The Dog Park

Posted on September 1, 2025 by cpeck876
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This is an old picture of an even older dog (although the white on his muzzle and feet came with the dog, there is more of it now than even in this picture.) He is difficult to photograph because he is either comatose or he’s wriggling. I have taken a lot of photographs of the tip of his tail, the curve of his butt and a little black blob on the ground with scattered white markings.

The first time I ever saw him (July or 2020) I thought he was the ugliest dog I had ever seen. We drove to Indiana to adopt a ‘bonded pair’ of older dogs because his co-dog was a Pomeranian, and I had always wanted and Pomeranian (because I had never had one.) Daisy was a nice little dog–very photogenic–but her life had not been easy and at 10 years of age, she was not interested change. Her owner had died, which made respecting her wishes difficult. She did her best to adapt. She found a safe place under Nancy’s desk and spent the rest of her life there. The highlight of her life with us was Last Out, when all the dogs went outside, came back in and got treats. Last year she became sick, and Pugsy became the one thing he had always wanted to be: An Only Dog.

Now I think Pugsy is cute, and I adore him. He is 12 (he was 7 when we got him) and he does pretty well for an old man. He is close to–but not quite–deaf, and neither of us know how well he actually sees, but he navigates the house well enough, and he knows the back yard. The last time he bolted out the door he was found standing in utter confusion in the middle of the road about two blocks from the house, and he came to Nancy in notable relief, because she had clearly wandered off and gotten lost. He is pretty much a house dog. He does not like rain, snow, cold, extreme heat, wind or persistent sunlight. He ignores chickens. The back door was installed, in his opinion, so he could run outside, huddle up against it and wait until we let him in again, when he demands a treat.

We did not invent this trick. When we picked up our bonded pair of older dogs, their bag of treats weighed more than the two of them combined.

Today is Labor Day.

Yesterday was the annual Harmony Fest, which our fine small town puts on every year, hiring singers and bands and dance troops to come perform for us while Main Street is blocked off and food trucks and various entrepreneurs line the streets with their wares. It’s just downtown, about six blocks from our house. We did not go. We did not go because hauling walkers and figuring out where to park and sitting in the sun and waiting in line for corn dogs no longer has the appeal it once did. Also, there are a lot of people at Harmony Fest, and this has gradually morphed from an attraction into a test of elder patience, a commodity in increasingly short supply. We have become borderline hermits.

This morning Nancy greeted me with, “I think we should do something today. Get out of the house, if nothing else.” We contemplated what ‘something’ might be.

She had read about a new business anxious to provide us with donuts and encouraging us to order in advance, but is somewhat evasive about exactly where they are. Nor was she sure that if we found them, we could count on their having unordered donuts for sale.

Possible disappointment, particularly when applied to sweets, is not a strong argument for adventure for me. In the end, she said, “We could get a Biggby Coffee.”

So we loaded up Pugs and we launched off for coffee and adventure.

First, we took Pugs to the dog park. I used to go to the dog park, back when I had a big, rambunctious dog who loved to run and who had a habit of running out the door, across the road, and in the general direction of about sixty different ways to get himself killed. I wrote 12 obituaries for that dog (Riley) while driving around Three Rivers, looking for a big gold tail. (He died eventually of old age.) I took Annie to the dog park until she began eating the other dogs. In the meantime our fine city built a small dog park out of the side of an existing park (it used to be a tennis court) I don’t know, three, maybe four years ago, but I had an old chihuahua/pug mix (whimsically called a Chug) and an even older Chihuahua/Pomeranian mix (PomChi?,) neither of which appeared to like any dogs other than themselves (for a bonded pair, it did not appear to like each other all that well.) So I don’t know where Pugs went, the first seven years of his life before we met, but at 12, this was his first trip to a dog park. An empty dug park. No other dogs.

He had a wonderful time. Dog parks are filled with delightful smells, and it is, of course, mandatory to run all the way around the perimeter upon arrival, although, when you are 12, you can cut the corners a little short, and, well, you may need to run back to find out where Nancy went (given you do not see all that well anymore.) But our beloved little Chug made a valiant effort. He ran, full-out, short little legs a-flying, across MOST of that dog park, topping out at speeds of perhaps an eighth of a mile an hour until he stopped, realizing Nancy was, in fact, lost. He ran up to the gate where he last saw her, and she was not there, either, but finally some sound vaguely penetrated the silence that surrounds him, and he found her all but leaning over him, assuring him she was still there. He promptly pooped, peed, sniffed the available water, and then walked back to the gate. I would estimate the duration of the entire visit to be about 10 minutes–but 10 minutes well spent.

Then we went to get coffee, solving the Cheryl Problem, and then we drove out to see the Highland cows (which were not anywhere visible) and then the Hoshel Road Canoe Park (which has changed from what it used to be, but then, almost everything does.) And then we went to visit the new bridge (or revised bridge, they tore the old one out) over the Portage River, and when we did so, Nancy stepped on the brakes.

This will take too long to explain for what it’s worth, but Dove is our second Escape. The first Escape had a larger back end and back seats that folded flat up against the front seats. Nancy took it camping for a week, once and slept in the back. Dove has a shorter back end (for instance, shorter than her recumbent bike, or shorter than a sleeping bag) and the seats never fold completely flat. There also is a hole about the size of a five gallon pail between the top of one half of the back seat and the other half.

So Nancy stepped on the brakes, and there was a soft ‘thud’. That was Pugsy falling through the hole. he landed on the floorboards and there was nothing back there that would hurt him, but he was fairly well sealed in. I tried, but I can no longer reach back with one arm and lift a 16-pound dog through a hole the size of a five-gallon pail, so we had to pull off the road and Nancy got out and fished him out.

I have no idea why I find that so funny, but I do. ‘Thud’. The dog just fell through the hole.

We then went on our way, which mostly involved driving around, looking for stuff, and twice more Nancy stepped on the brakes and ‘thud’ the dog fell through the hole. It must not be all that traumatic because he could easily avoid it, but every time it happened I laughed.

We came home eventually because drinking 24 ounces of coffee pretty much guarantees neither one of us can stay that far away from home. The dog is now resting under my walker. I have heard little from him except the occasional cough, since we came home.

(Side note, for those looking for a dog who have never had a brachycephalic dog before: if you have asthma or have lived with an asthmatic and it worried you, don’t get a short-nosed dog. Pugs doesn’t even look like a pug-nosed dog, but he snorts, coughs, chokes, and (my personal favorite) reverse-sneezes like a bulldog. I wake up at least three times a night and breathe for him. For those looking for a dog who have never had a Pomeranian before: they’re cute. They’re adorable. You will adapt, although it is a lot like living with Hitler with tiny teeth.)

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The King of Rugs

Posted on April 2, 2025 by cpeck876
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In the beginning his life was perfect. He lived in a pleasant apartment with his mother, the human Michelle and The Other One. He probably had siblings when he was young but all memories of them were lost to time. They were no longer in the apartment. When they first disappeared he wondered where they went and how they got there, but like most problems he could not solve, the questions just gradually faded away and he, his mother and Michelle had a wonderful life. The Other One was odd, but he was also easily ignored. The apartment had lovely windows that looked out over the parking lot and broad sills where he and his mother could sit and look out over the neighborhood. He was quite content. And then, for no reason whatsoever, strangers came to the apartment and Michelle helped them load him and his mother into Boxes of Betrayal, the boxes were shoved into the back of a giant, bad-smelling box that moved, and then they were ‘freed’ into a small room with two very large metal machines that made such horrible noises he and his mother both nearly died of anxiety and shock.

            The strangers had odd, barely comprehensible conversations about something they called ‘the laundromat’, as in ‘maybe we should just take the laundry to the laundromat because this is their safe place and the washer noises scare them’ and then the strangers made a more concerted effort to become their friends.

            They had moved to a house.

            His mother, somewhat more adventurous than he was, ventured out of the room of the metal machines to explore, coming back to tell him there were a number of very interesting rooms in the house to explore, but, unfortunately, there was also a very stupid four-legged creature even bigger than he was (for he was distinctly bigger than his mother)  that smelled awful, for no apparent reason wobbled, and—even worse—persisted in trying to smell her butt. He had never tried to smell his mother’s butt, nor she his. He could not remember clearly, but he did not believe any of his siblings had ever tried it. It was just rude.

            He ventured out of the room of the metal machines in a low crawl, alert for any danger, but inevitably the giant bad-smelling thing would sneak up on him and try to smell his butt.

            “What can we do to make your life here more comfortable?” the strangers asked.

            When he deigned to answer them at all he said, “get rid of the stinking butt-smeller.”

            “I was here first,” the stinking butt-smeller said. “I’ve known a hundred lesser beings like yourself. I am a dog, and I am therefore their best friend.”

            He would return to the room of the metal machines and curl up in his quilt-lined laundry basket and sulk about the vicious changes that had occurred in his life.

            “I found a window,” his mother reported. “It’s a wonderful window that has its own bench, and you can see out across a field of grass that has giant pterodactyls wandering around. I hissed at them, but they ignored me.”

            Doing the low crawl, tail lashing a warning to anyone who might attack him, he swore eternal vengeance on the wobbling foul-smelled butt-sniffing dog and eventually found the magic window. There were indeed pterodactyls in the grass. And he laid on the bench, and sunlight poured down upon him.

            There were two strangers: the feeder and the useless. He came to know the feeder was known as ‘Nancy’. He liked her well enough. She was easily trained. When his food supply dipped below satisfactory, he had only to come to her, file his complaint and lead her to the feeding station, and she would correct her failures. Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly magnanimous, he would allow her to pet him, and once in a very, very rare while, he would let her pick him up. (He had sworn off all contact with humans when Michelle stuffed him into the Box of Betrayal. Still. He got lonely.)

            It took him longer to understand what purpose Useless served in his life. (“She knows how to cuddle us,” his mother whispered in his ear. “I think one of our kind raised her.”) The Useless one was known as ‘Cheryl’, and he discovered, through trial and error, that she was not entirely stupid. She was not Michelle (but then, Michelle had stuffed him into the Box of Betrayal.) Cheryl was an excellent place to sit. In fact, he would eventually discover that he could take entire naps while draped across Cheryl, and she would hold the parts of him that threatened to slide off. Also, when he spoke to her she talked back. They had entire conversations, usually in the bathroom where the acoustics were particularly pleasing. He had no idea what gibberish she was saying and he was relatively sure she was too stupid to understand him, but still he liked the idea that she tried.

            And she was a wonderful, wonderful person to sit on.

            She bought him a brush (designed by a sadist) she found on TikTok, and attempted to scrape off his skin with it, but fortunately the second time he bit her she stopped that. She found a comb he liked much better (this time he only bit the comb) and then she found a bristle brush that made him sing and roll in her lap like a kitten.

            By now his mother had retired to special room in the house with a giant wooden spider in the middle of it named Charlotte. It was ‘special’ because the humans kept closing the door on him, limiting his visits with his mother. His mother lived on a pile of rugs which Charlotte and Nancy apparently made. When he asked her why, his mother said her foot hurt. So when Nancy wheeled her food cart into Charlotte’s room each morning, he would supervise to make sure his mother received only the best food, and when the humans went in in the evening to give his mother medicine he followed them in to made sure they behaved.

            Sometimes he ate some of his mother’s food. Just to make sure it was ‘right’.

            One day he heard the humans in Charlotte’s room saying things like, ‘I really don’t like the way that looks’, and they loaded his mother into the Box of Betrayal and went away with her.

            He never saw her again.

            And then a week later they put him in the Box of Betrayal and took him to a man who stuck him with pins.

            “I’m not going to eat for you anymore,” he said to them. He took up his position on the Cheryl-smelling blanket on the couch and napped. And napped. And napped.

            Cheryl put him in the Box of Betrayal and took him back to the pin-man. “He doesn’t eat,” she told the pin-man. “He barely moves, he doesn’t seem like he’s even able to jump up on the couch anymore. I mean, we gave him his first round of shots, and then his mother died…I don’t know what to do for him.”

            “Let me out of this accursed box,” he warned her, “and I’ll show you.”

            She did not listen to him, nor did the pin-man.

            But a day later she did take him home and let him out of the Box of Betrayal and she said to him, “You have to get better—I’m sorry you miss your mother, but so do we—she was a sweet cat. I can’t tell Michelle we killed both of her cats in five months. We were trying to save you.” He had no idea what she said, but he thought she might be apologizing for putting him in the Box of Betrayal.

            The next day he heard her talk to the rectangle in her hand (it’s a wonderful rectangle with a light and sometimes it makes noise. He’s bitten it several times, but it ignores him.) She said, “I’m beginning to think the trip to vet is a greater threat to his health that it is helpful, so he isn’t any better, but I’m going to wait a day or so and see if not hauling him around helps any.” He thought to himself, she is trainable after all.

            He cannot remember what Michelle called him (he can barely remember Michelle) but he thinks Nancy and Cheryl call him ‘Doc.’

            The dog is a nuisance and he still keeps muttering I was here first, and he still keeps trying to smell Doc’s butt. There is still no reason for him to even live in the house. But all in all, he’s not that bad. 

            Doc still cries sometimes to be let into Charlotte’s room, and when he gets in, he runs across the room (around the giant wooden spider) and jumps up on the pile of rugs, looking for his mother.

She’s never there.

He can tell, when Nancy is with him in Charlotte’s room, that she looks and him and she has a sadness in her, like something she would tell him if she knew how. And then he settles himself into a loaf and takes a nap because the pile of rugs is a sacred place, and he is the king of his domain.              

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Family, fiction, short-story, writing | 4 Comments

Where Are We?

Posted on February 8, 2025 by cpeck876
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This morning my phone pinged to tell me I have another notice somewhere of something, so curious, I looked, and the ‘notice’ was a posting on facebook. It’s Saturday. I’ve lost four consecutive games of Mahjong and my writing is not flowing smoothly (nor is the prose it has produced) so I went to facebook to find a beautifully photographed story of two tigers lying on the African Savanah, one of which appeared incapacitated. Two park rangers, one male, one female, both smiling, walked up to the injured tiger, did something magical, and produced three kittens. The father tiger looked up proudly. The two people left. There was no sound but some sort of ethereal music.

               It was a lovely little movie.

               I had a few thoughts.

  1. Tigers don’t live on the African Savanah. According to google there are a few in captivity in South Africa. Tigers live in Asia.
  2. Male tigers do not concern themselves with the birthing of babies, be it by humans or just very independent female tigers themselves.
  3. Emergency phone service on the African Savanah must be phenomenal.
  4. Tigers living on the African Savanah have better emergency health care than many Americans.
  5. I would not be smiling if I were walking up to a full-grown adult male tiger. In fact, I would not be a.) walking toward b.) any free adult male tiger. Anywhere. I would not walk up to an adult male tiger who had been hand-raised in a zoo in Indianapolis.
  6. I didn’t believe the one about the seal covered in barnacles that hung itself on the side of a yacht so the vacationing humans could pour barnacle-remover over her. Wild animals do no see human being as their saviors. Domestic cows do not come get their farmers when their calves are in trouble. It’s a lovely idea and I’m sure most humans love to see themselves this way: wild animals who have to outwit us to survive do not.
  7. Every time I see one of these—and the filming/AI is getting better and better—I think about the tourists who go to Yellowstone to get themselves gored every year because no one (except the handout at the front gate, every sign going into the park and endless repeated variations of movies on youtube, facebook, instagram and TikTok) told them buffalo are not part of the petting zoo.

There has been a preponderance social media ‘films’ of wild animals approaching humans for help for a companion animal. It may be one of the most popular tropes on social media these days, and the sad thing is, I believed the first one. The second one was badly edited. The fortieth one was obviously AI and the two-hundredth one makes me want to scream; but beyond that, I catch myself wondering, ‘was the first one even true?’ Has it EVER  happened? Or are we just so devoted to the notion we can do it ‘better’ than the guy before us that even a tiny miracle is swallowed by the rush of copycats until as a society we reach a point where we cannot believe ANYTHING we see in print, film or any other media? And once we get there…where do we go from there?

Or is that how we got where we are?

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MLK Day

Posted on January 20, 2025 by cpeck876
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It is currently 7 degrees outside. The sun is blinding, particularly against the snow. Nancy and I have resolved to never go outside again until the weather gets ahold of itself (although, we admit, this is not unusual weather for January in Michigan, and we can remember far worse.) I stand a better chance of holding up this vow that Nancy because I don’t have 5 chickens out in the back yard whose water keeps freezing.

Pugs has determined that going outside is highly over-rated, but it does net one the occasional treat for making the effort, so he continues to go outside. Rarely leaves the back steps. He had learned to bark to get back inside (where the treats are dispensed) and he had shortened his periods of tolerance before he begins notifying the neighborhood of his abuse. (The dog almost never barks in ordinary life.) He does not pee on the back steps. He does not shit on the back steps. It is far too cold to subject his house-worn tender feet to frozen water in any form, so he alerts me, I take him out, he huddles next to the door until I open it again, refuses to come back in until the treat is dispensed, and then pees on the kitchen floor. This is not endearing. On the other hand, he is 11, which is old for a dog, and I am 76, which is old for a human, and there’s no way I’m going outside to pee, so…

Doc, pictured above, is steadily becoming more at home here. He moved in with us in May, but he is not a cat who adapts to change well. Over the months he and Pugs have developed an agreement, of sorts. The terms are still being discussed, but a relative peace have settled over the negotiations.

The dog IS allowed to sniff the cat’s butt, but only once per reunion. Likewise, the cat is allowed to sniff the dog’s face once per reunion. The faces the cat makes at such smells is routinely ignored as they are rude.

Both the cat and the dog are allowed in the bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, all of the hallways, Nancy’s office and Cheryl’s office. Even at the same time, if necessary. The dog is not welcome in the laundry room, which is where both the cat’s food and litter box is kept. Both humans support this ban. the dog does not.

Both the cat and the dog are allowed in Cheryl’s lap during the humans’ morning discussions, but should face AWAY from the other.

Any feline vocalization means, “get away from me.” The dog should obey immediately.

The cat is now allowed near the dog’s food. The cat has no interest in the dog’s food, but the dog is a rambunctious eater. Even the humans maintain a safe distance.

Recently a new rule has been instituted which does not involve the dog. Complaints were filed. They were loud. They were persistent. It would appear the laundress, laboring under the mistaken opinion that she owns the house, decided to run not only the rumbly, tumbly machine, but the fat sloshy watery machine as well AT THE SAME TIME during a critical time during the cat’s personal schedule. Bitter, bitter complaints were filed with the non-laundress, who is incredibly stupid and does not speak Cat worth beans, but appears–sometimes–possibly to understand Cat better than the laundress, who committed this egregious error in the first place, and it appears these two large, clumsy beings actually have some primative method of communication between them, so the effort was made.

And it did appear to work. The laundress went into the cat’s private spaces and turned off not only the rumbly tumbly, but the sloshy watery machine as well, and Doc was able to conduct his private business. Later she restored both machines to working order, and he ignored her.

I am being bitten far less often than I used to be, not because he loves me any less, but because I have learned to hide vulnerable body parts while sleeping (or reading, or holding him in my lap.)

Now that I understand that the bath will never again be a place where I go to be alone and that it is, in fact, a forum for complaints, discussions, and even negotiations between the dog and cat, I would say Doc seems to be relatively happy, living with us. He is, hands down, the most talkative cat I have ever lived with, but most of these discussions are conducted in the bathroom, and I understand there are probably still a great many things we need to adjust to be fully worthy of his companionship.

For one, he would much prefer me without glasses. While in my lap, he spends a lot of his time trying to take them off for me. At night, in bed, it’s my C-Pap machine he is determined to free me from (I learned a long time ago to just take my watch off before the fight starts.)

Anyway, it’s cold in Michigan right now. We’re fine. We have quilts and electric blankets and all the comforts of a privileged life, but I forget–and am reminded at least once evey year–just how cold cold is.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged adopting older dogs, cat, cats, Dogs, pets | Leave a comment

Adaptations

Posted on November 16, 2024 by cpeck876
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Rain on a windshield at night.

When Doc first came to live with us, he would appear, often out of nowhere, and demand to be picked up. He is a remarkably verbal cat, for bigger than his vocabulary is; almost everything he says sounds like whatever it was, it should have been done last week, and you should have known that. He strides into the bathroom (we are never allowed to be alone in the bathroom) and issues some decree that makes it seem very clear that we should have done whatever it was a long time ago, and undoubtedly better than we’re likely to get it done now.

Neither Nancy, Pugsy nor I speak fluent cat.

He stalks into the bathroom, voices his complaint, and I automatically answer, “I know!” I don’t. I never have. But it seems to make him feel better.

When he first came to live with us, his most frequent command was ‘pick me up’. This was confusing for all of us because he did not like to be picked up, so we would obediently reach for him, grabbing whatever part of the cat was closest to us and begin hoisting it upward, and he would immediately come all unstrung, loose parts wobbling in every direction (most of them downward) because we were, apparently, supposed to pick up the whole cat.

The whole cat is bigger than the pug/chihuahua mix, it’s covered in sleek, somewhat slippery hair, and there are eighteen pounds of it. Which is big for a cat. Not phenomenally large, but unusual. It’s hard to pick up eighteen pounds of anything when sixteen of those pounds are leaning heavily toward the floor.

And yes, he is perfectly capable of jumping up onto a lap. It’s more fun to demand elevator service. (And the dog gets it.)

Over time we have all learned to adapt. I do my very best to get a grip on as much of the cat as I can before hauling it upward, but this is a challenge because as soon as you touch him he starts moving. Away, usually. This is not an indication of any change in the demand, it’s just the way Doc moves.

He prefers the way Nancy picks him up (either she’s better at it, or she’s the one he sees pick up the dog) and so he will wander in and out of the forest under her legs while demanding service. This service can be a challenge to provide to a moving target.

He has grown more tolerant of my elevating various parts of him. I’ve found, having shared a lifetime with cats, that if you pick up the front end, the rear will almost always follow. He has less faith in this than I do. And I would put one hand under his chest and one hand under his butt, but…he’s always moving.

This afternoon he appeared and announced he wanted to be in my lap. In my office chair my lap is not particularly conducive to cat-holding and the keyboard gets in the way, but, silly me. When I failed to provide the requested change in elevation he leaped at me, catching a nailed-grip on my quadricep, causing me to grab to various cat parts in sheer self-defense. The jump was successful, but it was anything but pretty.

We then cuddled and cooed and sang to each other for about five minutes, and then we were bored with that and he went on his way. He is a busy man, he doesn’t have time for silliness.

Doc is, give or take, somewhere between five and eight. We thought we were taking in older cats a woman was forced to surrender (and that part of the story remained the same, she was forced to give them up) but every time we talked to her they got a little younger. The vet says he’s about five.

My sister had a cat she bought with her house in Maryland (“No thank you, you’re nice people, but I’m not moving with you”) and eventually moved to North Caroline. (It was, reportedly, a long and noisy trip.) Anyway, her cat would show up at her feet about the same time each evening, and Lynn would say, “Okay–turn around” and the cat would obediently turn around and tuck in all of her loose edges, and Lynn would pick her up. Right now, Doc and I are working on a trans-species understanding of the word “No!” (Don’t bite my glasses, don’t bite my hand, don’t bite my nose, just basically don’t bite me) so we haven’t gotten to the finer points of positioning for pick-up yet.

But we are adapting.

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Whine Alert

Posted on October 30, 2024 by cpeck876
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Update: We had to put down Arrie after discovering what we thought was pillow foot was actually metastasized melanoma. She had been in pain for over two months; as long as we thought we could cure it, we were willing to help her fight, but realizing it was a one-way trip, we eased her transition to a gentler place. She was a wonderful and loving cat. We miss her.

Everything indicates Doc has recovered from his mysterious disease, which may (or may not) have been something as simple as a reaction to his vaccinations and a hyper-vigilant butler. (I am the butler.) (I never had children because they get sick.) (Well, there were other contributing factors, but that was one reason.)

Pugs is thriving on his diet of homemade food of savory and nutritious ingredients chosen specifically for him by the house chef (Nancy) and his own foraging for chicken shit, which is apparently delicious. Makes me gag, but then, I’m just a human.

We haven’t been to the vet in two weeks.

That’s not what I’m whining about.

I joined an exercise class. It’s at the senior center. It’s free. I was whimpering about some indignity my aging body had afflicted me with and a friend said, “I go to an exercise class three times a week. It’s free. I’ll pick you up.” My partner, it should be noted, has tried everything but bombing me out of my recliner to get me to go, so finally I said, “Screw it,” and I went. I’ve been three times now.

When I was less than a teen-ager my mother began worrying about my weight. I would never be happy if I was fat. I would never find a man to love me if I was fat. I would live a life of constant anguish and misery if I was fat. She knew–she had been fat as a teen-ager, and I was already fatter than she was at the same age. I am sure her intentions were sincere and honorable, but the resulting effect was not what she had hoped for. I thought to myself, “I’m smart, I love to read, I love to write, I hate walking much less exercising on purpose. I’ll never be an athlete. The only sports I ever did even half-way well were kickball and volleyball. And if nobody ever loves me, I can entertain myself.”

It was a wonderful philosophy (if not necessarily healthy) that served me well for years. I was blessed by nature with more upper body strength than most women of a comparable age. I could do the things I needed to do. I joined gyms and then didn’t go there. I joined a pool and showed up now and then. I read a lot. I talked about writing.

Somewhere in that process, injuries began to elbow their way in. I hurt a shoulder. My knees got stiff, and then painful. And ever adaptive, I stopped straining whatever hurt.

Which is, apparently, not the right approach to seventy-five.

I go to my exercise class (three times, so far) and I sit in a chair while the rest of the class stands (and I sit in the front, so if there are other chair-sitters, I don’t see them) and I admire the strength, flexibility and agility of the woman beside me, who is 87. (I also smile sensitively at the man who is younger than I am and only barely more flexible than I am, but it doesn’t fit my narrative.) We are reminded that one of the class members has been receiving radiation therapy every day for (I have no idea how long) but he wants to come back and see his friends.

And I sit in my chair, and I realize I have lost the ability to coordinate hand and foot movements when I’m sitting down. I know how to do all the things they do in class, but I can’t stand up for more than ten minutes, I have the balance of a drunken barn cat and I do–in extreme moderation–about two-thirds of the exercises the class does. And then I limp home, and every muscle in my body hurts.

Even my hands are stiff.

I am not asking for sympathy here: I am, after all, the one who sat in a chair for years of my life while the rest of the world bounced and side-stepped and did yoga around me.

I am just stunned to realize how completely inept a body can become if you don’t use it.

And I should also note there are all levels of ability in our class. There was a woman in front of me who was adding frills and flails to make the program more challenging, and beside her a woman who was barely getting through it. As the instructor says, “You’re moving. That’s what counts–you’re moving.”

I started the class because Pugsy loves chicken shit, and he’s going deaf. (Say what?) He goes outside roughly every two hours. He’s old, he’s only about half-house-broken to begin with, so ignoring his requests is fool-hardly at best, so I take him outside, and he patrols the yard, sniffs around, and eventually disappears from sight.

He’s gone to the coop for treats.

I question exactly how healthy that is for him. And I can sit in my chair on the back stoop and yell for him until I’m blue in the face, but if he can’t see me, he can’t hear me, and if I can’t see him I couldn’t possibly know what he’s up to.

So I had to get up, hobble out to the chicken yard, and call him from the doorway of the coop. This makes no sense to a younger person, I know, but the lawn is uneven, my balance is unreliable and I stumble over things. The first few trips out there (it must be all of 15, maybe 20 feet) were terrifying. However, when you do it at least three times a day, it gets easier.

I am holding out the same hope for my exercise class. I have no intention of joining a volleyball team anytime soon–I just want to be able to get into my car gracefully. I’d like to walk six feet without needed a cane, a walker or a crane. I took all of that for granted. I shouldn’t have.

And it’s not like nobody ever warned me.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged diet, health, weight-loss | 1 Comment

I am Not Happy

Posted on October 18, 2024 by cpeck876
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This delightful and loving portrait of Doc is one I took while he and I were waiting in the vet’s office. We were waiting for the vet to return with test results. As you can see, Doc has infinite patience with human stupidity, wrong-headedness and the peculiar belief we know more about what’s good for him than he does.

For those who have been keeping up (and given my inability to get these blogs to show up on facebook, there may not be many of you) Doc is improving. The night before last I woke up with a loud complaint lodged (next to one paw) in my left ear, which is the first time he’s come to bed with us in about a week. Last night he met me in the bathroom, escorted me to the bedroom, tucked me in, and sang in my ear for 15 or 20 minutes before he returned to whatever her normally does at night. Today he sat in my lap, sang to me, and even took a short nap. This means either I have been forgiven for past misbehaviors or he’s feeling better.

If you missed my last post, I took Arrie to a check-up on her pillow foot and we discovered she didn’t have pillow foot (although I understand the diagnosis) she had metastasizing melanoma, which is, sadly, a dead end street. We put her out of pain.

However, the fact that his mother suffered from three extremely rare cat diseases and disorders in the five months we had her has made me extremely cautious about Doc’s recent bouts of malaise.

We retraced our steps. He was a perfectly healthy, happy cat until we took him in for the first of his vaccinations. I brought him home. 3-4 days later he looked like shit, he barely moved, he would disappear for hours at a time, he stopped sitting in my lap, he stopped coming to bed with us, he quit escorting either one of us to the bathroom anymore and he barely curled his lips at Pugsy.

I took him to the vet. We ran tests. Everything came out normal except his temperature, which was 104. He was given IV fluids, a pain shot, and sent home. His diagnosis was Fever of Unknown Origin. And he improved that evening: the next morning he was another throw on the couch again. NO energy, no interest in life.

I took him back to the vet, they gave him a longer dose of I fluids and kept him overnight. We discussed the possibility that one factor in our lack of progress was his extreme dislike of being a.) put in a crate, and b.) taken to a vet. Stress, we thought, is part of the problem here. I took him home. He drooped o the couch. He hid. I called the vet, but we decided another trip in the crate might only aggravate the situation, so I kept him home and gave him a little time.

After I took Arrie in for a check-up and discovered it was her last, I came home and he was still listless and I panicked and made a new appointment. The next morning was the first time he jumped up on the bed with us again, so I cancelled the appointment, and he has been slowly coming back to life again ever since. He eats. Not as much as he should, but he eats. He pees. He drinks water. He moves.

So we turned to google. (I always apologize to my healthcare provider when I mention google. I’ll bet they all hate google.) We looked up ‘reactions to cat vaccines’. (Which immediately explains the first 3 questions the vet asked me each time I called. No, he’s not vomiting. Yes, he is eating some. No, he doesn’t have the runs.)

He fits all the symptoms of a ‘mild’ reaction to a vaccine except his reaction took longer and lasted about 5 days longer than ‘normal’.

I don’t now what that means. I don’t know that it means anything. It could mean I should stop going to google to look up medical issues. (Nancy says it’s spot-on about melanoma in cats.)

What have I learned? Doc is Doc. He is not Nick, he is not Joshua, he is not Babycakes. He is Doc with a capitol ‘D’.

If Doc is sitting on the floor, staring intently at you, mewing this plaintive little yowl that…possibly…in humanspeak means ‘I wish I were up there’, DO NOT PICK UP THE CAT. If you pick up the cat, you have ruined it, it’s no good, it will not do, and he must now get down, turn his back to you, and mutter about the utter arrogance of the human mind.

Nancy donated the largest of Arrie’s freshly-washed beds to Doc, thinking it might fit him and he might find some comfort in it. She put it on the couch, where he sleeps. He sleeps to the right of it. He sleeps to the left of it. He sleeps on the back of the couch over it. HE DOES NOT SLEEP IN THE BED. No. NONONONONO.

She put it in the wrong place. It’s contaminated now–he may never sleep in that bed.

I could pick up Joshua, flip him over on his back and carry him around like a baby. I could pick up Nick and he didn’t like it, but he would let me carry him–right side up–around the room. I could pick up Babycakes and throw him half over my shoulder and he would ride there all day–or wrap himself around my neck like a purring muffler. For reasons I cannot sort out, I do not seem to be able to get my hands on enough parts of Doc to get him off the floor. Nancy can, but he gives her an unforgivable look.

In our refrigerator we have a two-part dose of medicine to give Doc the next time we take him to his vet, one the night before, one the morning of. It doesn’t CURE anything: it’s to make him groggy and compliant enough to stuff him into a crate and drive him 1.5 miles to the vet’s office.

I should mention once he’s there, he responds to their handling, fondling, poking, carry around like a giant sofa pillow. He even purrs. It’s the car ride he doesn’t like. The box.

It’s a very bad box.

We should probably take it out in the back yard and burn it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animals, cat, cats, Dogs, pets | 2 Comments

Five Months

Posted on October 17, 2024 by cpeck876
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Doc woke me up this morning by putting his paw in my ear. He hasn’t come to bed with us, or tucked me in, or even escorted me to the bathroom in over a week, so I took it as a sign he is improving. So much so that I called his vet and cancelled his appointment this morning because Doc has made it VERY clear that vet appointments are unnecessary and traumatizing to his overall health.

Last week he had two of them, due to his logy behavior and general overall lack of interest in life.

Yesterday I took Arrie in for a check-up on her pillow foot treatment, and while I had her there, I mentioned she had a lump we found that we didn’t remember. “She didn’t have it last time,” the vet said. The ‘last time’ was three weeks ago. And while we found one lump, a detailed body search came up with 12 of them. They were black. Also, she’s been in antibiotics for her pillow foot for two months and her foot just keeps getting worse: I took her in because a.) she was due for a check-up, and b.) her foot has been swelling. It clearly hurts her. “I don’t like this,” her vet said, and she picked up Arrie and took her to another vet for a consult.

The infected pad on her foot is black. (I honestly don’t know if I ever looked at the pads of her feet before it clearly hurt her. Was it always black? I don’t know, but the first time I saw it I remember thinking, ‘this isn’t good.’)

As it turned out, Arrie didn’t have pillow foot at all, although it was a reasonable diagnosis. Pillow foot is relatively rare, as is a cat developing heartworm (Arrie had a living worm in her heart, also.) More rare than any of those in a cat is melanoma, which is black, and which had spread from her foot to her skin, as one contiguous organ, and, as the vet said, “I’d be surprised if it isn’t internal by now.”

Nancy didn’t go with us on this particular trip because I assured her I could handle one cat, so I called her. I said, “it’s not pillow foot–she has melanoma, and it’s metastasized.” I may have worked my way up to that more gently. Nancy has been providing ‘room service’ for Arrie for two months now.

Nancy said, “She’s too good a cat to have to go through all that. She’s in pain, she’s been in pain for two months–let’s put her down.”

So I held Arrie while the sedative worked through her system, and I told her she’d been a very good cat and we had enjoyed sharing our lives with her, and we would miss her. I promised her I would take care of her son, Doc, for her. She went to sleep in my arms.

So I came home and Doc was asleep on the couch. I have nothing against his sleeping on the couch, and I’ve been known to do it myself, but he’s been sleeping on the couch for the past week. He looked like shit. When he did get down he walked like an old man (best guess, he’s five years old) and like everything hurts. (When he’s feeling good he has a lanky, hip-swinging tomcat walk, all muscle and sinews, absolutely silent.) He’s slept in my lap twice in the past week (normally he’s with me during reading time every night.)

“Well,” said the Eternal Optimist, “I wonder how many rare and exotic fatal diseases this cat has?”

However. He has expressed an increased interest in food. He came to bed with us, and while sleeping between us, had a grooming session to improve his appearance. I hope to err on the side of caution: we will keep a close eye on him, but I am hoping he is on the upswing from whatever this recent malaise is.

He does not appear to have missed his mother yet, but I do. I’m sure Nancy does.

Pugs, on the other hand, may view this as one step toward regaining his status as Only Dog, which in his world can’t be bad.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cat, cats, Dogs, life, pets | 6 Comments

Better Living Through Chemistry

Posted on October 7, 2024 by cpeck876
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He stopped jumping up in my lap to help me read in the evening.

He stopped escorting me to the bathroom.

He stopped tucking me in bed each night.

He stopped checking on me 2-3 times each night. Wake up–I need to know you’re okay.

This started on a Friday because none of our animals get sick until the vet’s office closes or gets booked up for the weekend.

By Monday morning I was convinced he was dying. He’s (+/-) five years old. We’ve had him for five months. He is a beautiful, big orange tabby who, two weeks ago, was pronounced by his vet as ‘perfectly healthy’. And then BOOM! He curled up into a ball on the floor by my file cabinet and slept there all this morning.

I called and made an emergency appointment for him to see the vet. It was at 1:30. I crossed my fingers in hope he would live that long.

I drove him all the way to the vet’s office (1.5 miles, maybe) listening to the pathetic kitten-like yowls of an unhappy cat who, the previous week or so, issued complaints on a par with the National Tornado Warning siren.

I had no idea what was wrong with him. I have shared my life with something around 17 cats for whom I was responsible for, and not one of them (less than about 18 years old) had behaved this way.

I got him to the office, the vet came in to see him, and seemed unusually pleased to see he had peed in his crate (orange tabbies are unusually prone to urine blockages which can be fatal if not caught in time.) We eliminated a number of other potentials (diabetes, liver failure, kidney failure) but we came to a conclusion: Doc was suffering from Fever of an Unknown Origin.

No one knows why cats suddenly start running a temp and acting punky. Best guess–stress. What might have stressed Doc?

He hates going to the vet. He hates car rides. He went to the vet the week before last. He warned me I would regret my anti-feline behavior. I didn’t take him seriously enough.

So going to the vet to be pronounced completely healthy caused so much stress that Doc ran a temperature and tried to die.

So to review: Arrie (his mother) has pillowfoot. A rare disease that causes painful ulcerations and tissue damage to the paw pads of a cat. She also had one heartworm. Cats almost never get heartworm. One possible side effect of her having heartworm is the worm may die and block an artery as it is passed, thereby causing her death. There is nothing we can do to prevent this.

So now her son, not to be out-done, had developed Fever of an Unknown Origin.

They gave him a shot with an antibiotic (in case they missed an infection) and an NSAID (aspirin.) To do that they had to run a blood panel to rule out kidney disease because NSAIDs make kidney disease worse.

His vet expects him to show marked improvement by tomorrow. As a matter of fact, he has moved around more (and lodged more complaints) since he got home.

I love these cats. They are beautiful, affectionate animals, and Doc has become nearly as devoted to me as Pugsy (much to each other’s disgust.) Still, I can’t help but feel I’ve working my way through the encyclopedia of exotic cat diseases.

I shouldn’t complain. I’ll be punished.

Also, we have, waiting in the fridge, a two-part medication to reduce Doc’s stress for his next vet appointment (to finish his vaccines) which is, I think…next week.

I can’t wait.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cat, cats, Dogs, health, pets | 4 Comments

Pillow Foot, Take 2

Posted on September 24, 2024 by cpeck876
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The blue fabric, for those who do not automatically orient easily, is my t-shirt. It’s new, actually. I bought it from TikTok. I do not recommend making purchases from Tik-Tok, but so far I’ve made several and only one of them…well, two of them…did not end well. One was my fault: had I read the ad more closely, I would have discovered that almost every charger, wire, or phone accessory they make is for an iPhone. I don’t own an iPhone, but Nancy does.

Today was an adventure. Nancy, Arrie, Doc and I all went to see the vet. Arrie’s foot has developed an unpleasant smell and it does not seem to be healing, and Doc has never met our vet, so it was time to haul him in and find out what horrible health issues he has.

I have lied to you in the past. He does not weigh more than Pugs. He weighs 18 pounds, Pugs weighs 19 pounds. I swear to God the same amount of weight distributed over a cat body and a dog body creates a bigger cat than dog. Nonetheless, in his vet’s opinion he should lose at least 3 pounds. We are not sure how to do this. The cats are self-feeding, and if he were to run low on food in his usual feeding spot, he would go immediately to Arrie’s food supply, where she would just automatically give it to him. She is, after all, his mother. I told Nancy that for the time being, while medicine applications are directly linked to Arrie’s food source, we will content ourselves with thinking slimming, healthy thoughts for him and hold our breath.

Otherwise, Doc is a happy, well-adjusted five-year-old cat. (Well. After we got him home again, after he stalked me for about an hour, listing all of his complaints, and eventually he jumped up into my lap to tell me he is not pleased with my behavior and hopes never to see the vet or actually anything involving a car ride again in his life, he is, more or less, happy.)

Arrie has a secondary infection in her bad foot, so we have added a steroid to her treatment regime, and she has a mild ear infection, so we have drops for that as well. This is probably because her pododermatitis is overwhelming her autoimmune system. So we say this very gently and move in quickly, but Arrie has a heartworm that could die and kill her, and she has an infection in the pad of her foot that is notorious for being difficult to treat (and frequently recurs, even with treatment.) Which is a shame, because Arrie is a nice cat. While the cats were there the vet pulled out a set of clippers and clipped their nails (which had gotten long.) To do Arrie, they flipped her over on her back, with all four feet waving in the air. She uttered one complaint, and then sang to them while they worked.

I did not raise these cats. I am perpetually astonished by what strangers can do to them, and sometimes I wonder what that really says about me as a cat owner. Nancy’s daughter used to visit us, and sooner or later she would sit down on her knees, shove Cakes through her legs until only one arm came out in front, and trim his nails. She may have wrapped him in a towel to do that. I don’t know any of my friends who knew Babycakes who would smile cheerfully and say, “Oh, sure–let me!” when I brought up subjects like nail trims (and I did occasionally trim him myself.) I loved that cat, and he loved me, but I have scars from having known him.

I sat, utterly silently, while the vet tech uncrated Doc, carried him to the counter and set him up on it, and the vet checked his teeth, his ears, his belly, gave him about 3 vaccinations, and then the vet tech picked him up and carried him off for a nail trim and a blood draw.

When I try to pick up Doc I get parts of the cat, and a decided unwillingness of the rest of him to leave the floor. It took two of us to drop him into his carrier, Nancy to hold him while I unlatched every possible appendage from every possible edge of the crate. The vet tech carried him around like a sofa pillow.

Also, I am wearing a large bandage on the back of my left hand to stop the bleeding and leaking of an injury I sustained the night before last. Doc bit me. Doc bites me often. I have gotten fairly good at seeing it coming, but that one I missed altogether. I don’t believe he meant me any harm; I think these sudden attacks land under the misnomer of ‘love bites’, but I remain utterly mystified by what provokes them. It’s a behavior that just doesn’t make sense. ((Other than the fact that among cats, bites are considered a form of affection.) Unfortunately it’s a behavior we are adding to old skin with about the protective qualities of wet toilet paper, and I take blood thinners, which means that any break of the skin, no matter how minor, leads to blood loss. This last one is a 4-tooth gash about an inch across that somehow tore open another small wound I’d been healing, and by the time I managed to get it wrapped and start cleaning it up, the bathroom looked like a crime scene.

And yes: I know cat bites can lead to some nasty infections. So far this hasn’t happened. These are not deep bites, nor are they intended to do any harm, he just has sharp teeth and I have paper skin.

So my problem, essentially, is that I can watch total strangers handle this cat and marvel at how gentle, how adaptable, how malleable he is–but I’m afraid to fully commit to pick-him-up-and-haul-him-around because I find him unpredictable. And it may indeed be that certain hesitancy on my part that leads to the problem.

Anyway. We are working through it. Last night he came to bed with me, I was cuddling with him, and he found the bandage on my hand, so he bit that. Missed the bandage. I now have spot bandage on the place where he nicked me.

The vet and the vet tech are murmuring each other about how much they like big orange cats and I’m sitting there thinking, I wish I trusted him as much as you do…

I love the cat, don’t get me wrong, and I’m glad he’s healthy. I just wish I knew someone who speaks fluent Cat, because I thought I did, and clearly, I was wrong.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cats | 3 Comments