Maybe that was a paw holding my hand

After reading my previous post about celestial hand-holding, my college roommate Bob sent this photo of my dog Bart in front of our modest house in Gainesville, Fla. He said that maybe it wasn't any hand that was holding mine as I drifted in La La Land for four days after a series of seizures and heart attacks. He suggested it may have been a paw of my dear-departed dog Bart who was our fourth roomie at the time. Bart was an Irish Setter-Lab mix that I got for a Christmas present when I lived in Boston. He was everybody's pal, but not every dog's. Our landlady's dog Joe, a one-eyed misshapen cur, would start a fight every time he saw Bart. Or maybe Bart started it, who knows? Bart disappeared while staying at my parents' house in Daytona while I looked for a pet-friendly dwelling in my new home in Denver. He disappeared one night and never returned. I got the phone call on a frigid fall night and I was distraught for a very long time. Bob's comments cheered me because he may be right, my dog Bart was telling me that it was OK to stay on Planet Earth for a while longer as we would be playing ball or frisbee in the Great Beyond for eternity. That comforted me. Here's the photo Bob sent. Bart in repose. Hella dog, Bart. Be seeing you.

We say goodbye to our beautiful cat Lacey

Our cat Lacey died yesterday. She was old, 18 or 20, which is ancient for a cat. She was a Holstein variety, mottled black-and-white like the namesake cow. Chris, Annie, and I took her to the vet after she went a week without eating. She was still getting around but losing weight fast. She spent most of her time wrapped up in the cat bed in my  home office. We had watched her snuggle up to the heater vent for awhile and we put an electric blanket at the bottom of her bed. She seemed to like that.

Sometimes it's easy to tell when a pet has reached its end. We've had so many. Annie's Shelter dog Coco had a huge tumor on her head and blood tests revealed cancer. She was still pretty young but we knew she was in for months of pain so we took her for one last walk and opted to say goodbye at Avenues Pet Clinic. We spread her ashes in her favorite pond in the park. Not sure if that was legal but we were crying too hard to care.

Annie found Lacey five years ago at the Loveland, Colo., Animal Shelter. It's a really nice shelter, newer than most in the area. Annie, Chris and I had come to find a kitten to keep Annie company in her new Fort Collins apartment. So many cute kittens. Annie didn't show much interest so we passed by until we got to a large cage with one noisy occupant -- Lacey. A very pretty cat with a very loud voice. She came right up and pressed her face against the cage, begging for a touch. Annie obliged. I read the cat's description: "Dipstick, healthy older cat, declawed, female." As Annie played with the old lady cat with the dumb name, Chris and I found other cute kittens that Annie roundly ignored. We knew which cat Annie was going home with.

As it turned out, Annie left Fort Collins shortly thereafter and moved home to Cheyenne. She brought the cat with her, now called Lacey because that seemed to fit her better and it reminded Annie of the Irish Lace she likes so much. Teddy, our big male cat, was not amused. He's an outdoor cat who prowls the neighborhood and everyone knows him. He's a hunter. Annie adopted him as a kitten along with another kitten she named Bubba. Teddy and Bubba grew up together until Bubba disappeared one night and we never saw him again. We thought it oddly coincidental that a big owl made his home at the top of the neighbor's blue spruce around the same time. Owls are hunters too.

Teddy and Lacey did not get along. Teddy ruled the roost and Lacey was old and cranky. Teddy would whack at her with his big paw and Lacey backed up and hissed like a cobra. With no claws and small stature, she had to be vocal and scary. We also found out quickly that she was deaf. To make up for the silence, she filled the house with vocals. You always knew where she was, and maybe that was her point.

When Annie first took her outside on a nice spring day, she seemed stunned. It was all new to her, this outdoors stuff. She wandered through the yard sniffing at everything. She discovered grasshoppers and it was one prey should could snatch without claws. All that summer, she captured hoppers in her mouth and they bounded around our house for months.

Lacey found a home in my office. I write every morning and she seemed mostly content with sleeping at my feet or in her bed. When I rubbed her head, she looked up at me with those big eyes and seemed a bit surprised that I existed. 

Annie and I looked into her eyes yesterday as the vet administered first the numbing shot and then the kill shot. It was sad to see the light go out of her eyes. Before her spirit flew, she uttered one more meow. 

She had such a beautiful presence in the world. I know I am going to wake up in the middle of the night and hear her. I may hear her over the coming years. I may hear her when the light goes out of my eyes, welcoming me to The Great Beyond, where cats have their voice, their hearing, and their claws, and where I can spend eternity with the pets and people who made this life living. 

It's not good fences that make good neighbors

Neighbors.

Our tomcat Teddy chases my neighbor M's cat and, in return, M's tomcat sneaks in our pet door in the dead of night to eat Teddy's food.

We hear our neighbors' dogs barking but (we are thankful) not in the wee hours. The barking reminds me of our dog Coco, whom we had to put to sleep during the summer. Kind of a neighborly thing, really, dogs asking: "Why isn't Coco barking back as she used to do?" If it wasn't for our cat, the squirrels would be inundating our backyard. Coco's daily exercise was chasing the neighborhood's legion of squirrels.

Beyond the back fence are our neighbors from India. They've been in the U.S. for awhile -- their children speak as Americans while their parents have that Brit-inspired lilt of Indian speech. The wife occasionally holds garage sales with members of her church. I always drop by the purchase small items: a 1980s Denver Broncos' glass from Burger King; cartoonish alligator slippers that I wear during Florida Gators football games; some old plates emblazoned with a lightning bolt "S" as in "Shay." The husband works at our hospital. I was surprised when he was the one who conducted the most recent ultrasound of my heart. The family has put up a "Dead End" sign informing motorists that their odd little street that seems like an alley does not go through.

To the south, our born-again neighbor who's a teacher holds a Wednesday prayer rally. Cars line both sides of the street and I wonder how all of those people fit into that tiny house. Yet another miracle, I suppose.

To the north live my Mormon neighbors. The Mister is also a colonel out at Warren AFB. My wife and I were once quizzed about him by government agents doing background checks for a security clearance. We both gave him high marks for being a good neighbor. He must be a church elder too because he leads the Mormon handcart brigade down Capitol Ave. during the summer's Frontier Days parade. The Misses walks with him. They both dress in old-timey Mormon clothes. She is a terrific cook who bakes us Christmas goodies every year and who made me lentil soup after my heart attack.

Our neighborhood's only other known Democrat is T, M's wife. She's lugging around an oxygen tank these days. T knit us an afghan one Christmas. We rarely talk about politics.

Our tomcats carry on their little game. When shopping last night, I bought an extra bag of cat food. Teddy loves to chase M's cat when they are both outside. But when he comes to our house to dine, Teddy just sits and watches. Just his way of being neighborly.

Coco's now playing in that big pond in the sky

Coco and Annie

Our dog Coco passed today. We had her put to sleep, as the old saying goes. Put out of her misery.

We humans get to make that decision about our pets. Our family has had to make it too many times. A choice between peace and what we perceive as more suffering. Coco was too good a dog to allow her to keep hemorrhaging or suffer seizures as the cancer ate through her brain and into the skull.

She was only 7. Our previous dog, Precious, lived to 14 and, our cat, Diamond, 12. That seems about right for a dog and pretty darn good for a tom cat who spent most of his time outside. We just lost a black-and-white tom, Bubba. One night he didn't come home. He left behind his brother Teddy, who now seems a bit rudderless. 

Today was Coco's fourth trip to the vet for her persistent malady. First it seemed like a dental problem and then an immune system disorder and finally, today, we discovered the grim truth. As the vet explained the shadowy mass in her brain and the missing bone mass, we knew what decision to make. We postponed the end, taking Coco for a walk along the greenway adjacent to Avenues Pet Clinic.

While my wife Chris stayed in the office to put Coco's paperwork in order, our daughter Annie and I walked the dog to a local pond. Coco went right in, scattering the ducks, and then ignoring them. She lifted her paw, smacked it down on the water and tried to gulp the geyser that erupted into the dry Wyoming afternoon. She wasn't really a water dog. She never went farther than leg-deep. We once took her swimming in the Flaming Gorge Reservoir. The clear water was cool on that cloudless August day. We all got as wet as we could, but Coco halted before her torso touched the surface."This is as far as I go, silly humans."

Coco liked one other form of water. I put the nozzle on the garden hose and turned it on full blast. I let the water jet onto the lawn, and Coco leapt and bit it. She attacked that water, occasionally hacking as a wave of Rocky Mountain runoff clogged her throat. She did this as long as I held the hose. It could have been hours -- she always outlasted me.

Coco despised baths, and she suffered through brushing her thick brindle coat. She liked humans well enough, and she grew up with cats. But she wasn't overly fond of other dogs. She carried on a long-running feud with Tommy the Golden Retriever next door. They shared a fence. Coco would perk up when she heard Tommy moving about. She raced to the stockade fence where she and Tommy faced off separated by an inch of weathered wood. Most contests were declared a draw. As far as I know, she and Tommy never actually had a physical clash. Nobody seems to know what got them started.

Coco was a stray that was caught up in one of the Laramie County Humane Society dragnets. When Annie and I met her, she shared an enclosure with a bigger dog. When Annie approached, Coco moved to the gate, growled at her kennel mate and then jumped up, inviting Annie to pet her. She did. The sign on the kennel said half pit bull, half Labrador. She didn't look like either.

I urged Annie to move along, as had had lots of pups to consider. She wanted a little pup, while Coco's age was listed as six months. We visited all the dogs. While I was busy petting a little German Shepherd mix, Annie disappeared. I found her back at Coco's cage. She wanted to take the pup for a walk at the adjacent dog park. I could tell that she and Coco were a good match. Annie was 13 and she and Coco ran around for an hour. "I want this one," Annie said finally.
 _
Now she's 20 and Coco's no longer with us. After we all arrived home from the vet's, Annie composed a slide show of Coco photos. Coco gamboling through the snow. Coco in a pond. Coco on Annie's lap. Brief moments in our lives.

Annie will finish up at the community college soon and will be off to some university and then will be busy with other things. Coco's memory will fade. She will own other dogs and cats. Her kids may insist, as she did with us, as did her brother before her.

As for me, I may be done with dogs. I have said farewell to too many of them. But one day, I will miss the miss the cold nose pushed into my face too early in the morning. I may miss the feel of a dog's sloping head in my aging palm. I may even miss a bark erupting for no discernible reason. There's nothing for this but to get another dog, as painful as it seems right now.

Farewell, Coco. Enjoy that big pond in the sky. And don't go in too deep.

It's all in a name

I didn't like the name" Precious" when we brought our new dog home from the Animal Shelter in January 1992. I suggested to my eight-year-old son Kevin that we change the name to something a bit more Wyoming and a bit less suburban. But he was adamant. "That's her name -- you can't change it." He had a point. She did come to us with that moniker. The Shelter names all of its pets if they don't come in with one. But I told Kevin that it was going to be hard for me to yell out her name in public. I also pointed out that she might get beat up by tough-sounding Cheyenne dogs named Brutus or Spike. He wasn't worried. He assured me that she was tough enough to handle all comers.

But the name fit her. Even when Kevin morphed into a huge teen and later a young man with tattoos and deep voice, he never stopped calling her Precious. And neither did we.

Tribute to a great dog

We put our dog Precious to sleep today. She was 15, or 16 -- she was an Animal Shelter stray so the age was always a guess. She was one (or so) when my son Kevin fell in love with her in January 1992 at the Shelter in Cheyenne -- and we brought her home. She was a lively puppy and Kevin was a hyper eight-year-old, which made for a great match. We have photos of the two of them sleeping on the bed, romping in the snow, running through the park.

When my wife Chris and I found out how sick she was, we called Kevin, just finishing up his last day of spring classes at Pima County Community College in Tucson. The big 22-year-old cried. Later, as we held Precious as she passed from this earth, we all cried. Chris, our daughter Annie and I. Precious was a member of the family, a terrific companion. I'll miss her.