist that we should get a smaller dog. Through the phone and thousands of miles away, our parents counseled us against getting a puppy, and they certainly felt we should not get a big dog. They had heard us complain all too frequently of our diminutive and ratty apartment.

I ignored them. I cannot say what single-minded determination drove me on. I did not care if my new dog turned out to be an elephant. I wanted a dog and my new friend had puppies coming. It wasn’t rocket science.

I wonder now at my intensity. Was Autumn’s spirit out there, forcing me to make the choice? Did she want me to choose her after her birth? I don’t know. I had wanted a dog in Oregon, but for some reason, the move across country gave me the encouragement to make sure it happened.

We also were not one-hundred percent certain the dog in question would be huge, in spite of Maude’s size. There were two potential fathers in the litter. One was a German shepherd mix named Jasper. The other was a border collie named Cody. Both of these dogs were smaller than Maude. Genetics worked in both directions.

When I went to work at the barn the morning of August 16, 1993, Jeannie looked like the cat who swallowed a mouse. One look and I knew – the puppies were born. Dan still had not found a job and was helping me at the barn. We all worked impatiently to finish, then drove quickly to Jeannie’s house.

It was already hot when we pulled up the winding, dusty driveway late that morning. Jeannie’s house was also out from town, near the end of a gravel drive. A rambling, green, two story house with pointy gables, it was surrounded on three sides by a wide, wraparound porch.

On the porch, away from the front door, Maude was stretched on her side, twelve puppies in various states covered her body. Some were suckling. Some were sleeping. Some were crawling over the others. Some just lay there like lumps letting the others romp all over them. None had eyes. None had ears. Every dog color was represented. They were utterly adorable. I had no idea how I was going to choose.

What finally helped me choose was the moon. One wee puppy had a white, crescent on the back of her neck right behind her ears – a moon. It was about three inches long and a perfect arc. The rest of her body was a creamy golden brown. She had white tips on her paws and a funny, white hourglass on her chest, but the tiny moon stood out, a beacon ensuring I would choose her.

On our drive home after making our choice, I asked Dan, “What should we name her?”

“I have no idea. Mooney?” he answered.

I laughed. “Should we give her a human-type name like Edith, or a doggish name like Spot?”

“I don’t know. It depends on the name,” Dan said.

I thought for a minute. “She is such lovely autumn colors. Maybe we should call her Autumn,” I mused. “All that beige, with brown, and some white. She is colored like the end of summer, with the moon shining over all of it.”

“Maybe we could call her Summer?”

“Summer,” I said. Then, “Autumn.” Autumn seemed to flow from the tongue.

“I like Autumn,” Dan told me.

“Me too. I think that is what we should name her.”

Over the next few days, we made some other suggestions, but Autumn stuck. The name seemed to suit her. After we spent some time visiting her and calling her Autumn, no other name fit.

Two days after the puppies were born, Jeannie called to tell me her roommate’s father had cut off the puppies’ tails. We were both furious. These were mutt dogs, why cut off their tails? I went immediately to see and discovered that, thank heaven, Autumn’s tail had been spared. The guy had only cut the tails of half the puppies. One had bled to death as a result. What an idiot. Unfortunately, Jeannie’s dog was one of the dogs chosen for a docking. He now sported a stubby, black lump.

How different some things in my life would have been if Autumn’s tail had been cut. I would still have some Christmas tree ornaments she wagged off the tree, and several beverages whacked from low-lying tables would not have had to be cleaned up. But those mishaps were small compared to having a dog who showed her emotion so readily with her tail.

Over the next few weeks, Dan and I went to visit Autumn every day we could. We would sit with Jeannie and her roommates and watch television or movies in the evenings and hold Autumn in our laps.

At first, her eyes and ears were sealed shut. She held her four legs out stiffly, her claws splayed until we settled her next to the warmth of our bodies. She would fall asleep in our laps until we rose to leave.

A little over a week after she was born, we could see tiny slits in her eyelids, shiny brown eyes peaking through. Not long after that, it was obvious she could hear us. When we would make noises she would turn and look at us. The girls had moved Maude into their basement and off the porch to escape the ravaging humidity and heat, and to keep the puppies dry during the near daily rainstorms. Pretty soon the puppies were waddling around in the makeshift pen in the corner.

When Autumn was five weeks old, Jeannie called to tell me it was time to take her home. I had not been expecting to do so until she was eight weeks old. But apparently Maude, tired of feeding eleven babies, had stopped allowing them to nurse. They had been eating puppy food for over a week. They were rambunctious and growing, and the girls wanted them out of their house.

I was thrilled, and Dan had come around as well. All those visits to see our baby had warmed his heart, although I think the size of her paws had him nervous. She looked like her paws were going to be huge, which meant she would probably be large as well. We still weren’t sure if she was Jasper’s or Cody’s, although it was obvious from the puppies’ colors and various sizes that both fathers had impregnated Maude.

The two of us had gone shopping and bought Autumn a new, grey collar and matching leash, dog dishes, and toys. Like parents waiting to give birth, we were ready to bring our new baby home.

When we arrived to pick Autumn up from Jeannie’s house, she asked, “Are you sure you want Autumn? Because if you don’t, we have lots of puppies looking for new homes.”

I stared at her, incredulous. Why wouldn’t we want her? Was she kidding? We had gone and visited her nearly every day. I had held her for hours, even before she had ears that could hear or eyes that could see. “What makes you think we would want another dog?”

“My roommates want you to take another dog because Autumn is the friendliest of all the puppies. You know that she is the first to come running whenever anyone goes into the basement,” she informed me, smiling. “And she most loves cuddling and petting.”

It was true. Autumn loved people and had no reservations about visiting anyone who was nearby. I read later that the younger a dog is exposed to humans, the more socialized and happy the dog will later be. I believe that all that hugging, cuddling, and petting I did when Autumn was little made her the friendly, sweet puppy who came running ahead of the pack.

Jeannie knew there wasn’t a chance we would leave Autumn in favor of another puppy. She smiled as we gathered Autumn in our arms for the ride home.

Dan drove. I rode in the passenger seat, my little baby on my lap. She had on her huge collar. She put her paws on the edge of the door and looking out the window. I snuggled and cuddled her, thrilled she was finally with me.

First thing upon arriving home Autumn had her first bath. She was covered in fleas. The fleas were so dense it was like she had a second, dark, wiggling skin. I had to lather her up about three times to kill all of them. She also had a little pot belly, so I was sure she had worms. I had purchased dewormer ahead of time, knowing that with all those fleas, tapeworms were a guarantee.

We had planned that Autumn would stay in the bathroom for her first night. We were worried about potty on the rug. I bundled together some towels and blankets and made her a bed. I brought in a ticking alarm clock because I had read that the ticking reminds puppies of their mother’s heartbeats. We snuggled and kissed her, placed her on the floor, and closed the door.

She began immediately to howl and yelp. Loudly. We climbed into bed and waited for her to calm down.

She didn’t. The howls only grew in intensity.

Dan, finally employed, had to get up at four in the morning for his job. He was never going to get any sleep with this noise, plus I was worried about the neighbors.

“What are we going to do?” he moaned, trying to cover his head with a pillow.

I could not stand it. I could not let my baby be so sad. I clambered out of bed and went down the hall to let Autumn out of the bathroom.

“If you give in,” Dan informed me, “She will never learn.”

“If I don’t give in, neither of us will sleep,” I retorted. I snuggled Autumn a bit, then tried again to leave her and go to bed. I did not even make it down the hall to my bedroom before the bedlam began again.

I decided to erect some walls at either end of the hall and place newspapers all over the hall floor. I looked around for something that would work as a barrier and finally settled on cardboard boxes.

“What are you doing?” Dan hollered from the bedroom.

“I’m trying to make a place for her to sleep,” I informed him, cutting into the boxes and attempting to tape wide sections to the wallboard. The tape would not stick. Damn.

I then used push pins to attach the cardboard to the walls. This worked to keep the walls up. However, the pen I created did not make Autumn any happier. As soon as I placed her on the newspapers, she sat down and howled and yelled, louder this time.

I headed back into the bedroom to wait and see if she would quiet down. Amid the screeching, we heard some rustling coming from the hallway.

“What is she doing?” Dan asked me.

“I’m not sure, but I don’t want to go out there because she will see me and it will be worse.”

We waited. After a few minutes, there were some rustlings again, and then I heard Autumn immediately outside our bedroom door. I opened it to see our puppy, the cardboard walls felled behind her, waiting to be picked up.

In spite of the fact that I did not want poop or pee on the rug, this wasn’t working. I brought her into our room and into our bed.

Dan and I settled down into the covers with Autumn between us. She was so small, I was afraid she might fall and hurt herself. I turned off the light.

Within minutes, she started whining and then yelping.

“Seriously?” I asked her. “You don’t want to sleep with us either? What do you want?” Sighing heavily, I sat up, holding Autumn close. This seemed to be the only way to keep her from crying. After a time, I laid back down with her between us. She yowled for a few minutes, shuffling around in the darkness. I then heard her jump off the bed, but she wasn’t barking. The silence continued unabated and we fell asleep.

The following morning, I discovered her slumbering beneath our bed. There was a piddle on the rug. I ran Autumn to the patio and down the stairs. When she squatted again, I shouted, “Good dog!” Autumn regarded me as if I were a fool then sniffed the place she had peed.

We repeated a shortened version the next night. I tried the bathroom, but Autumn yowled before I even closed the door. I skipped the failed hall kennel and took her to our room. We started on the bed, and she barked until she jumped off and crawled underneath. It seemed that under the bed was where she wanted to be.

Over the next few days, whenever she slept, she went under the bed or under the couch in the living room. We had purchased some drops to place on newspapers that mimic the smell of urine so puppies will pee on them. This worked about two-thirds of the time. During the day especially, we could see that she was going to pee because she would sniff the floor and circle. We would either toss her on the newspapers or outside, whichever was closer. Sometimes she peed in response to our hollering when we saw her circling.

The floor in that apartment though, especially the hallway, was getting peed on. The carpet was smelly anyway, and the pee covered in various chemicals wasn’t an improvement. I finally broke down and bought a small carpet cleaner. It wasn’t much help, but it covered the chemical pee smell.

Autumn was so tiny. I have pictures of her standing on the edge of an upholstered chair, looking down at the floor that must have seemed so far away. I would put her in the laundry basket on the dryer when I was doing laundry. She would sit in a pile of clean clothes and watch me work. She was too small to jump out, and seem disinclined to do so anyway. Her paws were enormous in comparison to how little she was, so we were certain she was going to be a very large dog, but I didn’t care and neither did Dan; we were in complete love with her. She had won our hearts. Forever after she came to live with us, I described her as my first child, this little dog we plucked from a litter of twelve on the day she was born.

Read Autumn — Chapter 2

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Question

Sidenote: It drives me to distraction the way web sites bounce all over the place while loading these days. It looks like a page is loaded and you click on something, but no.  It’s not loaded and the click results in something entirely different than what you wanted, which then forces you to go back, and then wait again for the page to load, making sure it’s completely loaded, which means sitting there. Okay. Long sentence.

In ANY case, my real point here is to state that I am writing a book with various journal entries throughout the book, and I’m wondering, should I put in dates? Or should I just say JOURNAL and then write it in italics so the reader knows it’s a journal entry. Since I’m not using the year because it could be any year (after a certain point when the internet and smart phones exist because the characters use these items), but should I add the month?

Anyone who cares to answer, please do. Thank you.

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Anticlimactic

The interesting thing for me in finally finishing one of my books is how anticlimactic it has been.  I finished it, then sat here and thought, Okay, it’s done.  I will have to read through it and edit, but the bulk of it is complete. It seemed as if the occasion deserved something more, but it really didn’t.  If there has been a sincere shift in my thinking over the last few years it is this:  life is about the ride, not the destination.  This book just proved to me how much this has sunk in and become a part of me.

Time to rouse baby and get her dressed.  I love the smile she gives me when she awakens.  This morning before I got out of bed, I was lying next to her and she wakened for a moment, then patted my chest for milky, and gave me her lovely smile before latching on and going back to sleep.  Ah, baby love is the best love of all!

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Miscellaneous Blatherings

I have finished two chapters in two days, but now I have to work at the job that makes me money.  I don’t want to.  I’m burned out.  I took a small break, but I think I need a vacation where I leave the continent.  We are planning one of those, but it will not arrive soon enough.  There are other things happening in the meantime that I look forward to.  I just need to keep plugging away at the day job until I get over the funk.  It will happen; it has before.

Isabel has taken to letting her dollies nurse on her, or nurse on me before she nurses.  She is very generous, that one.

I have also been working on the second book at the same time as the first. Both are right there, in my brain, so when I want to work on one, I start typing and out it comes.  The problem is that I want to finish both and there isn’t enough time in the day.  But it will happen.  I’m glad enough for the work that is coming.

Milla is getting taller and growing things like breasts.  She complained about the bra I bought her so I just bought her some bigger ones.  As has been the case since she was tiny she likes her clothing five sizes too big.  I have to say that I prefer that to the opposite alternative.

Our next door neighbor is moving away.  Ours has not been a cordial acquaintance.  Mostly it hasn’t been an acquaintance at all, but what contact there has been has been unfriendly. She does not seem to like us, and we really don’t like her in return.  We have vowed to take a pie to the new tenant, hoping that a beginning kindness will at least give rise to the possibility of a friendly acquaintance.  We shall see.  I am glad, though, that the neighbor who does not like us is leaving.

It is sunnyish today, which is an improvement over downpours.  I’m glad that it is not brightly sunny or I would lament leaving work until the last day.  As it is, I will get it done without grumbling that I’m doing it in exchange for good weather.

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Monday

One of my several books is finally coming together.  I have been plugging away steadily and actually making a dent in getting it done.  The result though, is that when I have time to sit and write, it doesn’t happen here.  Many days, like this one, the choice is eat, write, cello, or French.  Usually only eat wins.  Tonight I bought plant starts for the garden, and since it was not raining I decided to plant those instead of all my other potential projects, so I managed only eat and plant.  Oh, and pull weeds.  First I had to pull weeds out of the planter boxes in order to plant the vegetables in them.  The ground was soft and loamy, perfect for pulling weeds and also for planting.  Oregon’s weather today was as schizophrenic as ever, unable to decide between warm sun and pounding rain.  I’m a bit dismayed by the rains we are getting.  They are more like east coast rains than typical Oregon rains, but things are changing in the weather world, so I should not be surprised.

In any case, it was pouring rain when I bought the baby plants, but by the time we got home, I made dinner and we ate it, the sun had decided to come out and stay out until dusk when I completed the planting.  This was quite satisfactory.  I love digging in the dirt and growing things.  It makes me feel centered.  Isabel came outside with me and helped. She scolded Ava whenever Ava barked at the wind, or the walking neighbor, or the squirrel, or the cat, or the way her fur fell across her face.  Isabel also made her hoo sound and showed me plants, helped me to pick weeds, and showed me how her coat snaps.  She liked pulling out the old leaves from the flower bulbs that have already bloomed for the year.  She stacked them in the stack of discarded plant parts and old rooty things.  Then she watched closely as I dug holes and placed baby lettuce or baby corn into them.  Adorable.

I finished this gardening project at dusk and my hands were filthy, so I figured it was as good a time as any to take a bath.  However, taking a bath and getting baby ready for bed took up the whole evening, leaving me basically no time for cello, French, or writing.  Now I should be sleeping but I’m typing this.  Why?  I have no idea.  I just pulled out the computer and started to go.  I can’t say what insane motivation drove me to it.  I am going to overcome this motivation now and go to sleep because the only time I’m going to get writing done during the week is in the early morning, which means getting up early, and if I am going to get any sleep at all (which is necessary in my brain for coherent writing), I have to stop this now and turn out the light.

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Pointless Rambling

Ahh, Lara never writes here anymore.  I’m tempted to stop using this blog and use the other one I started some time ago.  I like that one because the one person in particular who stalks me here doesn’t know where that one is at so I can say what I want without worrying I’ll get grief for it later.  It’s the Pure Med Spa thing that keeps me keeping this blog going.  I get a new note every few days from people screwed over by that company.  It has gone through about four or five incarnations since being called Pure Med Spa, yet it keeps on ticking and stealing from the public.  Seriously, the FBI needs to get involved.

My baby girl is getting bigger and bigger.  I do write on her blog DaysofIsabel.  I don’t keep it up as often as I envisioned in the beginning, but more frequently than I would have expected.  I love my babies, both the 11 month old baby and the 11 year old baby!

This has been a weird week of running into and reconnecting with old friends.  First, I ran into a lawyer friend I had lost touch with a few years back.  Then I reconnected with a guy I dated so long ago, all the major grownup things in my life had not happened yet.  Then I ran into my old paralegal from the toxic snake pit. Then yesterday I visited with a high school chum at his garage sale.  It really has been interesting reconnecting with all of these people.  I hope we can maintain better contact going forward.

We live in a neighborhood of old, lovely homes.  They are high-end homes from the turn of the century.  What I like about most of them is that they are sedate and solid, without being ostentatious or pretentious like so many of the disgusting mansions are these days. There are a few that are a bit too large, but mostly they are just really gorgeous older houses along a ridge that overlooks the city.

Apparently, one of our neighbors in one of these houses either passed away or moved to a nursing home.  There has been an estate sale going on for the last three days.  On the second day, after fighting yet again to get out of my driveway because of all the foot and parking traffic, I discovered what was going on and went over to investigate. It isn’t often I get to go inside one of these lovely old houses.

The surprise was how truly unspectacular this particular house is.  It certainly has the potential to be restored back to its original splendor, but as is often the case with old houses, it has been bombarded by ugly from the last several decades.  Hideous carpet covers much of the hardwood floors.  The bathrooms are tiny, the fixtures old and nothing special.  The kitchen is dated circa 1960, but not in a good way.  And the worst transgression is that someone built a covered porch thing out in the back that blocks the view from the house.  It’s hideous and large and seems not to accomplish much in the way of being a nice place to sit outside.

There were signs offering the house for sale at $632,000.  If I had that to spend on a house, I would not buy that one.  I think $400,000 is more its range, considering all the updating that will have to happen.  I also overheard some discussion about issues with the plumbing.  Of course, based on the prices these estate sellers were asking for simple junk, I’m not surprised someone is thinking they can get that amount for the sale price.  There was a set of big, old speakers they had priced at $800.  For some reason there was  a lot of old stereo equipment and they wanted 100s of dollars for each piece.  I have been looking for an older stereo and record player and based on what I have seen out there, those sellers were smoking crack to think an old set of speakers could bring $800.  They had a couple of old amps similar to those I have seen at other sales for which they were asking $250 and $300.  Nuts.  That’s how most stuff was there.  Some things were cheaper; they were offering 50% off anything under $50.  I bought a Shaft record in perfect condition for $1.50, a ceramic pot from Italy for $6, and a stuffed bunny for Isabel for .50c.  But most of the stuff was overpriced and nothing special.  They are going to have to drastically reduce to get rid of a lot of it.  Much will likely end up in a landfill.  This is how it goes at the end of our life if we have collected a bunch of not much.

Today I have a lot to do.  I have to finish some applications, pay some bills, finish an article, go shopping for baby party invitations, make a risotto, get the house ready for the busy week ahead, type a petition, and get some other petitions ready for hearings on Tuesday.  Tomorrow I have “oral surgery,” what they call it when they inject bone into the hole in your head where a tooth fell out 15 years ago in order to make bone grow for an implant.  Fun stuff.  They say it won’t hurt as much as a filling, but we will see.  I am not working though, in case it hurts more or for longer.

Isabel is up and crawling around.  It is time to get started on our day. We cuddled for several moments when she first awakened.  I love snuggling her. She is my joy.

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Softening the Edges of My Rage

Have you ever wished for someone’s demise?  Have you ever hated with such intensity that if the object of your derision were to meet with an untimely accident you would have to hope there would be for you an alibi, because such an accident would draw suspicion upon you?  I have been there twice.  It is not a comforting place to be.

The first was the sociopathic girlfriend of my ex.  She wanted to destroy me and in her attempts, I would imagine my revenge to help me cope.  There were moments where I would fantasize her death, giving myself the satisfaction of picturing a silvery knife so sharp, its blade razor thin slipping along the surface of her neck, aligning with skin and veins, blood seeping and pooling around her nape.  At other moments I divined her foot, uselessly pressing a brake line that had been cut, her car careening helplessly over a guardrail and smashing into a tree.

Eventually I learned to circle the wagons against this woman and she turned her attentions elsewhere, but not before making my life a living hell.  After a time the revenge fantasies ceased and life continued not quite as before; I carried a little cloud about me for a while.  I needed redemption.  I’m not sure it ever came, but I did move to a new place where I could remove her from my head. She took up too much space there for a time.

In recent months I move in and out of hatred again.  This one certainly takes more space than is deserved or warranted.  For every moment it is in my head, I leave no space for love or creativity.  It doesn’t come often, but when it does, it fills me with the intensity of a raging conflagration, burning and spitting and roiling.  No wonder hell is described as fire; hating someone is a sort of hell and it blisters and scalds.  I know enough pop psychology to know that such intense hatred only harms the one who is feeling it.  On an intellectual level I understand its ramifications, and so I bend my body into yogi poses, pound my feet in Nike sneakers, force my mind away from conversations that can have no solution, breathe down into the soles of my feet.  It works–most of the time.  But then it doesn’t and with it I must contend again.

Into this hatred happened a very young, very naive and stupid girl.  She was like some desperate and obsequious puppy, hoping to be liked, having no idea what the hell she had stumbled into.  I wanted to kick her.  I had no desire to befriend this naive creature trying so hard to be nice.  I wanted to fold her in half, destroy her hopefulness, rub her face in the anguish and rage she could not know or understand.  She tripped along, coy and carefree, like a puppy with her tongue lolling, tail wagging between her legs, hoping I would be friendly. Because she came from the one I so despised, I hated who she was and what she represented before she ever said a word.  I wanted her to back away, to get out, to leave what she had found.  She was not welcome.  She had no business.  I wanted her to go and to take her syrup with her.  After I aimed several poison darts in her direction, she started to get the idea.  For a moment I felt sorry for her and tried to warn her against where she was headed, but she wanted none of that, and nipped at me.  For this nip, I bit.  Hard.

I have been advised to write, to rend this vitriol from my veins.  Write she says.  Write.  It doesn’t matter what you say, just write.  If you can place this things that are in your head in a place outside of you then you will come to a place where they no longer matter.  Write.  Remove them from you.  Link them to someplace else.  And so I do.  I have for today for this moment softened the edges of the rage.

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Venom (fiction)

The one asked the other if she could say what drew her to him in the first place.  Her answers were heartfelt, loving.

He sneered and said he did not believe her, that she was lying.

Later the other asked again if she could say what drew her to him in the first place.  She could not.  All she could remember was the ugly sneer.  It made her want violence.  She imagined her fist connecting with flesh, skin rupturing skin, bones causing breaks in the tissue, blood angling for the surface.  She imagined saliva aimed with sharp precision.  She imagined sarcasm.  All she felt was ire.  She said that the heartfelt answers were gone, that they had been true, but were no longer.

Only bile remained.

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Riding in the Morning (Fiction)

I ride my horse nearly every morning, alone, regardless of the weather.  It empties my head, fuzzy yet clear, like that time between waking and sleep when thoughts slip unbidden through the ether into consciousness.  Riding in the morning keeps me in this happy purgatory, lets me dream while awake.  The rhythm is hypnotic.  Even.  These rides for me are like those times in a movie when someone is running through the forest and the camera shows a snippet or a piece of them, but mostly we see the blur of the trees, the movement of running feet, possibly what they are running toward. Or from.

I ride even in the rain,  covering myself with plastic, the studs in my horse’s shoes keeping us from slipping.  In my yellow rain slicker I appear as a golden alien, the crackling of the plastic keeping me from hearing anything beyond the rhythm of the hoofbeats under my body.

My favorite mornings are in early fall, when the possibility of cold and ice tickles, but the day will still be warm.  The air simultaneously lingers and moves.  Later in the day it will hover, but on an early fall morning, the air allows passage.

There is a private road along which I like to ride.  To the west lies a hayfield surrounded by a wooden fence. To the east immediately next to the road is a forest.  Between the road in the forest there is a strip of ground about fifteen feet wide.  The owners of the road keep the grass here mowed.  It is perfect for riding, wide enough to keep the ground from turning to muck, close enough to the tree wall to feel encased, protected.  In summer the trees keep the sun off our backs.  When it rains, they are umbrellas against the full force of the water spilling onto our bodies.  Some days I venture into the forest; others I stick to the road.

One of my favorite parts of these rides is the smells that fill my nostrils, my head, my body.  There is the deep, pungent warmth of the loamy soil from the forest that even in the height of the summer seems always damp.  On the mornings when the owners of the road along which I ride cut the grass, I bask in its sweet, genuine odor.  I ride in the morning and breathe in the smells.  The rides are bliss.

I named my horse Pluto.  Like a mythical beast taken from the novel of a school girl, his legs are long and graceful, his coat the color of ebony, his tail full and wavy.  My riding friends envy Pluto’s tail.  Many horses have thin and wispy tails. Their owners cover them in tail bags and pick out tangles with their fingers in an effort to ensure every hair is protected.  Pluto’s tail requires no such coddling; it is coarse and unruly.

On this fall morning, I ride out early, close to dawn.  Through the clouds, the moon still hovers near the edge of the horizon.  The air is chilly, promising it will soon overtake any hints of summer warmth.  I start slowly, warming Pluto’s muscles and my own.  I am not wearing a heavy jacket, my rain slicker tied at my waist.  Although the wind is cold enough I can see my breath and the grey sky is low enough that rain seems imminent, I know the ride will heat both of us soon enough.

As I turn down the lane next to the hayfield, I nudge Pluto into a canter.  He kicks a bit in anticipation. Cold air makes him fresh and excitable.  As we settle into a rhythm, the smell of grass and falling leaves fills my nostrils, the air numbs my cheeks.  I reach up and press my helmet more firmly onto my forehead, a feeble attempt to keep the cold at bay.

I want to know the future, I think as I squeeze Pluto into a canter.  He responds with a kick to the side, pulling down before settling into an easy rhythm.  Or maybe not.  Do I really want to know what is going to happen?  Do I really want to know anything beyond the sound of Pluto’s breathing, his hoofbeats in the grass, the trees flying by?  What would I do if I knew that at the end of the road I would fall, hit my head, and die?  Would I divert my path?  Would I want to know the specifics of every day until the end of my life?  Wouldn’t that be boring?  Where would come the joy in discovering something new if I knew everything in advance?

I don’t think I want to know the future, just that my life will turn out okay.  I think that is generally what people are after when they think they want to know what is going to happen.  Only life doesn’t always give us what we want or we don’t take the steps to get there.  If we knew the future and it was not good, could we change it?  I suppose part of what we would do depends on how we discovered what the future would be.  A crystal ball?  A dream?

Pluto snorts and pulls on the reins.  I shake my head to dispel these thoughts.  Too serious.  I gather my reins and ask Pluto to slow to a trot, then a walk.  Breathing heavily, he tosses his head, then turns and rubs his foamy muzzle on his shoulder leaving a gauzy strip of green goo along his wet skin.  We are both warm now, although it has begun to drizzle.

I turn from the grass to ride into the forest.  The leaves are starting to turn and the underbrush is dry, allowing us access into places that only a few weeks ago were covered in vegetation.  Pluto picks his way over the brush and through the trees.  Every so often he stops, letting me know that the way is not clear.  I allow him to guide us along altering and designing our trail as we go, only keeping a slight feel in the reins.

The rain is increasing, but the leaves overhead block most of the moisture.  I untie the yellow raincoat from my waist and cover myself against the wetness, pulling the hood over my helmet.  It muffles the sound of the rain dripping in the forest.  Pluto’s footfalls reverberate within the plastic coating, mixing with its crinkling.

I check my watch, surprised to learn that I have been riding for over an hour.  I should probably head back, but I don’t have anything to do this morning and I’m enjoying the solitude.  We are deep enough into the forest I know I am going to have to rely on Pluto to ensure our return.  I have done this before, this delving into the forest, buried deep within its underbelly.

I hear birds chirping above me. It strikes me as odd that birds would hang out and sing in the rain, but that is exactly what they are doing.  Don’t they get wet?  Do wet feathers work?  It seems to me that wet feathers would not fly very well, although I suppose the birds do not need to fly to sit on the branches and sing.
In the distance I see something white bobbing on the edge of the creek.  In the grey light, but against the reeds and grasses at the edge of the water nearly in the mud, the white glows.  It is drizzling harder now and the edge of my hood makes seeing difficult.  The folds and creases in the plastic on the raincoat cause the water to dribble off the front rim at odd angles.  With my hood up, I am enclosed in a water tunnel.  It is like seeing through a waterfall.

What is that?

I ride closer.  Whatever is lying there is lumpish and round.  Pluto is not impressed.  He keeps snorting and trying to back away.  I can see the sclera of his eye.  He doesn’t know what this thing is but he wants nothing to do with it.  Yet I am curious.  I squeeze him forward and he obeys.  I want to see.
I dismount and stare, pulling Pluto along behind me.  My hood falls back.  I feel the water begin to take over, but I ignore it and proceed.

Before me, tucked among the reeds, muddy water swirling around his ankles, is a dead man.  A pale, trapped, and hideously distended dead man.  Face up, his eyes are like squinty raisins in the bloated flesh of his face, arms swelling out the ends of the short sleeves of his shirt with its lower buttons popped, his bulging belly protruding above his belt.  He is grotesque.

Pluto snorts and paws, pulling back on the reins, yanking me off balance in the slippery mud along the bank.  I turn and pat him, cooing softly, telling him he is okay.  It is starting to rain harder.  The water sluices down the back of my neck, its rivulets curving between my shoulder blades.  My saddle is saturated, yet I want Pluto to mellow so I can go back to look at the man.

I have a friend who drowned in the Thailand tsunami, pulled into the sea by a vicious undertow during her Christmas vacation.  Is this how she looked after she died?  Like this doughy sausage person, a human loaf too big for its pan, her swimsuit cutting into her flesh, folds of it oozing around the seams?  Were her fingers so swollen they no longer really fit her hands?

It is then that I notice movement beneath the pale whiteness of the man’s thin shirt and see a slithery black thing scuttle across his belly.  Some creatures have already discovered the corpulent smorgasbord.  He is quite a feast, in spite of the water and damp.

Revulsed, I turn away.  Thoughts of salt water bring me hope that dear Angie was not eaten by water bugs, but I am deluding myself.  Sharks and fishes do not notice the salinity.  Her bones might have survived, floating to the ocean floor after the seizure of her flesh, but even these were probably dissolved in something’s stomach acid.  If she drifted ashore in aftermath of the tsunami, in the dense and humid heat of the jungle, more animals than these enjoyed a putrefying meal.

I turn away.  The water moving down my back has reached the top of my pants where my shirt is tucked in.  I can feel it creeping slowly through the fabric.  It is winning.  As I step closer, my foot sinks into the mud.  The edge of the creek is unclear, water and soil combining to create the illusion of solidity.

The stream eddies and swirls around his shoulders, bits of sticks and leaves collected along his edges.  On his neck I see a slug or a leech, but leeches need something living, don’t they?  It is firmly attached, slimy and full, whatever it is.

What to do about this horrendous thing, I do not know.  I would not be able to move him even if I could let Pluto go, which isn’t an option because he’ll leave me stranded here in these woods in favor of the warm and dry barn.  I can hardly blame him.  He can probably smell things I am not capable of.  In this I am glad for the rain; any smells of putrefaction have been rinsed away.

Once I leave, things will be different. I will ride back to the barn and find the barn manager and tell her what I discovered out in the woods.  She will stare at me in disbelief and ask questions, but not many because she is quiet that way.  We will go to the office and phone the authorities together.  They will arrive and want me to try and retrace my steps here.  I may or may not go with them, but if I do, I will be kept at a distance as they mill about him, circling like vultures.  Many people will ask me the same questions over and over, police in uniforms, detectives in regular clothes, everyone in raincoats and slickers.  I will be treated like the victim for having seen him even though I am not the one who has been harmed, the one who is dead.

It will continue to rain in pieces.  I will have to call my office and my husband.  Someone will offer me their mobile phone to make the calls because I have not yet replaced the one I lost riding out here in the woods.  My husband will tut and ask me if I’m okay, but he knows me and knows this would not bother me as much as it would others.  He will not treat me like a victim.

Throughout the day people will hear what I found on my ride in the woods.  First other boarders at the barn, then friends will hear from others, and coworkers will hear at the office.  Everyone will talk about this, everyone will ask, and in the answering I will lose this moment.  The repetition will grind it from my brain.

When the story comes out in the paper, as it most certainly will in this rather small place with nothing much going on, I will be for a moment a local celebrity.  People will talk about it and ooh and ah and wrinkle their noses in disgust, grateful they were not the ones who found a dead man.

Yet I do not want to be celebrated.  I did nothing.  I am not the one who is dead.  My life is not the one that is over.  My life wasn’t stolen by a wave as I lay on a beach at Christmas.  I am not the one lying swollen, being eaten by leeches, dead and unknown in muddy creek waters.

I stand there on the water’s edge and consider briefly telling no one, leaving this man to decompose in the water, his bones left for discovery by another at some point in the spring, the body no longer distended, the creatures no longer slithering under his shirt.  But I know this is not what I will do.

Pluto pulls at the reins, trying to nibble at the growing things near our feet.  I tug him closer and pat his wet neck. He rubs his head on my arm, knocking me off balance.  I step towards the man to right myself.  His face continues to stare, the swollen, raisin eyes meaningless without life behind them.

I reach down and run my finger along his arm.  I feel nothing.  He is not there, only this wretched ending of him.  I turn and gather my reins, place my foot in the wet stirrup, struggling not to slip as I clamber up on Pluto’s back. He takes a step to the side.  I hold him steady, pause, look down once more at the man who is not there, then turn and ride home.

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Pretending This is a Better Waste of Time

I’m ashamed to admit how much time I can waste on Facebook.  I only signed up about a year ago.  It was a nice tool for keeping in touch with Portlanders after we moved to New York.  Then it became a nice tool for posting information about the baby.  Lately I find myself surfing around friends’ friends and seeing if I missed any potential friends.  I also respond to nonsense.

I read somewhere that studies have shown that surfing these sites releases some neurotransmitter similar to getting a drug.  We keep coming back for more to get that neurotransmitter, but it doesn’t provide the satisfaction of a good, real conversation.  I think I relate.  I crave connection, but with all our running around, it’s hard to get together with people.

I was sitting here tonight, reading down the News Page again and thought to myself that if I’m surfing useless Facebook information, I’m not working on my article, I’m not working on my book, I’m not writing on my blog, I’m not sewing the Presidents Day dress I want to make for Isabel.  I’m wasting time.  So here I am, writing this useless piece of information about my wasting time.  Such a better use.

Right.

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I Used to Be Prolific

I used to be prolific on this blog. Now I’m not.  I wrote and wrote and wrote here.  Now I don’t.  It can’t do for me what it used to do, isn’t the place where I can write what I need to write much of the time.  I have toyed with the idea of ending it, but nah, I don’t need to do that.  I like its place.  There is still stuff to be said here.  I have other outlets I can use for the other stuff I can use instead.

I thought of a story while running yesterday. Often these running brain stories fritter away after I stop running.  Last week I thought of one with a mailman and a person in their house and their conversations, but later it seemed stupid.

But the one I thought of yesterday I kind of like.  It’s filling out, taking shape. Tonight I actually wanted to work on it, so I will.  It might take more time from this blog, but I don’t mind.  I like getting ideas that I want to write about; they give me something to look forward to.

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Pregnancy Brain

I heard someone say or I read somewhere that “pregnant women are stupid.” I have to agree. Having gone from a person with so many thoughts running through my head I had to start a blog to deal with them all so I could focus on the other stuff I wanted to write, to someone who can barely compose a coherent sentence, let alone an entire blog piece, all in the span of just under 8 months, I have to agree.

The end of the first trimester and beginning of the second were the worst.  I look back at my blog posts from that time.  The number of posts start to dwindle.  The topics become more inane.  In fact I wrote about the fact that my brain seemed not to be functioning as it had previously.   And I just wrote about the concern, but there seemed to be no real pressing urge to change it.  I was sitting there muddled in a fog.

Gradually over the last few weeks I have started feeling somewhat clearer, but by brain in no way compares to how it was when I was not pregnant.  My energy levels certainly don’t.  I have always been the sort of person who has a list of 20 things to do and gets all of them done with time left over.  Now?  Now it’s a feat if I remember, oh yeah, I have that appointment today, and manage to dress and get to it on time.  Then that’s it.  I’m done for the day.  I also used to clean the house once a week.  Now it seems it takes seeing pink around the drain in the tub to remind me to clean mildew, or the dog chewing up a roll of toilet paper to force me to drag out the vacuum cleaner.  About the only thing I’ve remained regular on in the housecleaning department is keeping the kitchen clean.  Of course, our kitchen is so tiny, if it isn’t kept clean it’s a disaster within 2 days so the “mildew ring” shows up sooner, so to speak.

Words also used to flit off my tongue.  I had a thought and a response to everything.  Often these thoughts had some intelligence behind them, and I would analyze and think around all the angles.  Not anymore.  Now I don’t even have the thoughts, let alone intelligent ones.

I have some great writing projects I’m working on.  They are like cars with broken batteries.  I give them a jump.  I get them going for a bit.  Then they stop again and languish, waiting for AAA to come and jump them again.  Only AAA takes its own sweet time.  I took months completing and revising a short story I’m pretty pleased with.  I was at the query phase, ready to send letters to the magazines I had chosen.  Incidentally, choosing the magazines took weeks.  Then I started to write the query letter, but it didn’t roll off the fingers as such letters had in the past.  I had to write something saying what the story was about.  Stuck, I stopped for the day, then took a trip to Portland, and I still haven’t finished.  It’s on the list.

The list.  I’ve started making these because I forget things.  I was never much of a list maker in my personal life.  As an attorney, I had lists.  I had calendars.  I am extremely organized.  But I never had to in my personal life.  Now I do.  If I don’t make a list, even the stories and non-fiction pieces I’m working on are forgotten.

I realize pregnancy has hijacked my brain.  I realize at some point the thoughts will return.  However, I also realize that soon there will be a little baby to take my attention and getting these things done will be a practicality nightmare.  This realization is somewhat overwhelming.  Will it be years before I get my brain back?  Will the stories I have been working on be dated by then?  I feel the urge to complete these projects, but can’t seem to get them done.  However, I have stopped just lying in bed in the morning when I can’t sleep after I had to get up for the tenth time to pee.  I have started coming here and writing a little bit now and then.  So maybe there is hope.  I guess it will be obvious by the number of posts I make here.  Or not.

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Pure Med Spa Again

In spite of the rather large number of comments I received on my posts about Pure Med Spa, not one of the commenters responded to my request to interview them for an article I am doing on the company.  I am posting this in an effort to find people who were harmed by Pure Med Spa, employees who would like to tell their story, or even those who had a great experience.  If you would like to speak to me, please comment on this post and I will contact you.  If you would like to remain anonymous, that request will be honored.

Thanks much.

Original posts:

You be Sorry You Mess With Me, Pure Med Spa

Let’s Eliminate Pure Med Spa

Good Riddance, Pure Med Spa

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I Should Have Been Born a Thoroughbred

I am one of those nervous nelly types who reacts physically to mental upsets.  I get a sore throat and diarrhea if my boyfriend and I have an argument.  Once I even threw up.  The consequence is that I have many activities to help with mental harmony.  I have a special grounding meditation.  I like massage and acupuncture.  Exercise helps.  So does listening to the right music.  Writing is a near cure-all for mental imbalance (isn’t that a nice way to describe being somewhat high strung?).

The thing that is rather a paradox is that when I’m all in mental order, I am one of the most laid back, relaxed people I know.  I remind myself of a Thoroughbred horse.  When they are happy, they are some of the mellowist, brightest, most easygoing creatures on earth.  But get them in a dither and watch out.  Actually, I am feeling great kinship right at the moment with these, my favorite breed of the horse world.  I have had a few Thoroughbreds who got diarrhea when they were upset.  Maybe I’m not so weird after all.  Or maybe I should just have been born a horse.

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Possessive S’s

Improper use of the apostrophe for plurals bugs the hell out of me.  Except in narrow circumstances, one places an apostrophe before an s to denote possession.  If one is discussing more than one of something, the apostrophe goes after the s.  One does not place an apostrophe before the s to simply denote plurals.

No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: yours, his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and whose. (Many people wrongly use it’s for the possessive of it, but authorities are unanimous that it’s can only be a contraction of it is or it has.)  Except for one’s, no possessive determiner has an apostrophe.  A number of them, like its, are homophonous with pronoun-auxiliary contractions.  As was previously noted, the pronoun its is very commonly misspelled; not only is there the homophone it’s (it is or it has), but ‘s is a genitive clitic.

For cryin’ out loud people, get it right.

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Thanksgiving Sonnet

Turgid turkeys, strained into rickety
wooden coffins, exit four-by-four from
a ten-ton hearse. Into the turkey mill:
mutilation, holocaust.

Perspiring hormones, Tom Turkey stares with
one sad eye at a crumbling chimney tower
belching death in putrid smoke, blackening
holiday skies. Annihilating light.

Bodies, bones. None remain unfrozen. With
elaborate precision he’s taken apart;
neck, gizzards tied in a bag between his
ribs, head ground neatly into pink hot dog slabs.

Holiday skies are crowded with turkey souls,
ascending to heaven like deflated balloons.

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Wacky Head

I guess I should just accept the part of myself that no matter how many times it happens, I will only remember that when I’m starting to chomp at the bit and get a little wacky in the head it means I haven’t been writing, even if I’m just writing nonsense like this.  It is probably even further evidence I should be writing nonsense like this rather than trying to write anything intelligent.  Part of the reason I have not been writing lately is that I can’t seem to think of anything intelligent to say.  I can’t even think of anything not intelligent to say.  My brain has been a vacuum.  Well, that’s not true.  But it’s been caught up in wanting to leave Hawaii and not much else.  The foolish thing about this is I should just write even if what I have to say is pointless because it helps to leak off some of the pointlessness thereby leaving room to possibly think of something a little less mundane.  And so it goes.

So here I am draining off the air, releasing some of the unimportant crap in order to clear my head.  We’ll see if it works.  The way things have gone in Hawaii over the last couple of days, all I can really think of is my escape and whether I will make it off this island.  I actually had the completely irrational thought that Hawaii would not let me go, that I would die here.  I told my boyfriend if this happened I want him to fly me to Oregon and bury me there.  Just don’t leave my body here.  You can see why there isn’t room for intelligent thought.

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Blogging to Ease Off

Busy busy.  Feast or famine, right?  I went for weeks with little to do except going to the beach, taking Milla to school, and working on some stuff I’m writing.  I would apply for jobs, go to interviews, and other interim things, but for the most part, I was bored out of my skull.  Then Boyfriend came to visit and we decided to move together to NYC and life suddenly hit warp speed,  I decided definitively to apply to grad school at Columbia.  I met a publisher who liked my work and offered me some editing assignments.  My housemates have a friend who needed help in her costume shop.  I have been writing pieces on Huffington Post and wanted to keep going with that.  Literally, all this hit at the same time and I was suddenly buried in things to do, so much so that I felt enormously pressured.  On top of it, my darling Milla went to visit her dad.  He has some changes going on in his life and it will be good for them to spend some time together until I get there, but I miss her like my arms are missing.  Yikes!

Anyway, life has not been conducive to daily writing on the blog, althugh I am getting writing done, just not here.  But I feel like I need this as a mental outlet and when I’m not getting it, the pressure seems only to increase.  Luckily today I was able to take an additional day off from the costume shop.  This is a good thing because I have started to feel like I’m coming down with something.  I woke up coughing twice last night and it took a while to stop.  This morning I was buried in the throes of sleep when Boyfriend sent me a text message at nearly ten that woke me up.  Thank goodness!  I would have kept sleeping all day at that rate.  My body is telling me to find a way to ease off.  Okay, so here I am.  Blogging to ease off.

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Smitten

I’m completely smitten.  Okay, here’s an aside.  How is it that a person who reads as many books as I do, who loves words and word origins, who loves language actually, can have gone through life and not known that smitten is a past participle of smite?  How is this?  I am completely pitiful.  I should have known this.  I knew its use as an adjective, as in struck with a hard blow, grievously afflicted, and very much in love.  I knew these definitions.  I did not put together that the very much in love use was metaphoric for being struck.  Cupid’s arrow and all that.  I make these discoveries that there are so many things I do not know.  Sometimes they seem so obvious, I wonder how it is I came this far in life and did not know them.  It’s like driving down the same road every day your entire life and suddenly noticing a gas station that has been there for years.  Duh.

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Published!

So how cool is this?  I submitted an article to Huffington Post and they accepted it!  It is a piece I wrote here on this blog about Sarah Palin.  If you’re interested in viewing it, go to the link here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-m-gardner/lowering-the-glass-ceilin_b_128346.html

If you like what I wrote, feel free to hit the buzz up button.  The more hits I get on that, the more likely the post will make it to a more visible page.

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Ginormous Headache

My head hurts like nobody’s business, right at the base of my skull in the back.  I slept wrong.  I wear this eye pillow.  It was cockeyed, plus my regular down pillow had slipped under my shoulders, so I awoke basically balanced on this little lump of eye pillow and my skull screaming in pain.  Every time I turn my head, I see white light and feel like vomiting.  The only thing that alleviates the pain is to stab my thumb or a finger deep into the tight muscle.  Unfortunately because of the angle, my arm cannot twist that direction very well.  I’ve tried stretching my neck to the front and back, left and right, to no avail.  This is so much fun.  I think I’m going to have to try an NSAID, and I generally avoid taking medications for such things.  Only for this, I don’t care.  It hurts that much.

I don’t know why I”m blogging about this.  It’s kind of a ridiculous subject.  But I told myself I would write some blurb every morning and all I can think about right now is this headache and Vantucky.  I know.  It’s silly.  There is a town next to Portland called Vancouver.  Portlanders call it Vantucky.  The reasons for this are self-evident.  Boyfriend is going to Vantucky this morning and he called me on the way. For some reason, the word Vantucky is stuck in my head, along with the headache, and the lyrics to Judy Garland singing I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.  It’s quite a combination, I can assure you.  The song is getting annoying.  It’s been crawling around in my head, worming its way through the neurons for days now.  I’m ready to be rid of it.  I will have to listen to something else over and over and over in an effort to make it go away.  Then that song might get stuck, but at least it will be a different song.  Last week it was Cape Verdean Blues.  I did not mind that song being in my head.  It flittered around, showing up periodically.  I would hum bars of it here and there.  It did not sit insiduously on one line for hours like the chasing rainbows number.  No.  It was a pleasant visitor.  Chasing rainbows is like a houseguest who has overstayed her welcome, leaving empty dishes around the house with food stuck in them and her underwear in the bathroom with the crotch up.  I want her to leave me.

I’m off to take drugs to try to obliterate this headache, then I need to take my baby to school.  Hopefully by the time I return home the drugs will have kicked in and this pain will have been alleviated.  If not, I’ll poke a nail in my hand.  It would probably feel better than this wretched headache.

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Miscellaneous Thoughts

So I’ve been convincing myself that it is okay to skip inconsequential writing because I’m working on a book.  The problem is that when I stop blogging or at least writing in my journal, then the words start pounding on the inside of my skull again and I start turning a little nuts.  That’s not a good thing.  I am not the best human when I am nuts.  I guess even when I work on a book I will have to write some little blurb here or in the journal or I’ll never end up completing the book because I will be in an insane asylum.  What a wierd brain I have, one that requires I write in order to be functional.  It also doesn’t seem to remember this until it’s going blathering nuts and I start wondering why I’m such a bitch all the time then I think Well duh, Lara.  It’s like food and sleep.  I know if I’m off and losing my mind, food and sleep are usually required.  I should add writing to the list because lately, I’ll have the food and sleep and still be going nuts.  Duh.  Write.

I have had a lot of thoughts about the political situation in this country, but there is so much to say and so many people saying it, I feel a bit overwhelmed to even know where to begin.  The progressives seem to understand that the McCain Palin ticket is a disaster.  It’s all we’re hearing about.  My question is whether average Joe American who pays little attention to politics can see past the fact that Palin has hot legs and McCain is a good ol’ boy.  Unfortunately, I’m not so sure.  Of course, there is the consolation that a person with these views would not likely vote, but that’s not much of a consolation.

I read an op ed piece today whose author said he did not want someone he could take out for a beer as the leader of the free world, he wanted a super hero.  My sentiments exactly.  I would love to try and reach average Joe American with that image…we need superheroes running our country or we will not be leaders for very long.  I cringe at the thought of what the rest of the world will think if McCain is elected, how humiliating that will be, especially after Bush.  I am not a person who gives much credence to what other people think, but I do care that our country does not appear as a pathetic joke.  If that moron and his Caribou Barbi are elected (or steal the election, which is a possibility with Diebold still in the picture), we may as well kiss our asses goodbye.  Or stage a revolution.  Unfortunately, in 2008, I do not see many people willing to go there.

I read another article where the author argued that we need to send Hilary after Palin.  I could not agree more.  This would eliminate the complaint that the men are picking on her because she is a woman, and Hilary is brilliant as an attack dog.  I wish she would do this.  Come on, Hilary.  If you are with the Democrats, do this for your country.  Take that pitiful excuse for a woman down.  She wants to claim she’s on your side, but she’s so far from anything you represent, she deserves your intelligence, your debate, everything you have to offer.  Go for it.  Do it for the country.  Do it for women.

Apparently Obama went on the O’Reilly Factor.  Here’s hoping they don’t edit the piece before airing it in such a manner to make Obama the fool.  I don’t trust that O’Reilly bastard or his network one bit.  Putting someone who can answer questions intelligently next to a man who screams, cajoles, and calls names….I’m not so sure. We will see.

Well this is it.  We’ll see if I can tame the word poundings.

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I Cannot Think of a Clever Title for this Post

I have not been writing as much here as I usually do because I have been working on a book idea that I have.  It’s an academic book so I’ve been doing some research in an attempt to solidify a thesis argument.  I have also been researching grad school programs to determine whether it might be worth my while to turn this idea into a dissertation (it’s that sort of book).  It might be useful to turn it into a dissertation because I could get a degree that would allow me to teach if I wanted to.

As an undergrad I wanted to become a university professor.  I entered the honors program at my university because it was designed to determine whether one would be interested in that track.  After spending a year on my subject and writing the thesis, I decided I was not interested enough in any one subject to become an expert on it.  Since then, I have often wondered how different my life would be if I had made that choice instead of law school.  I have considered attending law school one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.  I decided to attend law school because I thought it would be a way to make money while writing.  I realize that for me, making money should never have been part of the equation.  It’s one of those life lessons that are often talked about, but have little meaning until you experience them yourself.  Actually, thinking about it now, if I had chosen grad school then, it would not have been the right choice because I was not fired up enough about any one subject to become an expert on it.  Oh, I probably would have liked my job better than I liked being a lawyer, but it still would not have been just right for me.

Since I have had this idea for a book/dissertation, it is nearly all I can think about.  I believe that if I had been this fired up about a subject when I was considering graduate school as an undergrad, there would have been no question I would have gone that route.  I would have wanted to pursue something that arduously if I was passionate about it.  This latest is a subject I have been thinking about, talking about, and even blogging about for about 8 months now.  The friends of mine I’ve told about it kind of go hmmm, like Lara is nuts.  I just can’t get it out of my head.  Lately, I see and hear more and more around me that make me want to write about it even more.  The idea is solidifying, taking form.

This is how it was for me when I had the ideas for the papers I wrote in law school that eventually became law review articles.  One of them started niggling my brain in a constitutional law class.  The professor had made a passing remark about something and I started turning it over and turning it over, wondering and thinking.  I finally went and spoke to one of the con law experts at our school, an absolutely brilliant constitutional law professor.  After discussing the thought with him, I still kept thinking about it.  I went back and asked him if he would advise me if I wrote a paper about it.  I had already written my A and B papers.  I did not have to write about this, I just wanted to.  He agreed to act as my advisor and I wrote the paper and published it.  I was similarly fired up about the subject of my A paper, and I got it published too.  I feel just as excited about this latest idea.  Maybe I can turn it into something.  If not, I can at least write about it and try to convince a couple of people that my argument has merit.  Rather than sitting around on the computer lamenting myself, I have been working on this book, giving it shape.  It is preoccupying.  I need to find a temp job, or some job, but I keep thinking about this and wanting to work on it instead.  Ah, the muse…

Some who read me may have noticed a rather large number of my posts disappeared.  Well, they are not gone, they are simply marked private.  This means they don’t show.  Why did I do this?  Ah, hell.  I don’t know.  I was having one of those days when I wanted who I have been, at least parts of me, to go away.  So I hid everything I had written.  I periodically go back and unhide certain posts when the whim strikes, but like I said, having a project to focus on has been quite useful for my overactive brain, leaving me little time to worry about myself, or to repost my writings, as the case may be.  It’s a good thing.  I don’t imagine people are going back and reading old posts anyway.  My saying this is not me being a martyr; it is me being realistic.  If I thought anyone really wanted a post, I would put it back out there.  I just doubt it’s that important.  I am not some famous author, after all.

Aaaaanyway.  Didn’t my professors tell me never to begin sentences with aaaaanyway?  Maybe not.  Anyway, if I don’t post, it is not because I have jumped off of a bridge or drowned in the ocean.  Rather I am likely holed up in the library here where I cannot check out books. Or I’m online researching grad school programs.  Rest assured, if I decide to kill myself, I will write about it first.

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Spinning Time

My blog has turned into two things.  One is me going on and on about how pathetic I am.  The other is my ranting about the godforsaken political situation in this country.  It’s as if my sense of humor has taken a monster shit and been flushed down the loo.  It does not exist anymore, at least in writing.  I am not sure though that I ever had it.  I just had these magical moments where things came to me and I wrote them down, but they are gone now.  Or maybe it was just that I was not living in mental chaos all the time.  Lately I feel as if I live in mental chaos, in this box where I just want to know what the fuck it is that I want out of life and I go for it.  But the times I’ve known what I want and gone for it have been monumental failures, so I have really almost given up trying.  Well, I don’t know about that, but I’ve not known exactly what I want for ages, and that has been a big part of the problem.  Recently, I have figured out exactly what it is that I want, but it is one of those things that requires others on board and I have not exactly figured out how to present these desires to the other parties involved.  The result is that I mope about wanting these things, wondering if they are the right things to want, waffling whether I actually do want them, then wondering again if I do in fact want them how to present these things to other involved parties.  It’s a conundrum, I can assure you.

As it is I just spin time, organizing my room, thinking about things I want to write, sitting at the computer and staring, trying to remember what it was I sat down for, then getting up and wandering over to my bed to stare at the wall, continuing in my humorless vein.  It’s a good time.  It’s such a good time I am going to do it again right now because I am tired.  Good night.

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Melancholy

Well, by accident I just discovered full screen mode for typing this blog.  Wow.  Seriously.  Here I am all somber wanting to write and try to expel some angst and I accidentally hit a button and get this.  This is cool.  It is a nice little distraction.

What is the source of my angst?  I am moving to Hawaii.  I do not want to leave the man I love.  The thing is that if I take him away from the Portland picture, I do not want to be here.  He is the only thing I want to stay for.  I do not want to leave him.  If I thought for a half a second he would want me to go with him wherever he goes, I would do it.  But I just don’t think he feels as strongly as I do.  I could be wrong.  I haven’t asked.  It’s one of those things where I don’t know if I want the answer.  I will probably say something.  But in the meantime, I’m going to Hawaii, at least for now.

Why Hawaii?  There are two places on earth I would like to live.  One is Australia.  One is Europe.  I mainly chose Australia because it is an English speaking country.  Plus it is far away from wars and whatnot.  I’m afraid of wars and whatnot when it comes to my little girl.  I want her to be safe.  Perhaps I am naive in thinking that because Australia is farther from the wars we will be safer, but this was part of my thinking.  We also seriously considered Spain, and actually, I would still consider Spain.  I speak enough Spanish I could pick it up, and Milla speaks it as well.  But it is so close to the middle east.  So for now, I chose Australia.  In the meantime, on the way to Australia, I did not want to live in Portland anymore.  I have to leave here.  For an on the way to Australia place, I chose Hawaii because I have lived there before so it is a known entity.  I also know people there.  And Milla was accepted to school and got financial aid there.  Plus it is sunny all the time and I get seasonal affective disorder in this gray and damp place.  So why not, right?

Why not.  I did not expect to fall in love and I did not expect to fall in love like this.  This feeling is indescribable.  It feels like all the silly love songs from fifty years ago were written for me.  But it also feels like all the songs written about heartbreak are for me too.  It’s such a weird place to be in.  I know I have to leave, but I cannot bear the thought of leaving him.  This will be the hardest thing I have ever had to do.  Unequivocally.  I do not know how I am going to manage.  Well, that isn’t true.  I will manage because I always do by putting one foot in front of the other.  But I wonder if I’m making a monumental mistake, going there instead of I don’t know what.  Maybe he would not be the way he has been with me if I were staying here.  He has been wonderful.  He has been exactly what I want in a relationship.  Even the hard parts.  I have learned more about relationships from him than from all the others put together.  I have learned more about myself.  And then there is the fact he is just plain brilliant and so much a match for me.  I am completely blathered.  Love.  Damn biology.  His immune system must jive with mine.  His genetic footprint must be what mine needs to propagate.  Silliness.  Plain silliness.  I alternate between love songs and melancholy.  I cry.  All the time.  I am on cloud nine.  All the time.  What a disaster.  I take the steps I need to take to make this move, but I take them reluctantly and after procrastination.  I am getting done what I need to get done.  Yet I’m going through it in a daze.  Is this how it’s supposed to be?

So I write and hope it will help me through.  I have been writing, even though the dates on the posts don’t say so.  There have been things I cannot share because they do not affect only me.  There have been things that have happened he might not want others to know about.  I don’t know if anyone he knows reads this, but I do not want to take a chance, so even though I must write about these things, I keep them private.  I hope writing will get me through.  I hope when I land on that island in the middle of the world’s biggest ocean and my heart is crushed with longing I can write and it will be okay.  It’s something anyway.

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Filtered

A friend of mine called me about this blog.  She read it and saw today there is a password protected post.  I told her there are a few.  She wondered why.  I told her it is because there are some things I need to write but cannot share with anyone. She laughed, surprised I had a filter, considering some of what I’ve written and shared.  Ah yes…it seems I share so much, but some of me remains hidden.  Part of me is not for consumption, the secret place in my head. I have to write about some things, to work them out for myself, but I do not want to share them.  Maybe someday when some of it isn’t so fresh, I will remove the password, but by then the post will be so far back no one will read it anyway.  Perhaps even I will have forgotten it was written.  For now, however, I am filtered.  in a tiny way, I have to do this.  The writer needs the expression; the person needs the cloak.

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Inconsequential Blabbing

Well I managed to move out of the house I owned and rebuilt over the course of four and a half years.  You know, the first time I received an offer, tears formed in my eyes, but I knew it had to be done and moved forward.  Then that sale fell through, then the second sale fell through, and by the time of the third sale, I was so sick of the entire process, I never thought I’d be rid of the place.  During the sale that actually went through, there were numerous requests and addendums and all kinds of annoying crap that went on.  In addition, I had rented an apartment and begun moving stuff there I wanted to keep.  I needed to organize the stuff I did not want to keep in order to have a sale and get rid of it all.  During that week, I got to the point where I was so sick of it all, I didn’t care anymore.  I just wanted the process to be over.  When I finally visited the house for the last time to pick up my dogs and run a vacuum through the place, I felt nothing really except relief.  On the day the sale closed, I went over to meet the buyers and show them some stuff about the place.  I walked through showing them all the details, seeing this house I had lived in and loved, and felt no remorse or sadness of any sort.  I guess it was time to move on.  I made the house beautiful.  I am glad someone else will enjoy something to which I contributed.

I do not like the fourth of July.  I do not like fireworks. I do not like crowds of people, even if they are gathered together to listen to somewhat decent music.  We went down to the blues festival on the waterfront yesterday.  We walked back and forth through the incredibly dense crowds (so dense the fire marshall closed the place and only 10 people could enter for every 20 who left).  At one point we were at one end of the park and headed down to one of the stages.  As we walked, I noticed all the people sitting on their blankets facing the water.  There was a stage to their left and a stage to their right.  I wondered to myself why they were facing the water and surmised that perhaps it was to listen to both stages.  Then it dawned on me, genius that I am, that the people were there and facing the water to watch the pretty fires in the sky at dark.  Thousands of people were all mashed into that small space, smelling and rolling and milling about so they could spend a half an hour watching noisy fires in the sky.  My goodness.

I bought a Macbook.  I am typing on it now.  I am in love with it.  I like my desktop computer all right.  It serves its purpose.  But this thing is cool. It has so many features and runs so smoothly.  I am loving the steps that are left out.  On a pc, there are so many extra steps to arriving anywhere compared to this.  I also got an ipod.  I had one last year, but had to give it back to the ex-boyfriend who gave it to me.  Lucky Lara, welcome to the twenty-first century.

So now I have a little extra money, but I need for it to last.  I had a mini panic attack this morning considering all the things I am going to need to spend money on in the next few weeks.  I do not want the money to all end up gone.  The weird thing is, the more I have, the less inclined I am to want to spend it.  But I can be remarkably frugal (Macbook and Ipod notwithstanding).  I just have to pay attention.

This is a boring post.  I realized I had not been writing enough.  I have been staying up too late, and when I’m not working or doing things, I’ve been lying on my bed like a blob trying to catch up on sleep.  I recognize, however, that I have to write something, even if it’s boring, preferably every day.  It’s that old showing up I’ve committed to myself to do.  Since I’ve written less in the last two weeks then I’ve written in the last six months, I’ve got to recommit or I’ll end up out of the habit and I can’t do that.  So here I am, showing up and writing boring stuff.  Wheee!

I discovered Nina Simone.  I am in love.  Her voice gets under my skin, in my belly, fills me. I can’t explain it.  I hear her singing and I never want to turn it off.  Apparently she was a classically trained pianist who was not allowed to perform because she was black.  They let her sing instead.  Maybe it’s something behind that story I hear in her voice. Maybe it’s the grief of an entire race.  When she sings certain songs I feel something deep inside, a visceral response in my belly and chest.  There are a few other artists when theys sing that take me to that place.  When I hear music like this I feel like it channels me into that creative energy field, that primal place where I have to write and feel like I will expire if I don’t.  Weird.  I don’t think I’m explaining it well. I’m obviously not tapping into that place right now because I can’t seem to describe this.  Anyway, she’s brilliant.

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I Have a Burr in My Ass

I think anyone who reads this will wish I kept not having an internet connection for a few more days. I’m in one of those moods where I’m not mad at anything specifically, just generally irritated. I want to slap something. Too bad Boyfriend isn’t here. I would tell him some of the things I don’t usually say to avoid an argument, but which probably should be said. Of course, because I have a burr in my ass we might fight and fights with him tend to be demoralizing affairs. The air doesn’t get cleared, it gets filled–with shit, and I just couldn’t handle that right now. It’s probably a good thing he’s off playing the piano at musical theater he claims is crap and not here acting nice to me one minute and cranky the next. Did I mention I’m slightly irritable?

Annoying Number One: I can’t even spell out the whole story because it annoys the crap out of me, but Qwest needs its rectum cleaned with a giant bottle brush. I will be posting the entire story here sometime soon because the world needs to know what a filthy toilet germ Qwest Communications is. I just can’t do it now. I’d get all mad and shit and being irritable is annoying enough.

Irritating Number Two: This woman I’ll call Pita because she’s a pain in the ass stopped bugging me for a few days after she made me royally angry. She was one of the things that inspired the rage spoken of in my post from a couple of days ago. It has been so pleasant not seeing her number on my phone EIGHT THOUSAND TIMES a day. It has been so wonderful not having FORTY MINUTE voicemails left on my telephone. Well, she called today. I was on the phone with Annoying Number One. I saw her number on the phone. I hit ignore. A few minutes later, I’m shooting the breeze with the rep at Annoying Number One when I hear a message beep in. Huh? I didn’t even hear that ring. Uh, yes I did. It was Pita SEVERAL MINUTES prior. Pita is constitutionally unable to just call and either a) leave no message, or b) leave me a short message. Every message is like a call to the therapist or an instruction manual. The calls to the therapist are long, drawn-out affairs whereby I end up hitting 3 every few seconds to fast-forward through her self-analysis. Instruction manuals are her telling me what to do and how to do it. These inspire hits on button 3 as well. All of it irritates the fuck out of me. I have decided never to answer her calls again and delete all messages before I ever hear her voice. Perhaps she’ll figure out the plan soon and stop calling me.

Grumpy Number Three: Part of the I is Pore and Dum concert series, back today by popular demand, we have the Lara can’t get medsin agin cuz shes on Orgun Helth Plan an cant do nuthin but make up fake pill papers an sellum fer muny. Dang me! I was hopin I cud get sum muny for them fake pill papers but that there Walgreen place stopped me.   Nunna my kids daddies sent any muny agin.  Men.  Shit. Mebbe all jes hafta go an watch that telly agin an keep on wippin them 7 kids amine cuz they is blockin my soaps. Hell fire! Wish one a thems daddies wud come on over here and takes one of em cuz theyz makin me tired. Mebbe him an I can roll in the hay also for old time sakes.

Demoralizing Number Four: One minute Boyfriend acts like I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. He has a way of making me feel pretty special. Unfortunately, the next minute Boyfriend acts like he thinks I’m the stupidest fuck to walk the planet and he’s going to make sure I am apprised of this fact. My friends wonder whether he’s just using me for sex. I asked him once. I may as well have asked him whether he had murdered someone because he was so offended I would even ask. That’s how it is with him: you can’t ask because asking comes with the implication that by asking you imply he could do such a thing and how dare one imply he would do such a thing? I don’t know, the fact he seems not to give a shit about me half the time makes me kind of wonder. However, there seems to be no correlation between sex and his desire for me because occasionally even during sex he’ll suddenly turn from really cool to really shitty in about 30 seconds. I can’t figure it. Yesterday it seemed to come after a meal. Eating made him stop being talkative and friendly. To that point, he was the best boyfriend in the world. I actually was thinking I love him again (yes, my love waxes and wanes, like the moon. And don’t give me a lecture about real love not waxing and waning. Whatever. Maybe for you. For me, it fluctuates.) Anyway, he gradually became less talkative and more sullen towards me. He pointed out some error I had made in an observation. By the time we got to the place we were going for dessert, he barely spoke 10 words to me. I almost told him to go home and leave me alone. Demoralizing. I don’t know if he realizes all of a sudden he’d rather be picking his ass or cleaning his sock drawer than be with me, but it’s disconcerting and yes, very demoralizing. I don’t know how much more of it I can put up with. I keep asking myself if the half time wonderful is worth the half time feeling like shit. On top of it, I think he still might read me. I’m not sure. But if he does, he’ll think this is some broadcast message about him and he’ll probably punish me for it. Good times.

Pissy Number Five: Why did WordPress change the layout of this design to include the list of tags? I hate that. It’s ugly. Now I’m going to have to go through and find another design and blah blah blah so I don’t have all those words at the top. If something isn’t broken, DON’T FUCKING FIX IT people, for Christ’s fucking sake. Fuck.

Whipped Number Six: I can’t fucking sleep. I can’t fucking sleep. I can’t fucking sleep. Did I mention I can’t fucking sleep? The days I’ve been able to sleep in, I can’t. It used to be Boyfriend snuggling me at night helped me sleep. Lately that doesn’t even work. Part of it is the demoralizing issue, but the BIG thorn in my backside is STRESS.  Too much stress, too little outlets for it.  I have to be out of my old house a week from today and still haven’t sold enough crap. I don’t want to give it all to charity yet; there is still a lot of nice stuff there. On top of it, I’m required to pick up the dog poo in the dog yard and paint some spots the size of silver dollars and clean the place up after getting the things out of it and I work and I’m a bit overwhelmed. I also can’t find a home for my dog and do not want to give her back to the organization that gave her to me. Also I’m kind of frightened by all the changes I’m instigating and want but which still scare the shit out of me. And basically, I simply tired tired tired tired tired. I just need a good massage and a cuddle. I think those two things would go a LONG way to improving my outlook on life in general.

So there you have it. Don’t you wish you had stopped reading after about, oh, sentence two? I would. Perhaps being able to write again will help. Getting through major life changes would help as well. All I can say now is that my bed is beckoning and I’m going to go try and sleep.

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Dribbling Sanity

I don’t know if the fact I feel like I’m going crazy is because I have not had this outlet or because of all the other shit going on in my life or both.  Last night, I totally and completely lost it.  I went out into my car and screamed FUCK at the top of my lungs.  It did not help.  I had to sit there and stew in my juices until I calmed down.  I was so angry.  Actually angry.  The kind of angry where if the wrong person had been in front of me, I probably would have smashed them in the face.  That would not have been good.  It was just one thing after another after another after another, all damn day long.  I finally blew a fuse.  It kept me twitching for hours, like some fucking meth freak or something.

This morning when I came to work and was able to get on the internet, there was an email from someone who reads this blog checking in on me.  He was worried about me because my posts of late have been a bit angsty, then I disappear for 6 days.  I thought this was so sweet and somewhat ironic.  Some person I do not know wants to make sure I’m okay, but the people who do know me could give a shit.  It’s fucking insane.  This is the life I’ve created for myself?  Indeed.

I do not have internet access at home.  It will be a miracle if I do tonight after the shit and hell I’ve been through with stupid Qwest.  Their bullshit contributed to my fuse blowing.  I have a lot of work to do at work, not to mention the fact I’m being paid by someone to work for him, not write on my blog.  But today, I had to write something, even if it’s trivial nonsense like this.  I can’t stand the angsty, twitchy way I feel.  I can’t stand waking up in the middle of the night, then falling asleep before dawn, then waking up feeling like a train wreck.  If writing these few paragraphs will help, I’m willing to try it.  It’s worked in the past.

One kind of cool thing happened.  I won these tickets to a live performance at a radio station this afternoon.  I think I’ve heard the band.  I had one of their songs on my computer downloaded from when I used to have an ipod.  Other than that, I don’t know if I know their music since I’m great at knowing a song but pretty lousy at knowing who did it.  I don’t have a guest to bring to the performance, even though I’m allowed, but I’m not going to dwell on that.  I’ll pretend one of my internet friends is with me since it seems that’s what I’ve created for myself these days, a world where internet friends give more of a shit than live ones.  But that’s a big pity party and I hate that shit, so I won’t go there.  Still, all this makes me wonder where I went wrong.  Was it one thing or a series of less than decisions leading to this conclusion?  Probably the latter.

Sometimes I feel like my sanity is slowly dribbling away.  I try and regain it.  I try and exist in a life I want to be in.  I try not to focus on being lonely.  I try to enjoy each moment.  But sometimes, it just doesn’t work.  When shit is piled on one thing after another, when I realize I’ve drifted down a path I thought I took on purpose but it isn’t where I want to be, when my heart aches with the love that is no longer there, I feel like whatever semblance I had of who I am is escaping from a valve in the back of my head and this person I do not know is taking over my body.  And I’m not sure this is the person I want to be.  However since I can’t seem to figure out who that is anymore and no one else seems to give a shit, I wonder if it is worth bothering.  So I’ll keep on keeping on and hope in the meantime I don’t kill something when I lose my mind.

Reading back through this, it sure seems like a big pity party.  Ah well, such is life.  It’s one of those extra lonely days after a really bad day.  Guess I can’t be perfect.

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I’m Here, Aren’t I?

Showing up. Showing up. Showing up. As a writer, it is necessary for me to show up. I don’t have any desire whatsoever to work on the important things tonight. I have no desire whatsoever to work on unimportant things tonight. I have nothing spectacular or funny to say. I am boring. I recognize this. I also know why. I have not slept well recently. Over time, the lack of sleep draining causes sustained retardation in my brain. About the only thing I am capable of doing well (and well is the key word here) is watching South Park videos. Small problem. South Park Zone won’t let me watch South Park videos. I tried reading a book. I realized I had read a page with zero comprehension of the words in front of me. This means I have reached a state of brainlessness rarely achieved, even for me.

So here I sit, starting paragraphs with the word so. This is not a good thing. Oh, guess what I saw today? The back of a street sign had a foot tall green penis and balls drawn on it. There were little squirties coming out the top. Isn’t that original? I thought it was. Particularly the choice of green as a color for the penis. Perhaps that helped to make the penis stand out.

One of my bank accounts is a big, old mess. I have this account I use for Milla’s money. Well, I thought there was a deposit made that wasn’t, so a bunch of crap went overdraft. Here’s the thing, the crap that went overdraft was from point of sale purchases. What does this mean? It means that I used a debit card. I asked the bank to explain to me why they would approve the point of sale charge if there was no money in the account. Why not simply say no, this card is useless? Well, they could not answer this. Instead, they charged me $25 for the first two $7.75 purchases, then $28 for additional purchases, one for about $37, another for about $60, and a third for $20. There were a couple of others. Here’s the other thing. I had one big charge for $200, this was the one that caused the problem. It put the account overdrawn, then all these piddly ones came after. So I said to the bank, if that hadn’t gone through, none of the other stuff would have gone overdrawn. The bank person told me they put through the big charges first. At this point I noticed that indeed, the charges began with the largest and proceeded down in denominations. What does this mean? It means a big purchase makes you overdraw, then all the little nickel and dimey crap comes through and runs up BIG money for the bank. Isn’t that a great money-making scheme? The guy on the phone said it was because big purchases were more important. Oh really, you think so? I think it’s a scheme for your bank to make more money. Add to that the fact you allowed point of sale purchases to go through when there was no money in the account. He said my pointing that out was being abusive. Since I was speaking in a calm, normally volumed, well modulated tone of voice, I found this confusing. Abusive? I asked. How in the world is my pointing out that your bank is ripping me off abusive? I would say that your bank is abusive. He then asked if there was anything further he could do for me. I told him he could go and take a hike. Yes, perhaps that last line was abusive. I’m a bad person. I admit it. I guess paying $156 in fees for purchases totaling less than that makes me this way. Yes, I know there are those out there who would get all judgmental on my ass for not knowing about the deposit in the first place, but there are extenuating circumstances. Another person puts money in that account and I thought he did it. The judgmental people can now be original and say see what you get for doing your own thinking? Yes, I do. I get abusive, that’s what I get.

Well imagine that. I managed to eke out more than one paragraph. Wonders never cease. I didn’t even think while I did it. I suppose it is not necessary for me to point that out, my not thinking. It’s probably quite evident from what I’ve written. I know this. In my altered, brain dead state, I am able to fathom that my writing is pitiful. But I’m showing up, that’s what I’m doing. I’m having impure thoughts too. Isn’t that nice to know? You don’t know what they are. I could be thinking about sewage in the Willamette River. That would be an impure thought. You probably thought I meant sex, especially since I mentioned seeing the giant green penis drawing. But there are other things out there I could be thinking about that are impure. I’ll never tell.

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Trivialities

Holy criminy.  I don’t look at my eyebrows for a few days and the damn things completely take over.  Yikes.  Little sprouts here and there and everywhere.  It’s not a pretty picture.  I wonder if electrolosis really works and if it does if it costs much and if it doesn’t if it hurts.  If all these pieces can be satisfied I ought to go and get some in order to negate the requirement that I remove these hairs with tweezers every three days if I would like to avoid a forest across my face.  Frida liked that look. It doesn’t work for me.  I’m too pale.

I hurt my back.  I spent 20 minutes bent over picking up dog poop out of the backyard, tried to stand up, and that was that.  My back was out.  I have had difficulty walking, moving, sleeping.  I’m beginning to improve.  I have not had the back strength to sit and write.  I have had lots of interesting things I have wanted to write about, then I think of my desk and chair, my back gives a twinge, and that is the end of that.  Back trouble is not conducive to a writing career, at least for a person who does not have a laptop.

I have another offer on my house.  It is a good offer.  There is another offer in backup if this one falls through for some reason.  It’s not as good as the other, but it isn’t bad either.  Both potential buyers are in love with my house.  I have said all along that I want someone who loves it to buy it rather than some investor who is just going to rent it out.

Last night the man and I went to a hookah lounge and smoked a blueberry hookah.  Or rather an exotic blueberry hookah.  Every flavor is exotic, but when we asked for blueberry flavor, he said, Exotic blueberry.  Oh yes, our mistake.  Interesting little experience.  Lots of over-synthed techno pop eurotrash music that after a few hits off the hookah thingy wasn’t so obnoxious, although it would not have been my first musical choice.  I tried blowing smoke rings.  Can’t do that.  I tried blowing out just one nostril without covering the other one with my finger. Can’t do that either.  I’m not a smoker, never have been, so all those little smoker tricks are lost on me.  Overall though, it was fun to try something new.

Darling Milla, my NINE year old, is off on a trip with her class. They went to a farm.  It’s in Silverton.  She gets to milk goats, among other things.  Lucky for her it is supposed to be merrily warm over the next few days.  If I had to go camp on a farm and milk goats, I would infinitely prefer merry warmth to icy chilliness.

Now I have a drumming lesson.  I like drumming.  I love bass.  I am not taking official bass lessons.  I have been using a dvd.  I would like to take bass lessons, I just haven’t done it yet.  Plus I’ll need to find a decent bass teacher.  I don’t want to waste time or money on a crappy bass teacher.  So off I go to bang on percussion instruments and make noise.  That is if I can remove myself from this chair. The back is not happy I sat this long.  I realize this is a pathetic post.  It’s my effort at showing up since the painful back has kept me off track a few days.  It is what it is.

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Frou Frou

So one of the comments on my blog from earlier asked me to write about what I’m thankful for.  I’m thankful for a lot of things.  The thing is, sometimes when I feel like crap I just want to write about feeling like crap to get the thoughts out of my head.  It doesn’t mean I lie around in my bed all day staring at the wall moaning and lamenting my crappy life.  Nothing of the sort.  Writing is how I work such things out and expel some of the negative energy.  Right now, I don’t want to go through some laundry list of my thanks.  I’m not all frou frou about that stuff and sitting and writing out a list on THIS blog would feel frou frou.  So for now, I’m not going to do it.  Suffice to say I am fully cognizant of the fact I’m not living in a concentration camp, I have plenty to eat, and I have a magnificent daughter who loves me.  That isn’t so bad.

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May Update

So it’s been a while since I wrote because I was in San Diego having a BLAST. It was so much fun. Unfortunately, on top of the blast, I had the worst sore throat I have ever had in my entire life. It lasted from the day I arrived until yesterday. I finally scheduled an appointment and went to the doctor today, but I was already feeling improved. The doctor did a strep swab and found nothing. He said I had a really nasty virus. I knew that. It still kind of hurts to swallow, but not like before.

I started a new part time job today. I enjoy the work. The attorney I’m working for is really cool. He’s totally down to earth and laid back, but does a great job and gets the work done. I’m liking the part time thing. I came home today with enough energy to write, which is saying a lot. I used to come home from my day job too whipped to write even a note. This will be good.

We changed my house listing today and dropped the price again. It is now $25,000 less than when we started and $26,000 less than the appraisal from this winter. This sucks, but I can’t pay for it now, so better to get what I can than lose it.

That’s all the news there is to update. Nothing much else exciting going on in my life other than the conference I attended. It was given by Steven Forrest, an astrologer whose work I see as changing the entire field from one of bullshit fortune telling into something that can be useful in people’s lives. I learned SO much. I came home wanting to work with all the charts I’ve done and talk to people about it. I love being able to offer some insight into a soul’s evolutionary journey. Plus I made some amazing friends and had some unbelievable experiences. Like the ghost.

Two nights after arriving, my roomie and I were awakened at 2:10 a.m. to three succinct, LOUD bangs on the wall. I had earplugs in and the bangs still sounded loud. I took out my earplugs and lay there in the dark. I finally asked my roommate if she was awake and heard the sounds. She said she had. We could see the light around our hotel room door. There was no one outside. We were also on the second floor so footfalls outside the door rattled our room. There were none. The room behind us was empty and no one was above us. The sounds seemed to come from the wall behind my bed. Since I had had the wretched sore throat, I turned on the light to get up and get some Ibuprofen. I went to the bathroom counter and the Ibuprofen was no where to be found. It was completely and utterly gone. We searched high and low, all the bags, on the floor, behind the refrigerator. It was simply not there. Through this experience, I felt a heaviness in the room and kept “seeing” in my mind a woman in the bathroom standing in the bathtub. She was wearing a long black dress with a high neck and long sleeves. It was of heavy material, like wool. Her hair was brown and pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck. She appeared to be in her thirties. The next day we told everyone about our experience. People looked at us slightly askance, but it was what it was. We were not joking. One person said we should try and tell the ghost to leave. That night, the two of us imagined sending the ghost on her journey. We told her she needed to move on to her place.

That night when I returned to my room, the energy there felt much less oppressive. My roommate and I both slept more soundly than we had since arriving. The next morning, I arose to get ready for the day. My roommate was in the shower. As I began sifting through my toiletries, there on the top of my bag was the Ibuprofen bottle. It was so weird. I think we sent the ghost on her journey and she left the bottle she could not take with her. I know it sounds bizarre, but this story is true.

Last Thursday was Milla’s birthday. It’s true. My baby is nine. She’s not a baby anymore. She is a full grown girl. She’s amazing. It blows my mind I made this new human. She is such a delight right now. She has been FANTASTIC in the mornings. She gets up, takes her shower, gets dressed, combs her hair, eats her breakfast, brushes her teeth, and is all ready to go. I get up, pack her lunch, drive her to school, and come back home, all in about ten minutes. I love it. We’ve been on time every day for months now. I hope this doesn’t jinx it! Next Saturday is Milla’s party. She was in Colorado with her dad on her actual birthday. It was the first birthday in her life I did not spend with her but I figure since her dad has missed the last four, he was entitled to have her for one. She loves it, she gets two parties. What kid could want more than that?

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Meaningless Blabbing

So I’m in California at this conference thingy and I’m all jumpy and wired.  I was sitting in the hottub at the hotel and finished the book I was reading and had this desperate need to write.  Then I realized that unless I wanted to write in longhand, I wasn’t going to be able to write anything.  That made me even more stir crazy.  It was like knowing I couldn’t do it was enough to make me jump out a window.  Then of course I realized it is 2008 so it is likely the hotel has a computer for use, it is almost 11, and no one would be on it if there were such a computer available for guest use.  I was right so here I am.

Problem is I have this urge to spill but a lot of what I want to spill is stuff I don’t really want to write about in a public forum.  Maybe it’s because I can’t get to my private journal at home I’m all antsy?  Maybe, maybe not.  I’ve been this way all day.  Up and down.  I’m lucky because I found a book at the airport by an author I adore.  It isn’t serious writing, just a good story that keeps me entertained and makes me laugh.  It kept me occupied most of the day, kept me from letting the brain take over as it is wont to do on occasion.  I’m not like this so much since a lot of stress has alleviated in my life, but I have my moments and I’m having one today.  Maybe I’ll settle in tomorrow.

Anyway, they have a fifteen minute limit here and I still need to check email and my other blog so I’m off to it.  At least I could pour out these few meaningless words.

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Rebate Rant and Personal Update

I hate to break it to the government, but sending people their tax refunds for next year early does not constitute a “rebate.”  Rather it is a loan on money taxpayers would receive back next year.  It makes next year’s tax refund smaller.  Excusing the stock rebate or bill of exchange definitions, a rebate is a refund on something already paid for; it is not money you get on something before you’ve even paid for it, like taxes.  I’m sure there are those who love getting their money now, nothing like immediate gratification.  And actually I think it is best for people to calculate their withholding in a manner that helps them to break even at tax time because overpaid taxes are interest-free loans to the government.  But I just can’t stand it that this early refund tax money is called a “rebate” when that is not what it is.  Have fun next year when you fill out your forms and discover your refund has been reduced by whatever amount you receive now.  It’s also annoying to think a bunch of people spending this money is going to stimulate the economy.  The economy needs more than consumer spending to pull it out of the toilet.  Get used to it, the economy is shit for lots of deep-seated and difficult to fix reasons.  A bunch of Americans going shopping or buying gas isn’t going to stimulate anything.

Enough of that soapbox.  I spent the day preparing for my trip to San Diego.  I am soooo excited to be heading down there.  I need the break.  I need the sun.  I’m looking forward to the conference I’m going to, as well as the people I’ll meet.  I can’t wait!  However, the trip necessitated several activities on the home front to prepare for a) Milla going to her dad’s, b) Milla’s birthday, c) leaving a house that is for sale for four days, and d) digging out clothes from the far-reaches of the closet that will be comfortable in warmer weather.  Plus I needed to pay bills and balance the checkbook and do all that regular-living stuff that bugs the crap out of me.  Overall, it’s been a very busy day.

I don’t leave until Wednesday, but because tomorrow I don’t get to spend much time at home at all, I had to finish most of the preparatory stuff today.  I also have a job interview tomorrow!  Woo hoo!  I’m excited.  It seems like a really good opportunity.  It’s part-time, but would bring in enough income to keep me comfortable until the house sells.  Also it is working with an attorney who seems to be pretty down to earth and practical.  I like that.

After the job interview, I’m getting my hair done.  I love having my hair done.  I love the girl time at the hairdresser’s.  I love the conversations with the women in the salon.  I love the way my hair looks.  I love the way my hairdresser is also a masseuse so she rubs my head and shoulders.  I love the jazz they play on the salon station.  Basically, I love going to get my hair done!  I don’t love paying for it, but that’s okay.  It’s a nice trade-off.  And if I were earning money, paying for it would not bug me in the least.

So I had busy day today and I will have busy day tomorrow, then I fly off on a plane at 10 am on Wednesday to sun and fun.  Yummy!  I will not have access to a computer so I’m not going to be able to write.  Well, that’s not true.  I’ll be able to write in longhand and I do that when I can’t write on the computer.  It probably looks to anyone who reads this blog like I haven’t been writing anyway, but that is not the case.  I have another blog I have been writing on.  I also have two articles I’m writing and I worked on those as well.  So even though it looks like I’m not writing because I’m not keeping up here, that is not the case.

I’m going to bed soon.  I am vibrating.  I’ve been keeping late hours and it’s starting to make me a little groggy, especially when I have to get up.  It’s one thing to keep late hours when you can sleep in.  It is quite another when you have to get up and pretend to be a functioning member of society.  So off I go to pretend to be a functioning member of society.  I know it’s all an illusion, but I can pretend, can’t I?

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Lara’s Vacuous Brain

I realized after posting my last blog that I have had a dearth of deep thoughts lately.  NONE.  It’s all nonsense.  I wonder if it’s because I’ve been feasting on nonsense for the last week.  But no, my dearth of deep thoughts has been going on a lot longer than this decadent, Venusian week.  Maybe it is because there are so many other enormous changes going on at the moment that such happenings have sucked my focus from philosophical ramblings.  Maybe it’s the books that I’m reading.  But that wouldn’t be it.  Usually books like the ones I’m reading at the moment make me want to write and write and write, but I don’t have that urge, and this is unusual because needing to write usually keeps me up at night.

The simple fact of the matter is that my brain has been dry for several weeks now and the words have not been pounding at my skull trying to escape. The books I’m working on that seemed so important even a month ago seem trivial and annoying now.  I hope their seeming importance returns so I’ll have some desire to work on them again.  Maybe this is what is meant by losing the muse.  Who knows?  I’m not terribly concerned because it hasn’t been going on for very long and I DO have quite a lot of other things to concern myself with.  My house is selling and I need to move in a month.  I’m going to San Diego for a conference and need to prepare.  I need to find a place to live somewhere besides Portland and find Milla a Waldorf school there.  I guess those are big things.  But usually I would want to write about them.  Maybe I’m reacting to a long insomnia spell that is finally over.  I’ve been sleeping like a baby.  Perhaps the brain is healing from that.  Actually, this could definitely be the case.  I was so sleep deprived there for a while I couldn’t remember words like remember.  Uh, you know, that word about keeping something in your brain?  What is it?  Huh?

Anyway, until the deep thoughts come back I’ll continue posting pointless nothingness like this and today’s earlier post.  Good times.

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More Mindless Rambling

Wow.  So I check out of reality for a few days and when I check back in the hottest story out there is a transgendered man having a baby and Obama’s bowling ability.  I think maybe it’s time to check back out again.  I normally avoid the news but there are some headlines that are unavoidable.  Plus I listen to NPR and get bits and pieces there, although I extended my news fast to All Things Considered several years ago and have not felt the worse for wear as a result.  Gotta protect that old sanity, ya know?

So I pulled into WordPress this morning to discover many changes. I’m sure there are lots of us out here commenting on it, what we like, what we don’t.  I think once I get used to it, I will like it.  I’m already liking the place to type better than previously.  And I’ve noticed that there is a spell-checker.  Yes, I think I’m going to like it.  I’m not so keen yet on the dashboard, but I think with time and familiarity, it will all be good.

Okay, so right now Piper is spinning around and having a coniption fit because I’m typing and not paying one hundred percent attention to him, and Molly is standing over him, hovering like a bee over a flower.  I’m not sure of the influence she is attempting to exert, but Piper is oblivious.  Oh, and now she just got a good sniff of his butt.  Yum.  How was that for you, Molly?  Dogs.  They are unabashedly willing to partake of their senses, even if it involves a good solid butt sniffing.

I realized today that I am in some regards paralyzed by the sheer number of things I need to do.  Many of them are small things.  I just need to chip away at those things.  Others are huge, like packing, for instance.  I just need to dive in and begin.  It’s funny, just last week I was discussing hoarding with my counselor.  You know, why people hoard, how it gets started, all that.  I know a few hoarders and their lives are completely stuck.  One of the reasons we discussed is how something happens and the person lets things go, then things get out of hand, then they are paralyzed by the mess and magnitude.  Then I discovered this morning that my paralysis is similar; I have not been doing anything because there is so much to do.

Earlier this week, I had dinner at the new house of some very good friends.  They were lamenting all the work they need to do to make the house a home.  I advised them to take it one space at a time.  Break it down into smaller pieces.  I’m taking my own advice.  I’m going to make a list, then I’m going to sort the list into manageable pieces, then attack each piece.  Some of the stuff I need to do could all be done in one day if I just did it.  Like filing a tax extension.  The taxes are done, I just don’t have the money to pay them yet.  So I’m going to file this extension.  I doubt it will take long, but I haven’t done it.  And this CLE reporting thing lawyers have to do.  It’s a pain.  I started it, then stopped for some reason (probably to go do something really important like bang drums or play the bass) and never picked it up again.  Now it’s sitting here on my desk.  Both these things, tax extensions and CLE reports, have a deadline.  It’s a good thing or I could see them sitting there even longer.

What is this, this procrastination?  I’ve not been much of a procastinator before.  Yet here I am.  And this week when Milla has been gone, it has been oh so easy to play.  South Park video?  Much more appealing than tax extensions.  I have a friend who texts me, Want to go watch a late movie? Yes.  Not Uh sure, or okay, but YES.  Emphatically, yes.  Oh, and go here and watch this video.  It’s called Mathmaticious and parodies Fergilicious.  It’s better than Fergie’s.  More entertaining.  His sexy dancing in front of the window kills me.  Very clever.  Pretty soon he’ll be passed all around and end up in a South Park episode getting killed by Chocolate Rain guy.  Good times.

See what I mean?  It’s so easy.  Just start typing your blog or doing something else.  After a bit, feel like a break.  Casually open a new tab.  Type in YouTube.  Then surf a little.  Find something that looks interesting, like Mathmaticious.  Watch it.  Laugh.  Then watch what it’s parodying, or click on something else on the side where all the videos are in a row.  Discover a lot of time has passed.  Shake your head in dismay at your ability to waste a lot of time.  There is facility in time-wasting like no other, especially when computers are involved.  Millions of others conspire to help you.  Yikes.

I have wasted enough time this morning, er, afternoon.  I must do something productive, if only for a moment.  So I’m going to get up and go brush my teeth.  That’s a step in the right direction.  My drum store neighbor is bringing over the drum set this afternoon.  I’m thrilled.  I CANNOT wait.  I keep looking out the window, waiting for him to pull up.  Come on little drummies, come into my house.  I want you.  Banging drums has to be better than watching YouTube, right?  I’m having one of those moments I’ve written about before where I can’t come up with a coherent ending to my post, so it continues to ramble on and on about nothing at all.  Come here little drummies?  Seriously?  Did I say that?  Okay, I’m really going now.  I have to go to the bathroom.  Oh there’s a story there that I can’t tell on the internet, but it’s so awful and funny, maybe I’ll put it on my secret blog, my anonymous blog.  It needs to be written about because it’s that hilarious.

I’ve decided since typing this that I REALLY like the new WordPress. It’s much more user friendly.  It saves my posts for me, eliminating the likelihood of blog loss because of my fucked up computer.  It’s great.  I love it.  I’m going to have to figure out tags and all that, but it will all be good.  I’ll get it done.

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All the Wittle Animals and Adam

My friend wrote this.  I thought it was such a funny story, I had to post it.

Once upon a time, God got an itch to create himself some little planet.  Yeah.  And on the planet he put all the wittle animals, some shrubbery, and Adam.  Oh, and then he turned on the light.  And then he rested.  Yeah.  And Adam was lonely so he ripped out a rib and created a woman.  Yeah.  And then God made sure that Adam and Eve were stupid and wouldn’t question anything.  Yeah.  So then, there was a snake, a talking snake, that persuaded Eve to eat an apple.  Yeah.  And then, well, then everything went to hell (woman’s fault, you know).  And then, God wrote the bible and told everyone that this was the Bible and that it was the word of God and that you had to obey it all.  Yeah, even the parts where you stone your own children to death if they profess non belief.  — CW, 2008

My choosing to publish this story represents a perfect microcosm of a little problem I have been dealing with lately.  As cliche’ as it sounds, on some level my blog is my own personal therapy session.  I come here and spout and think and muse and make shit up no one cares about.  Part of the deal for me is that I have to be brutally honest.  But also, no censoring.  And lately, I have wanted to censor.  I have been worrying way too much about who might read this and their reaction.  As a result, I have not been the happiest little camper lately.  Part of it, I’m sure, is that I’ve not been sleeping well.  Not sleeping makes me turn into a rather cranky little monster, if you know what I mean.  Lack of sleep will do that to a person.

But another part of my angst has been wanting to write stuff and then not doing it because of my perceived expectation of a reaction or concern over what others will think of me.  I even went so far as to delete the post I wrote on toxic work places because I was worried someone at the old workplace would read it.  I also worried about what I wrote yesterday about wanting a boyfriend, all concerned the man I’m going on a date with might read it, realize I’m bananas, and run screaming for the hills.  I worried a parent in Milla’s class might discover what a foul-mouthed hooligan I can be.  Then there were a few days where all I wanted to write was a bunch of negativity because I was mired in a sleep-deprived, hormonally-induced, mini depressional psychosis and I didn’t want people to think I’m that much of a mental health disaster.  For over a week now I have not written much at all because of concern over someone reading what I had to say.

Then last night I was reading and taking a nice bath to relax before bed in the hope I would fall asleep when I realized what I have been doing.  I realized I was censoring myself and I had to ask, what in the world is going on here?  I am not writing for the audience, I am writing for me, regardless how stupid, opinionated, depressed, or ridiculous I may be.  I want to have an audience, that’s why I put it out there.  But I can’t write with the audience in mind.  So I had this little epiphany and resolved to go back to being my usual blabber-mouthed, opinionated, cussing sometimes self, regardless if I was having a good day and regardless what anyone else might think or say.

Then this morning I received the story my friend wrote and wanted to post it because I think it is hilarious.  I cut and pasted it and put it into my wordpress window, then when it came time to tag it and categorize it, I started to worry about offending someone or the neo-nazi religious types that might read it and send me hate mail and I got a little flutter and almost didn’t put anything in the tags and only a couple of categories to ensure no one would read it.  Then the lightbulb went on and I realized I was doing it again, censoring, worrying about the reaction, and I knew then that I had to post it and add all the tags and categories I would have if I knew no one was reading it.  I had to put it out there, regardless of the reaction.  Because ironically enough, I honestly don’t care whether someone likes it or not.   I’m just too tired right now to deal with the possible reaction.  And that is the crux of it, I suppose.  I have been feeling so lousy from lack of sleep that I do not have my usual strength and resolve to put up with someone else not liking what I have to say.  I’ve regressed back to the person in my teens and early twenties who had zero confidence in her writing or her self.  I suppose it is normal to make these regressions when I’m overly tired, but it doesn’t mean I have to stay there.

So I’ve put on the story and I put back the toxic workplace post and I’m leaving the relationship post and if there is anyone reading it who doesn’t like it, well, I guess that’s too bad.  Go read something else.  I’m not trying to change your mind.  I’m not trying to make other people hate my ex boss.  I’m not trying to troll the blogs hoping some Prince Charming will read my relationship posts and come sweep me off my feet.  I’m writing because I have to and it keeps me sane.  It is part of my spirituality.  I know that’s a useless psychobabble reason, but it’s true, and that’s all there is to it.

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A Million Little Thoughts

I was thinking about the book A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.  I found the book to be an entertaining read. James got into a lot of trouble for embellishing some of the book and not admitting it up front. I wonder what he was afraid of that he didn’t just put in some disclaimer saying as much when he wrote it.  I doubt anyone would have cared. Unfortunately, the fallout was huge, and he’s still brought up as some sort of failure of a journalistic standard or whatever.  It all was way too overboard though. I mean seriously people.  Get a grip.  What I find ironic is that people managed to get so up in arms about it considering he called himself a liar several times in the book, and also he seemed the sort who liked to make a story big.  And the stuff he embellished was the stuff that made the story big.  Plus if he manages to offer some other solution to addicts besides various anonymous, then more power to him.  And he was honest about calling himself an addict and a criminal, which he was, at least the addict part.

I don’t know that I like the word criminal.  Yeah, someone did a crime and maybe at that point they were a criminal, but if they repent does that make them a criminal forever? Kind of like an adulterer or murderer.  But if we’re going to label someone something like that forever, then if they had been honest and hardworking then committed a crime then were honest and hardworking again, aren’t they still honest and hardworking?  And are all crimes necessarily dishonest?  I have known more than one person who had an affair while married or in another sort of long term relationship who did not repeat their behavior in other relationships.  Does that still make them an adulterer?  I guess you couldn’t get over murderer though. Once a murderer, always one I suppose.  Funny how we choose certain labels that can be added or subtracted depending on the circumstances, but the bad ones certainly seem to stick around longer.  Okay.  I can’t say anything anymore.  It all becomes some damn theoretical debate in my head, all this trying to get at the truth of something that may just be limited by language

As I may have mentioned before, my brother is staying with me at the moment.  I have been paying close attention to him, and I have noticed one consistent aspect to his behavior, and that is his absolute inability to delay gratification.  I know studies show that inability to delay gratification in early life can be a predictor for addictive behavior later in life.  And Derek just can’t.  It’s nuts.  He wants something, he wants it now, and he is basically obsessed about it until he gets it.  On occasion I have been able to explain him out of his desire for the thing, but often it will come up again several times with me reminding him again of the reason out of the desire until it finally sinks in or another thing rises to take its place.  For instance, I am minimally employed at the moment, so money is tight.  This means I do my best to keep from squandering it on things I don’t need.  Derek, however, has no job at the moment and has about $700 left.  He wanted a new external dvd drive, so he ordered it.  I asked him why and he said he wanted it.  I told him he might need the money for food or something later, and he just kind of shrugged.  I think on some level he must recognize his inability to keep from spending money if he has it because he gave me $500 to hold onto for him.  It also serves as a kind of monetary deposit should he fail to get another job and pay me for the space he sleeps in my basement.

I wonder if this inability to delay gratification is the key behavioral component that makes an addict an addict.  I’m sure all humans at some point or another have moments of unwillingness to wait for something.  I know I have paced and waited and stared at the phone hoping that new guy will call, biting my thumbnail to the quick, jumping like a startled rabbit when it finally does.  Or not even waiting, but picking up and calling him, then kicking myself in the ass afterwards wondering why didn’t I wait, damn it!  And credit cards are evidence alone that many, many people want stuff before they can afford it.  But I wonder if addicts choose to act more often than not.  A food addict wants food and eats.  A sex addict wants sex and goes to find it, regardless of the consequences.  An alcoholic wants alcohol and drinks, again regardless of the consequences.  Curious.  There is probably a body of theory and study out there in addiction medicine all about this, I’m just not in the know about such things.

Well, I can no longer delay my desire to eat.  I’m hungry.  So I’m going to go and make food.  The desire to write has been overridden by my body’s need for something in its empty stomach.

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Random Rant of the Morning

Why the hell is it people can’t figure out basic punctuation rules when it comes to quotation marks and things like commas and periods?  Even if you’re quoting something, the punctuation mark goes INSIDE the quotation marks.  Everyone seems to want to pretend to be British these days, where they stick the punctuation outside the quotes.  But guess what?  We had a little war about oh, say, 215 years ago, give or take a few years that allowed us to secede from Great Brittain.  Do you know what this means, to secede?  It means that we became a country of our own.  We left the mother ship.  We took our baby steps and fell and grew to be a country with language usage all our own. Lots less cool and boring in most cases, but still ours.  For instance, we took the “e” out of judgment.  We add a “the” before we head to the hospital.  We go on vacation instead of on holiday.  We call our boots and condoms rubbers.  They call their erasers rubbers.  There are lots of little different things.  And one of them is putting the damn little punctuation marks inside the quotation marks.  It is so bloody distracting to see the punctuation mark outside the quotes.  See there?  I used a British swear word to show everyone how distracting it is when Americans pretend they are Brits.  Weren’t you distracted? I hear you.  You’re saying, “Here she is complaining about Americans acting like Brits and she’s acting like one herself!”  I’m with you. But see, I did that on purpose to make a point.  Those people out there using the punctuation marks outside the quotes aren’t making a point.  They are just using the marks incorrectly.

I put a rant about this very issue on Craigslist Rants and Raves.  Do you know what?  Someone flagged it for removal!  This is a site where people use the foulest of language, some posting the most horrendous photos, with arguments back and forth between people on the web basically threatening to kill each other, and my little rant about putting small punctuation marks inside the quotes got flagged!  I swear.  I suppose Portland rant and ravers want everyone to think they are from Britain or something.  Weird.

So please.  I beg you.  If you are American and you are writing, follow the rules.  Put the small punctuation marks inside the quotes, whether or not you are quoting something.  This is the rule.  If you don’t believe me, I can recommend an excellent site on grammar and punctuation.  It’s called Wilbers on Writing and it’s at www.wilbers.com.  The specific rule about small punctuation marks inside the quotes can be found at www.wilbers.com/quotes.htm.

That’s it for the random rant of the morning.  Thanks for sticking around.

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I Apologize in Advance for My Lack of Brevity and Wit

My daughter goes to a Waldorf school. There is a lot I love about the school. She has learned to knit and she is only 8 years old. She can do math word problems like no non-Waldorf 8 year olds I know. And she’s been learning music for years now as well.

But sometimes, if I’m honest, the “I’m liberal and New Ageyness” of some of the parents can be a little annoying. It’s like listening to the local NPR station sometimes with these people. Oh yes. Tomorrow we’re going to the farmer’s market to find grain to grind to make our own bread from scratch. It’s all organic and grown on that lot that was purchased in north Portland. Oh really? Wow. Yes, tomorrow Balfour and Aaliyah and I are going to a pottery class for 3 year olds, then we’re going to chant at the spiritual center. Both of these statements are made to one another in perfectly modulated, quiet voices, our indoor voices if you will. You know, just like NPR. And of course our children have unique foreign names to show our multiculturalism. We may be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but we’re diverse!

I know, I know. I’m being judgmental. I mean, after all, I am blonde, blue-eyed, white, and liberal. We eat organic and Milla knits. But I can honestly without a doubt say that sometimes our house sounds like trailer trash central. I walk in the kitchen and discover my dog vomited all over the floor and I scream, “What the FUCK is this mess? Goddamned dogs!” And last night, I admit it, we watched Dumb and Dumber without compunction. That movie is stupid and funny. And Milla watched it and laughed right along with me. Uh oh. If any of the other Waldorf parents found out, I’d be voted out. Maybe her teacher could claim the fact we’re late at least once a week is because Milla has heard the word fuck and has seen Dumb and Dumber. The fact I’m the only parent living here and have a hard enough time getting my own ass out of bed let alone my daughter’s has nothing at all to do with it. No sirree. And on the days where we’re late and I’m in the parking lot hollering at Milla to get moving because she’s the slowest thing on the planet sometimes, I swear, the holier than thou, how dare you speak to that child in that manner looks on some of the smug little faces make me want to whack them one. I don’t spank her. She’s got a good life. It isn’t going to kill her for me to tell her to get her damn ass moving already when she’s taking her own sweet time checking out some spot on the car door instead of getting into school. Jeez.

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Milla’s school. She used to go to a different Waldorf school where it felt like being in junior high all over again. The exclusion that went on there was out of hand. I guess what bugs me about the “I’m Liberal and New Age” crowd is that it’s worn like some badge of honor and used as a way to exclude those who aren’t in the “I’m Liberal and New Age” crowd. It’s the queen bees in another context. “Oh,” the eyes say as your child walks by wearing, GASP! Something from Old Navy! “You mean you didn’t spend eight-thousand dollars on a pure cotton, hand-knitted, grown up on the remade lot in north Portland skirt and shirt combo? How DARE you! I would NEVER let a stitch of acrylic touch my perfect child’s skin. And I certainly wouldn’t let little Balfour wear something made somewhere besides my own backyard! God forbid.”

It’s frustrating when you agree with the results of someone’s choices, but the why of their choices is problematic. Does it matter? I suppose it does in the context of trying to live without judgment, just letting others live their own life. Even the fact that it bugs me that they judge me for not being “Liberal and New Agey” enough in their minds is a form of judgment on my part.

Thinking about it, I suppose it’s how or why we identify with groups. Do we do it to belong or to exclude? And in belonging is there automatically excluding? Or can you belong simply for the sake of being a part of something? And some things people belong to by an accident of birth, yet this does not stop their identification to the point of even killing someone else who had a different accident of birth. Ireland comes to mind here, or Israel and the Palestine. Why is it that we will fight to the death for something that we wouldn’t have cared about if we had been born to another family? Even a seemingly innocuous choice, like which dog breed you prefer, can be a choice for exclusion as well. It’s weird. The whole thing is tied up in a big, old mess. Humans have this need to be a part of a pack but in doing so they leave others out of the pack and it seems like every conflict centers around this tidy piece of information. It’s the nature of conflict, isn’t it? One side against the other. One view against another. Me against you against me.

Sometimes it’s funny though. I try not to laugh at the “Liberal and New Age” voices in the hall at my daughter’s school. I try not to roll my eyes in class meetings when the parents get into a disagreement that they don’t want anyone to recognize as a disagreement. We’re using soft voices and “I centered” messages so it’s not a disagreement, is it?

“But really, I just can’t have Aaliyah eating cheese pizza for lunch, and we wouldn’t want her to feel excluded if the rest of the class has cheese pizza. She is allergic to dairy, yeast, soy, sugar, brocolli, pineapple, peanut butter, white bread, wheat, and every nut on the planet after all.” (And that’s another thing. Why is it that every kid is allergic to 18 different foods? For Christ’s sake, get a grip already!)

“Well, you know, Galbraith has been so cooperative at home lately, I promised him he could have cheese pizza. I wouldn’t want him to feel like I’m not listening to his needs if I didn’t get him cheese pizza.”

“Well, perhaps it may have been a wiser choice to bring him other options for his calm behavior. Perhaps you could discuss another choice with him. I’m sure he would be awake to such changes.”

“I just think that would create a lack of trust. Galbraith is such a sensitive soul. He has to be open to understanding, but I wouldn’t want to send the wrong message.”

And on and on and on. I just want to scream, For Christ’s sake! Let’s get the fucking pizza already. If your kid doesn’t ever eat pizza, how the hell is she going to miss it when everyone else eats it? And you’re just afraid Galbraith will throw a fucking tantrum if the class doesn’t get pizza. Why are we sitting here listening to this drivel at a parent’s meeting? I thought we were going to find out what they’re working on in class, not spend a half an hour bitching about whether or not to let the class have cheese pizza.

I sit there during these meetings and look at my shoes and wonder why it is exactly that the rest of us have to sit and listen to this nonsense for a half an hour. Oh, that’s right. Because we’re giving them an opportunity to be heard. And we all need to be heard, right? What about my right not to have to sit and listen to the shit? Guess what? We can’t all have all our rights at every moment we want to have them.

Okay, that was the longest, pointless rant ever. Sometimes I wonder about the pointlessness comes out of my typing fingers. I start with one thought and end up somewhere completely different. There is another blogger I like to read.  He wrote about the fact that he writes about a bunch of nonsense sometimes and wondered why he does it. Why indeed? Why is there this need to spew forth our opinions and observations? Why is it that when I’m writing for my blog I can write and write and write but when I just did my journal it was like pulling teeth sometimes? My counselor said that artists need an audience. I just wonder how anyone could call my drivel art. It makes me chuckle. But Full Metal Gerbil is right about one thing, if I’m writing on here, I’m not wasting time elsewhere, so it’s all good. Plus it keeps me sane. I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I need to in order to keep the brain sane and last night I realized I was in a depressive funk. I just have to do it. I have to get the meaningless drivel on the page. If someone has the stamina to sit and read all of it, more power to them. I apologize for my lack of brevity and wit.

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Truly Random Thoughts of a Stream of Consciousness Insomniac

My brain is normally overflowing with words.  I can hardly exist sometimes with all the words leaking out my ears and nostrils.  But for the last few days, my brain has been remarkably quiet.  I’ve thought of a few things, but nothing like usual.

Okay, non sequitur here.  But I’m sitting and typing this and my little dog, Piper, is lying down next to me with his funny little back legs stuck out straight behind him and he’s licking his front paws.  Oh!  Now the greyhound started snorting (she does that periodically, kind of gags and snorts like she has something caught in her throat) so Piper just jumped up to warn her with a couple of throaty little barks that he’s here so that snorting better not come any closer.  Oh she’s warned all right.  She’s lying across the middle of the floor taking up that half of the room.  I’m sure she plans to trip anyone who wants to come after me.  Dogs.  They are so present.

So anyway.  Last night I was pondering the fact that my brain has not been very active recently and I had a few interesting thoughts I wanted to write down, but I was too tired.  The brain wanted to sleep.  Sitting here, I almost wonder if it’s the insomnia that’s shut down my brain.  I have not been sleeping well.  It’s been over a week.  I know why.  I have no job.  I’m not making much on the contract work I’m getting.  I’m not sure how I’m going to pay the mortgage next month.  I got a shutoff notice from the city for water.   So I lie there in the middle of the night when I wake up and force myself into the moment, try not to worry about the future, try not to plan how to bring in cash.  I keep focusing on the pillow or the comforter or my dogs snoring or Milla’s arm across my head.  Bonk.  That brought me back to the present all right!

It’s funny how difficult living in the moment can be.  But I find that my days are much more stress free than they used to be, even if I’m not the best living in the moment person.  Compared to how I used to be, I really shouldn’t be so hard on myself.  Now I have to figure out how to stay in the moment at 3 in the morning when my brain wants to consider all the possibilities having no money brings.

So sitting here contemplating this now I am certain that the empty brain is just trying to sleep.  It does not function well without rest.  It loses its verve.  I yawn a lot.  I know this place.  Stress has always manifested as insomnia for me.  Insomnia makes it hard to be awake, in every sense of the word.  It is kind of nice for stream of consciousness, useless blogging though.

I’m selling my house.  I am moving somewhere warmer.  Or at least sunnier.  Milla’s dad wants us to move to Boulder where he lives.  He says it is sunny there 300 days a year.  I have a friend here who is from Denver.  She says it is sunnier there too, even though it’s cold.  I’m curious whether the sun alone will cure me.  I long for heat as well.  In the heat I can wear wispy dresses and flip flops.  In the heat I can pull on a t-shirt and cutoffs and I’m ready for the day.  In the cold I have to go searching for layers that won’t be terribly uncomfortable but will keep me warm.  And the choices!  It’s overwhelming.  So today, I can wear a maroon turtleneck, or hmmm….a black turtleneck?  How about grey?  And let’s see, should I wear the Levi’s for when I’m bloated or am I sufficiently watered that I’m not retaining anything and can wear the skinny ones?  Gee.  I’m not sure.  I could wear khakis, but that would require ironing and I really don’t feel like ironing.  So Levi’s it is.  There are those who tell me it’s because I’m so skinny that I’m cold all the time.  I don’t have enough padding.  So I should just gain a bunch of weight then I won’t be cold?  Not sure that would work.  I’m not the sort who gains weight easily.  And too much sugar makes me insane.  So I could try eating a lot more than I do, add sugar, and I’ll be chubby and meaner than hell, but I’ll be warm.  You know?  I think I’ll move instead.

Well off I go to try and earn some money so perhaps I can sleep.  That would be nice.  At the moment, I would really like a nap.

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Listen to the Music

I read this blog on Matt Nathanson’s myspace page.  He was lamenting that we don’t have music like the 60’s.  He thinks music today lacks the depth of the music in the 60’s and that it doesn’t impact us today the way music did for people then.  He received several comments back, mostly it seemed from aging baby boomers, agreeing with him.

Sorry, Matt, but I couldn’t disagree more.  I have long felt the baby boomers were always more flashy and external in their dealings with the world.  Notice us!  We’re here!  Our way is the best!  Since other generations have come along, the baby boomers have lamented their lack of everything, character, depth, taste, you name it.

But I don’t think we lack any of that, we just go about things in a different way, and our way tends to be more introspective.  I’m Generation X.  We are not like the boomers.  Music is just as important to us, it is just more internal.  I think it’s appropriate that Kurt Cobain is held up as a sort of icon of our generation.  His internal struggles are the struggles of our generation. His pain is our pain.

I have recently become acquainted, through an online forum, with a whole lot of people born within the two years before and two years after me.  All of us, no matter what part of the country we’re in, no matter what we’re doing, are all struggling, mostly internally, with the demons the baby boomers loved to scream about.  We just don’t put it out there for everyone in the same way the boomers did.  We mull things over.  We ponder.  We observe.  Our movies are quieter.  Our books can be quite dark (and darkly funny).  Music speaks to us as individuals.

Matt comes from the generation after mine.  I have long observed them as being kind of like the baby boomers, but happier.  They are creative and amazing, and seem to be enjoying themselves.  Us X’ers are struggling with a generational creative angst, but we internalize it more.  I look at the generation after mine and want what they have, their spirit, their verve, their happiness.

Music means more to me than most things.  I listen to certain songs and I am transported to that creative energy wave where I feel connected to all things.  I hear certain lyrics and know that the poet who wrote it (that’s the extent of my poetic ability–Ha!) was speaking my words, only more eloquently and with a beautiful melody.  I have generated some of my best writing after hearing a song that took me to that energetic creative place.

So Matt, don’t underestimate the music of today.  It’s amazing.  I love it that we have avenues to access music outside the mainstream music industry.  Right now I live in Portland and the music vibe here is unbelievable.  We’re tuned in…just because we aren’t screaming it from the housetops like the baby boomers did doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect us just as deeply.

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Post #45

Have you ever had a brilliant thought in the car or in the middle of the night when you’re too tired to get up and do anything about it then the second you’re in a place you can write it down it’s gone?  I suppose that is what separates the successful creators from the unsuccessful ones, either the ability to remember those brilliant ideas or the wherewithall to drag your ass out of bed to write the thoughts down.  There is that little thing though, about something seeming brilliant in the edges of sleep, and it turns out to be pretty crappy in the light of day.

Apparently this brilliant piece of drivel was my post number 45.  I don’t know why I didn’t post it or name it.  I was probably distracted by living in some other moment than the one I was in, longing for Ron or Frederick or some other figment of my imagination and not paying attention to the moment I was in.  So today I’m fiddling around with my wordpress account, creating a new theme, doing something different, and I notice there is a little button above where I compose that says DRAFTS.  And after DRAFTS it said Post #45.  So I clicked on it and found this tidbit of thought.  I remember typing it, but beyond that I don’t recall much.  However considering I have wasted many days in the last several weeks not living in the present and focusing heavily on the male figments of my imagination, I can reasonably assume that one of them is the reason the post was interrupted and forgotten.  How sad it is.  How sad indeed.

When I consider the hours, days, weeks, months, years I have wasted living outside the moment I am in….ah well.  I suppose lamenting this would be futile as well.  There is no way to retrieve those moments.  I can only hope I remember to live in the present going forward.

Today is particularly difficult.  I must remember this is only about my third day of understanding, and I would not say it’s full understanding or that my brain is in a groove with it yet.  I would suggest to myself that this will take some time, but I don’t want to limit things.  At least awareness is present, so that should help.  But today I have been wanting to live my old patterns.  I have been fighting the urge to leave the messenger on in the hopes that one of the figments will communicate with me.  He has, but it has been little.  I heard something on the radio that reminded me of the figment and felt something funny in my stomach.  Reminder again, he’s a figment, he’s a figment.  Get here.  Look at the sky.  Isn’t it cool? Look at the clouds swirling in the late afternoon light.  The sun wants to peek through.  It is cold, but it is bright.  Okay, I’m here.

Post #45.  Sounds like a mile marker.  Perhaps I can find some interesting metaphor for the milepost to help me remember that the other stuff is all just figment.  It is where I have been in this qwest to live in the moment and to avoid living somewhere else.  It can help me give up the figments who are really only synapses firing in my brain.  Here I am.  Here is this bright computer screen.  Here are these keys that I type on so effortlessly.  Here is the heater on my cold feet and my bladder that feels as if it would like to be emptied.  Click on the mute button so if the figment sends you an IM you do not scramble in an attempt to respond immediately, thereby engaging the figment or hoping the figment will communicate further with you.  Relax.  Breathe.  You are here right now.  And that is all that matters.

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Dharma Struggles

I have been thinking a lot lately about being present in the current moment, living right here right now, because living anywhere else gets me into trouble.  I have been struggling with this concept for some time now.  I think I originally started with the Tao Te Ching a couple of years ago, and at that time it seemed right, but I didn’t start to live it.  Then I lived the worst year of my life and the concept was placed before me in a book by Pema Chodren called When Things Fall Apart.  There were moments last year where existing hurt so badly, where if I had not had my daughter I would have chosen to die (although some of the moments would not have happened without having my daughter because they came from problems with my ex and his girlfriend so who knows how things would have been).  In any case, I did not want to be here I hurt that much.  During those moments, sometimes the only way I could get through would be to read the book about being in the moment and be in that moment reading that book.  Or I would lie in bed and hold my daughter and focus on that moment alone to get to the next.

Then Peter came along and I became obsessed with his lying and cheating and totally tossed all the living in the moment out the window.  Focusing on him took the focus off me.  But that got old and I finally chose to walk away.  Since him, I have had a series of “relationships” where in each case, the man would be there but not be there or disappear or act in any number of ways that were not present.  Finally, I have been communicating with a man for over a month via email, chat, and phone, who makes no effort to see me in person despite ample opportunity and despite many claims that he would like to meet.  And with him I just realized I was projecting this entire what could be scenario onto him and absolutely not living in the present.  He’s this, he’s that, he’s everything I think I want, yada yada, but these are all external things.  They are not him because he is not real.  He is not here.  I have never seen his face in real life!  Jesus, it’s ridiculous!

And it dawned on me, what the hell does the universe have to do to get me to understand this point?  After the last couple of years, I have lamented to anyone who would listen, if the universe just told me what to do, I would do it.  But the universe did just that:  it gave me the Tao Te Ching over two years ago.  I did not live it.  It gave me the worst emotional pain I have ever experienced and I did not live it.  It finally gave me a series of relationships whereby each subsequent man was less present than the first.  It finally took one who is really not here for me to think, “What in the world am I supposed to be learning from this?”  I was asking this question before, but I was NOT getting it.  Now I think I’ve got it and I wonder, why the hell was it so hard to fucking figure out?

So now I am here and I am trying to live in each moment.  As part of this, I am trying to accept who I am in this moment, not to judge, not to criticize, not to worry, just to be.  And it is the most peaceful I have ever felt.  I have been worrying incessantly about where my next dime is supposed to come from.  I have been terrified of owing taxes and where my next mortgage payment is coming from.  But all of those things are not hurting me right now.  In this moment, the mortgage is paid.  In this moment, no one is taking anything from me because I owe taxes or my family-law attorney.  I am going with the dharma, existing here and now.  Why waste this moment worrying about what is not happening, right now?

Yet here is where I get confused.  I need to find some way to earn money.  I do not want to wait until the moment when my house is being repossessed to realize that that moment sucks!  There has to be responsibly planning for the future without sacrificing the now.  Only I have no idea how to go about it.  Another big part of all of this process is choosing the life I lead in a manner best suited to who I am.  I chose law school to escape where I had been rather than to choose a life I wanted.  This was a terrible reason.  I hated being a lawyer.  It was the biggest mistake I have ever made.  I wanted to write so I chose law school thinking I could make money writing and because I feared that I couldn’t make money writing any other way and feared that my writing wasn’t good enough and made this major life choice without having had any idea what my life would be like.  It was all about escape and fear and concerns about what other people thought about me and making money and nothing about living my life on my terms or accepting who I was or what I could do without worrying about other people.

So now I am trying to make active choices about who I want to be, what kind of life I want to live, doing things that nourish my soul, and at the same time, I have to pay the mortgage.  One part of me says keep doing these things you need to be who you are.  Write the articles and books.  Try to teach the classes.  Do the astrological consultations.  And if you do these things, money will flow to you, because you are doing what you need to do.  But I admit it.  I’m afraid.  I’m afraid if I don’t take more active steps like even applying at Starbucks or putting this house on the market before I get behind on the mortgage, I will lose this house and end up in a worse position than I am in now.  It is all coming from fear.  I do not trust the universe to take care of me.  I suppose that is the crux of it, isn’t it?  Maybe I should pay attention and try to get whatever lesson is in this before life gets really rough, like it did with the living in the moment stuff.  But I just don’t know how.  So I am asking the universe, please, give me some guidance and I will pay attention.  I will do what I have to do to pay attention so you do not have to bonk me on the head.  I will do my best to trust and have faith that I will be cared for and that everything will be okay.  I don’t suppose I have any other choice.

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Word Jail (or Lara is possibly a mental case, I’m not sure)

My words are being read.  Not by many, but some.  So how truthful will I be in what I say?

This life is surreal.  My new favorite word lately, surreal, because that is how life feels lately.  It is so unfamiliar.  This isn’t a bad thing, I just have no idea how to navigate this alien landscape that is my life.  I suppose I have the tools to figure it out and get wherever I’m supposed to go in this life, in fact I know I do.  But it still scares the crap out of me.  And right at the moment I wonder how much of my anxiety is the result of staying awake too long, how much is the result of doing things I’m not sure of, how much is just normal considering the newness of all of my life.  Maybe my friend Mark is right; maybe I took on too many new things at once.  But I like change.  I wanted change.  I guess I got it and now I have to figure out what to do with it.

Word press.  Pressing words.  Pressing in the sense of print media.  But for me it is more like words pressing the inside of my brain begging to escape, words that don’t have any meaning for anyone except me.  What is that?  What is that need to tap into that energy line and disappear into the void for a while and let the words out?

I guess the words are in jail if I don’t express them.  They are prisoners held captive by no will of their own, so if I don’t let some of them free, there will be a coup and I will be in trouble.  Actually, trouble has been brewing for years because I have not let them out when they needed to escape, just to breathe for a while.  And I paid for it.  Big time.

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Concatenation

I love that word.  Concatenation.  It just rolls off the tongue.  And I love its meaning.  I love its use in Little Women.  It is a great word.  One of those words I pray is not lost in the mundanity of modern word usage.  I hope that since so many people are posting blogs, it means there are enough lovers of the English language that words such as this one will not die for centuries.

I did a google search for language lovers and discovered that there is a website dedicated to links to websites for language lovers.  I also discovered a site called spellorg.com, belonging to the Society for the Preservation of the English Language and Literature.  Very good!  Very good indeed.  Keep concatenation with us, as well as many other brilliant and uncommon words.

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Addendum to the Longest Post

I was so tired the other night because it was late when I was writing, so I finally just had to stop.  After I stopped writing, I did some quick google searching for the sites that I did not know.  What I found was surprising.  Most of the sites were socialization and video sharing sites.  Badoo, a top search for the world, looks to be like myspace and facebook.   Same with hi5 and second life.  Daily motion is a video sharing site and appears similar to Youtube.  As my kind commentator pointed out, tmz is a place to follow celebrity gossip.

I thought about this quite a bit yesterday.  MSNBC says that its top clicked stories of the week are all murder and killing stories.  I checked a few other “news” sites and found similar patterns.  Yet a search for what people are looking for, at least in 2007, reveals that what we actually seek is to connect, through socialization sites and video.  We’re interested in the latest celebrity scandal (i.e., tmz and Anna Nicole Smith), but for the most part, we want to connect with one another.  In a sense, it could be argued that we are not so interested in murder and death as we are in life, our lives and the lives around us.  Even the checks on celebrity stories could be viewed as a way to connect; we wish to see how those who appear to have everything are really human in the ways that they mess up.  (And of course it is so much fun to taunt Paris Hilton when she cries about how she’s “changed” after a few nights in jail.  Poor baby.  Yes, you are human.  Riiiight.)

I think perhaps the “news” organizations ought to consider getting a clue on this point.  They design sites where you click for the “latest story.”  Yet those stories are chosen by the organization and a link is created to click.  They are the ones that are creating the “top-clicked stories” because they are the ones choosing which stories to present.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, created by the “news” organization.  Would their results be the same if their subject matter were different?  I doubt it.  In fact, if murder and killing stories weren’t on there at all, they could not be clicked at all.  Suppose the stories presented were about world affairs or national interest pieces.  Yes, the stories may then be about killing because the stories might be about wars, but they probably would not be the sort of sensationalized killing stories available via the “top clicked sites.”

What with the proliferation of shows like CSI, I suppose the “news” organizations think all we are interested in is murder and killing.  What they fail to understand is that it isn’t the murder that interests us on shows like that, it is the investigation and the finding of the clues.  These are two different things.  In some ways the investigation is a form of joining together between the people seeking to find the clues into the murder.  Again, connection.  Like the searches on google for social sites and video sharing, what we seem to seek is relationship and association, not murder and killing.  This shouldn’t be surprising, but considering “news” organizations have sought to shove murder and killing down our throats as long as there have been “news” stories, I don’t expect it to end anytime soon.

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The Longest Blog

Happy New Year.  And what are the top ten stories being clicked on at MSNBC?  Amanda Knox’s deadly exchange.  Who’s Who Student murdered in Italy.  Photos:  Terror at home for Connecticut family.  Who killed Stacy Peterson?  To catch a predator.  The reals story behind “Alpha Dog.”  Phil Spector evidence photos.  Predator goes to Kentucky.  Palladium murder photo gallery.  Photos:  Death in the Hollywood Hills.

Seriously?  Is this seriously what Americans consider the most popular pages on MSNBC?  Does MSNBC do something to market these murderous stories and photos so everyone is so interested in them?  Shouldn’t we all be disturbed that the top stories grabbing American attention are all about killing and mayhem?  Jesus.  Something is really messed up about that.  There must be something at the site that encourages people to choose these stories.  I cannot yet fathom that these are the top story views by choice.  I would think a more accurate measure of what people are searching for would be the top ten google searches.  Then people would, of their own accord, be entering the information into the search engine and not having it flashing in their faces begging them to click.  Google is good that way, with its lack of ads and fanfare.

Well.  So I did a google search for the top ten google searches and came up with an interesting page analyzing the year 2007 and the searches done throughout the year and the top searches, both by U.S. and by the world.  They calculate the top searches as rising and falling.  For the world, the top risers are iphone, badoo, facebook, dailymotion, webkinz, youtube, ebuddy, second life, hi5, and club penguin.  The fastest US risers are iphone, webkinz, tmz, transformers, youtube, club penguin, myspace, heroes, facebook, and Anna Nicole Smith.

Well.  There are many searches on these lists for things I have never even heard of, so I must not be in line with the rest of the world population.  I’m not “with it” if you will.  However, I can count myself among the top US searchers on youtube and myspace.  Myspace I use so I don’t have to type it in the URL.  Pure laziness on my part because from google’s response I can click right into wherever I want.  And Youtube needs no explanation.  I’m shocked Club Penguin is on here.  Milla loves it.  I have to convince her not to play it after she’s been to visit non-Waldorf friends.  I would not have known it was so popular.  I do not know what badoo, dailymotion, webkinz, ebuddy, second life, hi5, or tmz are.  I am going to have to search those, thereby increasing their search popularity, just so I can find out what they are.

There are fallers from the list as well.  World Cup tops this list, followed by mozart, fifa, rebelde, kazaa, xanga, webdetente, sudoku, shakira, and mp3.  I do not know what fifa, rebelde, kazaa, and shakira are, although I think shakira might be a singer.  My goodness, I’m frighteningly out of touch, aren’t I?  I’m surprised mozart is on this list, not because it’s going down, but because he is on the list at all.

For anyone who cares, I found this information at:  http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/

Well it is officially 2008 on the west coast so I can now head to bed.  This blog has the notoriety of having been started in one year and completed in another.  Makes it sound as if I spent a good deal of time on it, rather than about 21 minutes.

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I Know What I Want

So I’m at work and I brought my puppy and he’s rooting around on the floor, spinning in circles, being completely silly.  He loves rubbing his tummy on the carpet like that.  He grunts and makes goofy noises.  I love him so much.

So I’m reading this book, well, listening to this book being read to me in my car.  I’m really enjoying it.  It’s John Irving and he’s always great.  Anyway, as is often the case with me and books I enjoy, I can see the movie as I would direct it.  How I would tell the story, who I would cast in the various parts, what part of the book I would keep because it’s rare to be able to include an entire book in a movie.  Often there are smaller side stories in books that work in books but don’t in movies because of the nature of reading versus viewing.  For instance I thought the first Harry Potter tried to include too much.  One book made into a movie where I think the movie did better than the book was Sideways.  When I read Sideways, it was as if the movie makers saw the book exactly as the author and as the reader, yet they left out some sensationalized side stories that almost seemed like they were written as over the top movie scenes.  The movie was better having left them out.  I digress.

Anyway, I’m reading this book and I can REALLY see the movie.  It’s a great book and I can feel the entire atmosphere of the thing.  Then at some point, I hear the name of a chapter and it is the name of a movie and I realize that this book has been made into a movie and I would not have conceptualized it as the movie maker did at all.  I hate the movie version.  The actors they chose for the leads.  Ick.  Wrong.  And as is often the case with movies turned into books, they took the most sensationalized parts and chopped them together with none of the connecting tissue from the book and just made this big mess.  I remember when I saw the movie that I did not like it and feeling like something was missing.  Now I know why.

I know movies are different than books, that they are their own creation and I don’t think they should be compared in many cases because they are what they are.  But I also don’t think you should try to pretend a movie is the book if it loses so much of what was originally there.  Like The Shipping News.  Puke.  God, I couldn’t even watch it.  They fucking butchered the book.  Why didn’t they just call it something else and leave the book alone?  Get an idea from a book, then go make your damn movie, but don’t pretend it’s the book when it’s not even in the ballpark.  I have read The Shipping News so many times.  It is easily my favorite book, and that is saying a lot because you can’t pin me down on a favorite ANYTHING.  Seriously.  This book, I know it inside out and backwards.  I know its characters.  I can SEE its characters.  When I heard the book was being made into a movie, I had to read the book again.  I could SEE that movie, see how I would shoot it, the angles, the light, all of it.  And NONE of the book made it into that movie except a few pitiful, over the top plot lines and the names of the characters and that was IT.  They didn’t even make the characters look like the characters in the book and the looks of the characters in the book are almost characters themselves.  HOW could they?  Ack.  Gags me.

So I’m reading this John Irving book now and hearing it and having to force out the characters and story as envisioned by the screenwriter and director (one and the same in this case) as I try to enjoy this book.  The story is actually quite fascinating.  I love it.  And now I have Jeff Bridges’s face looming in to take over one of the main characters when he’s not even CLOSE!  He doesn’t even inhabit the character of the character, let alone the looks.  Looks in a movie can be different from the looks of the character in a book if the actor can BECOME the character, but he didn’t.  Remember Sandra Oh and Virgina Madsen in Sideways?  In the book, Maya looked like Sandra Oh and Stephanie looked like Virginia Madsen, but they are switched in the movie and it doesn’t matter because the actors so inhabited the characters.  It just doesn’t detract in any way.  But in this book I’m reading now, Jeff Bridges is not the character he plays.  Maybe he never read the book.  Maybe he just read the screenplay that butchered the book.  Because as I conceptualize the character in the book, not only does he not characterize the character, he does not look like the character looks.  And Kim Bassinger…I won’t even go there.

Why would John Irving let this happen?  Why would Annie Proulx?  Maybe they don’t get a choice.  But John Irving and Annie Proulx are HUGE authors. They have to be able to maintain some control.  Why couldn’t the movie makers just say that the movie was “inspired” by the book and not pretend the movie is the book come to life when it’s not?

Well that’s enough of my film/literary snob rant for the day. What do I know?  I just know I can’t stand that movie and it is interrupting my enjoyment of this book.

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Glug

Have you ever gone swimming somewhere noisy, boats roaring, children screeching, just the sounds of summer and wetness…then you dive under the water and it’s silent and thick, the water fills your head?  You might can barely hear the other sounds, but they are muffled and far away.  You are present only in the moment of being there under the water by yourself.

Well, that’s like writing can be for me.  I start writing and lose any sense of time.  I don’t notice the sounds.  I’m gone.  I love that place.  It’s better than any substance designed to obliterate reality and there isn’t a hangover, although there can be some disorientation upon returning to consciousness and having to deal again with reality.  That can be somewhat of a shock.

I love that this blog thing tells you that no one reads what you say.  That’s all good though because I might be tempted to edit myself if I thought anyone was looking at this or gave a damn.  I probably do anyway because it’s not my journal.  Oh well.