Category: Animules

Wherein I talk mostly about dogs.

Beast vs. Comfort Furniture

A couple months ago, Heather, Erika, and I went to the TROSA furniture store on Foster Street in Durham.  It was complete bedlam because the Duke students had just gotten back, and they were clamoring to find cheap furniture with which to outfit their dorm rooms and frat houses.  Everything that was remotely nice or hip or functional already had a ‘sold’ sign on it.  I was about to give up on the furniture and just see how many hipsters I could elbow on the way out, but my friends and I made a pass through the upstairs room first.  And I found an awesome chair.  An old-ass, yellowy green easy chair, in surprisingly good shape, that squeaked when you rocked it.  Perfect for my old-ass house.  Best of all, forty bucks!  Except it was half-off.  Twenty bucks!

I brought it home, and Maxwell took immediately to the seat back, especially when the late-afternoon sun slanted in.  Redford loved the chair itself.  When he was boisterous, it gave him pretty easy access to Maxwell.  When he was tuckered out, he’d curl up in it, his head flopped over the arm.

Now, here’s the thing about Redford:  he shreds.  And not the good kind of shredding.  No lightning-fast guitar riffs.  No adept cutbacks on a surfboard.  Not even destroying documents with which someone might ruin my credit.  I mean savagely ripping apart perfectly good towels, blankets, and pillows.  It’s kind of cute, actually.  You can practically see him thinking, “I’ll get you, varmint!”  And he’ll snatch the item up in his teeth and whip his head back and forth, deftly breaking its neck, before stopping, dizzy, and staggering into my CD rack.

Well, Redford had tried a couple of times to kill the cushion of the green chair, but I always managed to wrest it from his fierce jaws before he did any serious damage.  That’s why, when I came home from work the other day, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing.  The chair’s cushion was destroyed…and Redford was locked safely away in his kennel.  At first, I thought Violet had done it.

Now, here’s the thing about Violet:  she shreds, but only old magazines, completed crosswords, and tags that have been pulled off new items of clothing.  And she doesn’t even do that very often.  Mostly, she just collects my footwear and snuggles with it on the couch or in my bed.

But there was no denying, the green chair’s cushion had been maimed—the upholstery ripped completely off, bits of fabric and foam littering the living room floor.  That’s when I noticed that all the foam bits lay around Redford’s kennel, the upholstery was inside Redford’s kennel.

That little bastard had stuck his little bastard-paw or little bastard-snout through the wire of the cage and somehow ripped my chair’s cushion to bits.

Either that, or Violet is up to some very tricky shit.

Redford, on the temporary replacement cushion...a pillow from my bed

Dear Maxwell

How did you become mine, little man?  I guess we should thank your lovely first mom Samantha, who intuited that I needed for her kitty to become my kitty when I moved out of the house on Ridgefield Road.  Or we could back up and say it was Sasha, who decided I should to be roommates with her childhood friend Samantha when I came back down south after six years in New York.  Or we could give credit to the New York City Teaching Fellows, who realized I would be a great teacher and put me in a program with the wonder that is Sasha.  Or we could say it was that poster on the downtown A train, because without that, I wouldn’t have even known about the existence of the NYCTF program.

Let’s do that.  Let’s say it was the poster.  I feel like you were a long time coming to me.

What a handsome devil.  Blue eyes and white feet.  A pink nose with a splotch of black that spilled over onto your lip.  Did you flinch when Mother Nature was daubing at your face?

And the most non-discriminating lover there ever was.  If Burt Bacharach had a code, you lived by it.  If a lap was created, you’d climb into it.  You were clear that everybody could use some of what you had to give.  When Dad came stay with me, he’d call, “Amy!  Come here and take a look at this!”  I’d head into the living room to find Dad supine on the pull-out couch and you lying square on his chest, your face in his face.  “This cat LOVES me,” he’d say.  And you did.  You loved my dad.  Just so happens you loved everybody.

You even loved Boonie.  And then Redford.  And they both kinda tried to eat you.  What a mensch.

When I got you, at 12 years old, you were…well, let’s just say you would have shopped in the Big & Tall department.  You lumbered.  Over the next four years, you lost seven pounds and started to slink around like a German shepherd.  A nine-pound German shepherd.

It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming.  You were my Renal Failure Kitty.  But coming home to your cold corpse was harsh.  I wish I could say you were curled serenely in your spot on the back of the easy chair, but you weren’t.  You were on the couch, stiff, with a look on your face like in the last moment you had glimpsed Death and wished you could turn around.  I feel guilty I wasn’t there for you in your final moments, but I kinda get the feeling you waited until I left on purpose.  You probably knew I couldn’t handle it.

So now.  Well, now there’s no more scooping litter.  I won’t miss that.  No more sprinting, dripping, out of the shower to rescue you from Redford’s adoring maw.  No more cleaning up piss off the floor, the bathmat, the kitchen table, Redford’s face.  No more having to erase your attempts to update my facebook status.

Hm.  I miss you, buddy.  I mean, my lap’s so cold.

Love,

Amy

A New Low

I have a cat, Maxwell.  He’ll be 17 in July.  Maxwell, as you may recall, is in renal failure.  In the last few months, he’s started pissing outside his litter box—on the floor, on the bathmat, on plastic bags, on clothing that didn’t quite make it to the hamper, and most notably on the kitchen table.

This afternoon my animals and I were in a pile on the couch, as we are wont to be, a mélange of the limbs, heads, torsos, and tails of three species.  Maxwell stood up, shimmied backward a little bit, and peed directly on Redford’s face.  Redford only sort of noticed.

They Can Never Take Away Our Freedom

I was 16 years and 3 months old when I got my driver’s license.  My dad took me to the DMV.  I drove the nice DMV lady around the block in an ’89 Nissan Stanza and then sat waiting for 20 minutes while they printed up my card, stuck my Polaroid onto it, and slid it through the laminator.  I could feel the glow of that plastic rectangle through my purse as I drove my dad and me home, but I didn’t really get it until I was in the kitchen.  Nobody else was home.  Dinner was a couple of hours away.  I didn’t have any homework.  And I had my driver’s license!  I didn’t have to have an adult in the car with me anymore!  I turned to my dad and said, “Can I go to the mall and get David a Christmas present?”  He looked about as excited about the prospect as you would’ve expected him to, but to his credit, he handed me the keys and said, “Watch out for the other guy.”  I kept giggling to myself on the 10-mile (yes, 10-mile) trek from my house to the Boone Mall.

Let’s be frank.  The Boone Mall is a piece of shit.  I mean, nowadays there’s an Old Navy, so it’s slightly less of a piece of shit, but back then we’re talking JCPenney, McCrory’s, and K&W Cafeteria.  The most exciting retail outlet was either the Walden Books or that place where you’d buy ridiculously over-priced gummi bears and jelly beans just because they were displayed tantalizingly in those jars under the glass counter.  I don’t remember whether I bought any gummi bears that day, but I did buy my best friend David a Christmas present, a truly stupid, stupid Christmas present:  a toy saxophone from the K&B Toys.  Anyway, my point is, despite the fact that it’s a piece of shit, because it was the destination of my first solo trip ever, the Boone Mall still feels like freedom to me.

My friend Sean has a similar association.  His older brother was driving the two of them home from school one day, and when they paused at a light, his brother said, “Do you feel like going through the drive-thru at Taco Bell?”  It had never occurred to Sean that they might be able to divert the car from the school-home track, and to this day, freedom comes in the form of a Taco Bell bean burrito.

Going hiking is my dogs’ favorite thing in the whole wide world.  Of course, watching them be happy makes me happy, AND letting them off the leash is simultaneously nerve-wracking for obvious reasons.  I take a pocketful of goodies whenever we go, so they’ll have some incentive to come back to me.  And I bet if Violet and Redford could talk, they’d tell you that freedom tastes like chopped up hot dogs.

What says freedom to you?

Older Sister, Younger Brother

Me:  Sit.  Good girl, Violet.  (I unhook her leash.  She sprints away.)

Redford:  (bucking like a bronco) I WANNA GO I WANNA GO I WANNA GO.

Me:  Then you need to sit.

Redford:  There I sat NOW CAN I GO.

Me:  Nice try.  Sit.

Redford:  (sits, trembling) Aw man. (I try to unhook his leash.  He bolts and nearly chokes himself.) OK OK OK.  (sits, trembling)

Me:  Good boy.  (I unhook his leash.) OK.  (He sprints away.)

Redford:  VIOLET WAIT UP oh my gosh I’m running so fast hi Violet did you see how fast I runned?

Violet:  Ran.

Redford:  Yeah ran.

Violet:  No.

Redford:  Oh, well I runned really fast wait I gotta poop.  (poops, sprints to catch up) Hey wanna go this way?

Violet:  No, I’m going this way.

Redford:  OK how bout we go the way you’re going oh wait I gotta poop.

Violet:  Go poop, then.  I don’t need to hear about it.

Redford:  (poops, sprints to catch up) Hey Violet wanna play chase?

Violet:  Not unless a deer is ‘it’.

Redford:  OK let’s go find a deer oh wait I gotta poop.

Violet:  Ugh.

Redford: (poops, sprints to catch up) I can run faster than you Violet wanna see here I go!

Violet:  So?

Redford:  I gotta poop.  (poops, sprints to catch up) Hey Violet what’re you smelling?

Violet:  Something.

Redford:  WHAT IS IT can I smell too oh my gosh it SMELLS LIKE POOP AWESOME!  (drops and rubs his neck across it)

Violet:  (sigh)