Sometimes at night, the small dog will trot to the bedside. Stomping her toenails on the wood floor and breathing extra-loud, she'll roust us for a trip outside. She's subtle but insistent. If we don't react, she snorts. Ignored long enough, she might escalate to a stagey sneeze or two, the castanets of her feet going double-time. Bless her heart, I remind myself as I swing my feet onto the chilly floor, better she wake us than leave an accidental present on the carpet. When she descends the stairs under her own steam, Lilly's outsized Boston-Terrier head makes the process tragic and funny. It goes like this: one step, two steps, hop hop, things speed up -- the teeter-totter tips -- and she tumbles down the last few steps. She regains her feet after this noisy disaster with only a brief, wincing look of confusion, but I can't shake the idea that she'll break something falling that way. So now, I sit on the top stair while she clambers into my lap and I convey this grunting sausage-roll of dog in my arms to the lawn. She's also perfectly amenable to being carried in a canvas ice-bag, like a fat-eyed load of firewood. When encouraged, she'll step over the folded side of the bag, ignoring the indignity of having her narrow butt tucked into place, and wait, frozen, blinking, enfolded in stout fabric, until back on solid ground. She loses track, from time to time, of what she meant to do on the lawn. Standing motionless under a big moon, she seems to be sleeping with her buggy eyes wide open. Urged to "be a good dog," she snaps out of it, giving me an apologetic look before attending to the chore. Told that she is being "a good dog," she flattens her ears at me, even while she balances on three legs. As soon as she can, she speeds away from the scene and back to my feet. Sometimes she'll pause at the bottom of the steps and give me a look. Perhaps she's hoping for a boost. "Hup, simba," I tell her (the words a reference, I should be ashamed to admit, from Tarzan cartoons, not David Foster Wallace). And up she hops, occasionally missing her footing but steadily ratcheting her way up the stairs and then bee-lining it back to her dog-bed. In daylight, a treat is the normal reward for "being a good dog," but I learned my lesson the first week she slept under our roof: do not reward her midnight runs with dog-biscuits or else she will be at it non-stop -- sneezing and clacking her repeated demands for midnight runs and dog-biscuits. Even a good dog can be trained into a tiny tyrant.
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File this image of Lilly and Betty under the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words." A phrase that I thought was from an old Kodak ad -- but when I went in search of a fun link to the vintage print ad I almost remembered -- nope. Instead, I give you confabulation. Indeed I do. Confabulation: psychological term for the process of creating fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memory. Unlike a lie, confabulation is usually done without intention. Often involves autobiographical details. Seen frequently in patients with alcoholism, aneurism, and/or Alzheimer's. But enough about that.
Write me a caption for Betty and Lilly as a comment below, and there's a prize in it for at least one participant! Past prizes have included: Lunch at Yummy House, a copy of Stewart O'Nan's wonderful Emily, Alone, homemade soap. That doesn't mean someone isn't going to win the jar of Flarp! this time, but isn't that just like the world, all full of happy uncertainty? We inherited the small dog when my mom went into the hospital for heart surgery. A rescue Boston Terrier, Lilly was astonishingly well behaved: not a chewer, not a barker, not a dog prone to accidents. She was needy and a noisy breather, a snorer, with an unfortunate tendency to lick. She had no street-smarts and no dog-sense to speak of, but she sat and stayed on command. And she didn't beg for food. We'd meant to get a dog, but not for decades. It wouldn't be fair, since we travelled so much and were away from the house so often. Still, when the Dog of Destiny shows up, you have to open the door. So Lilly came along with me to the hospital to visit Mom. She went with me when my sister and I started rehabbing Mom's house. She waited at Masthead Enterprises with Mr. Linton while I ran errands. She accompanied us to friends' houses for dinner. I started taking Lilly to the dog park mornings, early, when the pack of big, kindly dogs met to chase each other around and sniff. Not a fan of conflict, she protested loudly whenever the other dogs play-fought. When they didn't pay attention, she would inch closer to the fracas, barking and feinting, often breaking things up by sheer force of will. The other dog-owners named her "The Mayor." One day, she snatched a stick from the pack: three Labs, some mixed shepherds, a greyhound, a mastiff, a pair of boxers. Twenty pounds of buggy eyes and gravelly growl. The other dogs formed an uneasy circle around her, but none dared to take it back. Another time, she outstretched the greyhound on a gallop around the park. The greyhound's mom and I both called a halt to the game after one circuit: Lilly looked uncannily like the metal rabbit, and the greyhound's teeth seemed to be growing with each mighty stride in chase. As with any playground, friendships form. Lilly and Calusa, a 200-lb mastiff played the bow-down game, both holding perfectly still with their forelegs stretched out and their butts in the air. Then they would break, leaping and snorting and freezing again, flashing the whites of their eyes at one another, like two goofy ends of a telescope. My mother did not make it out of the hospital. I focused on finishing the rehab of her house. At the dog-park, with half-a-dozen dog-owners standing around holding their coffee mugs, watching the dogs and throwing the odd tennis-ball or worn Kong, I was grateful to simply consider the dogs. Lilly learned to circle back to me when she irritated the pack. I learned which owners were inattentive. I was over-protective, but she was little and foolish. One morning, she came out of a scrum scrambling but unable to get to her feet. As I snatched her up, other dog-owners were jotting down the numbers for their doggie emergency rooms, offering advice about which place was open early. I slid her into the passenger seat and tore back to the house -- I'd left my wallet and everything else there. By the time I whipped into my parking spot, Lilly was up and moving around the front seat, non plussed by my drama. "She got her bell rung," her vet told me. "Didn't you, sugar?" he added, to the dog. A few weeks later, Lilly was walking oddly. Though she was not a dog to yelp, she was clearly uncomfortable. She shook it off. At Christmas, a year after Mom died, I rushed the small dog to the vet. An X-ray showed that at some earlier point in her life -- pre-Mom, pre-us -- a mishap had left her with four ruptured disks. In some spots along her spine, it was bone-on-bone. The vet didn't look at me. "You know she's on borrowed time, right?" Then, chucking Lilly under the chin, "We'll give her a shot, and maybe you can have your dog for another Christmas." She bounced back. All dog stories end badly -- but this one? Not yet. Four years and Lilly continues to bounce back. She caught and ate a fiddler crab recently. The crab battled valiantly for its life, leaving the small dog with a de-crabbed claw dangling -- like one of those plastic ornaments in a not-so-mainstream facial piercing -- from her jowl. She shook it free and went after the next crab on the seawall. |
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