Dick and the Resurrection Dog

I walk in to the parental homestead to find both Mother and Father sitting mournfully in the front room, looking much like someone had died.  Dick, the dog, is lying with his head between his paws, his eyes downcast.  He looks so inconsolable that I become very alarmed at the whole scene and ask, in a nervous tone, what had happened.  Father tells me I’d better sit down.  I look at Mother and she tells me I’d better sit down.  Mother never agrees with Father, so I realize we have a situation on our hands, and I sit down.  

 “It’s terrible,” Father begins, with what looks to be tears in his eyes.  Then I notice that Father’s arm is a massive bruise and he has cuts on his face.  

 “What on earth happened?” I interrupt.  

 “Oh, just awful,” Mother chimes in.

 There is a long silence in which my heart begins to pound precipitously.  Finally, Father says, his voice breaking, “Dick killed a dog.”  I look at Dick who can’t even pick his head up off the pillow.  This is the same dog that goes crazy with excitement when he’s around me and here he lies, utterly broken with shame.  

 There are more pronouncements of what a terrible dog poor Dick is before I get the story straight. The whole time Father speaks, Dick lies there in an absolutely pitiful state.  From what I gather, Father was walking Dick down at the end of the alley, almost home after a long dog walk that is carefully planned to avoid confrontations with other dogs as Dick has had a few run-ins.  Father’s friend at the end of the alley came out to say hello when all of a sudden, the friend’s little white dog came running out of the open garage and attacked Dick.  Dick hates small dogs and he was none too pleased to be attacked by one.  He picked up the small dog between his giant jaws, and tossed it back down onto the ground.  The dog didn’t get back up.  Dick had killed it.  In the ensuing melee, Father got knocked down.  To hear Father tell it, the white dog lay motionless in the alley not far from where Father lay bleeding on the ground.  Dick stood over the dead dog as if willing it to get up so he could kill it again.  The whole while Father is telling this story, Mother keeps chiming in with statements like, “terrible, Dick,” or “just awful, Dick”.      

Later that day, apparently the daughter of Father’s friend came down to see if Father was okay.  Father gets choked up again explaining how terrible he felt that Dick had killed this girl’s “poor, sweet dog”.  Dick actually lets out a whimper as he lies there on his bed, completely beaten down with grief.  “Look, Dick,” I say, bending down to rub his ears, “it’s not your fault.  That dog attacked you and you just were protecting yourself.”  He wags his tail slightly.  “Poor Dick couldn’t help it,” I say louder to Mother and Father, hoping to snap them all out of it.  “He was attacked!  What did you want him to do?”   The only answer is another pitiful whimper from poor Dick. "It's okay, boy."  I tell him.  "I understand.  I was attacked once, too."

Years prior, when I was about a year and a half old, the whole family piled into the station wagon and took a long drive up to the northern lakeshore suburbs.  One of Mother’s friends from her nannying days in Winnetka was going to give us a sheepdog puppy.  I don’t remember too much about this, but I know it was a sheep dog because I frequently heard about how it was my fault that we never had a dog.  Every time we’d see a sheepdog, I’d be reminded of this fact.  “Hey,” one of the siblings would pipe up in a martyred voice, “that’s the kind of dog we would have had if Mars hadn’t gotten herself bitten by that dog.”  Then numerous pairs of eyes would shoot daggers at me because clearly toddler me had purposely gotten attacked by a dog and spent an extended period of time in a hospital cage just to spite the rest of the siblings. 

On the way to get the sheep dog, we stopped off at a different friend's of Mother.  When it was time to leave, I remember Mother and her friend talking on and on endlessly and me getting tired of standing, waiting for her, so I squatted down onto the floor of the house, by the staircase near the front door.  Then I remember, and with the type of painful vividness that really is crying out to be discussed with a mental health professional, being tied down to an emergency room steel table in what was essentially a kid version of a strait jacket, while somebody waved a scary looking clown doll above my face to get me to look up.  All the while, as I recall, I screamed and thrashed about, futilely.  Apparently, the cocker spaniel that lived in Mother's friend's house had taken a good pound out of my cheek when I was crouching impatiently by the stairs.    The whole incident eventually translated into a week or so hospital stay for me. 

The older, teenaged girl that I shared the hospital room with had a broken leg that had to be elevated so that she couldn’t really move.  Her leg was chained somehow to bolts and chains hanging from the ceiling.  She moaned all night long.  As for me, I was locked away in a crib at night that had a top on it that closed down around me like a cage.  Is it any wonder I am not a fan of closed spaces?  Never ending sibling dog bite rebuke, kiddy straight jacket, medieval torture device chained leg to the ceiling, cage.  Almost miraculously, unlike Sibling #3, I don’t even need to surround myself with the somehow comforting feel of a good paper towel.  Not to mention that I should have been a complete nut case whenever I encountered a dog, but a terror of dogs, fortunately, never came to pass.  Not to say that I don’t have my issues, but who doesn’t?

Regardless, I was the victim of an unprovoked dog attack, just like poor Dick.  And just like the siblings did to me, the parents rebuke Dick with every slump of their shoulders and every heart broken utterance of “what are we going to do with you, Dick?”  As if Dick had a problem that needed fixing.  A few months pass, and Father’s tread, made far heavier with guilt and grief for the small dog, does not become any lighter.   He frequently tells me how bad he feels about the whole thing and he doesn’t know what to do with Dick.  Dick is nothing short of miserable.  He no longer bounds around the house, though he still sits quite literally at Father’s right hand at the breakfast table, being fed buttered toast and steak cooked especially for Dick.  Still, I think, the guilt has gone on long enough.  I confer with the siblings and we admit we are all worried.  I continue to remind the parents that, Dick, like me, was the victim. 

One day, I go for a visit and Father tells me when I walk in the door, “You’re not going to believe this!”  I notice that the light is back in his eyes.  He is standing up straighter.  And for the first time in ages, Dick jumps up excitedly when I walk in.  I am thrilled to see that the old Dick is back!  I don’t have to wait to learn what has brought about this change as Father urges me to sit down, so he can tell me his good news.  “I saw my friend that lives across the alley yesterday,” he begins with a smile on his face.  (This is different from the friend with the ex-white dog that lives at the end of the alley.)  “He stopped to tell me that he’d heard about what Dick did.  He was laughing as he was telling me this,” Father says.  “I kept telling my friend what a terrible thing Dick did and how I didn’t trust Dick anymore.  But my friend wouldn’t listen.  He kept laughing and then he told me that it was too bad Dick didn’t kill that ‘little bastard dog.’”

Father continues, “’Wait a minute,’ I told him.  ’Dick did kill him’, I say.  I told my friend how I saw the little, white dog lying in the alley, completely lifeless.”

“‘That dog wasn’t dead,’ my friend announced.  ‘That little fucker was just playing dead.  He attacks my dog all the time and then plays dead.  So when I heard Dick got hold of him I was hoping he’d killed the little fucker, but no such luck.  The little fucker charged out of the yard yesterday and attacked my dog again.’”  My father just shakes his head, his delighted eyes wide, not quite believing this unbelievable story.  “Is this too much or what?  I mean, can you believe this?” he asks, his voice an octave deeper from mirth.  “He was playing dead!  The dog was playing dead and the whole time I was blaming poor Dick!”

Mother chimes in, “I always knew Dick was a good boy.  Aren’t you Dick?”  Dick prances around happily, the truth of the resurrection dog having set him free.  If only I could as easily toss off memories of being tied to a table while a scary clown danced before my eyes.  Maybe I need to carry a roll of paper towels with me.  Although, there are those that argue a dog is the best therapy of all.  Regardless, it's really no wonder I’ve got a whole lot of crazy cat lady lurking, along with myriad other issues, under the long since faded scars of the dog bite.

The Cryogenic Cat

                The temperature recently dropped to the single digits and the Son, not yet acclimated to Chicago’s new global warming winters, thinks longingly of the neighbor's ice rink and angrily questions the safety of having schools open on such a dangerously cold day.  I tell him that when I was his age, the temperature in Chicago was actually 27 below zero one January day, and that was without the wind chill.  That was the day that we found Radish, the cat, shivering under a pine tree when we were walking to the bakery a few blocks away for our Saturday morning sweet rolls.  As he was clearly a stray, we brought him home and added him to our collection. 

                The first cat we ever had was Mr. O’Toole.  I’m not sure where he came from, but he lived to be over twenty years old.   He was Nanny’s cat and she used to cook him three delicious meals a day.  At one time, he was so big (his white color made him look even bigger), that Sibling #1’s friend refused to walk past him on the stairs, referring to him as “that bobcat”.  When Nanny could no longer take care of him (i.e. cook him three meals a day), he came to live with us.  After him came a long string of cats found hungry in the streets or alleys: Midnight, Manhattan, Spy, Darwin, Darren, Boris, Star, Mother Cat, George, Pig, Slate, Quinn, Lil, Patrick, and probably more whose names I’ve forgotten. 

                Mother Cat was always considered Sibling #4’s cat.  Mother Cat is the most likely culprit that pissed on the box of donuts that had gotten knocked off the bread chair (the chair next to the kitchen table where the bread was stored - - our version of a bread box) and onto the floor.  I still chuckle when I think back to the day I discovered Sibling #4 eating one of the wet, mushy, urine filled donuts that she had retrieved from the box on the floor.  If you’ve ever smelled cat piss, you’ll wonder how it is that Sibling #4 didn’t notice the extraordinarily strong smell off the donut.  Apparently, gluttony knows no bounds.   

                Star was always my cat.  Not particularly fond of birthdays to begin with, I woke up on my 20^th to find Star lying stiff under a chair.  Star was the first of the Russian Blue cats to live with us.  Boris joined the family shortly after.  He liked to jump up on unsuspecting people’s shoulders and sit there, much like a trained parrot would do.  We always found it hysterical when he'd jump onto someone's shoulders and they would become completely terror stricken.        

  

                Ivan is the latest Russian Blue to live at the family homestead.  And poor Ivan is the source of the family’s most recent misadventure in insanity.   A few days ago, Mother called me sounding breathless and in a panic.  About a week prior, Ivan had gone missing.  Mother called to tell me she had just found Ivan, unable to move its back legs, lying in the basement.  She moved him upstairs to a comfortable spot and called me.  I went over, alternately sighing and cursing the entire drive, as I had both offspring with me due to an early dismissal from school.  The last thing I wanted to do was take a half dead cat to the vet to have it put down with the Son and Daughter in tow.   

                When I arrived at the house on my reluctant angel of mercy mission, Mother seemed to think the cat only needed a shot from the vet.   I went and took a look at the cat and it looked at least three-fourths dead to me.  I saw no blood or signs of trauma so suspected the cat had either had a stroke, or more likely, been gripped in Dick’s large jaws and shaken about for sport.  While Dick leaves all the other cats alone, he reportedly had it in for Ivan.  Perhaps it was because Ivan was still a somewhat feral cat that hadn’t been fully incorporated into the household.  Regardless of how it had happened, it was clear Ivan had come to the end of his nine lives.  

                 Father, however, seemed to think differently as he had diagnosed the cat as “frozen” and said that it just needed to “thaw out”.   Why I am stunned by this explanation is beyond me.  And why I felt the need to point out that, while yes, it was bitterly cold, cats don’t become paralyzed from the cold and then just thaw back to their regular selves, however nice an idea, is also beyond me.  You'd think by now I'd know better.  Anyway, when I tell Mother that the vet would either immediately put the cat down or would run expensive tests and then most likely put the cat down, she replies that no tests were needed as they already knew what was wrong with it.  “It’s frozen.  It only needs a shot.”   At this point, I needed at least a double.    

                “Listen,” I replied, “the only shot that cat’s getting is a final shot.”  The parents wouldn’t hear of it, so I left the half dead cat at the house, painfully aware of how leaving a cat to linger on would negatively impact my karma.   I tried unsuccessfully to comfort myself with the fact that it really didn’t seem to be in any pain.  And then there was the whole issue of transporting a mostly dead cat to the vet for its final journey while fielding endless questions from the Daughter and extremely sensitive Son.  Nonetheless, I felt awful about it.  With a heavy heart, I email the siblings to explain the latest situation and to give them the deep freeze theory.  While it is self-evident, I nonetheless point out to them that the deep freeze theory is just further evidence of the fact that we are all well and truly fucked.  

                Later that day, when the phone rang and I could only hear cackling when I answered it, I thought the Devil was calling from hell to congratulate me on my inaction with the cat.  Turns out it is actually Sibling #3.  In between cackles, she explains how she thinks her husband, who enjoys lying about in a blanket on the couch, frequently gets frozen and it takes him a few days to thaw out.  I am not amused.  Then Sibling #1 attempts to clarify the freeze/thaw cycle by emailing how Mr. Freeze came upon his frosty powers that frequently sent Batman into a deep freeze.  He ends the message by stating that none of this will help the poor cat unless Dick has recently come into possession of a freeze gun.  Sibling #4, ever more practical, chimes in with the suggestion that she takes a few days off work and gets a family discount on an airfare/euthanasia package deal to Brussels, the only EU country where doctor assisted suicide is legal.    

                I am sick thinking that I left a cat to possibly suffer and when I call the parents the next day to say I’m coming to get the cat, mercifully sans children, I am greatly relieved to hear Mother tell me the cat has moved on.  I pass on this information to the siblings, along with my concern over what would happen to the body; the ground is frozen solid.  Sibling #3 promises to go over and move the cat into the garage with Louie until a hole can be dug for it.  Only, when Sibling #3 gets to the house Mother tells her that she was wrong and that the cat isn’t actually dad.  Like Betty White and Eddie Murphy, Ivan’s death had been misreported.  Sibling #3 recommends taking the cat in and having it put down, but again, the parents won’t hear of it.  So, she checks on the cat to be sure it isn’t suffering and finds that it isn’t really moving.  She can’t decide if it is still alive or not.  Sibling #3 calls to update me on all of this and I can’t help but to repeatedly ask her what sort of an idiot can’t tell if a cat is dead? Then she says, cackling again, “Oh, and dad said ‘The cat’s fine!  Just leave it alone.  It’ll be fine!  In a few days I’ll dig a whole and bury it in the yard.’”  

                The next day I go over with a pot of chili that I had made and no one in my house would eat as it was really quite awful.  Spices are not exactly my forte.  Oblivious to the unappetizing taste, Father sat down joyfully to devour half the pot while Mother sat on the couch weeping.  I took that as a good sign that the cat had finally moved on.  I had to be sure, though, so after heating up the chili, I snuck down into the bedroom where I feared I’d find the cat body as I doubted anyone had thought to move it out to the garage.  Sure enough, Ivan lies curled up on a blanket on the floor of the closet.  I crouch down and stare at it and, to my great horror, think I detect a slight rise and fall of its midsection.  I crouch lower and get even closer and stare at the cat, hoping I just imagined the movement.  Having to be sure, I poke a finger at its tail and find it is soft and not at all stiff as it should be.  Shit, shit, shit, I think.  Having no choice, I poke the same finger into the cat’s body and it is not cold and stiff, but only sort of cool to the touch.  Ugh.  I don’t think it is moving so it has either just died or is at least 95% dead.  Chagrined and appalled that I am poking at a possibly dead cat, I see Sibling #3’s point; it is a lot harder than I thought to determine if a cat is deceased.  Regardless, I am not carting it off to the vet now, nor can I move it out to the garage until I know for sure it has passed on and so I leave it there again.  This is getting ridiculous.     

                I pass by my place of employment on the way home.  The night prior, my classroom absolutely reeked of weed.  After suggesting that the student or students in question at least air themselves out before coming to class, I had to invite the off duty cop security guards in to remind the students of the school’s no tolerance policy.  After this whole cat saga, however, I hope that whoever reeked badly enough to smell up the whole room comes back to class reeking just as strongly.  I can only hope that the smell  is potent enough to help me get over my finger poke at a possibly dead cat that, ironically, was unfortunately not as frozen as I'd have liked. 

A Conical Christmas

I never expected to be greeted with tidings of comfort and cheer, but I thought if I carried on as if nothing were amiss, no comments about the hair would be forthcoming. Of course, I was wrong. Perhaps fittingly, Mother started in first. Mother, whose eyesight isn’t the best anymore, let out a low, guttural titter that meant she was laughing at someone. That someone was me. This was approximately two seconds after she walked in the door on Christmas day. “Did you do that to your hair on purpose,” she says in greeting, actually snorting as she finished the question. It was less a question and more a statement of disbelief.

“What’s wrong with it?” I respond, trying to play it cool. I knew I had gotten a rather unfortunate haircut, but I didn’t think it was that bad.

“It’s terrible,” Sibling #4 chimes in. Then, because she does not share the same issues with personal space that the rest of us have, she swoops in right behind me and raises her hands up behind my head like an overly dramatic mime, if there is such a thing, imitating a cone. “From the back it makes your head look like a cone.” She doesn’t have to add that I have a long head to begin with. That’s understood. The long, horse face comes from Mother’s side of the family.

“Well, at least I don’t look like Laura!” I retort. Laura was our great aunt. She only wore black, wool coats on the rare days she ventured out, even if it was a hundred degrees outside. Her face bore a fairly constant scowl of disapproval. The appointment of a non-Italian pope caused the look to become permanently etched into Laura’s features. I now frequently see that same expression flit across Sibling #4’s face with greater regularity. Because she is Sibling #4, she doesn’t seem sufficiently concerned by this. Instead, when I bring it up, as I frequently must because I know she can’t help the expressions she makes, Sibling #4 adopts both the vocal tone and the facial expression with frightening accuracy. Perhaps this is only fitting. It was, after all, Sibling #4 that sensed something was amiss and called us from out of town to check on Laura, only moments before the hospital called to say Laura hadn't survived the surgery. Most people drink wine at family gatherings and take lots of pictures they can put up on facebook for all their “friends” to declare how stunningly lovely they are. We happily mock long dead relatives and attack each others Achilles heel. “At least my hair will eventually grow out,” I can’t help but to add. That is, if it doesn’t all continue to fall out from the stress.

Once we greet each other in this fashion, we all make haste to get the food on the table. The sooner everyone eats, the sooner everyone can go home. Like I’ve mentioned before, we don’t quite understand parties. Sibling #3, the host for this year’s Christmas non-event, is so eager to get us all fed, that I suggest next year we simply prepare to-go-boxes. Whoever is hosting, can have them ready so that the lunatic visitors need only pull up to the curb, roll down the window, and be on their merry way. As Sibling #3 likes to think she is the more social of the bunch, the only way to understand her eagerness to have us all gone is to either take it personally, or to assume that the stress of hosting a gathering is such that she can’t wait to slip out to the garage and don an entire tinfoil outfit. Who knows? Maybe she has even created one that looks like a Santa suit for the occasion.

After we eat, we get the out of town siblings on the horn. We are always slightly resentful that neither Sib ling #1 nor Sibling #2 has to endure the planning and execution of a lunatic holiday. We do our best to get Father on to a political topic when he is on the phone with them as this will guarantee they get to spend quality time with their Father on the holiday. Mother, meanwhile, lets out a snort every time she looks at my head.

After this, we reminisce about Christmases past. We mock Sibling #2’s globe like eyes that scanned the sky for Santa far into junior high and perhaps beyond. Inevitably, Sibling #3 always mentions how she was sent out at the age of six or seven to purchase Sibling #2’s present that would magically appear under the tree on Christmas morning. Sibling #3 has more of the martyr syndrome than the rest of us, although coming immediately after the golden child, perhaps it is understandable. Then, Sibling #3 begins to cackle as she recalls how Sibling #1 would buy candy bars for everyone as a present and when he’d get mad, he’d show us our present and eat it in front of us.

I remind the siblings of the quilted velvet dresses Mother had made for us that we would wear to midnight mass. “You mean the one with the green skirt and the cherries on the top part? That was mine,” Sibling #4 states. “That’s the one I wore when I won the Miss Peanut Queen contest”. Everyone needs something to be proud of so I don’t mention the picture of her wearing this dress in which her body looks like the size of an ant and her head looks like a giant balloon.

“No, not that dress. There were at least three of these quilted dresses and we would all wear them. Don’t you remember?” I prod.

“Wasn’t the dress pink?” Sibling #4 asks. And then Sibling #3 begins to cackle again as she very clearly remembers the pink dress and her role in ruining it. The pink dress was a long number that for some reason, even though I generally wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress, I loved. Sibling #6 was wearing it for my First Communion. As we were late, Sibling #3 and one of the other siblings were on either side of a very young Sibling #1, holding her hands as they ran along towards the church. They ran through the bus barns, which were right next to the church, and didn’t notice that they had dragged Sibling #6 and my pink dress through what was apparently a massive oil slick. As if we didn’t all look crazy enough running in late for my First Communion, there was poor Sibling #6, quite literally covered from head to toe in black oil.

The quilted dresses nobody remembers are quickly forgotten as, by this time, we all need air and head out for a walk. I’m guessing this is when normal people up their intake of alcohol. We simply escape for a while. When we have sufficiently soothed ourselves with a minor endorphin release, we head back to the house for dessert. Shortly after, we are all resting comfortably at our respective homes, sated and truly looking back with fondness on our family gathering, at about the time most people are only sitting down to their Christmas dinner.

A friend passing by in a car earlier today, stopped to chat and see if the kids had gotten what they wanted from Santa. There had been some question as to whether or not Santa would be able to acquire a popular electronic device that was seemingly out of stock everywhere. The friend was far more relieved than I was when he learned that Santa had come through with the device. When I suggest Santa would have just left an I.O.U. if he had failed to acquire it, the friend is clearly horrified. “What?” I ask in response to his horror. “One year Santa gave me an I.O.U. for a sweat suit from the Sears Outlet. I was probably seven or eight and I didn’t mind. I was happy enough with that. I think I even got the sweat suit eventually. What’s the big deal?” The friend just shook his head and said that explained a lot.

Of course, I have spent the days since Christmas studying my conical hair in a mirror. completely perplexed by how to remedy the situation aside from wearing a hat constantly. That, and wondering just how it is Sibling #3 is in possession of a photo of me from when I had the mumps. The Nephew, demonstrating the true Christmas spirit, happily posted the photo on the fridge for all to see. "You look like a guy," he says with a giant smirk. Actually, I look like a young man on steroids due to my massively swollen glands. The hat which I have taken to wearing, I am relieved to say, is a polyester blend mix. I have yet to fashion my own out of tinfoil, though I think we'd all understand if I did.