Nostalgia

Yesterday morning I spent two hours talking to a cousin—a cousin whom I've never met. He'd read my memoir, Tainted Legacy, saw the last name "Williams" mentioned as one of my ancestors, did some checking, and yeah, we're cousins; his great-grandfather was the brother of my great-great-grandmother (all of which we happily verified on Ancestry.com). Our conversation, over that two hours, led us from laughter to tears and back again as we shared family stories and secrets, heartaches and triumphs. And in the course of our dialogue, we discussed an individual who may or may not be a blood relative, someone with whom I had contact while researching Tainted Legacy. But I haven't spoken to her in years. And now I'm curious to know who her people were. So is new-cousin-Chris.

"Don't let her slip away, Kay," he implored.

No kidding.

So I went looking for her phone number. I began by searching my entire Bertha Gifford file (and let me tell you, it's extensive, including all my notes, newspaper clippings, photos, every email I've ever received about her or the book—printed--rejection slips from agents and publishers—ha ha ha ha ha ha ha—and the True Crime comic book in which her story is featured. (No, I won't mention which one or the issue date. Good lord, it's horrid.)

But I didn't find her phone number.

So today I finally (after quite a few years), went through my nightstand drawer, the place where I keep the cards my kids send me and other precious mementos.

Is it important to mention that I've had the same nightstand since I was born? Yep. For sixty-plus years it has sat sturdily next to my bed in every home I've lived in. The beds have come and gone (I sometimes miss the waterbed), but the nightstand remains stalwart. I promised my mom in 1972 when I moved out of the house and she sent it off with me that I'd sand it down and refinish it. Sorry, Mom!

I didn't find that phone number.

But I did find an abundance of other treasures, including a birthday card The Youngest Granddaughter made for me—yes, that granddaughter, the one who just started college. I have treasured it all these years for the way she depicted us together.

 And a Mother's Day card my son drew for me—in the 1980's—complete with an Ewok sticker to fancy it up.

 And a card my mother sent me... when she was 90.

 And the two-page letter my sweet cousin Danny Fiocchi sent me after he'd finished reading Tainted Legacy, which was not long after it came out because at its publication, I'd sent him a copy, since the book came into being only because that stubborn Irish/Italian man refused to let me give up on it. In the letter, he mentions that he is 51... that he started working at the age of 16... that in all the years he's been working, he's only been late for work "a handful of times, today being one of them." Because he couldn't put the book down. "Thank God I'm my boss," he said. See why I love him?

And all the precious bookmarks my bibliophile friends have sent me over the years, including one from County Cork, Ireland (wherein the Murphy ancestors lie buried), several made for me by my beloved cousin Jean Thompson, and one I procured from the Singing Wind bookstore in Benson, Arizona (Winifred Bundy, proprietor) in 1993.

I have been steeped in nostalgia all day. And you know what? It's a nice place to visit when you've been sad. It has reminded me of how much love has been surrounding me all my life.

Now if I can just find that phone number....

Part II: June

(If you have not read the previous post, “What Happened to June,” you can find it by simply scrolling down past this one.)

At this writing (7:45p.m. on Monday, September 10, 2018 to be exact), June is still missing. And I am still hopeful that she will be found and returned to me… unless she didn’t survive her first night out alone, in which case there is nothing that anyone can do. But I try very hard not to think about that.

Harry Cauley told me today, “When you have a dog taken by a coyote,” (which, tragically, he did--two, in fact) “it tests what you really believe about nature.”

This post is not meant to be a philosophical musing about whether there can be good or evil intentions in Nature, or whether the Universe loves and watches over my June-bug with the same care afforded the coyotes in my neighborhood. But if I am honest, that question continues to loom in my mind, as much as I work to replace or suppress it.

Also occupying my thoughts is this:

Several days after June’s adoption, I was sifting through all her paperwork, sorting out what I would need to get her licensed, and I came across a handwritten note attached to her spay certificate that mentioned a problem had been identified with the kneecap on her left hind leg. She was still wary of being touched in those first days, so I had not had the opportunity yet to give her a bath or a belly rub, but I had noticed a strange stiffness to that back leg when she walked. I called her to me right then and ran my hand down her leg. Inside her thigh was an ominous lump. So the next day we were off to the vet.

As soon as he examined her leg—palpating and manipulating it hard enough to make her tremble all over, though she never cried or growled or tried to squirm away as the vet tech and I held her steady—his eyebrows drew together and his forehead wrinkled.

“I don’t like what I’m feeling,” he said, “and I don’t understand it.”

Moments later the vet tech led her away for x-rays, and I paced around the room, anxious, worried, texting a friend for comfort and support.

She came back to me wagging her tail.

“We gave her a few treats,” the vet tech said. “She was perfect.”

Of course she was.

What wasn’t perfect was her leg.

“Come on in this other room,” the vet said, “you’ve gotta see this.”

The x-ray of her leg was appalling. “Extremely distressing,” was the phrase the vet used.

Somehow, at some point, June had sustained “severe trauma” to her leg, so much so that the end of the femur was twisted horribly, the condyles (those rounded protrusions at the end of the femur) unable to fit correctly into the grooves in the tibia.

“That lump we were feeling is possibly a mass of bone fragments,” the vet said, “not her knee. Her knee is over here on this side, displaced by the twisted femur.” He frowned again deeply. "I don't know how this happened to her, but I find it extremely disturbing." As did I.

“So what do we do?” I asked, still staring at the screen, still trying to process what I was seeing, how she was possibly walking—no, running—what had happened to render this dog’s leg in this condition, how many months she went enduring the pain with no treatment and no comfort in her injury.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“There’s nothing we can do. We can’t untwist her bone.”

“So… What’s your prognosis?”

“Well, eventually,” he said, turning off the screen, tidying up the room, making like he was about to leave, and never meeting my eyes, “she will develop arthritis in that leg.”

“And I’ll know this…?”

“She’ll let you know. It will be very painful for her.”

“And then…?”

“And then I’ll prescribe painkillers. Because that’s all we can do.”

“So this will be years from now, right? I mean, she’s still a youngster. She’s not even two yet. And we still have lots of daily walks and playing in the dog park ahead of us.” I stroked June’s head. Scratched behind her ears.

The vet looked up sharply at this and finally looked me in the eye. “I want only moderate exercise for her,” he said sternly. “Nothing exuberant.”

“But how long until…?”

He looked away again. “A year. Maybe two.”

And with that, he was hurrying out of the room, muttering something about catching Dr. So-and-so to show him June’s x-ray as he’d never seen anything like it before.

June got a few more treats as I paid the bill. Her enthusiasm in eating them distracted me for the moment so that I didn’t cry until I was back in the truck with her. Then, of course, I cried all the way home, rubbing her back as she lay curled in a ball in the passenger seat, telling her what an amazing girl she was, that phrase, “nothing exuberant” running on a continuous loop in my head as I recalled the walks in the woods we’d already had, June filled with the joy of life until she was bubbling over with it. And I assure you, it was absolutely contagious.

It took a day or two for me to fully process what the vet had said. At first, I had to work through all that sorrow for what June had endured all alone. When I finally came out from under that cloud, I began to think more practically. Well. We would just get a second opinion. This was not a death sentence. We would stay positive and I would watch her daily for any signs of favoring the leg.

I had already started looking for an orthopedic specialist when June went missing.

As I mentioned in the first post about June, these ramblings were supposed to have been told with June lying just behind my chair, on her favorite dog bed, not from this quiet room without a dog in it. But I feel compelled to tell the tale of her bum leg now because it’s meaningful to the situation. My girl is a fighter. She’s a survivor. She has the sweetest temperament, but she is also tenacious. Whatever is happening to her now, while she’s away from me, I pray that she summons all her resources to stay safe.

I am still hopeful… and hoping everyone is joining me in the one powerful vision of June coming home where she belongs.

What Happened to June

This post was supposed to be joyful and celebratory. It certainly is not… though I remain hopeful. Because what else can I do?

Three weeks ago today I adopted a silly but sweet, naughty but remorseful, quiet except when she is wildly exuberant, young German shepherd mix dog who weighed just under fifty pounds and matched the fur color of Sgt. Thomas Tibbs to a T.

I had looked for months for a dog who would fit in with our pack of one quirky dog and two particular cats. Then I lost Sugar Plum… and I put the search on hold until I could gather myself enough to move from grief to good memories. I’d actually gone to Upland Shelter to look at another dog I’d seen on their Facebook page, but didn’t think that dog would work for Thomas. One of the volunteers suggested I look at “Libby,” and I fell in love with her at first sight. (But in my head, even before she was mine, I changed her name to “June,” after my beloved aunt. That, in itself, is a story for another time.)

June was brought to meet Thomas, behaved herself like an excellent dog citizen, and I quickly signed all the paperwork to make her part of our pack. Of course, Thomas was indifferent to her, as he is with every new person, dog, cat, rabbit he meets. And Purrl hid under the bed.

But it only took a couple of days before I had the dogs walking together, one on either side of me, for our morning walks. At under two years old, June is still puppy-ish, and would invite Thomas to play in the yard. He always declined. So on walks, just to mess with him, she would suddenly cross over in front of me, nuzzle his ear, then resume her walk, wagging her tail in good humor at her teasing.

Although she barked at Purrl at first (sending her back under the bed), she learned very quickly to “leave the kitty,” and Purrl (as I knew she would) made it a project to try to win her love, in much the same way that June was trying to win over Thomas. The developing dynamics between the three of them were a source of daily entertainment.

With the exception of eating, June’s happiest moments were when we went hiking. Early on, I let her off the leash—because I knew she would always stick with me and Thomas (who remained on the leash). And she did. But her delight in the freedom to explore made her explode in ecstatic “zoomies,” and she would race ahead of us on the trail as fast as her long skinny legs would go, then turn and gallop back past us, sometimes charging Thomas or doing a drive-by ear nuzzle. Then she’d turn and do it all again. Like an exhausted kid after a swim party, as soon as we got in the truck to go home, she’d curl up on the front seat, exhausted, and fall asleep.

Unlike Thomas, who spends his days after our morning walk sleeping in my bedroom (sprawled like a king on his huge memory foam bed) June would follow me around the house. If I sat in the den to work at the computer, she’d curl up on the dog bed there and doze. If I went out to the back yard to garden, she’d follow me out, finding a patch of shade to lie in or trotting around the yard, sniffing all the remnants of the possum who visits nightly.

She went with me everywhere. I took her to Petco, to Home Depot, to visit a friend in his home, and to a meeting of my book club. Always she was an ideal citizen, walking nicely beside me in the big stores or lying quietly at my feet while I chatted.

I took her with me because June had separation anxiety. She’d been adopted and returned to the shelter because, the day after her adoption, her new people had left her alone in the house. I don’t know what kind of damage she did, but it was enough that they returned her two days after adopting her. So I bought a crate for her, and when she was comfortable sleeping in it, I began the slow process of helping her feel safe when I left the house, leaving for a half hour the first time, an hour the next, two hours after that and finally, three. She did great.

And then she left.

Last Tuesday, just as I stepped into the bathtub, she wandered out the back slider into the back yard, apparently discovered and stepped through the doggie door she’d never used, and trotted out through the open garage door. She never looked back. My neighbor spotted her and came down to ring my doorbell, getting me out of the tub, but by the time I’d thrown some clothes on and grabbed the keys to the truck, she was out of sight.

It wasn’t until hours later—until I and half the residents of my community, including the maintenance workers, had searched every square inch of this property calling her name—that someone spoke up and said, ‘Oh, you’re looking for a dog? I saw a brown one go out the front gate at about 9:00 this morning. I didn’t know anyone was looking.’

Friends had already driven around outside the park, but I went again anyway, searching all through the late afternoon, driving for hours, then going back out that night, trying to determine which direction she would take, and terrified at the thought of her being out all night. Sometime around midnight, I collapsed on my bed and slept. The next morning at dawn, I was out looking again.

How do parents of missing children survive the ordeal?

At this point, I have done everything that can be done to find her. She is listed on several lost pet Facebook pages. I am checking all the local shelters twice daily (via Petharbor.com—bless them!). And thank heavens she is micro-chipped. If a kind person picks her up off the street and takes her to a vet or shelter, she will get back to me. I am hoping and praying that happens.

Where is she headed? Back to her loved ones, her puppies.

June was found on the street in Los Angeles—with eight puppies. Thankfully, Upland pulled her from the L.A. shelter and gave her a safe haven in which to get healthy and raise her puppies until they were ready to be adopted, which they were. One aspect of her personality that the shelter volunteers had noted was that June was fiercely loyal to and protective of her puppies, something that endeared her to me all the more. After she was separated from them, she never really had the opportunity to bond with a human. She was with me only two weeks and two days. Though I knew I would love her forever, the feeling had not yet become mutual. She was still somewhat confused about all this change of caregivers and locations, and when she saw her opportunity to take control of her own situation again, she took it.

As far as I know, she’s still trying to make her way back to Upland. It’s forty miles. Dogs have traveled much farther distances to return to those they love. She’s a tough little survivor. Maybe, just maybe, as she’s trotting down the road, someone will pull over, scoop her up, have her checked for a chip, and I will get that call I’m desperately longing for.

There is more to June’s story. There is The Very Bad Incident at the Vet’s that happened a week after I adopted her, which becomes a strange but critical aspect to this story. But this post is already far too long, and you have been very patient if you’ve continued reading, and I am now crying too much to keep writing. So stay tuned for Part II about what happened to June. And please join me in thinking good thoughts for my girl-on-the-run, that she’ll be protected, and that I’ll get a second chance to convince her that this is the best place in the world for her to stay forever.

Road Trips

As soon as I bought the new Subaru, I wanted to take a hundred road trips. Sadly, I only had time for a few before I lost my #1 house sitter to college life, and I had to cram those few into her tightening schedule of placement tests, freshman orientation and (gasp!) house sitting for other friends.

The day after I brought the Crosstrek home, I drove good friend Harry to Claremont to visit some friends. A quick aside here: I almost bought a Jeep. Friends know I’d been planning for some time to get a Wrangler. In fact, The Grandson and I had discussed this way back in the days when he was still a teen and I was living in the mountains. In May, I test drove a dark gray 2014 Wrangler that was immaculate—but didn’t buy it. Because, in the end, I knew it would be difficult to get Harry up into it, as climbing is not currently his best skill. (He is, after all, 87.) So I passed on it. And I’m glad I did. He slipped into the Crosstrek easily when I picked him up, stretched out his very long legs, and smiled. “I like this car,” he said. That’s all I needed for validation.

The day after that, my sister and I headed up the hill to Oak Glen for some breakfast and early Christmas shopping. We drove off the beaten path a few times, just for fun, which is when we saw the guy at the top of this post. We loved that he was smiling, so we took his photo, then left him in peace.

A week later, the sis and I took another road trip, this one down to El Cajon to drop off her guitar for some repairs at the Taylor guitar factory. If you live in Southern California, and you love guitars, this is a great day trip. We took the 1:00 tour of the factory and were amazed to see just how much hands-on skill goes into making a good quality guitar.

If you do the trip, be sure to stop in Escondido and go to the Home Sweet Home Café for breakfast (or lunch). Oh my word… I wasn’t hungry again for the rest of the day, even though we took the long, beautiful way home through Julian, and we could smell the apple pies baking!

Then it was time for me to head to Utah, a trip I’ve been wanting to make since becoming a member of Best Friends Animal Society during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Mom was living with me at the time, and as we watched the news, we both decided we should make donations which would help this amazing rescue and these people who jumped into boats, navigating through congested flood waters to literally pull stranded pitbulls and other pups off people’s roofs and porches to save their lives. (Bless them forever.) The sanctuary for Best Friends in Utah is huge and thriving, and they are committed to a world in which stray and abandoned animals are no longer euthanized. Visiting the sanctuary was a dream come true.

After Sugie’s death in May, I collected some items that volunteers at Best Friends had requested. I had filled the back of the Subaru with these things--kitty treats, outdoor portable play enclosures, a water fountain. When I arrived, I was quickly greeted and helped with unloading them, given paperwork to fill out if I wanted the tax deduction, and then booked for a tour of the sanctuary. All this from a very sweet volunteer named Allie. The tour is a driving tour; you’re loaded into a small van with a dozen or so other folks that you immediately bond with because, like you, they love animals, too, and then you’re driven around the entire facility, stopping at Dog Town, Cat World, and one or two other places. It was fun and informative, and we arrived back at the visitor’s center in time to take advantage of the Best Friend’s Mobile Café, which was serving a delicious vegan lunch of fresh fajitas, beans, rice, salad, chips, brownies and iced tea—for $5. Loved it.

On the tour, our guide had suggested that we return on our own to visit Angels Rest, the memorial park that is part of the sanctuary. I’d seen pictures of it in Best Friends Magazine—the hundreds of wind chimes hung from trees and posts continually blessing the last resting place of so many beloved pets. Our guide told us she believed it was “a sacred space,” and that visiting there was “a moving experience” that one can only appreciate by going there. I didn’t know if I could. I still miss little Sug every single day, and I knew that if I went, I would spend the time crying.

And that’s exactly what happened later in the afternoon when I ended up returning. Only… it became a healing experience. As I began to walk among the hundreds and hundreds of headstones, a slight breeze came up, gently rolling its way through all those wind chimes…. I thought I would only visit for a few minutes. I stayed for nearly an hour. There is something very validating in sharing the grief of others. I have lost so many dogs and cats in my life… and the pain never gets easier to bear. But when you see how many people have adored their pets in the same way, to the same depth, it is, indeed, a moving experience. That hour was the best part of my visit to the sanctuary.

I was home only for one day before I left again for my final road trip of the summer, heading up the coast to meet The Oldest Son in Morro Bay. We stayed in a sketchy hotel and laughed about it, walked on Montana de Oro State Beach, which we both love, took photos of otters and squirrels and breathtakingly beautiful coastline, and ate several amazing meals at various eateries. All of that in two days. I could have stayed a week. But he had work to get back to, and The Granddaughter/House Sitter was at home packing, getting ready to move into her dorm at Cal Poly.

This summer that began in great sadness gave way to some great times and great memories. Thanks for sharing them with me.