For the record

I am still catching up on my e-mails and general day-to-day detritus and read through Kathleen's last two posts and, for the record, I find no impertinence whatsoever. A dog is absolutely a part of the family; and in Garth's case, maybe more so than in most families. The mornings must be terribly sad. And I love what she says about the interaction with people that having a dog affords, the forced entry into the world at large and what a joy that must be. Everybody likes playing with a dog.

She mentions how different her memory and feeling of the stone house is now, and I have a house story of my own to add. One morning last week, when my dad was able to stay home and care for Mom for a while, the kids and I snuck off to Smithfield to take a peek at the old house. It was the first time in two years that I had been brave enough to do so.
And ... it is for sale. The people who bought the house did not love it properly. The trees, windows and doors are covered with NO TRESPASSING signs. Part of the split-rail fence is down; this was common, for bits to fall, but I always ran out to fix it. Now nobody is there to fix the fence. The yard is overgrown, the bushes a wreck, the house nearly unviewable from the road. My curtains are still there, though, barely parted to allow a peek inside to the house I loved so much.

My tears were hot and angry, and I wondered, Could we have it again? Especially if we end up coming back to North Carolina a lot to help care for my mother? But would I want it again? The neighborhood was going downhill and, frankly, we would have been moving anyway. The writing was on the wall. But when I look at that house, I think not of the sadnesses and scary things -- a drunk 19-year-old missing the curve and plowing through said fence, being ejected from the car and dying in front of my husband; the man who was shot in his yard across the street while my children played; the person who took pot shots at the house and terrified us for a night -- and I remember happinesses. The baby boy who called it his first home. Christmases. The Mother's Day when I came out of the shower to see that my daughters had written "I love you" messages in chalk all over the driveway. Why couldn't the new people love that house the same way?

Bring out your dead

“The Colbert Report” has picked up on the fact that Denver has the bubonic plague. In City Park, about five miles or so north of the casa, several squirrels have tested positive; and apparently, one got into the city zoo, next to the park, and infected a capuchin monkey. Now all the monkeys are quarantined.

The day before the story broke, a squirrel died in our front yard. Blegh.

So, if you need proof that the Dark Ages have returned, look no further than Denver.

funfurall

Yet I cannot help thinking my last post is an impertinence from start to finish. Robin is in the process of losing her mother; here I am writing about my departed dog. I am, in point of fact, in the process of losing my father and probably in not too much longer my mother. And here I am writing about my departed dog.

But is the love we have for animals any less, though different? Is it even any different? I know I am on dangerous ground here. The line we draw between our species and all the others is sharp and inviolate; that is part of the deal, of being human. To blur it is to invite all sorts of unwelcome questions. And yet Garth was part of the family. What can I do about that?

There are oddly humorous moments amid the sorrow, and one of them occurred when we got Garth's ashes back from the pet crematorium, and in a moment of idle curiousity I went to the Web site of the pet funeral home that did the job,
http://www.regencyforest.com/. I don't know why it surprises me that everything you could do for a human funeral you could do for a pet, except maybe embalm the pet and have an open-coffin Irish wake, with wailing and drinking. And who knows? Maybe if you ask nicely, you could have that, too.

A Disorganized Post

It's a different feeling that I have today
Especially when I know you've gone away
Lou Reed


There is nothing to do but go on. Sometimes I think I am doing that more or less successfully, and other times I think it is quite impossible, that the idea that I am managing is nothing more or less than an illusion. An emotional hallucination.

I get through the days. They have a different shape now. For nine years I woke up every morning and thought: the dog. He has to eat. He has to pee. In North Carolina, the latter meant letting him out on the back yard; here, it more demandingly involved getting dressed, putting on his leash, rumpled and half-awake facing the world outside, however briefly. For most of his life, Garth woke us up insisting on his rights, on a start to the day, jumping onto the bed, pressing a wet nose in our hands, pacing around the bed. Now we wake up to silence; his absence is perhaps most striking at that moment.

In North Carolina we went for walks, but it was generally one longish one per day, in the morning, a ritual more than a necessity. In Brooklyn, Garth went out several times a day on walks of varying duration, from early in the morning until late at night, and I realize now how much my perception of my environment was affected by this. I was always seeing the doormen and the postman and the construction workers in the courtyard, running into dog buddies in the neighborhood, pausing so Garth could be admired by children, viewing the harbor from the Promenade at all hours and observing how the water changed color with the sky, being dragged into the pet stores. It was often an inconvenience: when it was raining, when I was late to leave for work. But it forced us to interact in a way that we no longer have to, to be aware of things that now pass us by.

Everything begins and ends at the exactly right time and place. That rather ominous line of dialogue from "Picnic at Hanging Rock" has occurred to me more than once lately. It's easy, now that Garth has gone, to hop on a train and spend two days in the country -- which is exactly what I ended up doing, just one week after his death, when my father was hospitalized for five days after a heart attack. Much better that these two events occurred in the order they did, rather than the reverse. How fortunate, too, to be in New York, instead of North Carolina, at a time when my parents will obviously need me much more.

And Garth's death has somehow closed a chapter in North Carolina. The stone house that I shed so many tears for no longer seems like home in any way. To imagine being there without him! It's simply impossible.

Aarone update

Aarone Thompson's father, Aaron Thompson, has been indicted.

Loss

In so many ways, both happy and sad, Kathleen’s and my lives have complemented each other, as if we were two sides of a coin. We met at the end of our college careers (her Master’s, my bachelor’s) and took the same career paths. When I began having kids, she got a dog. She moved to Brooklyn, and I to Denver, within weeks of each other.

And on the day she lost Garth, I began the process of losing my mom.

On the day Kathleen lost Garth (I will not give the date; right now I want to pretend it never happened), my mother was rushed to the hospital with symptoms both sudden and alarming (loss of speech, inability to walk, uncontrollable vomiting) and was diagnosed with brain and lung cancer. Stage IV. Inoperable. She is in treatments to buy a little time with us, but how much is unclear. She had been a smoker for years but quit nine months ago and, about five months ago, developed a vicious cough that doctors wrote off as myriad, less serious things. If you want the names of doctors who write off a longtime smoker’s debilitating cough as “nothing serious,” drop me a note.
I am in North Carolina now and will be a lot over the next few months, seeing the old friends and visiting the old places. For the next few months, at least, I will have two homes. I will have a route – a very, very long route – that will take me through the homes of far-flung family members as I make this drive with the kids over and over. I will have to learn how to deal with the needs of my mother and balance them with the needs of my children as we prepare for hard times; how to deal with my autistic sister’s needs; how to make sure my dad takes care of himself during this period (which he has not been doing); how to meet the needs of my family and balance them with the needs of all the people who want to wish her, and us, well; and, somewhere in there, sleep. If I can get to sleep, which hasn’t happened much. At night I am finally alone, left alone to process the day, and my heart finally breaks.

It’s so nice to have a friend like Kathleen who, somehow, manages to go through many of the same things at the same times. As she deals with her heartbreak, and I with mine, we know that neither of us will be alone.

Garth, Noted Smooth Fox Terrier, 13

Garth Flynn-Karwowski, a k a Ch. Moorhaven Ropin' the Wind, died yesterday in Manhattan after a brief illness. He was 13.

The cause of death was brain cancer, according to his neurologist, Dr. Boaz Levitin.

Garth, born May 10, 1993, in Raleigh, N.C., was a smooth fox terrier, black and white with touches of brown that turned white in later life. His sire was Ch. Dayterra Double Your Fun ( a k a Wrigley); his dam was Ch. Foxtrot Chocolate Chip ( a k a Cookie). Like most American smooth fox terriers of his era, he claimed descent on both sides of his family from Ch. Ttarb the Brat, the renowned Australian.

Garth, under two owners, lived the life of a show dog until the age of 4 or 5, making the circuit of Southeastern shows, accumulating enough points to bear the initials Ch. At age 4 and a half he fathered two puppies, whom he did not get along with, being unwilling at all times to share either the limelight or the attention of his people. His stubborness, which those who knew him best consider one of his defining characteristics, thus led him to his third and last set of people, who lived at that time in a small stone house with a large fenced yard in ITB Raleigh, where he -- mostly happily -- spent the next seven years of his life.

Garth loved food -- all food (except bananas, which he would sniff disdainfully and then turn away from). He was particularly fond of baby carrots, raw beef and ice cubes. He also liked to eat certain nonfoods, including snow. (When he could get it, which was not that often in North Carolina. Apparently not understanding that it was not really food, he would gorge on it until he became completly chilled and had to be carried inside and wrapped in a blanket until he stopped shivering). When he was a young dog, he once killed and devoured an entire rabbit and then spent the rest of the afternoon vomiting up bones and fur, according to his breeder and first owner, Stephanie Dangerfield of Raleigh. Devouring a plastic pacifer of the toddler son of his second owner, Jodi Badstein of Willow Spring, under the mistaken impression that it was food led to a trip to the dog hospital at a young age. Early in his days at the stone house, he once ate most of a bar of Dove soap and spent several days looking unhappy and vomiting suds. Another notable episode involved eating an entire container, foil wrapping and all, of souvenir mint-filled chocolates from a friend's trip to London, mistakenly left within reach when the humans in the house went out to dinner.

Garth feared thunderstorms at the time of his arrival at the stone house, which was unfortunate, because they are very common in North Carolina. He would hide and shake. Later, he decided to fight back, and would run around the house in the middle of the night, barking at the thunder to drive it away and waking the household in the process. He was also afraid of other loud noises and very intolerant of toddlers.

He was well known in his Raleigh neighborhood, popular with both dogs and people. He liked to take walks in the minipark nearby and go into the creek there in the summertime, getting wet and smelly and finding dead things to roll in. He also enjoyed relaxing in his yard, interfering in attempts to garden, (like all aristocrats, he disdained work) chasing cats that dared to venture there and playing keepaway with rawhide bones and floppy plastic frisbees. (He did not fetch.) When he was tired of the game of keepaway, he would hide the object in the ivy and return, empty-mouthed, with an innocent expression. Chasing the chipmunks that lived in the stones in the backyard was another favorite pastime, one he would become completely absorbed in and could be lured away from only with peanut-butter-covered dog biscuits.

As far as is known, he never caught a chipmunk, though he did once take away a bird from a neighbor cat in a quick scuffle under a parked car. (The bird was dazed but survived) And while walking on leash, he once caught and dispacted an inattentive squirrel with a quick shake and a few snaps of his jaws.

Although initially dismayed by the move to Brooklyn at age 11 and the loss of his house, yard, and familiar routine, Garth learned to enjoy being a city dog, where there was an abundance of admiring humans, dogs to meet and greet, urine deposits to be sniffed and pet stores within walking (or dragging) distance. No walk was complete unless he had managed to lure his person into one of the nearby stores that distributed dog biscuits. He also enjoyed his visits to the country, where he rejoiced in the smells of rabbits, skunks and many other types of wildlife.

Survivors include his people, Kathleen and Jarek.