Aug
21
Perverse attractions
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In Ann Patchett’s This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage she writes about deliberately exposing herself to poison ivy in order to leave summer camp: “Like virgins to a volcano, we threw ourselves in. We rolled in it. We picked it. We rubbed it in our hair and stuffed it in our shirts and ground it into our eyes. Reader, we ate it. (…) We turned to a plant as Juliet had turned to a plant before us: to transport ourselves out of a difficult situation.”
When I was in outdoor school — a weeklong camp Corvallis middle schoolers were sent to — I did something similar. It wasn’t to escape, and I wasn’t nearly so thorough in subjecting myself to a known irritant, but I remember that as soon as we were taught about poison oak I rubbed it on my arm. I guess I was just curious about what would happen, although the rashy, itchy results were, in retrospect, boringly predictable.
I’ve successfully avoided poison oak ever since, even when hiking the Rogue where it lurks around every bend in the trail and continually readies its shiny-leafed embrace for your one misstep. But I have for some reason thought of that decades-ago decision many times over. I can’t think of another instance when I’ve done something quite that foolish in quite the same way, but the ease in which the choice was made has never fully left my mind. It’s part of the reason I shrink away from the edges of towering dropoffs: my brain instantly thinks, wouldn’t it be terrifyingly simple just to step forward instead? It’s not that I want to fall. It’s that I can’t stop imagining the little effort it would take to do so.
Aug
18
Last Wednesday Dog had her spay surgery, which went fine except for the part where I had to hand her leash over to the nice vet assistant and walk away while Dog tucked her tail between her legs, tried to follow me, was brought up short, and looked at me, you know, with her face. Then I picked her up several hours later and she walked over to me, all druggy and confused, and pressed her nose against my legs, like thank god you’re back you won’t BELIEVE what they did to me. O, the guilt.
Anyway, she recovered nicely but they sent me home with this GIANT sheet of heavy clear plastic with strips of velcro running down the sides. This was Dog’s Elizabethan collar, a.k.a. the cone of shame. It was intended to stop her from licking or biting her incision, but when I put it on the next day — not without a struggle, getting the ends to overlap enough to attack the velcro was nearly impossible — she just … stood there, head hanging straight down towards the floor. I don’t actually think it was physically too difficult to lift, but she was weighted down with SORROW. It really did feel torturous, and it somehow made it worse that she patiently endured it instead of trying to get away from us.
Labs mostly come in four modes: 1) YAY, 2) derp, 3) zzzzzzz, and 4) WOE. But there’s Lab woe like Oh jesus is that a slice of turkey wow it looks really good by the way I am literally starving to death and there’s I don’t know why you’re hurting me but I love you anyway woe. That’s the kind of woe we were causing her with that ridiculous cone, which I suppose she may have eventually gotten used to but in the meantime all she could do was stand in one place all spooky-like, sort of like the end of The Blair Witch Project. Even JB, who isn’t nearly as much of a sucker as I am, shook his head and said sympathetically, “Legit shits the bed, Dog.”
I found some sort of inflatable donut collar at the pet store to try instead, but then a clever friend on Instagram shared that she’d put an old t-shirt on her dog instead of using the cone. An easy, comfortable, free solution that’s also hilarious-looking? SOLD. So that’s why Dog has been sporting one of JB’s shirts for the last few days. I think she looks quite nice.
JB: “Is that my shirt?”
Me: “No, of course not. That is a smock. A medical dog smock. From the medical dog smock store.”
Ruby’s prior owner gave us this massive folder that included her medical records, AKC stuff, and what amounts to a nicer scrapbook than I ever made for my own children. Photos, glittery stickers, the whole nine yards. There are printed poems and quotes scattered throughout, and here is one I can’t read without my eyes getting hot and my nose starting to run:
Go with me on difficult journeys. Never say, “I cannot bear to watch,” or “Let it happen in my absence.” Everything is easier for me if you are there, even my death.
When an animal shows you nothing but love, it’s so hard to cause them discomfort. You know it’s for their benefit, but they don’t. All they know is they trust you. God, it’s a big responsibility, you know? And now I know why dogs get fat, it’s because we want to give them ALL THE TURKEYS to try and tell them, thank you, I’m sorry, I love you too.
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