Daxohol

"Heavy Petting" Part 3 - Dog Days

This is the story about a time in my life were it rained dogs.  Nope, not cats and dogs.  Just dogs. 

I was eighteen when I left home and moved out on my own.  I lived with my boyfriend at the time in a tiny house that his parents owned. 

Previous to our living in that little house, my ex’s drunken wife beating brother lived in it.  He no longer lived there as he was in jail for...come on guess....beating his wife.  Of course, when he was locked up, he dumped his dog (Spirit) on his wife, who already had a dog from Spirit’s litter of puppies she bred with a German Shepherd.  The woman was also a drunken idiot and could barely care for her four children let alone handle the responsibility of an additional dog.

We were happy to take in the dog.  By then, I had grown out of my allergy to furry creatures and I was just so thrilled to finally have a pet that actually wanted me too.

Spirit was a pure bred Siberian Husky.  She was loving, yet she preferred to spend most of her time in the basement were it was cooler.  She would come upstairs periodically to get her love and affection then head back downstairs.  In the winter, I had a hard time getting her indoors as -40C weather was like a tropical paradise to her.

Within a couple weeks, we got a phone call from the drunken wife begging us to take the other dog (Bear).  I loved Spirit’s company so much, and since she was such an easy dog to care for, I that I thought having another around would be great!

I was right! I loved it! Those dogs were my babies.  Life with those dogs was so much fun!  Spirit and Bear got along famously.  It was truly wonderful for me to see mother and daughter doggies look after each other the way they did. 

That particular winter I had a real hard time getting Spirit in the house because we were having such a harsh cold winter.  She absolutely loved it and refused to come inside.  Since we didn’t have a back yard, we had her on a lead that stopped well before the sidewalk.  Spirit was also a very quiet dog.  She hardly ever barked.  I think we had her a week before I actually heard her bark. 

Our neighbours loved my dogs and they got lots of attention.  Folks would walk right onto our lawn to pet the Spirit.

One day, Spirit started coughing.  I thought maybe she had a hairball or something.  A few days passed and her coughing got worse.  I booked an appointment for her to see the vet.  My ex was to take her over the weekend while I went away with my father up north.

Upon my return, I learned that Spirit’s condition turned for the worse the night I left, and he rushed her to the emergency vet clinic were she died.  The vet did a blood test and that test showed Rat Poison.  My ex informed the vet that we did not have rat poison in our house.  The vet told him that sometimes, bad people do bad things to animals.  He said it was likely a person who poisoned Spirit.  He then asked were we lived.  Apparently, Spirit was not the only one in our area that got poisoned.  Two other dogs and a cat also died in the last week of rat poisoning.

I was devastated.  So was Bear.  She moped around, didn’t eat much and whined.  The story does not get better from here guys.  It only gets worse.  Two weeks later, Bear, who never went out on the road, ran directly in front of a car she saw coming.  Bear died of a broken heart.

Losing those dogs was hard.  It was really hard.  I waited so long to have a dog, then I got two, then they were both taken from me so soon.  I had them for a year or so.  I didn’t think I could ever have another dog after losing Spirit and Bear.

About a month later, my ex’s over bearing bossy sister came to our door with a dog. 
“Here! Have this dog! It’s a stray from the farm!”
“No, I really don’t want another dog.”
“No really, have this dog! Oh look at how cute it is!”
“No, seriously I don’t want another dog.  I’m still upset about Spirit and Bear.  I just don’t want a dog right now.”
“You have to take this dog, I can’t keep it!”
“Why did you take it? It was a stray.”
“I had to! It was lonely! You have to take this dog.”
“No.”
“Take this dog.  You have to. Dad said.”

Dad said.  Yup.  What Dad says, goes.  No questions, no buts, nothing.

The dog was not house trained.  The dog was not a puppy.  When I took it to the vet to get checked out, it had heart-worm.  $475 and “maybe” the dog would live. Dad said save it.  I told him we didn’t have that kind of money.  I was told, to come up with it.

The dog lived.  The dog lived to reveal it’s abandonment issues which involved shitting on the floor when we left.  If I shut the door to check the mail, I’d walk in to find the dog mid shit.  Nothing worked to break the habit.  I tried everything.  I dreaded leaving the house everyday, only to return to piles of shit all over the house.  But I had to keep this dog.  Dad said so.

Awhile later Dad said we had to move to a different house.  This is the second house he bought for the drunken wife beater and his drunken wife.  He went to jail again for…come one you know it by now…beating his wife.  The drunken wife moved out so we had take over the new house, while The bossy overbearing sister would move into the other little one. Clear as mud? Good.  We also inherited…come on, guess…another dog.  This one’s name was Wolf.  Because it was actually part wolf, and part Husky.  Yip.  A wild animal and a shitting machine. 

I came to the realization that this was not my father.  This was not my problem.  This was not the kind of family dynamic I wanted to be in.  I grew to resent my Ex for never sticking up for himself or for me.  I knew that so long as I stayed in this relationship, I would have no control over my own life.  I would not be able to cook macaroni and cheese without step by step coaching by a control freak father in law.  I would not be able to decide if I want a pet or not, where I lived would not be my decision, it would be because Dad said so.

I left.

I’ve never had a dog since.  Someday I will.  But I will pick it out.

The lesson?  Look out for number one.  Don’t let someone else dictate to you how, where or who you live it with.  I was given one life.  One life to do what I wanted with.  Because I said so.

"Heavy Petting" Part 2 - The Itch

When I was a child, I was allergic to the world.  At least, that is what it felt like anyway.  I was allergic to anything with four legs or feathers, on account of my asthma.   Therefore, I was not allowed to have any kind of pet.  Fish were out, for as long as we lived in the little town where I grew up because they just died in the water we had.   You could scratch a layer of film off it with your fingernail. 

I longed for a pet.  I had various insects as pets; caterpillars, praying mantis, beetles, the time I brought 40 zebra snails from the river home in my Barbie suitcase, a frog that had worms, etc. etc.

We had this next door neighbour who ate onions like apples.  He was the kind of guy that spent his days puttering around the yard without actually doing anything.  Nothing seemed to change in his yard despite all the things he banged around, moved and took apart.  Of course, this was my own child's eye perspective.  In his back yard he had a big barrel that just collected rain water.  It never really did anything, it just sat there being a barrel of water.  Nowadays, barrels of water are a breeding ground for West Nile…but at that time, I discovered it certainly was a breeding ground, but for what? I didn't know.

I stared into that barrel completely astonished at the number of little white twitching things swimming around in it.  I ran home and grabbed a plastic container.  My mother grimaced, as whenever I ran outside with a plastic container it only meant one thing.  My desperation for a pet was being flirted with by some unknown creepy crawly thing that she had to convince me to keep outside or else the house will fall down under the pressure of one more living thing for it to have to shelter (our house, it was falling apart bit by bit, driving my mother nearly crazy).

I scooped out a container full of these delightful twitching things.  I sat them on the porch.  Everyday I would check on them and see how they were.  I never fed them because, well, what the hell do you feed little white twitching things that came out of a barrel?  Days went by and one day I went to check on them and miraculously they had transformed overnight into little black tadpoles!  Incredible!  I was totally amazed that such a radical change had happened so fast!  Was I going to get frogs? Some sort of lizard? A DRAGON?!

A couple days later, when I was doing my first check of the day, I noticed that there where only 5 little tadpoles in the water.  Where the hell did all my tadpoles go?  I looked around…I look up.  There was a large menacing spider.  It seemed to shrug its legs to say “What? They were RIGHT THERE!”

I moved my last five little tadpoles away from the stupid spider.  Over the next couple days, my tadpoles got fatter.  Then one morning, I finally found out the final form of these amazing little things.  Sitting on the top of the water, were five baby mosquitoes, drying out their wings.  Their former tadpole exteriors sat still at the bottom of the container.  I raised mosquitoes!  I was so proud!  Secretly, I thought a dragon would have been cooler.

Those mosquitoes probably lived on to bite people and annoy them.  Hey, even though there was no such thing as West Nile yet, the barrel of standing water was a breeding ground for it after all!

I didn't really get the true lesson from raising those mosquitoes until later in life.  What those mosquitoes taught me was to discover the unknown.  There is so much about the world that I don’t know, so go and be open to learn about any of the Creator’s gifts.  I apply this lesson to my improv too.  Discover the unknown.  Be open to what wonderful creations you and your playmates can bring onto the stage.  As the old saying goes, Improv is life.  I need to play soon!

"Heavy Petting" Part 1 - Of Hamsters and Teenagers

If you are receptive, or just plain crazy, you can learn valuable life lessons from pretty much anything.  Important life lessons can come from events, people, stories, and even pets.  This is my first installment of "Heavy Petting" a series on how the pets in my life have taught me things and affected my life.

Some of you may not want to be eating anything while reading this particular post. The rest of you will probably reach for some grapes when it gets good.

When I was a teenager, I had a hamster named Mr. Gotee. He was grey with a white mustache and beard. He was one of two hamsters we kept from the litter of 9 our first hamster had. Mr. Gotee always had personality. How can a hamster have personality? Well the same reason cats have facial expressions. They do.

One day, while Mr. Gotee was running on his wheel, something shiny caught his eye. He came to a stop very suddenly and tried to run off the wheel, but his foot got stuck in the wheel and the wheel kept momentum. Unfortunately, along with the shiny thing, the edge of the wheel also caught his eye. Unlike shiny things, edges of hamster wheels are not fascinating. Mr. Gotee managed to somehow obtain a wound that resulted in his eyeball coming out of it's socket.

My mother called a vet to see if there was anything that could be done. The vet said that it could just dry up and fall off, however, given that hamsters do not handle stress or trauma well, he would most likely die.  Hamsters can die from a catching a cool breeze. They can also die if you slam a door too loudly.

Mr. Gotee, was no ordinary hamster. He didn't let something like his eye dangling out of his head slow him down.  Nope, he got right back on that wheel and kept on keepin' on.  As I watched my hamster run with his eye rattling around on his furry little cheek, I thought to myself.  If this little hamster manages to live through this, I will make sure that I try my very hardest in life not to let anything get me down. 

Mr. Gotee's eye shriveled up, and fell off. Fortunately, nobody saw it while the cage was being cleaned. That would have been just gross. It was bad enough we had to look at a hamster for days on end with it's eyeball flailing about. Now that the eye was gone, he just had one eye shut. I wanted to make him a little pirate patch for him, but hamsters, like cats, dogs and ferrets, should not wear any kind of attire.  The stress of eyeball popping out may not have killed him yet, but the stress from looking like an idiot would surely bring certain death. 

Mr. Gotee went on to live for 2 more years after he lost his eye. When he finally did die, I was glad to say that this hamster touched my life in a spiritual way. He taught me at the age of 15 that pain is no excuse to curl up and die.  Severe Asthma as a child taught me that too, but I need to give credit where credit is due.  Birthing my enormous son with no drugs was testiment of that. 

I saw this hamster cope with such a disgusting injury. He overcame odds of infection and death from the sheer magnitude of it all in comparison to his fluffy little self. If this hamster can get through losing an eye with no assistance, I can get through my last year of high school, I could get through my sister saying "ya-I knowwwwwwwwww" a million more times, I could handle the sadness, anger and hurt over my parents separation. All that, from a little hamster who's brain was too small and probably forgot his pain from one second to the next. "OW SHIT! Oh Food, OW DAMMIT! Oh, I'm pooping...now what was I doing? Oh yeah SON OF A B*TCH OW OW OW!" Thanks Mr. Gotee.