A Milestone Moment I'll Never Forget

My daughter and I reached a milestone in our relationship last week. Most fathers, assuming that they stick around long enough, end up burying at least one family pet before it’s all said and done. And while I had already achieved that objectionable goal (thanks to the passage our floppy eared bunny “Rabioli” several years back), yesterday brought with it a new challenge for a soft-hearted father like me – putting an animal down.

My faithful blog readers will remember that, several months back, my puppy Lola had children of her own. And like an idiot, I agreed to let my kids keep one of the pups. Zoe – the much loved half-breed (see puppies story below) had a rather tumultuous life. She was abused by her mother as an infant. Lola, though a good mother, likes to play rough. And Zoe learned the hard way that when another dog pins you to the ground with her teeth around your neck, you should just play dead until she leaves you alone. When Zoe was 4 months old, Isaac shot Lola in the foot with his BB gun – on accident of course – but he didn’t tell us until after the vet had run extensive tests to determine why her ACL appeared to be torn, only to find a small BB lodged in her ankle. Isaac’s little shenanigan netted us about $350 in unnecessary bills, and as a result, I sat Emily down to break the news that we could no longer afford to keep Zoe. After about 30 seconds of uncontrollable crying, Emily had me convinced that we should not only keep Zoe, but that I had better not ever discuss the idea of getting rid of her again, for as long as Zoe lived (a promise, I am proud to say, that I kept). About a month later, we noticed that Zoe wasn’t putting on weight like she should. Come to find out, Lola was eating more than her share of the food and poor Zoe was getting next to none. We rectified the feeding arrangements, and Zoe soon put on weight. After another month had passed (just last week), I came home to find Zoe extremely lethargic and unresponsive. She had been healthy and vibrant the day before, but now she just stood over her water dish, barely moving. Fearing that she had come down with something serious, I did what I could for her, trying to get her to drink and eat – neither of which I could do successfully. With the vet already closed for the day, we decided to take her in first thing the next morning.

When I woke up the next day, I discovered Zoe up under the shed in my backyard, lying as stiff as a board. I pulled her out, thinking she was dead, only to find that while rigor mortis had already set in, she was still breathing. Immediately, I set off to dig her grave. After a half hour of fighting the tough, red clay of South Georgia, I laid Zoe down into her final resting place, and headed towards the house to fetch the pistol. With every step, I wrestled with the idea of shooting my daughter’s favorite pet, but I knew that Zoe was as good as dead. She was as stiff as a board, and every breath was a chore. I imagined how the scene would play itself out, and I winced at the idea of having to tell my daughter the truth, “Zoe is dead, and I pulled the trigger.” But knowing it was the right thing to do, I decided that I was actually the hero. After all, weaker men would have let the dog suffer. Not me. I was a true protector of the innocent.

I gathered up the gun and several bullets (just in case I missed the first time), and I told Heather to move the kids to the far end of the house and make lots of noise. I didn’t want to have to explain the loud banging noises coming from the site of Zoe’s death. Upon my return to the freshly dug grave, I was relieved to find that Zoe had already breathed her last. I thanked the Lord and quickly covered up her remains.

I still had to break the news to Emily, which was as bad, or worse than, having to actually pull the trigger. She didn’t take it well, to say the least. We visited the grave as a family to say our final good-byes. Then, thinking the worst was behind me, I then set out for work.

Lunchtime brought about an even more grizzly scene for me.

As I pulled my truck into the driveway, I noticed that Lola was lying around, kinda sad-like, in the yard, chewing on a bone of some sort. I went over to console her. As I approached, I noticed that the bone in her mouth was rather large. Instantly, my already stressed little mind went into overdrive and filled itself with the most horrific of thoughts. The closer I got, the more convinced I had become that Lola had exhumed the remains of little Zoe and barbarically picked her carcass apart, only to have dragged the femur of our little puppy across the yard to gnaw on it tauntingly in front of those who still bore the pain of the morning’s events. My knees weakened and a wave of nausea hit me like a pillowcase full of soap. I bent over to throw up, but nothing came out. I accepted the fact that my dog was not just a cannibal, but an incestuous one at that. “Get a hold of yourself, man!” I mumbled quietly and then turned towards the grave to confirm my fears. I couldn’t tell, from that distance, whether it had been disturbed or not, so I ran, not walked, to get a closer look. Discovering that it had not, in fact, been tampered with, I soon relaxed. Visibly shaken, I walked slowly towards the house to get a grip, and maybe grab a sandwich and some chips.

I busted through the door and immediately asked my wife if she had given Lola a bone. Turns out my father in law had bought Lola one of those rawhide doggie bone things at the store. I then explained, with a slight degree of embarrassment, my dark thoughts to both my wife and my mother in law. While they laughed out loud, I was relieved that my eldest dog was not the monster I had believed her to be only minutes before and that Zoe was resting quietly beneath the red clay in the back yard.

Yes sir, this was a milestone moment I’ll never forget.

Puppies

I’m blogging again. It’s been way too long. This last hiatus left a mark. See, blogging is therapeutic for me, and lately I’ve been in need of much therapy. I’ve been busy doing such things as starting a school, which can be somewhat stressful, especially when you consider that all other schools in the area hate me with a twisted, maniacal sort of hate. Hate is not good for me. I generally tend to internalize it. And I allowed myself to believe that I didn’t have time to blog, with the school and all. But truth is, as the cliché goes, I don’t have time not to. To blog is to laugh out loud at life. To not to is to stuff all those laughs into the pit of one’s belly where things tend to fester and ferment. A fermented laugh is not as intoxicating as it may sound. Therefore… I blog. Plus, I had a really great story that is very bloggable.

My dog just had puppies. Wait… before you get all giddy, let’s explore this a little more. This isn’t an episode of Leave it to Beaver where the family dog’s long awaited day arrives and she gives birth to perfect, purebred Collies while Mom, Dad and the children look on with glee. No… this is a real story, with real people and real dogs with real birth defects. Perhaps I should back up just a bit…

My dog, Lola, is a beautiful chocolate Labrador Retriever, who chews everything in sight, including, at times, my kids. When she joined our family last February, we had grand plans for her. She was to be a house dog. However, her relentless desire to chew on the furniture and pee indoors incessantly, despite a good half hearted attempt on our part to house train her, eventually culminated in her permanent removal from the inside. She became an outcast, and over time, the children forgot about her – the same children who assured me they would take good care of her. Lola gradually became lonely as the children did their own things.

As any good father would, I tried to spend as much time Lola as possible. I would come home and play fetch with her, made sure she had plenty to eat and drink and gave her lots of thorough rub downs. But I am but one man, and Lola’s loneliness grew deeper by the hour. Deeply disturbed, I tried to figure out a way to find Lola a more acceptable home, but the kids would cry every time I broached the subject. And crying kids cast spells over their mothers, so Lola remained.

Winter turned to Spring, Spring to Summer, and eventually Summer gave way to Fall. As the leaves began to turn, we Dismukes quickly realized we had reached a bit of an equilibrium in our canine/human relationships. You see, Lola had now forgotten about us. (Except for me, of course, seeing as how I was the only one to show her any affection at all, limited though it may have been due to my first priority of starting a school.) And thanks to a lack of parental involvement, at least on my wife’s part, Lola began searching for her identity in promiscuous relationships with other dogs.

Looking back, we should have been aware of Lola’s sexual escapades. All the warning signs were there – her rebellious attitude, the fact that she was sleeping in later and later in the mornings, strange dogs hanging around the house, and her slightly swollen, discolored vagina. However, as I mentioned earlier, most of the family had forgotten her, and the only one with enough compassion to deal with Lola’s adultery was too busy starting a school that would benefit hundreds of uneducated children for years to come.

The arrival of December did nothing to make us (er… them… not me) notice Lola any more than we had in prior months, especially as the kids anticipated Santa’s annual visit. However, the week before Christmas, something awful happened. Lola’s teets dropped dangerously low, and we were forced to deal with a new kind of problem we had never experienced before. A multitude of questions flooded our minds. How had this happened to our dog? Who was the father? Had it been consensual? Is Lola ready to be a mother? Will she just chew up the puppies like she’s chewed up everything else in our yard? Can a pro-life family get a doggie abortion? But eventually, the questions faded as we began to prepare for several new additions to the family.

Just last week, Lola’s puppies arrived. 6 little babies… all black. Three of them had tails. The other 3 only had partial tails. Nubs… if you will. Ironically enough, Lola has been a very good mother, taking great care of these little pups… even the ones with nubs.

How long do you think it was before our kids and my wife started asking me to keep one of the pups? That’s right… the very same ones who had banished poor Lola into the realm of the forgotten seem to want another dog to join the family and, eventually, the realm of banishment where Lola resides.

My father has a part time yard man who works for him. I use the term yard man loosely. See, when he was hired, I think the idea was that he would do yard work exclusively. However, over time, this yard man, who’s now in his 40s, spends much of his time reading the paper, riding around town on my dad’s mule (not a real mule… see the picture), and generally slacking off. He’s probably not the most intellectually astute person I’ve ever met, although somehow he’s managed to outsmart my Dad, who graduated with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech. In an effort to protect the identity of said yard man, I will refer to him simply as “Lewis”.

When Lewis found out we had puppies, he did what any good yard man would do. He waited until he was on the clock, then drove the mule over to my house to see the dogs. He’d already agreed to adopt one of them, and he wanted to go stake his claim. Upon discovering the nub-tailed puppies, he reached the conclusion that the father had to have been a Rottweiler. In his elation at the magnitude of this new revelation, he rushed over to the bank to share with me the good news.

I told Lewis that Rottweilers are born with tails and that they usually clipped them off just for looks, to which he simply replied, “yep”. A long silence. “So,” I added, “you can’t really tell who the father is simply because 3 of them don’t have tails.” More silence. Then he confidently, but slowly said, “Rottweilers got li’l nubs for tails… ‘dem dawgs got nubs too… ‘dat means a Rottweiler was the Daddy.” Sensing some resistance to logic and reason, I went on, “you know… if you cut your hand off and had kids, your kids would still have hands.” He pondered this for a moment, and then said with finality, “I know that ‘dem dawgs is part Rottweiler.” Conversation over. When I shared this story with my Dad, he revealed that Lewis once had a child who was born without thumbs, which got me to thinking…

Maybe they are part Rottweiler.