Remembering Jack

It is 10:50 p.m. and I can't sleep.  My last post was about my beloved Jack.  I think about him often. He died February 26th, 2014.  It's ridiculous how much I miss him.  I have been watching videos of boxers on YouTube and its funny how much people love their dogs.  Why?  Why that surreal connection to an animal?  I wonder if broken people like me from dysfunctional families come to love their animals because they are constant. My dog loved me back regardless of my mood.  Jack would never leave me he was always nearby.  When I cried he came to comfort me.  Sadly I cannot say the same about my family.  Perhaps this is why some come to love their dogs so desperately.

Out of desperation and sadness and a need to fill the hole in my heart I went out and bought a standard poodle two months after he died.  The rebound dog.  What a mistake.  Not only did I know nothing of this breed other than what I researched he was also from a breeder who kept him unsocialized in a garage for four months (I didn't know this until I drove 4 hours with my 6 year old to pick him up).  Needless to say the three months we had him did not go well.  He was terrified of everything.  He bit my son every chance he got. In fact, he bit 7 of my his friends -- this was something the parents were not very happy about.  No amount of training was reversing this behavior so I did the unthinkable and most humiliating thing ever -- I returned him to the breeder.  Like the jilted lover I ran into the arms of another way too soon and could not love him enough to make it work.

So here we are one and half years after Jack's death and we are looking to add to our family again.  A boxer this time.  I can't help but wonder if I will find one as wonderful as him.  What if I don't?  What if I pick a bad one?  A "bad one" you say?  What could make him bad?  Maybe he won't like kids. What if he doesn't like other dogs?  Worse yet -- what if my husband hates him?   My husband doesn't want another dog because they make life difficult.  I say -- they make life wonderful.

"Life is difficult!" I say whether you have a dog or not.  These last two years I have been toiling away at my graduate degree and its been ... difficult (my youngest son recently revealed to his 2nd grade class my favorite activity is "studying").  Earlier this year my sister-in-law died (way to young) and my family continues to grow more disconnected each year.  My adult son whom I never thought would "inherit" the dysfunction of my family -- did.  My husband likes to say it trickles down from the top.  How true this is.  The matriarch, my mother, is very disconnected and uninterested in her children's lives.  It has been this way for many many many years.  My nephew recently went into the military at age 18. His mother was with my brother for many years and they had two children.  Those children endured much including my brother abandoning them when he found someone new.  Oddly -- they are doing very well.  I have pondered this lately a great deal and the difference between her family and mine (they have dysfunction as well) is her parents are very active in her life -- as well as her children's lives.

Of course a dog can never take the place of a loving family, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, but unlike so many family members today -- your pets are present -- always.

I find this writing to be cathartic....perhaps I will try to do it more.

Jack Brody

Jack doesn't get up when I get up in the morning anymore.  He doesn't get up when Ethan gets up either.  I don't know what is worse that he doesn't bark when the doorbell rings or when I say "lets go for a walk" he just looks at me instead of running to the door.  I gave him his favorite treat ever the other day, denta-bones from Costco, and he just let it drop on the floor.  I put the bone in the dog kennel with him and it was still there, uneaten, when I got home.  He looks like the Jack I know and love -- but he is not himself anymore. 

This cannot be Jack Brody whom I brought home ten years ago from the dog pound.  I think he is an imposter.  Jack goes nuts when someone knocks at the door or rings the bell.  You can't even say the word "walk" because he will jump up and run to the door.  The real Jack once broke into the pantry and ate a whole bag of his favorite bones before he got busted.  Yeah, that Jack, he loved to come alive at ten pm when we went to bed -- he was always ready to go for a walk and play ...at bedtime.  He loved to "woof-woof-whoooo" us when he was feeling playful.  I have the funniest video of Jack barking our the front window and Ethan was right by him barking too.  This Jack, this one who looks older and tired, doesn't enjoy those things.

I am not sick like Jack is now, but I don't feel like doing the things I love any more either.  There is a black cloud hovering over me and I wonder as I cuddled him in the kennel -- if I have caused whatever is happening to him because I didn't see the signs the valley fever was back.  Would he be his old vibrant self if I had him checked three months ago?  Did I steal years from his life?  There were so many little signs right before he got worse: slipping on the floor more than normal, dog food all over the kitchen (it was falling out of his mouth), extra drool, and more lethargic.  I wrote them off as old age or just thought "that's odd."  It is not odd now -- it is more the norm these last couple of weeks.

My husband doesn't understand this love I feel for Jack -- he thinks its odd. But for me its normal to love a dog like a family member.  Right now I feel like someone I love very much is dying before my very eyes -- he happens to be a dog.  Just a few weeks ago Jack was bounding around, wanting to go for walks and gobbling up his bones.  How did this happen?  I had once heard, somewhere, you can tell when someone is dying because all the family and friends come to visit.  For me, it is Jack not doing the things he loved. 

I hope he gives me a sign when he is ready to die.  I don't want him to die.  I am not ready for him to die.  It seems too soon.  I don't want to be the one who has to kill him.  What will I do when he is gone?  

He is the best dog I have ever known. 

"I'm an Artist..."

My son creates so many works of art that it is impossible to save it all.  As such -- I am not embarrassed to say I have to throw some of the less creative, very large and least recognizable "creations" away.  One day as I was explaining this little known fact to him (because I usually throw the stuff away after I have hidden it for a sufficient amount of time for him to forget about it) he said to me ... "I am an artist -- I did not make these creations so you could throw them away."  I must admit I felt like the worst mom ever and-- did I mention he is six?

Six years old and we already have three special boxes full of all of his special creations.  I used to throw these less desirable creations in the recycling bin, but in his rummaging for new items to create he would find the things I threw away.  This started happening so frequently I  knew I wasn't going to be remembered as a loving mother hence the reason for hiding-until-forgotten routine. 

But I really am a loving mother and I demonstrated this by helping him on his most recent art project.  He created a puppet theatre to exhibit his paper bag puppets he made at school.  Unfortunately  after three brief puppet shows it has become a decorative item next to the couch.  I think he decided acting was not for him so it is back to the drawing, and writing, since he is also an author (he informed me of this today -- he is now writing an informative book on the solar system with renditions of each planet). I am not really sure what I am going to do with the puppet theatre.  It would be a little conspicuous if it "disappeared" even momentarily.  I know for a certainty it will not fit in the special box and it does not go well with my couch and Pottery Barn accessories.

Well one thing is for certain, if it is not for certain how I will keep all of these wonderful creations, and that is I am very proud of my little author/actor/artist/musician (don't want to forget he is a piano player now).  I hope he can forgive me one day for throwing away his lesser artworks as well as dedicate something to me -- his dear loving mother.

Deutsch 101

Yep. I am learning German.  I must say I wished I would have payed more attention to English Grammer in high school (or maybe I did pay attention but it was so long ago and I am so old I can't remember).  Now I am not only learning German, but relearning English Grammer at the same time.  My head is reeling from all the new terms: predicate noun, direct and indirect objects, prepositional phrases.  The only ones I am really sure of are nouns and verbs.  Of course add to all the English grammer I am learning the many German words like eigentlich which means actually and hoffentlich which means hopefully.  And to make it even more complicated the German language has all these cognates and false cognates (words which look like English words but may or may not have same meaning).  For example, der after which one would think means the same as the English after...but it doesn't... it means anus.

I wonder at this point if I will ever be able to speak German -- let alone English (God only knows how I made it this far without knowing when and where to use a predicate noun).  I am enjoying myself, and in spite of my now very obvious difficulties with English, I can make out some of what I hear in German and alot of what I read.  I would call that progress.  

So onward we go into Kapitel Zwei (Chapter two) where I am learning proper placement of predicate nouns, objects, pronouns and prepositional phrases in German Sentences. Good luck to me....

The Little Blue Composter Who Is No More

Our composter ended up working out for us very well -- with a minor caveat which I will address very shortly.  But first let me say one does not realize how much one throws away until you have a composter.  In our case we used the compost for our organic waste from meals (stalks from lettuce, egg shells, etc...).  Unfortunately, we had more waste than we could throw into the composter because it was quite small.  After three months roughly we had produced about 1/2 of the drum (25 gallons) of compost and we used it in our raised garden beds. 

We probably would have had more compost except for that caveat I mentioned earlier.  Our composter started to smell like a sewer thanks to the sweltering temperatures of Arizona!  There appeared to be armies of flies amassing at the entrance holes and maggots growing by the hour in our once fertile blue barrel.  Unfortunately, this smell, the flies and maggots was not going over well here in suburbia so the little blue composter went into the big black trash bucket and is no more.  We really miss him and wish him the best.