To the Library we go

 

We walked the dogs to the library the other day. It was a magical moment when the weather was cooperating, and I actually had the energy to walk. We leashed up the dogs and put our overdue books in a bag and off we went. Cricket loves to go on long walks and visit other places. She would prefer to drag me around the neighborhood for an hour or two a day, if it were up to her, whereas Butterfly would prefer to never leave her backyard.

“Let’s go!”

When we first moved to this apartment, a year and a half ago, Butterfly blossomed. She smiled more. She ran in the yard and recognized our door right away and ran straight too it, off leash, within days. She was home.

“My backyard!”

Butterfly is not a fan of walking along the very noisy street next to our building, though, so I had to carry her for the first part of the trip to the library. I carried her down the hill and across the street, while Mom and Cricket stopped every few seconds to sniff things and race ahead, and sniff things again and race ahead again.

“Must. Sniff. Everything.”

“Cricket, are you sure it’s safe out there?”

I expected Butterfly to be fine walking on her own once we reached the side street, but she still refused. She tried to pull back towards home, and when that didn’t work she just refused to move at all. She was afraid of every noise, especially the birds squawking from the nearby trees.

I carried her like a baby, with her head resting on my shoulder, and that seemed to calm her down. I tried setting her down a few more times, because fifteen pounds gets heavy after a while, but she’d walk for a little bit and then stop and refuse to go any further.

“Mommy, I think my tongue is falling out of my mouth.”

We finally made it to the library and dropped off our books in the book slot, and then decided to walk home through the duck pond, hoping the serene atmosphere would help Butterfly stay on her own feet. We walked on the sidewalk, to avoid as much goose poop as possible, and for a little while, Butterfly was fine. She was even running ahead of Cricket, who was hyperventilating. The sound of Cricket’s breath, scratching against her vocal cords, made me picture a tiny musician inside of her throat, playing a tiny violin very badly.

“I’m not choking. I don’t know why you think I’m choking.”

Before we were halfway through the park, Butterfly balked again. I veered off onto the grass after all, hoping that would make her feel better, but it didn’t. I had to carry her, and dodge goose poop, all the way up the hill, until we were back to the sidewalk and the busy street. I put Butterfly down, just to rest my arms for a second, and as soon as she realized we were on our way home, she started to hop and smile.

We had to wait for the light to change, and then wait for cars to swoop around the corner at high speed, but then Butterfly pulled me across the street and up the hill as determined as a marathoner in her last lap.

“Are we there yet?”

I’d been listening to Sheryl Crow singing “Home” earlier in the day, maybe on a TV show or a movie, and the song had become an earworm playing over and over in my mind, louder and louder, as Butterfly pulled me into our parking lot, and around to the backyard, and straight to our door. Home at last.

“Wait, the walk’s over?”

 

The New Cat On The Block

The first time I saw the new cat, he was sitting on one of the porches at our co-op, half hiding behind an iron banister. He was small, almost kitten-like, and white with grey patches. He watched as I walked the dogs past him. He watched and watched and watched, while the dogs ignored him, or didn’t notice he was there.

The cat with no name. Yet.

I read recently that dogs have a hard time seeing things that are too still. They see objects better when the objects are in motion.

Cricket may be able to smell the cat…

but she can’t find it.

Eventually the cat hit his limit of watching and jumped down behind an evergreen bush. The dogs noticed him then, but it was too late, he’d already disappeared.

Butterfly was quickly distracted…

by a birdie.

I saw the new cat a few more times in passing, literally, passing in front of our door on his way to somewhere else.

And then, one morning, he was sitting in the recess next to my front door, waiting by the window of one of the downstairs apartments. The girls didn’t notice him in his stillness and I could almost picture him putting a paw up to his lips, telling me to keep his secret.

I needed a picture of him, because writing a blog makes me think every experience needs pictorial evidence. So I took the girls up to the apartment and picked up my little red camera. I thought I was on a fool’s errand, but I went back outside and there he was, still sitting by the window.

Still there!

I’m not going to say that he posed, but he tolerated me staring at him and clicking away. He seemed to have a particular boundary distance in mind, so as I got closer, he stepped further away. I took a dozen pictures at least, but eventually I got too close and he ran away.

“You’re getting too close.”

“Are you following me?”

He didn’t seem like one of the feral cats. He didn’t have their clever look, or their quick reflexes, and he really did seem small. And the window he’d been leaning against was the one Muchacho used to use as his entrance and exit.

Muchacho

Muchacho, the big cat on campus, hadn’t been seen in months. He’d had a cancerous tumor removed last year, but he’d seemed to recover nicely. All of his fur grew back and he was his sweet, friendly, pee-all-over-the-yard self for a while. But then he was gone.

Muchacho, the scratchy glutton!

It’s possible that Muchacho died not long after I took his picture and wrote about him for the blog. He didn’t seem ill at all, though. I’d prefer to believe that he went to an old cats’ home or to stay with another relative. I almost wonder if he was saying goodbye that day when he let me pick him up and give him a hug, just for a moment, before realizing what he’d done and jumping out of my arms to freedom.

The last time I saw Muchacho.

The new cat must have smelled Muchacho’s lingering scent by the lower window and found it welcoming.

Something was drawing me to this new cat, and I felt disappointed when he wasn’t outside during the girls’ walks. There’s something magical about finding a cat hidden in the landscape, like a real live Where’s Waldo. But it’s more than that. Cats make eye contact in a very satisfying way. They stare and observe and notice me in a way people don’t. People are too busy walking by and thinking of other things, but cats notice me, at least until they decide that I’m crowding their space and run away.

It turns out that one of our neighbors has been feeding the new cat behind the tool shed and is contemplating calling the county to have him trapped and neutered, like the other feral cats. Meanwhile he’s been getting bigger all the time, and I’ve been wondering if he has a home somewhere nearby, and just comes over for the food, and to have his picture taken.

I’d like it if that were true.

Magical Thinking

 

Up until a few years ago, I was a very hopeful person. It wasn’t necessarily reasonable hope; some of it was fantasy-like, and full of magical thinking, but it got me through. The hopefulness started to recede as my health got worse, and as rejections piled up for my writing. And as the hope seeped away, I started to realize how necessary it had been.

“There will be chicken in my future, right?”

Hope doesn’t have to be reasonable or rational. Hope is like a dream: it can defy gravity and space and time. I think it takes some amount of magical thinking to be a writer, or to remain in therapy, or to even plan ahead and imagine that things can be different in the future, instead of continuing as they are now, indefinitely.

“If I dream about a walk, it will come.”

Butterfly gives me hope, because of how sweet she is, despite eight years of being used and abused at a puppy mill. I believe that Butterfly survived her ordeal by believing in magic, and dreaming of a place, far away, where she could run and play and eat as much as she ever wanted. Even if that fantasy had never come true, the dreaming of it still would have made her days easier to bear.

Butterfly’s first day home

Dogs are role models for hopefulness. They wake up in the morning believing there will be walks and cuddles and food and excitement. They give us hope that life can be good even if its parameters are small; even if the gifts available are small. They give us hope that a life filled with love might be enough.

“I have Mommy’s sock and that means I have Mommy.”

Dogs are trying so hard to teach us happiness, and we are stubbornly resisting the lessons and holding on to our pessimism. They must be so frustrated with us.

“Treats?!”

Magical thinking is supposedly bad for me, like chocolate cream pie, or fried chicken. It’s a vice, a drug, a crutch that has deleterious effects on my mental health. But magical thinking is also where my hope comes from, when reality can’t supply it. If my life had been lucky, and most of my efforts had paid off in success, and most of my dreams and goals had been realized, maybe I wouldn’t need magical thinking. But I don’t know anyone whose life is like that.

Even under the worst circumstances, it’s the hopelessness that will destroy you. Being too realistic, too practical, too down to earth, can kill a person.

“Treats?”

Cricket always believes that she will get a plateful of whatever we are eating for dinner, and that she could eat a whole rotisserie chicken on her own without any bad after effects. There’s something about magical thinking that is vital to our well being. It’s what allows us to believe in things that don’t yet exist. It allows us to go beyond what we’ve been told in school, or by our parents, and imagine something different for ourselves.

“It’s my turn next, right?”

Maybe I haven’t lost my hopefulness after all.

Sweet dreams.

Dog Osteopathy

 

In my endless search for a diagnosis, or just relief of my physical symptoms, I’ve been to cardiologists, pulmonologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and neurologists; there have been all sorts of medications, and physical therapy, and vision therapy, and massage, and acupuncture, and yoga. After this summer’s adventure with the lumbar puncture and anti-seizure drugs, Mom decided I should try osteopathic manipulation – just because.

The first appointment with the osteopath was a history taking marathon. She took endless notes on her pieces of paper, with all of the words going in different directions, with arrows and circles and overlaps.    She took height and weight and blood pressure, and then examined my eyes, and mouth, and reflexes. I kept hoping that all of these examinations would lead to some new understanding of why I have trouble walking, or why I have terrible headaches, or why I’m so exhausted, but she just kept asking more questions.

I had to come back the next day for the rest of the first visit, so that she could check my alignment. She poked at my shoulders, and shoulder blades, and hips, and ankles, to see if they matched up or were out of whack. My shoulder blades seemed especially fascinating.

Then I had to lie down so she could check everything again: hips, pelvis, ankles, and knees, and who knows what else had to be marked on a body map. And then the lights were turned off and the magic table lifted up and the power in the whole building went out. I wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or a bad one: either I brought my bad luck with me into the building, or I was so powerful that I could disrupt electrical currents. The doctor didn’t mind the extra darkness; she just went on searching out different points on my body, and pressing them, and swaying.

There was one spot on my upper back that made my stomach grumble, which was interesting, at least to me.

The doctor spent a lot of time on my neck and head, pulling and pressing and doing different hand formations, stretching skin on my nose and across my jaw and on my forehead. It was a bit woo woo for me, actually, but I seem to be willing to try just about anything.

I didn’t actually feel better when the treatment was over. My head still hurt, my body ached, and I didn’t walk very well. If anything, I was more exhausted afterwards, and I felt like my Serotonin stores had been depleted by all of the pressing and poking. But I kept going back.

After a few treatments, I started trying to reenact the work on Cricket. I would press on either side of her spine, locate tension, and mark where her shoulder blades and ribs and tail bone were. I worked on her jaw and cheeks and ears and neck. I don’t know if it helped, but she liked the attention and she yawned when an especially tense point relaxed. I kept hoping I’d find a hidden spot between her ribs, or below her ear, that would make all of her anxiety slip away.

Cricket is ready for her treatment. Ducky too.

I asked the doctor if I could bring Cricket in for a professional treatment, but she said her bosses would frown on it. As if dogs are germier than people. Cricket keeps herself very clean, and she’s got hypoallergenic hair, and she really does need help balancing her chi.

Cricket is always tied up in knots.

It’s possible that Cricket, the runt of her litter, never finished building up her nervous system. Maybe there are too many nerve bundles close to her skin, or glitches in her back legs, from the two knee surgeries she had as a little one. Maybe some of her nerves knotted up during the surgeries and clogged her messaging system.

She seems to need a lot of work on her throat, where all of the barking comes from, and her neck, where she tries to pull out of her collar, and her face is especially tense, from all of those frowning and growling muscles.

Spinal balancing?

I tried the homemade treatments on Butterfly too, and it made me even more aware of how different their skeletons are; the shape of their shoulder blades and rib cages, the placement of muscles, and where they store tension. Butterfly needs special attention to her heart center, which on her is a wide expanse under her collar. She has a prolapsed heart valve, but she’s not on medication yet. She goes in for echocardiograms every six months to make sure things don’t get worse. But she also uses her heart so much every day, offering sympathy, expressing love, and wishing everyone well; that’s the muscle in her body that gets the biggest workout.

Butterfly showing her heart center, and her tongue.

Butterfly, after treatment.

Butterfly has been very patient with her treatments. Meanwhile, Cricket has been standing on my chest, demanding more and more osteopathy while I’m trying to read, or sleep, or hide under the covers. I started out wanting to help rewire her nervous system, but I think I may have created a monster.

“More!”