The Dog With the Old Soul (5 page)

Charles Kuhn

He came to us as a gift,
not asked for or expected. A little bundle of dappled tan-and-black fur accented with black spots. Hence, we named him Spotty. His huge ears made him look like a very small bunny rather than a young puppy whose owner wasn’t able to care for a disabled pet.

My wife, Melissa, a schoolteacher, was an easy mark. She has a soft spot for animals and seldom turns an injured or sick animal away. I was an even easier mark. My struggle with progressive multiple sclerosis keeps me home and makes me particularly empathetic to animals with disabilities. So I became Spotty’s full-time caregiver.

He weighed in at two pounds. His sweet disposition made you love him from the moment you met him. His eyes trapped your heart, two shining brown orbs that stared up at you in complete innocence. Who could resist that look? We sure couldn’t.

His back legs didn’t work. I could relate to Spotty’s discomfort, having slowly lost most of the use of my own legs. Spotty would never race with the other dogs. I may never toss a football or play golf again.

We hoped his condition might be due to poor nutrition and corrected his diet. He gained a few ounces and, with careful muscle massages and flexion, soon scrambled across the floor. But his limited motor skills never allowed him to walk properly or play with our other dogs. We carried him everywhere—often from the couch to my desk chair, where he slept on my lap in cozy luxury throughout the day, snuggled in the comfort of his favorite blanket. At night he was cradled between us, swaddled up to prevent any bladder accidents. He never heard a disparaging word. Through no fault of his own, his handicapped life offered him enough challenge. We never burdened him with more.

We scheduled a veterinarian appointment for a general health checkup and to see if any light could be cast on his condition. Some sort of neurological disorder was suspected, but the diagnosis went no further. Our daily routine with Spotty continued, until one evening everything changed.

Melissa was in the backyard on a rainy evening, filling feed trays in the aviary. Spotty lay on my lap as we enjoyed our time together on the couch, but as he was prone to do, he stretched his back legs aggressively and propelled himself from my lap onto the cushion next to me. I quickly righted him, but something was terribly wrong. He gulped for air. The color of his gums turned from pink to blue to white. I put my pinkie finger down his throat, thinking he may have swallowed a thread from
my sweater or a piece of lint. I turned him upside down and patted his back in a silly effort to perform a doggy Heimlich maneuver. Nothing worked. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed Melissa, screaming at her to get in the house. Within moments she burst in the front room.

I yelled, “It’s Spotty! He’s dying!” She ran to me, grabbed him and headed out the door. She was gone with Spotty. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.

I listened to the rain pelt the roof and said a silent prayer for my wife to drive safely and for Spotty’s life. Melissa told me later that she drove like a maniac to the veterinarian’s office, steering the car down the rain-soaked pavement as she performed mouth-to-nose resuscitation to keep Spotty alive.

She ran into the veterinarian’s office, screaming at the top of her lungs. The doctor jumped into action to save Spotty. After nearly ten minutes of not having a heartbeat or a breath, Spotty came back. The cause of this emergency was unknown. At the time we didn’t care. This little angel that had fallen into our lives lived again. Ecstatic, we’d worry about the cause later. For now we had our little miracle back with us.

“Later” came in about sixty days. We had been referred to a very reputable veterinary school in a nearby community. Using high-optic X-ray technology, the doctor soon diagnosed luxating cervical vertebrae in his neck. Any awkward movement that dropped Spotty’s chin to his chest could result in his spinal cord being pinched by misaligned vertebrae, which would cut off necessary nerve impulses to keep his heart and lungs working. A surgical correction was dangerous and economically
unrealistic. We were told that a do-not-resuscitate order should be followed at his next seizure.

It became our goal to treat every second of the remainder of his life as a gift and to relish the joy of his presence. Each moment of his resurrection was cherished. A month after his diagnosis, tragedy struck. Spotty had been cradled with extreme care every day since we were made aware of his prognosis, carried in a small flat bed with cushioned and slightly elevated edges to prop his head up. We snuck him into the movie theater. We carried him into stores, where one kind shopper saw his ears and commented, “What a cute bunny.”

Then, one night, his exuberance took him. He propelled himself aggressively into the corner of his bed, where his neck bent down and the misaligned vertebrae squeezed his spinal cord. In that second the damage was done. My wife tried valiantly to revive him. We lost our precious Spotty that night. Melissa sobbed uncontrollably.

We were devastated. I blamed myself for taking my eyes off him. Melissa was inconsolable. We slept little that night. The next day Melissa dutifully showed up to teach her fifth-grade class. She stifled sobs throughout the day.

On her lunch break Melissa called the teacher’s assistant who’d brought Spotty into our lives and told her what had happened. Later that afternoon the woman came to the door of Melissa’s classroom with a small puppy. Spotty’s twin sister, Sophie. She hadn’t told Melissa she had kept Spotty’s sister. She didn’t think Spotty would live out his life, and she’d planned to give Sophie to Melissa when that sad day came.

When Melissa came home that evening and walked into my office, holding a little spotted puppy with bunny ears, I was dumbstruck. Another miracle had occurred. Spotty had been brought back to us a second time! But that wasn’t the fact. Melissa introduced me to Sophie.

Spotty can never be replaced, but Sophie has helped mend the tear in our hearts from losing him. We will never forget Spotty. His incurable zest for life was an inspiration to anyone, but especially to me. When you are helpless to stop a disease that ravages your body, it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself. I’m six-two, but I found encouragement from a two-pound puppy. Between us, Spotty and I didn’t have a decent pair of legs. I could relate. Another way I feel even closer to Spotty is by remembering that he and I both came into this world with healthy twin sisters, who deliver miracles by their sheer presence on a daily basis. He had Sophie. I have my twin sister, Judy. A miracle to be cherished each and every day.

Sophie will never take Spotty’s place. But she has created her own place in our hearts. There are times when I cuddle Sophie and look into her innocent, loving eyes and thank her for bringing such joy into our hearts and for helping me recall her precious brother, Spotty. He will never be forgotten and his memory will always be cherished. She reminds me of that wonderful gift each moment I hold her close to my heart, and I quietly offer my thanks for twins.

Robyn Boyer

The birds started showing up
around the same time I was ready to throw in the towel.

My house, my job, my life were coming apart at the seams. My home, purchased post-divorce, so carefully styled into a beautiful, welcoming and feng shui–perfect haven, had become a burden. The maintenance costs and challenges were eating at my savings, my strength and my nerves.

The breaking point came when, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, the sliding-glass door between the living room and the smaller of my two enclosed brick patios spontaneously shattered into a thousand pieces. No errant BB shot, no thrown rock from a passing kid or truck, no explanation except maybe poltergeists. This came on the heels of having to shell out thousands of dollars to replace cracked and uplifted sections of my driveway, caused by a tree planted by
the developer years ago in the too-narrow strip between my drive and the neighbor’s.

The homeowners’ association had also begun to hassle me about the house’s unsightly rust-stained rain gutters and trim. My house, built by the developer as a showpiece and to sell lots for big custom homes around a man-made lake, also still had the original roof. That was twenty-two years ago, and there was only so much you could do once the shakes started cracking and curling in the relentless Sacramento summers and shedding after every winter storm. A house of woes.

So there I was, with no more savings, trudging back and forth each day to an underpaid, soul-bleaching job, my health and well-being a crapshoot. When the glass door cracked, I did, too. Sobbing, overwhelmed and bone-weary from the seemingly endless struggle to keep going, I sent an email to my father and a few friends. I see now that it was a cry for help, something I’m not too fond of doing, but there it was: fall into the abyss or ask for a hand.

My father responded by sending me a Wikipedia link explaining why windows sometimes spontaneously break. Another friend said, “I don’t know what to say.” But my friend Gail, my rock, my beacon, said, “Hold on. You’re not going anywhere. I’ve got your back.” She’s a cop, and I could hear her commanding voice through the email.

The solution was to sell the house, rent and get out from under burdens too great to bear. Bit by bit, with Gail’s support and assistance, I made my way, worrying as I have all my life that this, too, would fall away, pulled out from under me at the
most inconvenient time. On the edge, never safe, always on the edge. My close companions Depression and its good friend Anxiety love the edge. They work there to cloud your sense of direction, twine themselves around your heart like a gnarly root, take hold and squeeze the life out of you if you don’t chop at them with whatever tools you’ve got. Worst of all, they rob you of your sense of what is possible.

I put the house on the godforsaken market, which was still teetering from the international financial meltdown, replaced the sliding-glass door and more sections of the concrete driveway, and had the gutters and trim repaired and painted. Now all I had to do was come to terms with a buyer and the unsettling proposition of moving my life’s accumulation of stuff—pushed in one direction by pragmatism and pulled in another by attachment.

And that was when I began to notice the birds around my back patio. At first it was just a pair or two. Little common finches, the males dandied up with orange crests and breasts, the females drab brown with white and tan speckles. Sometimes there would be just three of them, two males jockeying for a female. But then they started coming in droves. One pair turned into dozens, with the occasional odd man out. The twitters and calls of a few soon became a din as the scout birds sent word that bird heaven awaited all who arrived.

What had been designed and built to be an outdoor room for entertaining people became transformed over the spring and summer months into a playground and nesting area for the birds. It was like a theme park for finches, with diaper stations
and a drinking and splashing fountain. The copper railings I’d installed atop one of the patio walls to espalier the camellia bushes became a singles bar, a place for males and females to land, check each other out, flirt and hook up. A paned mirror with a shelf became a favorite spot to peck away at their own images for hours, leaving a daily mess of droppings on the ledge and sloppy kisses on the glass. The outdoor fan became a tilt-a-whirl as one after another would fly full throttle, land on a blade and ride the spin round and round until it stopped.

They built their nests above the patio, under the roof’s eaves, on top of a broad, load-bearing beam. They tucked them back into the
V
where the beam and the overhang intersected. I watched as they swept in throughout the spring days, carrying straw and lint and long pieces of dried plants in their tiny beaks, sometimes squabbling over materials. At one point a pair decided to build a nest atop one of my outdoor speakers attached to the beam. Not sure this was a good thing, I pulled the makings down before they could get to the stage of patching it all together with spit and droppings. I did this three separate times, but the couple persisted, returning each day with a fresh stash of nest material until I relented.
Okay, you win,
I thought.
It’s your imperative and the least I can do for all the delight you bring.

They took over the backs of the patio chairs, a short hop from the fountain and the copper railings and just a quick flight to the nests above. Some days I’d look out and see the tops of four of the six chairs lined with birds, as many as six or seven to a chair. My cat would often lie in one of the chairs, catching
a nap in the afternoon sun. The birds ignored her and she ignored them. Everybody felt safe, I guess.

I’d have to clean up the patio on Sundays for open houses, and even though the birds disappeared while I hosed everything down and, presumably, the females laid low in the nests while lookie-loos poked about my place, once all the strangers cleared out and the activity subsided, the birds returned, reclaiming their rightful place in my backyard.

Once the nests were built and the little blue eggs laid, the females brooded and the males kept company and food steadily arriving. One by one, each nest sprang to life with four or five tiny babies. Although the babies were hidden from view and thus well protected from passing predators, like blue jays, if I moved slowly and didn’t startle the mothers, I could see the babies from inside my living room as they poked their tiny gray heads up, beaks opened wide, clamoring in a high-pitched keen for food. Mornings and early evenings, when I was home from work, I’d listen to the sounds of life seeking life and smile with gratefulness.

Soon enough the babies grew too big and had to leave the nests. I watched the parents as they weaned their brood, going from feedings several times a day to just perching on the nest with a “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” look when the fledglings peeped for food.
How do they know what to do and when to do it?
I wondered of the parents. Could I learn some primal lesson, apply it to my own role as a parent, see how much was too much to give or just the right amount? The hard-nosed indifference the parents showed at this point in their offspring’s development both impressed and disturbed me.

That was when the worrying started. I feared for the babies’ safety from jays. I worried that with all the jostling going on in the now too-small nests, one of them would fall out and onto the bricks. I found a dead baby on the ground, in the planter that borders the brick, and wrapped it in a gossamer cloth bag. With a heavy and trepidant heart, I buried it deep in the mounded dirt around the camellia bushes. I worried that the babies might starve because their parents somehow weren’t wired right, that maybe they’d been passed over when Nature distributed the familial handbook. I worried that the house wouldn’t sell, that I’d never find a better job, that I was blowing it as a parent. Like the fledglings, I was on the precipice of my own future, unsure and scared, but unlike them, I was too wound up to trust my instincts.

One by one the fledglings made their way. I’d see them hopping about, testing their wings with a short flight from the patio’s brick pavers to the backs of the chairs. From there they might flutter over to the fountain or into the persimmon tree. The persimmon tree, which was finally starting to bear fruit after three years of leaves and not much more, became a way station for them, a safe place to flutter to and hide before attempting the longer flights to the top of the forty-foot-tall cottonwood tree in the neighbor’s yard. I knew the babies were going to be okay when they could fly from the copper railings to the top of that cottonwood. It was the highest perch in the neighborhood. And as with the backs of my chairs, I’d see dozens of them hanging out together there, perched on the arched branches at the very top, swaying with the winds.

When I was lamenting one day the growing absence of the birds, my daughter assured me in her knowing and wise way that my fears for the birds, for her and for myself were misplaced and that everything would work out, take its proper course. “Nature’s a bitch, Mom. This patio was a nursery. Be glad you gave them that.”

Watching the fledglings become fliers calmed me down and restored my hopes. By summer’s end the nests had emptied and my bird park had closed for the season. I had the occasional visitors, probably the babies who, now grown, were starting their own round late in the breeding cycle. The persimmon tree produced so much fruit that it toppled over and had to be culled and restaked. Neighbors living on my street bought my house as an investment and I now rent from them; I didn’t even have to move. My job prospects are looking up. I’ve slimmed down and generally perked up.

When Gail jumped in to help, she asked only one thing of me. Her lifesaving assignment for me was to write down what the next twenty years of my life would look like, in other words, what I wanted from those years. As the challenges that once seemed insurmountable fall away, and I search for answers and a life of purpose, I realize that she has made me feel safe…like the birds must have felt when making my patio their nursery. I’m betting they’ll return next year. I’ll be here, brimming with a sense of the possible, waiting to see what life will bring.