October

James and Sam, June 2009

My doggie Spooner died just about two years ago. He and I started out his life with very much a love-hate relationship. My other dogs had died tragically in a fire at the boarding kennel where we’d left them, and so I took on Spooner at a bad time. I really wasn’t up for him. I was pregnant, in the throes of morning sickness and sorrow besides.

He was a brat, overgrown, obnoxious, a mutt expected to be about 50 pounds… well at 90 pounds, we knew we didn’t have what we supposedly had, but it was all water under the bridge by then. His mind was perpetually caught in his zipper, and if he wasn’t chasing girl dogs, his thoughts were on food. My husband is not a dog person; he always has the vague feeling dogs are out to get him. But Spooner could make even a dog lover think this.

As he grew old though, he mellowed, and though I never embraced his frightful shedding (God bless the inventor of the shop-vac), I did come to adore him, the energy of him, the luxurious, plush feeling of him in my arms, his patience, his sense of humor. He was a first rate guy.

On his last trip to the vet, they wanted to draw blood, and I told the technician, “He’s blind. You’ll have to help him.” She said sure, and headed out through the door, and ran my boy into the wall next to it. I never took him back. His rashes were the least of his problems. We had to link our arms under his belly and haul him to his feet, so arthritic was he. What he suffered most, it seemed, was profound vertigo, so intense he’d crap on the patio (simply not done) and vomit, always circling to the left.

He’d get lost in the yard and we’d have to help him, and I swear it, when we’d fetch him from the lilac bushes, he seemed grateful, licking my chin, the kids’ hands, tail wagging. We bought Sidney, anticipating his death and the hole it would leave, and he snubbed her for months, turning his head to her exuberance. In the end, he seemed grateful for her good eyesight to lead him back to the house.

When the whole thing was obvious, I called the vet and asked him: His tail still wags. He still seems to find happiness in his life. Terry told me the truth: “Val. If you are waiting for the day his tail stops wagging, that day will not come. You tell me if it’s time.”

We had him come to the house and it was done. No trip to the nerve wracking clinic where they ran him into the walls, just an old friend who came to his bed so he didn’t even have to get up.

Afterward I fetched an old silky 101 Dalmatians sleeping bag and Jay and Terry zipped him into it and each took an end and carried him out to the trailer. The next day we took his body to Wisconsin, and in a small clearing in the woods that my dad had chosen, the men dug a deep hole and gently put his body into a safe place in the ground. While they did this, my mom took the kids to cut flowers from her garden, and they piled them on top. It was the end of our buddy Spooner, and the end of an era.

After Christmas last year, the oldest girls, 21 and 19 then, set up a lobby for another dog. Because Sidney had been a 9th birthday gift for Maria, James should also have a dog for his 9th birthday. Okeee. They kept it up, begged, cajoled, and tormented me.

James

I said I’ve done a big dog. I’m not doing it again. But Mom you looooved Spooner! I know it. I did love him very much. And then they got James crying about the injustice of it all, and what I have never been able to stand, since he was born, is James’ tears. I am the same way about Dan. He’s 26 now, but his crying has always broken my heart too. I think it’s the lip, the tragic lip. Sigh.

Last January I caved, and I knew I was caving and would regret it, and Heidi and I went and picked up a Newfoundland puppy, a 20 pound teddy bear, flat face, fuzzy, funny, fat. We asked James her name and he told us, “Samantha.” And so I began doing the big dog thing all over again.

James and Sam

This weekend in Wisconsin, I sat on the steps, and dark comes early now in October. The kids had eaten their fill of hot dogs and little fruit pies cooked in the fire, and were playing Ghost in the Graveyard, starry night overhead, autumn wind whipping in the trees.

Sammy, our new dog, was beside me in all her obnoxious, what? Glory? I love her and I hate her.

She’s too big. She sheds too much. Her huge fanning tail spans a swath 6 feet wide, knocking things to the floor left and right. And I pry her jaws open and shove pills deep into her enormous mouth (she has rashes, just as Spooner did) and I chase her from the wastebasket, and yet she’s never cross with me, only bemused and patient.

I know someday she’ll be calm and she already has the happy energy of Spooner’s that I missed. In spite of her soft, spitty mouth and the way she steps on everyone’s feet, she’s an angel.

James, always airborne

This weekend the younger kids discovered the joy of the old TV show, Full House. Season Two was a birthday gift to Maria, who turned 12. This was a favorite show of those college girls who got me involved with Sam.

This weekend was a marathon of Full House episodes, the 90s fashion and hair, the goofy plots, the sweet faces of those children… and images of my grown girls as children kept finding me… while my little girls enjoyed those corny stories all over again. Uncle Jesse, Michelle, Stephanie and DJ, the theme music, “Aaah, Aaah, Aaah, Aaah, Every where you go…” I was tugged back and forth between then and now.

But I sat on the steps that night, watching them run in the dark, shrieking as they reached the home-free tree, and could see clearly once again that we change and we grow.

One stage leads to another, and it’s all good. I’m here now, with other children, who are just as sweet as their older siblings, and they’re going to pass through my arms in a flash too.

Of course, him again

(No wonder this bedframe is cracked)

Whenever I’ve been giving birth to a baby, that’s all I can see: the baby. But those babies were babies only the fleetingest of seconds, and toddlers for only a year, preschoolers for the blink of an eye, and shortly they were relatives, family, friends.

A dog’s age played out, and I still am a momma to those daughters, though they’re in their 20s now and women, they’re still my girls. I suppose I am still my own mama’s girl, and I know how her grandmas doted on her, and my grandmas love me. It all just rolls on, and I’m beginning to see that I ought to let it.

Not just let it, but enjoy it—appreciate it, embrace and love it.

And so here we are again, another October, three years after I wrote this, still with all our families creating and becoming and love drawing us all forward. –love, Val