He DOES Have a Pulse.....

When my baby brother first met Larry, he asked, "Does that dog even HAVE a pulse??"

Yeah, he's pretty laid back.  And the first couple of weeks, he moved like an old man, stiff of hip and slow of step.  He just generally didn't have a f..., well, any energy, to give.

He was stressed.  He was mourning.  He'd lost everything, twice over:  His name, his surroundings, and most of all, his person.

I'm pretty sure it was just one person, and I think it was probably an old guy.  Larry perks up every time a slow-moving old guy with a cane and a baseball cap comes by, and moves a bit faster to check him out if possible.  With Maybelle we were able to keep her name.  With Larry, we only knew that the rescue had been calling him HotDog for a couple of weeks, and they didn't know his original name.

Camping this weekend loosened him up.  He knows how to work a zipper (but you have to watch - he likes to take the slider off - we have a couple of sweatshirts that don't zip anymore) so he could get into the tent anytime.  And even though he could have left the tent without assistance, he woke me up for permission when he needed to go out in the night.

The fenced dog park let him do what he likes:  Monitor the perimeter.  And once that was done, he RAN.  It was amazing to see a dog that only a few days earlier required dragging to move, run.

This mornings' walk got even more interesting.  Larry got a squirrel by the tail.  Yes, Dave, yes, he did. There were a few factors in this.

1) City squirrels are oblivious little gits.  They apparently assume they are pretty safe.
2) Larry has some pretty impressive sneak skills for a big dog.  He drops low, the tags stop jingling, and he moves in careful.
3) When he shifts from stalk to strike he SHIFTS FAST.
4) Squirrels, when in a panic, underestimate the size of their squirrely butts in relation to the openings of chain link fences.  It was a nearly fatal slowdown.

In the end, the squirrel's tail was missing a good bit of fur, and Larry was wearing his finest Stoner Smirk.

He's becoming quite the family man. If you don't go to him, he'll come to you.  Yes, the boy has a pulse.

DeeDee

The Smell of Childhood....

From the time Citygirl was three I've been taking her camping.  The first time was laughable.  I learned quite a few things on that overnight in the woods:

1) I had been camping all of my life but I had never been 'The Grownup' on the trip before.
2) 'The Grownup' has to pack more than a tent and sleeping bags.
3) Waking up in a camp with no coffee is horrid.
4) Other campers, although total strangers, are sympathetic to this fact and will give you coffee (AND Tylenol) if you look pathetic enough.
5) You need to find other people who are better at adulting than you are to go camping with.

Fortunately for us, we soon after met our neighbors across the street. Their three young boys and their orange tent ("The Rainmaker") were veteran campers, willing to let us tag along while I figured out 'The Growup' thing.  THEIR friends had two boys, and a girl nearly Citygirl's age, and a huge canvas tent they lovingly referred to as the Taj Majal.  (The first time I met them, they were assembling this tent in the dark.  Their then-11-year-old boy was assisting as dad instructed:  "Move the pole left.  Left!  NO, MY left!  You'll NEVER be a f***ing engineer!"  I debated the wisdom of staying.  I'm glad I did - that line is etched in camping lore and laughter forevermore.)  We all camped together at least once a year for a long, long time, returning each Memorial Day Weekend to a local campground, adding family and friends as time went on.

Then.

Kidney failure. Transplant.  Constant concern about germ exposure.  Our campground flooded and the team worried that leftover contamination from the flooding would make it an unsafe place for Babygirl for a year or so.  Citygirl's graduation weekend took us out of town one year, and....I don't really know what all else happened.

So this year, for the first Memorial Weekend since 2010, we went camping at 'our' campground.'  Many of our campground friends have grown up or moved away.  But some still come, and for Babygirl this is campground "home."

"Remember that time we had that race where people had to put their heads down on a bat and spin around and then ran?  And people ran right into parked trucks?"  "Remember those people over in the corner who always had that HUGE fire?"  "Are we going to build the big slip-and-slide on the hill?"  For a child who often cannot remember being anything but sick, such memories are sharply sweet.

Home. Return to a simpler, worry-free time.  S'mores around a campfire, teaching a new generation Grampa's song about the bear, and spending time on the thyme-scented hill where Citygirl and I used to lie with Bobbe and Tory, watching the stars until we felt sure it was the earth moving under us, and not the stars moving over us.

DeeDee

Wait....Where's Maybelle....?

Getting a new dog right before you lose your beloved old dog was regarded by many who know us to have been a somewhat insane idea.  We kmew, of course, that Maybell was dying.  We had no idea, obviously, that it would happen only a week after we arrived home with Larry.  But the advantages of that choice have been very clear in the past five days.

Starting with Simon:  The old man did not do well when his brother died.  He spent weeks looking for him, and clearly mourned his loss.  I can't say that Simon and Maybelle were as close as Simon and Garfunkel were (they were littermates, after all), but having another dog here has made the loss of Maybelle less traumatic for him.

Then there's us:  Larry is acclimating, and increasingly showing us his goofy side.  He's begun to play, and if he still isn't the world's best walker, he at least appreciates the opportunity to get out of the house.  The fact that he so clearly likes us, and is so happy to be here helps ease the pain of the loss.  And when I needed to cry the other day, he sympathetically let me sob all over him and didn't protest.  He's like Maybelle in that way.  Maybe it's a hound thing.

Finally, there's the neighborhood:  Everybody who sees Larry is excited.  "What a sweet/beautiful/awesome dog!"  "Yeah, he's pretty laid back.  We suspect he was a serious stoner in a previous life."  "Hahahahaha! Yeah, I can see that! Probably went to Woodstock. Hey, wait....Where's Maybelle.....?"  It makes telling people about her loss less painful when there is a gigantic goofy distraction at the end of the leasth.

Once again, I have to say:  If you are looking for a dog, consider an adult rescue.  Larry came from a high-kill shelter, and we are lucky to have him.

Larry, snuggling with Hubby's ALF toy.

In the SMALL dog bed, naturally.

DeeDee

Linking Sense to Sound and Sight....

Synesthesia: (noun)
1. a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.
2. or, the feeling that you are losing your mind.

I suffer from synesthesia.  I can sometimes hear smells. I smell smoke when there is nothing there.  Blinking lights go 'tick-tock' in the front of my head.  Sounds can split into dozens of separate pieces that refuse to rejoin.  Soda bubbles dance on the roof of my mouth when there is nothing in it.  I can see green when everybody else is seeing orange.

Thankfully this weirdness is not a full-time occupation.  Migraine auras generally last only about 20 minutes, although I was stuck in smoke-land for about 48 continuous hours last week, which is incredibly distracting. 

Perception is an amazing thing.  I remember doing a study on taste and inheritance in college.  We were given paper strips impregnated with a chemical that only certain people can taste.  The ability to taste (or lack thereof) was inherited, and we were to test our families and see what sort of patterns emerged.  The 'taste' gene was apparently recessive, and no one in my family could taste this stuff, but I swear to you that it was FOUL.  Turns out that there are dozens of such things.  I tested a couple dozen, and among my classmates I was the only one unfortunate enough to be able to taste them ALL.  I remember that one was BHA, a common food preservative.  No one else could taste it.  (Perhaps I passed all this on to Citygirl, and that is why she can tell what country any given wine is from without seeing the label?)  The entire experiment made me understand why some people can eat liver (shudder) and other people think all meat smells like dog poo.

I wonder.  I've wondered since I was a small child if things would look the same if I could look out through someone else's eyeballs. There is no way to know for sure if the blue I see is the same as the blue you see, at all.  

What if autism is just a more-or-less permanent state of synesthesia?  What if one day pine trees smell like pine and the next they smell like a loud train coming straight at you and you can't predict which it's going to be?   I have a glimmer of how horrifying that might be to try to sort through.

What an incredible blessing it is when sound and sight are linked correctly to sense.

Be grateful if that's true for you.

DeeDee

1,000 Miles....

We've had Maybelle just over a year.  Not counting the few days I've been in Philadelphia, and a couple of days before Citygirl's wedding, I've walked her every day.  More often than not, we walk twice a day.  Our typical walk on a weekday morning is about two miles, and weekends can be four or more. Evenings are another one to two miles.

Taken altogether, we've walked over a thousand miles.

Rain, snow, bitter cold, sunshine: We've done it all.  We're on a first-name basis with all the neighborhood dogs:  Jeter and Coach, Ruby, Gracie, Sadie and Maya, Sugar, Chester, Penelope, Lucy, Jackson and Oppie and Cooper.  Poodles and Pitties, Rottweilers, Goldens and doodles and little white fluffballs and stiff little terriers, all buddies or enemies depending on whether Simon is tagging along or not.

We are down to our last miles, now.  Last night the inevitalbe happened:  Maybelle couldn't drink.  She keeps trying, and trying, and trying.  And I keep replacing bowl after bowl after bowl of blood-tinged water where the level never really goes down.  Tonight's walk was brief.  She got tired halfway up the hill and had to stop and rest, although you could see she really couldn't figure out WHY.  She led me the rest of the way around the block, stopping to try to climb onto any porch with people on it to say 'hey' one last time.

We will walk one more time before breakfast tomorrow, like always, down to the river so she can sniff the 'coon and beaver tracks. And at 11:30 we'll go see Dr Kathy one last time.

DeeDee

Being Mothered.....

As I was walking this morning, I was thinking about my Mom.  It's funny to say that I don't miss her, and it isn't QUITE true, exactly.  I finally concluded that I don't miss who she was in the last four years.

So I tried to think back:  When was the last time she was truly my mother?  When, in the sense that SHE mothered ME, and not the other way around?

The memory came to me hard. It was the summer of 2011.  We were on vacation, and Mom was with us, actually adding to our stress because her mobility and mental state had begun to decline - but she insisted on being in the center of everything.  That horrible summer when Babygirl had just been diagnosed with kidney failure and we were out of time and options. (The Beach.....).  That relentlessly horrible vacation with the daily phone calls that just kept adding and adding and adding to the stress until I finally couldn't take it anymore.

Mom was there for me while I cried, and I REALLY cried.  I cried forever, out in public, on the boardwalk for the love of ALL that's holy.  I must have looked like the worst kind of wreck, and she never once suggested that I was over-reacting or needed to 'just calm down.'  She just stayed with me and held on until the storm passed.  I can still feel it - her unconditional love and support.

It wasn't long after that that she became incapable of those things.  Not that she didn't love us - she always did - but she couldn't remember that we had any kind of problems going on that might be bigger than whatever was drifting through her mind at the moment.  If I could go back to anything, I'd want to go back to when she was fully present, for that was one of her great gifts, and something she was always far better at than me:  To live fully in the moment.

 This.  I miss this.

A few years later, a stranger....

And in the end, this....

DeeDee

Adjustments....

My brother and sister-in-law came over to meet Larry yesterday.  He was sleeping in the back hall, a spot he chose to avoid the chaos of three small, loud, running toddlers (who, by the way, neither bothered nor impressed him).  My brother looked him over, admired him, and then asked, "Does this dog even HAVE a pulse?"

Larry's pretty laid back.

The first few days with a new pet are always an interesting learning curve.

Larry does not understand stairs.  Like, seriously, not even a little.  On our way home we had to hoik his 80 pound self up and into the the truck each and every time we stopped, and when we finally got home, he looked at us and pretty much said, "No, thanks, I'm good, I'll just sleep here" rather than try to get out one more time.  Every morning when we let him outside he trips over his leash, skids off the end of the deck and flies out into the yard.  It's the fastest we see him move.

Larry is afraid of moving cars.  Since we live in a city and walk on city streets, this is a little challenging.  The first morning he froze or dove into the bushes every time a car went by, and Holy Hannah help us when it was a garbage truck (and remember, now, I have three dogs with me!).  He has decided, after just three days, however, that these vehicles are apparently not intent on killing him, so he now just stops to look and make sure.

Larry is afraid of beach towels.  We got rained on yesterday, and were totally drenched.  I dried off Simon, then Maybelle, and then went for Larry.  That is when I learned that Larry can, indeed, run.  Somewhere in his past someone must have tossed something over his head to restrain him somehow, so if I want to wipe him down I have to start on one side at the back and work forward with a small towel and don't, for heaven's sake, let the thing flap.

Maybelle, who is never snarky, has been snarking at Larry (a growl, a bark, no teeth).  He can't figure out how to get on a couch anyway but he was afraid to be in the same room with her for a bit.  They are working it out.

This is everybody this morning (Maybelle is against my leg, and Larry is in Simon's little bed LOL):

All chillin' with mom. Time for a walk.

DeeDee