Before you flip the page, saying, “She’s writing about the damn dogs again,” I beg your patience. This is not really a story about the dogs. It’s about fragile human connections, cruel fate, and unconditional love.
Okay, this first part is about the damn dogs. My house has been in an uproar since last summer when Bonnie’s illness led to a household fight over alpha dog status. Historically, Bonnie was always the boss, while the pack consisted of Moxie, Paddy, and me (please note my placement in that list).
However, according to our latest canine trainer, with Bonnie hospitalized a good part of last summer, then spending weeks on the sofa, Moxie felt the need to protect her and take over as Alpha Dog. Unfortunately, it was a position he felt responsible to assume but insufficiently courageous to handle.
His false bravado translated into irrational, hysterical barking at anything outside, near the front door, or entering the house. That included the riding mower, mailman, trash truck, vacuum cleaner, and any intrepid visitors who got past the gauntlet.
Prior to this new Moxie Braveheart, we actually needed a doorbell. In fact, we got a cool electronic device to sit atop the doorbell and respond to every door chime by amplifying and relaying the sound to other rooms.
Well now, with Moxie’s frantic early warning system, the hair-trigger electronic chime responds not only to the doorbell but to Moxie’s bark, so all day long, between the barking and chiming, you don’t know if you’re at Westminster Cathedral or Kennel Club.
Paddy, already a little neurotic, hides in the closet, sniffing Doctor Scholl’s foot powder. His addiction escalated to gnawing leather, and one day I came home to discover that he’d munched one each of four pairs of shoes. My shrieking set Moxie and the door chime off and we all nearly lost our minds.
Then the phone rang.
Now I don’t know if it’s the same in your life, but I’ve started to view the new millennium as Reality, Part II. Part One was The Epidemic. Many of us had loved ones we lost to AIDS for a premature taste of life’s cruelties. We often heard, “We’re too young to be at our contemporary’s funerals.”
Well now we’re at a stage where bad news and illnesses are creeping back and are slightly more age appropriate. When our contemporaries talk about various aches, pains and conditions, it can be just good-natured kvetching.
But kidding aside, life is starting to feel increasingly fragile.
This time the phone call was about my college roommate. A victim of the hideously cruel Huntington’s disease, she now needs round the clock care in a nursing home. With Huntington’s, your motor and mental skills all deteriorate—but you don’t die. It’s devastating.
When I called the nursing home, I was thrilled to hear that while Lesley’s voice was slowed, speech somewhat slurred, her memory and sense of humor seemed pretty intact.
Lesley and I have been part of each other’s lives pretty regularly since we were 18. I spent some of her honeymoon with her in France, after wiring funds so she and her new, now ex, husband could pay their Monte Carlo casino bill.
Following my divorce, she, in turn, took me to Provincetown, sat me down on a bench and told me to take a great big look around. Without that push, I might still be in the closet.
Long a vegan (one serious vegetarian) and animal welfare advocate, Lesley sat around in plastic shoes, putting up with my carnivorous ways—provided I agreed to put up tomatoes with her. If not for her, I’d never ever have been near a farm or mason jar. And she’d have missed several plays and a boat trip.
“Are you going to bring the dogs to see me?” she haltingly, hopefully, asked when I called. “Please….”
So despite the recent household reign of terrier, we scheduled a road trip. Reclaiming her authority, Alpha Bonnie seat-belted the rest of the pack into the car and we took off. Eight long hours, two pee-breaks and several rawhide chews later (no, I did not. I gnawed cheese doodles instead), we arrived on the shores of Lake Seneca in Geneva, New York.
Miraculously, we’d found a Ramada that welcomed pets, checked in, and headed for the nursing home.
The smile on Lesley’s face as the fuzzy grey Schnauzers burst into her room was worth its weight in kibble. Up on Lesley’s bed the pups jumped, dispensing kisses and unconditional love.
Obviously my dogs felt no obligation to protect us, the nursing home, its occupants or visitors, since my pooches became perfect little angels. As we took Lesley down the hall for a haircut, Moxie perched on her lap in the wheelchair, regal as a prince. Paddy, the royal footman, heeled alongside the carriage.
All along our route, patients looked at our entourage, with smiles and sparkles in their eyes, waving, talking, and sometimes merely grunting to the dogs. People who seemed mired in lonely silence only minutes before reached out to pet and pamper my dogs. I cried more than once.
I’m not going to pretend that the weekend was easy. Seeing this once beautiful, dynamic woman dependent on aides and confined to a tiny, waning life was tough to handle. But given the circumstances, the weekend was far better than we could have expected.
There was an outdoor bar with live music along the lake at the hotel, where Bonnie and I sat, in the cool evening air (with the dogs!) listening to a chanteuse and sipping Smirnoff. It was all very European.
On Saturday we spent a long day back at the nursing home, our dogs adorning Lesley’s bed like the New York Public Library’s lions. When conversation was too tough, or cheeriness hard to sustain, Moxie and Paddy rescued us with their antics.
By Sunday morning, after emotional farewells (and a quick check to make sure all the nursing home residents still had all their shoes), we humans were emotionally spent—and the dogs were just plain spent. It was a long ride home, with time to discuss life’s cruelties and the need to make every single day count. The dogs, of course, know a thing or two about stopping to sniff the roses.
While we suffered beach traffic, they awoke only for shards of hot dog and a potty break outside Philly.
This afternoon I was preparing a package with a portrait of the pooches to mail to Lesley for her room, when friends rang the doorbell. Moxie went off like the hound of the Baskervilles, the door chime did the Bells of St. Mary’s, and Paddy raced to the foyer with half a Reebok in his choppers. And you know, I didn’t care.