I hope to take a better portrait of us all dressed up later, but I couldn't resist sharing a preview of our costumes. The pugs and I are headed to Chestertown, NY this Sunday for the annual pug parade. We hope to enter a few costume contests, too. This is the same costumes the pugs will be wearing for Halloween. I know it's silly, but it's also fun and I love making people smile. The pugs? They don't much like the wigs, but they love the attention, so the costumes are greeted with tail wags, circles and squeals!
Gandalf
Amazing Grace 2
A day after I last wrote about him, Gandalf died. I was never blind Gandalf’s owner in any official sense, but he owned my heart. Part of the attraction, no doubt, was guilt because the loss of his vision – at least in one eye – was partially mine. He was one of the earliest litters I saw born at Pugdom, my friend Joan’s home. I named him and his brothers – each after wizards, magicians or spells of some sort: Copperfield (who we officially called Copperfeld because of some AKC rule not allowing us to use the names of real people); Merlin, Dumbledore, Hocus Pocus and Gandalf; two fawns and three blacks.
Shortly after their birth, Joan, our friend Jessica, and me were scheduled to take a trip to Joan’s condo near Florida and Joan being Joan piled the litter of five and their Momma into the van, not to be deterred from our travels. They made the thousand-mile trip south before their eyes even opened. It was Thanksgiving time and in typical Joan fashion we traveled with few stops. We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner in the condo and turned back for Vermont a few days later. On the way home, the puppies began to open their eyes. Ghanny, however, seemed to have something wrong with one of his. It was crusty and gooey and I worried that Joan, who had developed a bad cold on the trip and was in a sleep-deprived state. might not be staying on top of things. So I bugged her and then bugged her again to give him some medicine, which she finally did. Problem is she had two types of eye drops along – one with steroids and one without. One was okay to give, the other not. We gave the wrong one. In the morning, little Ghanny’s eye was bleeding. We had stopped at Joan’s son’s house in D.C. for the night and he rushed the puppy to the vet only to learn he would probably lose sight in that one eye. It was sad and I felt horrible. We didn’t talk about it. Joan, too, felt guilty and over the years memory has kindly blanketed these feelings with a new version of the tale. Sometimes Joan recalls Ghanny being born blind, other times she remembers only the accident that took his second eye, believing it took both. That time a small stick got him while he was playing outside and our one-eyed boy became officially blind.
He never seemed to mind. Ghanny was born docile with a gentleman’s disposition and after the loss of his vision, he settled down even more, developing a trotter’s high-step prance as he would feel his way from his livingroom nest outdoors to the deck and down the steps to the backyard. This was his routine for much of his life – sun on the porch, strolls in the backyard, warm slumber in his corner bed broken by dinner and the occasional concert by me. I always hoped he saw something, that my song would evoke a momentary return of vision, a small grace, but he adapted and never seemed to complain. When he heard my voice, he would rise from his bed, cocking his head and high-stepping it to the livingroom gate where he would wait for me to pick him up and sing. A brush of his cheek to mine and then the anticipated kiss.
For many years I had dreams of taking him home. I knew I could not have three dogs where I lived, so I daydreamed of a camper or building my own home in time for him to become mine. These dreams never saw the light of day and by the time my other dogs passed, Ghanny had grown accustomed to his life at Joan’s. He was a Pugdom dog.
In his old age, the other dogs turned on him as they often do. Perhaps triggered from some pack mentality where weakness could hurt the whole group, they attacked him leaving him wounded. Not long after, he suffered a stroke. I wanted to grab him up then and take him to the vet, make sure that the wounds had not caused an internal infection. But, Joan nursed him and bathed him and I knew that in spite of any ministrations we each could give that his time was drawing near.
We took him on a rare outing to the Tunbridge Fair his last weekend and out the day before for a visit with our friend Norma. He was better the first day, almost comatose on the second. I leaned down and whispered in his ear. I sang his song. On the first day, he still managed a kiss, on the second it was me who kissed him, right below his chewed up ear. In that moment, I hated dogs for being dogs, for the beatings they instill on each other. I hated Joan for having so many, for not taking him to the vet, for not being able to do more. I hated me for not being able to give him a better life. But then, as he stirred beneath my hot whispers, I felt only compassion. We all live by our instincts, we each adapt. I felt an amazing grace settle on us both. No judgments. Things could have been different, things might have been worse. Gandalf might have come to live with me and had snacks and toys and known the noise of a busy home, but he had sleepy days in the sun, home-cooked meals, a dry bed by the stove. He was independent, loved and serenaded, and in his final moments, he knew the comfort of Joan’s hand. Blind, he knew the smells of home.
The amazing thing about grace is it swallows guilt whole, leaving the sweet aroma of love.
Pug Social Here We Come!
I went to Petsmart yesterday to return the Bert and Ernie costumes I had purchased for Alfie and Waffles to wear to the upcoming Pug Social. Waffle's Bert costume was too small and Alfie's Ernie costume too big, but I was fortunate enough to find replacements. You will have to tune in tomorrow to discover what characters I chose. While we were shopping I spied a couple with their black pug Mia, very busy trying to fit her in a costume of their own. Pugs are not easy to shop for. They are broad of chest, but often slim at the waist -- toy dogs but never tiny. These two were in the store for quite some time. I had a chance to chat with them and snap Mia's picture. I learned her name and that she was a Green Mountain Pug Rescuee. She and her family will be at the Social tomorrow as will me and my two girls. Come back to see all the photos and hear about the fun! We are planning to enter the costume contest, pug races and much more!
Joan and the chicken
Animal Love
Joan leaned against the gray chicken’s cage, cooing quiet comfort to the interested bird. As the bird grew closer to her, I reminder her of the time the llama had spit in her face because she had overstepped the boundaries and suggested if she wasn’t careful we might be rescheduling her upcoming eye appointment from November to an emergency room visit. She backed away, but not before clucking one last “sweet nothing” to her new-found friend.
That’s what going to the fair with Joan is like. You can’t really talk about animal love without bringing up her name. For me the two have become synonymous. Not everyone would live the way my friend does. A former concert pianist, Joan has let her house go to the dogs literally, having one in every corner of the house and many more on her bed at night, where the climb upon her hip, curve into the crook of her neck and the small of her back and on top her head, making it impossible to turn.
Also a former nurse – she’s had many careers – she helps her animals through to the end of their days, nursing them when others would choose to give up. Before I met her and in the beginning, I was sure I knew what it meant to love an animal – limited numbers, vet care, a peaceful goodbye when the pain gets too bad – and, there’s wisdom in that, but now that I’ve known Joan I’m no longer as sure my way is the only way. I have been with her when dogs passed on car rides to pug socials and while I would have rushed them to a medical end, she has wrapped them in towels and blankets, placed her palm on their brow and sat with them until their labored breathing ceased. As I look at her with blind, failing Ghanny and see the deep affection pass between them, I wonder once again, is it the worse thing to die where you have lived – in Joan’s bed or in the car where you rode as a pup, head hanging from the window? If you could talk would you choose the comfort of that palm and the familiar smells around you to a doctor’s needle?
Ghanny and Joan
But, this story is not about death. It’s about life, with Joan it always is and that’s why my beliefs expand. I see the life all around her and the love pouring out of her. She can’t pass a dog, donkey, chicken, goat or frog without stopping to caress and chat with it. For a while, she volunteered, helping during rainstorms to move frogs safely off the roads. She had a pet toad that hung outside her door and she would occasionally have to save from the pugs. She once brought it inside and placed it on the bed beside a litter of puppies, so I could take pictures of them both. The toad was bigger than they were. She has even been known to leave spider webs up in her home so as not to disturb the creatures.
But what I love most is seeing the immense and simple joy these animals bring Joan each time she meets a new one. Her face lights up, her blue eyes literally twinkle, she puckers her lips and begins chattering away. The story goes that she received her first pug from Prime Minister Clement Attlee after she burst in on a meeting he was having with her husband. She had just been outside Harrods in London and saw her first pug on the street. She ran into the meeting breathless, exclaiming, “you wouldn’t believe what I saw and describing in detail the little fawn pug on the street.” Shortly after she returned home to the United States to be greeted by Attlee’s gift of her own fawn male, Harrods Bugle Boy, who came with a mile-long pedigree that unrolled like a scroll.
When I see Joan interact with an animal, she experiences pure, unadulterated glee and being witness to it, I feel a little bit rub off on me. Joan’s unconventionality, her child-like joy reminds me to open myself up to wonder, to crow with the chickens and howl with the dogs. She may not be right about everything, but she is right about this and so, I learn to open my mind, but mostly my heart to possibility, to move beyond judgment to awe.
Joan and a sheep
Puggies
My license plate reads “Puggies” to the embarrassment of my brother and likely any other family member who has to drive it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if it simply said “Pugs” although I have a feeling they’d turn their noses up at that as well. But “Pugs” and “Pugz” and “Pug” were taken when it came time to register my car with the state, so “Puggies” it became.
“Puggies” is in homage to a statement my mother and I heard years ago at one of the joint concerts and dance recitals my friend Joan would host with her daughter, TDB, and her students. I hadn’t known Joan long, when she invited my family to attend. I had recently bought my pug, Vader, from her and she thought I’d enjoy it given that one of the musical numbers would feature Joan’s cast of pugs being pulled in wagons and on leashes by her littlest students.
At intermission, my mother went to use the bathroom and found a roomful of giggling, little girls in pink tutus and ballet flats squealing, “the puggies are in the building.” It was cuteness personified and so the memory stuck, as did the name, which popped to the surface, when scouring my mind for possible pug-themed plates.
To complement my license plate, I have adorned my car with an array of bumper stickers – a bone reading, “I love my pug” and a round car magnet declaring “I work hard so my pugs don’t have to.” I also have a yellow and red sticker reading “Thank God for Hana” and a silver "HI" logo for my beloved Hawaii, as well as a small stuffed, tuxedo-clad pug that hangs from my mirror.
All this paraphernalia has been there since I got my first Versa in 2009, but they show up ever so better on the brand new royal blue Versa I purchased last week. Until the license plates are officially changed, my father, who kept my old car, has had to ride around in the former “puggie-mobile” as has my brother, who borrowed it. My new car awaits its new moniker, but that hasn’t stopped passersby from pausing by my car to read the transferred bumper stickers. I know because I’ve been watching this interaction from the windows of Books-a-million as I work. So far this evening there have been several. They pass my car only to hit reverse, backup and smile. The other day in Waterbury I parked next to a man in the exact same car, color and all. I jumped out declaring – “We have the same car!”
“We also have the same dog,” he shouted back, nodding at my pug bumper sticker. “Ours is a blonde,” he noted. We stopped and chatted, walking away with huge grins on our faces.
I know my family humors me. My siblings probably seeing me as the doddering, childless aunt to their children, who projects her affections onto her two somewhat annoying dogs. “Puggies” is silly, but harmless, they seem to convey while I try to argue it’s only good branding for when I finally write my dog book. Truth be told, my car and I sport the title with pride. Yes, I love my dogs and the enjoyment they bring and yes, I was serious about the branding, but the real reason I’m glad my car doesn’t read VT 4342 or some other banal number is the same reason I remember the squeals of those girls. Puggies conjure up smiles, glee and grins, if also an occasional shake of the head.
Norma and Ghanny
Grace
Love doesn’t always look like we expect. Today, it looked like three old dogs. None are pretty. One is blind, bitten, unable to sit up on his own. Another looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon – all folds and skin and gaping mouth. She breathes like a labored guppy and hops on three feet like a rabbit, holding her right, rear leg in the air. She has a luxating patella; her knee pops out. The third’s tongue hangs from her mouth where a horse once kicked her in the jaw. If her youthful luck was poor, age itself has caught up with her and her legs are now crippled and buckled. Still, she moves with the speed of a slithering sci-fi alien, clearing an expanse with surprising grace. They are not the dogs one would choose to bring home. No cuddly puppies, here. The ears of two are bitten from rambunctious play and pack rumbles gone awry. Some would say these dogs have seen there day.
Narnia
My friend Joan doesn’t think so nor her friend Norma. Looking at Norma with fractured hip hobble ever so slowly to and from the car, one might suspect she has seen her day as well. She has suffered strokes and broken bones. Yet, Norma shuffles and picks up blind Ghanny to take him in the thrift store, to show him off to her friends. I worry as she lifts him with shaking hands that she will drop him. I worry she will slip on the wet ramp and fall. I worry she will hurt him. I worry she will hurt herself. She lifts him anyway and I hold my breath and scurry out from the car to spot them both. “Who do I catch first?” I ask Joan.
But with a luck reserved for fools and children, both make it inside. Norma falls into a fading upholstered chartreuse chair amidst other furniture that has seen better days. Ghanny buries his head into her shoulder. He cannot walk any longer. Joan thinks he may have had a stroke. If he were my dog I would scoop him up and take him to the vets. Spend the hundreds and thousands on tests and medicine. She does not. She nurses him as she has done many before him, cleaning his sores and soiled bedding, letting nature take its course.
Ghanny
He is limp and ungainly like a pile of wet laundry spilling out from a hamper; he spills over the lips of Norma’s folded arms. She announces him her “grandbaby” and I monitor the reaction of the chunky, bearded twenty-something store clerk. He approaches to see “the puppy.”
“He’s not a puppy exactly,” I warn. I want to apologize, embarrassed for Ghanny, for Joan, for the young man. “He’s an old one. He doesn’t exactly look good.” And, then I wait, watching for any look of distaste – daring him to make one, expecting it at the same time. And, I am disappointed and simultaneously made happy when all he says is, “Aww, sweet puppy and smiles at Ghanny and at Norma.” He is a good young man.
He even stands and chats for a few minutes as Joan peruses this palace of discarded items for a few finds. She debates over two seven dollar molded chairs, considering them for the kitchen of her new house. I survey them for stains. Was the tan molding once white or always tan? Joan and Norma both deem them “wonderful, a good price.” They lack disdain for the worn; they don’t seem to need everything to be in good shape.
Still, we slip from the store without the chairs amidst a friendly goodbye from the young man and a declaration from Norma that “that place has everything.” We make our way to the feed store where Joan debates over dog food, comparing prices while I offer to buy Ghanny a can of grilled salmon and chicken and Norma throws in a stick of beef jerky. We split it among the other geriatric dogs. They gum it down, drool dripping from the side of their mouths. Each squeals for more.
Tar Baby and Narnia
Dogs fed, it’s our turn and though Joan parks as close to the Chinese restaurant as possible, we still have to walk a block or two. If Norma were my mother, I wouldn’t have her go, but she stifles our protests and makes her way out of the car. We totter down the streets and I remind myself to exhale. We will get there.
We do. We feast on curried chicken, wonton soup, fried rice as Norma struggles to hold her quivering cup. Joan makes a not-too-subtle jibe in my direction about eating out too much. Norma offers to start crocheting a blanket for Ghanny – an undeclared death shroud because we know his days are numbered. We chat about pleasant things, too. It is not how everyone would describe love, but as we return to Norma’s apartment and let the two old-lady pugs out to do their business, another young man awards us with smiles.
“What’s wrong with them? Poor puppies,” he says, watching them hobble, but still reaching down to pat their heads and chuckle.
“They’re old,” I offer, resigning myself to the fact that not everything needs to be fixed. Sometimes love looks like three old dogs. Sometimes it is about letting go and experiencing grace.
"Vaderman, Vaderman..."
The store clerk must have thought I was crazy today when at the register I burst into song. I had just found the perfect Halloween card, a black, googly-eyed pug dressed as Darth Vader. Perfect because of my pug Vader, who died last year at the age of 14. Seeing this large, paper model brought his memory to my mind, a smile to my face, and his song to my lips.
Most of my animals it seems have come with a soundtrack – I would sing to my old girl Buffy when I groomed her, “making Buffy beautiful, making Buffy pretty” in a soft singsong voice. My black-and-white cat Mime would often hear the refrain “Jesus loves the little kitties” sung to the tune of “Jesus loves the little children.” When I got to the part “red and yellow, black and white,” I would always shout out, “That’s you Mimee,” in honor of her coloring. I sing to Joan’s dogs when I visit, but mostly to her old blind pug Ghanny, Amazing Grace, “I once was blind, but now I see,” I sing, hoping that some part of him does.
Vaderman had his own song. I think I sang it to the tune of another I knew, but I no longer remember the original. Instead, I remember shouting out Vader’s powerful melody, “Vaderman, Vaderman, if he can’t do it than no one can. He’s the wonderful amazing Vaderman.” And, he was.
I’m glad when I saw the card today it did not make me melancholy, but rather gleeful. “There you are little man,” I said aloud and proudly brought the card, along with a second for his breeder Joan to the register. As I handed it to the clerk and sang my ditty, I told her the story of Vader. She seemed ambivalent, like she’s seen it all before. And, as I looked at the cardstock cut out of my Darth Vader pug, I smiled remembering how I had once seen in my snorting little puppy, a resemblance to Vader of Star Wars -- black and raspy of breath. We’ve all seen things once or twice before, but where as my antics created a sense of bemusement in the store clerk, the whirling eyes of the paper pug conjured in me music and memories of a wonderful, amazing dog.
Girls in the Sun
I captured this quiet moment of my girls in the sun!
Two Old Dogs
Two Old Dogs: Mother and Son
“Ma, let’s just sit here a spell. “Let’s.”
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His joints are stiff, his eyes clouded. Her knees pop out of joint. They are mother and son and they spend most days on a faded dog bed, on a stone wall in the front of a pale yellow house. They claim the summer sun. They sit like two black gargoyles, strange sentinels, appearing to guard the house -- a blind watchdog and his feeble though feisty mom. Life has slowed for these two old dogs, but they are content. Their dog days are now.
SONY DSC
Old Dog
He sits war weary on the lawn, soaking in the golden light of his golden years. Not a soldier, but an old dog whose wagged his tail and done his faithful duty at the side of two women -- first one’s dog then another’s. In this moment his own man, surveying his first yard, the expanse of his kingdom, the battlefield, where his life has played out. Now he waits as all good dogs do, without complaint, for his ladies, two friends, to return home. He laps at clean water, turns his face to the sky, and closes his eyes. It is well past mid-day, but the sun feels warm, the grass cool and even now there is still a wag to his tail.
He soldiers on – the symbol of perpetual hope, living in expectation that bones may rain down upon him, good fortune and good food come his way, and the people that he waits for may now turn the bend. Old dogs have the patience and faith of saints. What else do they hope for, what more can an old fella’ want than a patch of sun, a pat on the head, and to hear the words “Good Dog” echoed like bookends at the beginning and end of his days.