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Death & Dogs
2005-01-11 - 11:56 p.m. I've been having disconcerting premonitions of death lately. Not my own. I feel as though I am being prepared for a death, shored up emotionally almost. I've been pre-occupied with the physical manifestations of death, also what happens after death, what to expect, whether to cremate or inter (I'm personally leaning toward cremation), psychic after-death communications with loved ones . . . you get the drift. My mama is old. 81. She's a cancer survivor of 17 years, which is when she had her mastectomy and radiation. Mi hija was a baby at the time she was diagnosed and treated. She has been considered cured for many years, and except for increasing memory problems, she is in better health than I am. But she is still an old lady, so it is possible I am being prepared for her death on some level. My daughter is young. She, however, had an abnormal pap and is having a colposcopy and biopsy on Thursday. I realize that an irregular pap is not that unusual (at about the same age, I had the same, and had cryosurgery to removedysplasic cells), but it still gives me pause. Then there is Gipsy, Queenie's sister and my former friend in Houston. Back in December 2003 she got her diagnosis of terminal peritoneal cancer and was given a year to live. No one knows how she is doing because she decided that she hates both Queenie and me after she learned that we went to Italy together. Neither she nor her older daughter will return e-mails, letters, phone calls, etc. For all we know, she is already dead. Tomorrow I am going to ask Lily to call and check on her. I used to have this basset hound named B@bs. I got her as a stray (surprise, surprise) back during the Dago Years. His goofy uncle had found her one sub-zero night at the all-night truck stop and brought her back to their family's property. I awoke to the unmistakable bay of a basset, and went out to see what the deal was. I promptly fell in love with her, an old red and white female basset, obviously overbred by her elongated, dragging teats, but just the smartest, sweetest natured dog I ever did see. B@bs loved to ride in a car more than anything in the world. Being that she was found at a truck stop, I think it likely that she had been a long-haul trucker's dog at least at some pont in her life. Or maybe she was just trying to hitch a ride; I don't know. But that dog lived to ride! I had to sneak out of my trailer in the morning to go to work. I used to pull the chain for the ceiling fan in the kitchen 3 times before I left the house: "chh-chh chh-chh chh-chh," and no matter where she was in the trailer, she heard that and knew i was leaving and she was fixing to miss out on a ride. One morning my next-door neighbors actually videotaped us for America's Funniest Videos trying to leave, because B@bs had gotten out and the trunk was open and she jumped up in it and crawled waaay to the back so I couldn't haul her out easily. Once I got her out the trunk, she then ran around the car and through the open door into the back seat. I was mad, but it was funny as hell to me even while it was happening. Anyway, I loved that dog. I spoiled her rotten and spent thousands of dollars treating her for breast cancer due to overbreeding. She also had heartworms, as I think every single untreated dog in this mosquito-infested state does, and it was the two-part, $500 heartworm treatment I subjected her to that finally killed her. I grieved for that dog more than some people do for humans. The guilt I felt for pushing the treatment on her when she wasn't in that much distress was enormous. I felt that I would never get another basset, b/c they wouldn't be B@bs. About 3 years after her death, I was in the pool over by my mom's. I was reading the paper while floating around in the water and read a want-ad that said, "Found - female basset hound - very friendly." I don't know what possessed me, as I think at the time I was already up to about 4 or 5 dogs after an all-time high of 6 before a couple deaths, but I got out of the pool immediately and went in to my mom's to call. It turned out that a little old lady down the road from where I used to live with the Dago (and where I found B@bs) had found this dog out in the road and had taken her in. But she was old and couldn't keep her. she said, "Honey, they're trying to get rid of me!" It was the first day the ad had run, and I was her first caller. I told the lady that I certainly didn't want to take somebody's pet, but that if nobody claimed her, I was interested, I'd had bassets before, etc. She said come and get her and she'd give anyone who called claiming ownership my number and they could retrieve her from my house. So my daughter and I went over there and got her. She was about 18 mos old, ri-color, healthy, spayed, friendly. You know where I'm going with this, right? We were smitten. The lady's name was Carla; she said she'd had her about a week, didn't know from whence she came, but she was healthy and good-natured. We gave Carla my number to refer her rightful owner's to us, as her ad would run for 5 days, but heard nothing. We bonded immediately, named her, bathed her, introduced her to the pack (she loved everybody, and vice versa), let her sleep with me in the bed. This bh became the alpha female and my ace boon coon companion in a matter of days. About 2 or 3 weeks after I found her, and another week that Carla had had her, her original owners decided to run an ad for a "lost dog." It had her photo and all. This was their dog. My heart was breaking, but I called these people. I couldn't keep their dog, it was the next closest thing to stealing, but the time frame bothered me a lot. It was at least 3 weeks since the dog went missing. I've lost dogs before. The dog I got when I was pregnant with mi hija disappeared twice. I drove all over town one time, tracking her perambulations with increasing frenzy, until I found her at the sheriff's substation well after midnight. The other time, I literally papered the neighborhood with her photo and description, until it finally panned out and we had somebody call us. So I know that if you lose your dog, you are desperate and look until you find her, or until common sense dictates that there is nothing further you can do. But I called these folks. I used my cell, and I star-67'd the number. Said I was a friend of a college student who had found a bh near the university. The people lived about 20 miles from where Miss Carla found the dog, but I'd seen the picture. I knew it was their dog. The lady said they kept "her in a pen in the back yard," that the latch had broken and her husband would have to "put duct tape on it or something." My blood ran cold. Pen-in-back-yard-duct-tape-on-lock kept running through my head. I asked how long she had been missing, said my friend just found this dog. This goofy bitch said a few days, she wasn't sure, because neighbors kept telling her they saw her "around." I knew she was lying at that point, and I knew that she didn't deserve to get the dog back because she was an irresponsible pet owner. But I still knew that it was closer to dognapping than I ever wanted to be. I told her I'd have my friend call her, and ended the call. That night, I was driving home on a back country road with mi hija. I was telling her what I'd learned that day on the phone, from the ad, how torn I felt over the whole matter, what I wanted to do vs. what I should actually do. My daughter is actually much more level-headed than I, and I wanted her insight into the moral aspect of this situation. At the exact moment I was asking her opinion of what to do, both of us saw a red and white basset in the ditch looking over its shoulder directly at us. It was an exact replica of B@bs. We both cried out, "There's a basset hound!" I drove maybe an 1/8th of a mile until I found a spot to turn around, and headed back, looking for the dog. It was so uncanny, we had to make sure we'd seen what we saw. Plus, it looked so much like B@bs! I drove probably a mile in the opposite direction at about 10 mi an hour, with both of us hanging out the car, eyes frantically searching the ditches for a bh, a dog of any kind, really, that would explain what we both had seen. There was nothing, no canine, definitely no red and white replica of our dead basset in either direction. We concluded, rightly or wrongly, that we had seen a "ghost basset hound." We took it as a sign that B@bs was telling us to keep this new basset, that she had sent her to us to be rescued, that we shouldn't give her back to ppl who would pen her into a backyard enclosure and seal it with duct tape. The fact that she looked into my eyes over her shoulder sealed the deal for me. I know what B@bs looked like, and that was her on the road that night. So anyway, I don't know what's coming in the form of death, but I feel it hovering, and it unnerves me. I hope that I am wrong. I dreamed of the tarot, and the magician card, which isn't traditionally a death card. I feel that my messages are coming through, but may be garbled. I'm praying for Strength, for Clarity, for Peace of Mind, to handle what the future brings, even when it is a harbinger of a winter of the soul. �
still here - 2009-12-18
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