Suzy Says

I am once again fortunate enough to have my friend Phil’s dog Rita, aka the Queen of the Dog Park (I am unfailingly asked if she’s Phil’s Rita whenever I take her to the park. It’s like accompanying a celebrity) for a couple of days. Being a dog aunt is as great as being an ordinary aunt. You can play with them, have a great time, and then give them back to their regularly scheduled guardians. You can take credit for them if they reflect well on you, or blame the parents/guardians if they don’t. All the fun, none of the responsibility, unlike most things in a grown-up’s life. Sorry, kids, but it’s almost all responsibility and hardly any fun. So don’t be in a hurry to get here.

So I was used to having a dog around these days, but I still got the canine surprise of my life yesterday. I had left the front door open so the spring breeze could waft in (Rita is so well trained that she will not sneak out), and it wasn’t the only thing. Suddenly, I found a 130 pound rottweiler on my lap. Both Rita and I were astonished. One minute, it was just Rita and me; the next, a giant dog is licking my face with glee. It was Fidel, the huge, silly two year old rottweiler who lives in my building and sounds like the Hound of the Baskervilles when he barks.

The two dogs started playing together just as Fidel’s guardian came to my rescue…with Fidel’s brother Che (on a leash). That’s a lot of dog for one day. And some serious canine cardio.

I’m fortunate to have the company of lovely Rita this weekend while her guardian is at a Tai Chi workshop.

Rita reminds me a lot of Jed the Wonder Dog. They’re both girls, both adorable, both around 10 years old (despite the whole dog years thing, dogs don’t seem to worry about their age as much as girls do), both well-trained, both smart and sweet-natured and both want to be with the people. They would both chase the stick until their big old hearts gave out. They both charm complete strangers. If I were a single guy, walking either Jed or Rita would be an infallible way of meeting girls. They both have very high “Awwww” factors, which would reflect well on me. Does anyway.

Having a temp dog is great. For one thing, it gets me out of the house a couple of times a day to go to the park and throw the stick. Being underemployed has somehow translated to my being underexercised, too. You’d think that not having to waste 8+ hours a day at the office would make it possible to go to the gym all the time and get all kinds of things accomplished, but not the way I do it (or don’t do it). Fortunately for me and my cellulite, Rita is very motivational.

This morning, I shoved my feet into sandals, grabbed Rita’s leash, and headed to the park in a non-caffeinated state. Walking dogs seems to be the only thing I can do pre-coffee. She chased the stick happily (she has more moderate stick taste than Jed, who prefers the huge and unwieldy style, bigger than your head and often accessorized with pine cones or nails or other hazards) and wandered around on the grass.

It was a perfect summer day: not a cloud in the resolutely blue sky; warm, but not hot; a light breeze; the air scented with flowers and cut grass; the trees lush with green leaves. It reminded me of the summers of my long-ago childhood. When you look back through the soft focus of 25 to 30 years, you only seem to remember the good things. It seems like it was always summer then. We were fearless in those days. My sister and I walked to school together through the woods, unconcerned. We could stay on the beach without our parents for hours at a time. Our parents limited our TV watching, avoiding our exposure to violence both real and fictional, and we played outside year-round. It was a more innocent time, pre-9/11, pre-Internet. I’m glad I grew up when I did.

Guess Rita traded me a walk in the park for a walk down memory lane. And we’re both happy with the trade.

Loyal readers with good memories may recall John’s hurried trip to Petaluma in the middle of June to pick up my mother’s cat while Mom was visiting my sister and brother in the country. At the time, we thought Mom’s visit was just that, a visit, and she would eventually go home and we could return her cat to her.

As usual, we were wrong, and Mom is now permanently living with Megan for what remains of her life, and Mom’s cat is now permanently living with us, making us severely outnumbered by what our friend Mike, with an apt and delightful turn of phrase, calls The Feline Five.

Now, not only is this far too many cats (John & I disagree on the ideal number, which makes it a good thing we didn’t have children, because reaching a compromise on how many would be impossible, if our views on cats are anything to go by. I think the right number of cats is around 2, and he thinks it’s more like 12.), but the original four absolutely hate Twice* and it’s like the Middle East chez nous, with peace between the warring parties approximately as likely in Middle East West as in the original Middle East.

I mean, Twice has lived with us for 4 months and it’s still a non-stop hissing fest. The original four just keep harassing her, chasing her around and hissing and generally being the worst possible hostesses. I feel really bad for Twice, because she is very shy and affectionate and has no claws, unlike all our girls, so her only weapons are hissing and running away. She must feel like a hunted gazelle on one of those nature documentaries.

I don’t understand it, either, because all the other cats get along with each other. They’re always playing together, snuggling together, and sleeping together. They are their own little family. If things get weird, they stick together.

The only time we’ve ever had problems integrating a new cat into the family was when we brought Cleo home, since she was an adult and everyone else came in as kittens and figured out their own pecking order. But Cleo and our late, lamented Jo fought for a good month before things settled down. Eventually, though, they worked it out and all was serene.

But four months and counting? Maybe we should invite Jimmy Carter over and see what he can do.

*All of my mother’s pets, which we have had to re-home or keep ourselves, have retarded names, without exception. Besides Twice, there was a cat named Li’l Bit, and her dogs are Schatzi, Digger, and Bear. Yes, Bear is a very common dog name, but in this case, it stands for Baroness Von Hershee. I’m not kidding. Really. I guess I’m lucky I got named Susan.

Of all the problems I anticipated having while Mom’s dog was our non-paying holiday guest, the one that really is one is not one I even imagined (and how’s that for a convoluted sentence?).

I knew the endless walking in the endless rain would be an endless pain in the ass, and so it was. I knew that picking up dog poo from the rain-soaked street would also not be my favorite activity ever. I expected that the whiny loser who lives downstairs from us would bitch about her presence (he did; I apologized). I expected that she would scare passers-by and/or get into it with other dogs, and that also happened, though not to a lawsuit extent.

I was mostly worried that she would harass and even hurt our cats, not because she’s bad or mean, but because she is woefully untrained. I discovered that Mom’s approach to dogs is pretty much the same as it was to her kids: either yelling at you or hugging you, for no known reason and no possible prediction of which you’ll get. So you end up with someone who is, uh, challenging to live with (just ask John).

Taking all this into account, we decided that the best thing was to shut the cats in the bedroom while we were at work, giving the guests free reign. They all seemed to be getting along pretty well on the weekends when we were there to observe and police if necessary, so we decided to leave the bedroom door open while we were out for a couple of hours on New Year’s Day.

Big, as Ah-nuld would say, mistake.

We got home to discover the afore-mentioned and completely unanticipated problem. All cats were present and accounted for and unchewed, but the dog had chewed a big hole in the custom-made fabric blind in the bedroom, the one we had to get after the whiny loser downstairs “trimmed” the tree outside said bedroom window so that no fewer than seven windows had a stunning and unobstructed view into our bedroom. I’m shameless, but not that shameless, so we got one of those blinds that lower from the top, preserving our modesty while allowing us to enjoy what remained of the tree.

But now, there’s a huge peephole in the blind, which will have to be replaced ASAP. To be fair, we were aware that the dog had a penchant for blind-chewing, given that she had chewed the metal blinds in the living room the first week she was here. But those came with the apartment and I’m less worried about people looking into our living room than our bedroom, oddly enough. I figured I could just sell the twisted living room blinds on eBay as a sculpture by a hot young Southern California artist (which is sort of true) and see how much I could get for them.

Suzy’s new mantra: only ten days left. Only ten days left.

I’m still sick. It’s still raining. I’m not convinced that the two are necessarily connected, but I’m also not convinced that they aren’t, either. I am, however, convinced that daily dog walking in daily rain is not conducive to evicting a cold.

Worst of all, I actually had to vacuum my own house today. For the first time in years. It’s against all the laws of nature, you know. I figured the cleaning lady couldn’t cope with the sudden, if temporary, appearance of a pit bull at my house (and I feel exactly the same way), also my Spanish, though adequate for menus and getting drinks and even suppressing drive-by flirting, is not up to explaining rental dogs, so I told her not to come back until after Mom has.

So it’s been almost three weeks since her last visit, and with my dust allergy and untidiness intolerance, I had to give in and vacuum today. I really, really hated it and am further convinced that everyone should have a cleaning lady, even the cleaning ladies. Housework, like all forms of work, is to be avoided at all costs, and if avoidance is impossible, you gotta be paid for doing it.

A peek into the whole new world of temporary dog ownership:

I was a little worried about Schatzi’s barking – John said she barked a couple of times when he left for work on Monday, but no angry notes or messages when I got home, so I guess it’s OK. The Same Names, who live across the hall, said she only barked two or three times when John first left and that was it.

She goes completely mad with joy when I get home, bouncing around and squealing and licking my face and unable to contain her utter rapture at my presence. I am beginning to realize why people have dogs, even when they live in an apartment. It’s the ego gratification. All you have to do is go home, which you do anyway, and you are greeted with the enthusiasm of a celebrity stalker spying his/her victim in the famous flesh. But with all the joy and everything, I could hardly get the dog’s leash on. However, no barking.

It’s a whole new world, walking a dog, especially a pit bull in post-dog mauling case San Francisco. Some people get nervous as we approach them, and I try to keep Schatzi close to me and as far away as possible from the stranger, just in case. Some people do want to pet her, so I let them.

Then there’s the etiquette of approaching other dogs. Even those of us with rental dogs soon learn that if a dog sees another dog, canine politeness requires at a minimum a perfunctory butt sniff. Still, I feel that I should ask the dog’s attendant if it’s OK first, particularly if they are walking one of those teeny dogs that could all too easily be stepped on unnoticed. They always say yes, probably because their dog is the exact same way, even if almost invisible.

The challenge of the entire endeavor is not lessened by the storms we have had ever since she arrived (and which are scheduled to go on through next week, giving me a very unpleasant El Nino flashback), making poop removal even less enjoyable than it inherently is. I’m sure others have noted this before me, but really, it’s impossible to do this without thinking that if aliens were to observe you, they would think the dog was the superior being. If nothing else, the dog is in charge. You have to walk it, or risk the stinky destruction of your lovely home, and you have to clear up the results of persisting in feeding it, or risk alienating your [rich and snotty] neighbors.

They say every man has his price, and I am surprised that mine turned out to be so low: $300, which is what it would have cost to board her and have someone else clean up the poop. Seems out of character for me to do it myself instead of paying someone else to do it, which is my usual solution to the unpleasantries of life, like housework.

But it’s not utterly unrewarding. There is the ego boost of the joyful welcome when I get home from work, and Schatzi has now established a routine of curling up on the bathmat while I have my bath and read “The Box of Delights” (me, I mean, not her. She is dumb as a post – or a Bush). She is already good about not going in the bedroom – we have forbidden it to her so our cats have their own “territory”. So far she hasn’t chewed anything up or peed in the house or anything, but “so far” is only a couple of days. So far.

Dentist: No cavities for me, but John got my helping as well as his own and has at least four and possibly more. Looks like there’s some pain in his future.

Other than that, mild flossing lecture and complete removal of what little make-up remained after a day’s work and walking to the dentist’s through torrential rain.

Dinner: Mom and Alice seemed to cancel each other out, proving that there really is some truth to algebra after all and two negatives really do make a positive. And I thought I’d never use algebra in my every day life. Who knew? Though it did take 30+ years to come in useful.

Food was as cafeteria-like as ever, and the pouring rain and darkness didn’t enhance the usually stunning view from the dining room, which looks over Aquatic Park, the historic ships at Hyde Street Pier, and Alcatraz, which was too bad, since it was Mom’s first time there. It will also be her last, since the Officers’ Club is closing at the end of the month.

Mom: Treated us to a visit to a whole new room in the funhouse of her mind. She informed Alice and John over dinner that when I was a kid in Upstate New York, we used to cut down trees (we did have 5 acres of land, including a pine forest, and we really did cut our own tree each year) for every class in our elementary school, treat them with flame retardant, and then bring them to the school, where we also supplied the happy little students with hot chocolate complete with marshmallows. I changed the subject immediately. John and Alice looked bemused, but were too polite to comment.

She was driving me so crazy that when I went to the gym on Saturday, my trainer asked me if I was stressed, because I had the tell-tale flush over my throat and chest that I get when I’m upset. It was gone by the time I left the gym, but reappeared fairly rapidly after getting back home.

Took Mom to the airport in the worst of the storm on Saturday afternoon. Carried her stuff, got her checked in, where she was supplied with a wheelchair and an airline person to push her in it. I had to leave her at security, and as I hugged her good-bye, we both started crying. I am such a perverse little freak. She annoyed the crap out of me during the scant 24 hours she was with me, showing that I am:

1. A really horrible person, since I get annoyed at my terminally ill mother; and 2. A really horrible daughter, same reason.

Weather: Hell. We have been relentlessly pounded by storms and high winds since Friday, and it looks like we are in for at least another week of it. Jonathan was wise not to come down here. They got almost 17 inches of rain up there between Friday morning and Saturday night. Their power’s been out since Saturday, though Jonathan bought a generator a few years ago, so Megan can come and visit the electricity at his house when she’s tired of the silent, lamp-lit dark of her house. It’s funny how close they live to the 19th century there.

Jonathan got 12 calls on Saturday alone, and at one point, he and Jed were trapped in the fire truck on Albion Ridge Road (the road that leads to their “town” and the sea), by downed power lines on one side and fallen trees on the other. He just turned his pager off until help arrived. A tree fell and missed his house by less than a foot.

Guest Pets: I’m already sick of walking the dog in the pouring rain and scraping poop off the soaking wet sidewalks, and we’ve only had her for three days. She is a very sweet dog, but not very smart. For example, she pees on a hill with her butt facing the top of the hill. We also can’t let her in the bedroom, because our cats need their own place to be sans the guest beasts, who get the whole rest of the apartment. So you can imagine how fun it is feeding 5 cats and a dog in separate rooms.

At least Mom’s cat and dog curl up together on the couch, which we have covered with a sheet.

It’s going to be a loooong month.

We had a great Thanksgiving. The weather could not have been more glorious, and in honor of Mom being with us for Thanksgiving for the first time in years, everything looked its best. Dinner was fabulous, and it was a happy evening with family and friends, the way it should be.

On the day after Thanksgiving, we went in to Mendocino for the annual craft fair, where I saw this sculpture and finished up my Christmas shopping – late for me! Tried not to think about all the horrible wrapping and mailing which awaits me. Wouldn’t you think I’d be good at Christmas wrapping? But alas, my impatience cancels out any pretensions to artistic ability and it generally puts me in a Grinch-like mood, which is why I get things wrapped at the store if possible. You can tell an authentic Suzy wrapped present by the amount of tape and unevenness of the paper.

After the craft fair, we stopped by the Fetzer tasting room in Mendocino, and tasted different wines before buying some, always the best way. We ended a lovely day at Ledford House, in their beautiful, comfortable bar overlooking the ocean. You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful view of the sunset. Our friend Mark was working at the bar, which meant that a glass of Roederer chamapgne was waiting for me by the time I sat down, and we were also treated to their fabulous baked garlic and ch&egravevre on toast. The perfect end to the perfect day.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Jonathan’s dog Jed, who has recovered from her run-in with the bench a couple of weeks ago. Her fur is growing back on her chest, but the stitches have been removed and it’s hard to believe there was two inch deep gash there. She is even back on ball duty.

Jonathan’s cat Iggy is either chillin’ or killin’. Here he’s doing the former. I envy him.

My brother’s best friend, Jed the Wonder Dog, is OK but had a ball-chasing accident. Chasing the ball is Jed’s main interest in life, other than going everywhere her Food Guy goes. Ball throwing for Jed is much like sex for high school guys: there’s no such thing as bad. As long as you’re getting any, you’re happy. In my family, we refer to a condition known as Jed Arm, which is the result of throwing the ball for Jed for too long (too long for you, that is. It’s never long enough for Jed).

The other day, she was chasing the ball with such intensity that she failed to notice the pointy edge of a park bench until it was too late. She gouged a hole in her chest and was immediately taken to the vet. The vet said that Jed would have to be knocked out to repair the damage, because it required inside stitches as well as outside ones, like when she was spayed. The vet said that while Jed was asleep, she’d clean Jed’s teeth, too, which needed it after 8 years of continuous kibble service.

So yesterday, Jonathan brought Jed back to the vet and held her while she was knocked out and then waited to bring his repaired dog home. Her chest is shaved where the hole was, and it’s bruised pretty badly, but Jed and her Food Guy are resting easy today.

When the phone rings at my house before 7 in the morning, I can be reasonably sure that it’s a member of my family, since they know I am congenitally incapable of sleeping in, even with the best of intentions. Of course, I can’t know if it will be bad news (my younger sister calling me at 6:30 a.m. to tell me that Dad was dead) or good. Wouldn’t it be great if they could make a caller ID that told you it was bad news so you could just ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening? I wish my reality was as stringently edited as “Jaws” playing on the Family Channel. I never want to know the bad news.

Since those in charge of technology development consistently ignore what I want, like the bad news caller ID and teleportation to Europe, I have to just answer the phone and hope for the best. Today, it was my city-hatin’ brother Jonathan, unexpectedly in town and inviting me for breakfast across town with a bunch of people I had never met before.

So I got dressed and took a cab to the Lower Haight. The Haight is not a place I go to very often, so it was fun to hang out in someone else’s neighborhood for a change. It’s a funny thing: although I live in a city, I don’t often venture outside my neighborhood or the Financial District, where I work. Jonathan’s friend C lives in a converted brake shop in a block of lovely Victorian houses. His place has a huge hammock hanging from the industrial-sized skylight in the livingroom, which also features a bar, found art, and a fairly impressive record collection. Definitely a bachelor pad.

A couple of C’s friends, who live around the corner, joined us for breakfast at the euphoniously named Squat & Gobble, where we had fresh OJ and eggs scrambled with chicken apple sausage. We sat outside with Jonathan’s faithful dog Jed at our feet, whose usual patience and good manners were rewarded by her very own plate of sausage, as well as miscellaneous breakfast food items that were surplus to requirements. It was nice to hang out and laugh and talk, especially since I had such an exhausting and horrible week. No-one can be uncheered around Jed. Happiness is, as Charles Schulz so truly observed, a warm puppy. Even when she’s almost 9 years old. Maybe especially.

Dichotomy du jour: the guy running up California Street this morning (and I do mean up – it’s one of the steeper hills in the city) with a cigarette in his mouth Bogart-style. Even though I saw him do it, I can still hardly believe that anyone can run up that vertiginous hill while smoking. I walk up it every day on my way home and by the time I get to the crest of the hill where the Fairmont is, if I had anyone to talk to I’d sound as breathless as Marilyn Monroe.

One of the fun things about working in the Financial District is that it is a favored place for Guide Dogs for the Blind to train guide dogs. This morning, they were unloading the dogs from their van and it was so hard not to pet them, especially the happy little yellow Lab puppies! Can you imagine that being your whole job: training and playing with guide dogs? I’d pay them to be able to do that.

They reminded me of the time I was with my father and we were taking the train to Guildford, Surrey, together (travelling by train is surely the most pleasant possible mode of transport). Dad assisted an elderly blind lady into the train, accompanied by her guide dog. She told us that she was going to visit her former guide dog, who had gotten too old to be her service dog but now lives with an old friend of the lady’s in the country. The lady said she loved her new dog, but was still deeply attached to her old dog, who had served her for almost 15 years!

One of the animal charities John and I support is the wonderful animal sanctuary in Utah, Best Friends. They put out a monthly newsletter that is exceptionally entertaining, informative, and as they put it “all the good news about animals”. We support many animal charities, but I can’t bear to read the tales of cruelty, neglect, and abandonment. So the news from Best Friends is always especially welcome. This month’s issue had an article on a parrot owned by Winston Churchill. Churchill was my father’s hero since he was a a boy, not surprising since Dad grew up in London during WWII (when I visited Dad’s parents in the Silver Jubilee summer of 1977, Dad’s wartime picture of Churchill was still pasted to the wall in their bomb shelter). I wish I could share this story with him:

“The owner of a parrot who was taught to swear by Winston Churchill is claiming that the parrot is the oldest bird in Britain. Charlie, a blue and gold macaw, is reported to be 103.

He seems to be getting a bit cantankerous in his old age, but still manages to whistle away happily. Although he had two owners before Churchill, his colorful use of language is said to spring directly from the late Prime Minister.”

If I live to be 103, I fully expect to be cantankerous and using colorful language!