Jack wasn't thrilled with Dixon- now he's afraid to go to sleep because every day he wakes up, the nightmare's worse! 

Here's our Dixon Lucas-- better known as Dixie Doodle 

Animals

So I'm thinking, if I want to help with the gutwrenching, rip your heart out by the roots animal situation in the hurricane disaster areas, and I absolutely can't find a way to extricate myself from other responsibilities, but I absolutely HAVE to help because the stories coming from down there are not something I can stand to just sit and read and do NOTHING, that it will help whether I foster an animal from a local no-kill, which will make room for them to bring others up when they come back, or foster one of the displaced from the hurricane. The so-called Katrina pets. They are all babies in trouble. We lost our Shelby dog, a shepherd/lab mix, on the 27th of February, 2000. He got sick one Sunday, I was single-momming it and broke and I couldn't afford the upfront fee all the emergency clinics insisted on. My oldest daughter was still on the phone trying to get someone to say we could bring him in without a bunch of cash, my younger two were standing beside Shelby when he died. I felt so guilty at letting him down, letting everybody down because I didn't have the money to get him to a vet when he needed one. I felt I didn't deserve to have another animal entrusted to my care. Finally I allowed myself to be persuaded to be given a cat. The girls wanted some kind of pet so badly that they had taken to naming the moths that got into the house-- "You just stepped on Slinky!" "But I didn't KNOW it was Slinky, I thought it was just some other moth!" OK, so I'll take your cat you can't keep anymore because your apartment manager was called on your too loud party and found your cat you are not allowed to keep there. His name is Jack? He's 3 months old and likes to push all your glasses into the sink and break them while you're at work-- CUTE! And what did you say this box of gravel is for? Oh. Well, I've never had a cat. Well, here's the thing. A cat is not a dog. If you've had dogs, and never had cats, you have to allow your mind to expand around a cat, to get to really know them. Jack is not a sweet cat. He is not cuddly, he does not want to crawl up in my lap and be petted and he will scar for life anyone who tries to touch him anywhere below his neck. Also, note to self: never expose top half while sleeping jammy-less, thinks nipples are chew toys. Far from being grateful that I took him in, well... if you know cats I don't have to go on with this. In some twisted way, I began to understand and even IDENTIFY with his bitterness at life, having his fingers taken off at the knuckles in the "declawing" process just to save someone's furniture when she wasn't even willing to pay a bit extra each month to keep him. Having his testicles removed before he even knew what they were for. As we bonded, I think I began to see the wisdom of his cynical outlook on life, and he developed a habit of pushing me back on the bed and banging his forehead on my chin to make me wash his face with my finger, licking it between every couple of strokes. He had an annoying habit of attacking exposed flesh that endeared him to no one, the girls would come out of their baths and he would be crouched to pounce on them. Every night the house was shattered with bloodcurdling screams and I would find them huddled together at the bathroom door, held hostage by Jack the Cat. Interesting fact: old plaster walls seem acoustically different, they seem to echo and reverberate high pitched noises much more than newer wallboard. Sometimes, Jack would lie at the bottom of their bed while I was reading to them at night. They thought it was so sweet until one of them would reach down to pet him and he tried to sink his teeth into their finger. The youngest would say wistfully, "I wish we had a dog we could play with, that would let us pet him and hug him". Uh-oh. Cut to flashback-- me, in my 87 Camaro IROC, under light in old abandoned Kmart parking lot, on my way home from the hospital where my mother is lying in a coma after a massive cerebral hemmorhage. My car is making some awful ticking noise and I can't get my hood open to see if it is low on oil. I am screaming curses upon the world at large. Up ride 3 knights in shining red pickup. They jumped out, opened the hood, said the oil level was fine and told me they thought the noise was coming from the catalytic converter. Two of them, Kevin and his son Nicholas, I have come to know well over time since then. I have gotten to know Kevin's wife, Vickie. They are good people. Kevin is the World's Last Honest Mechanic, and he is one of those rare people with the Gift, that engines seem to know and tell their problems to so he can fix them. I have been to many Bad Mechanics, maybe just so I would appreciate him when he came into my life. His wife is one of those very cool people who is still truly in love with her husband after many years. A Real Wife. About as rare as an Honest Mechanic. Kevin used to raise Great Danes. He took the same pride in it that he seems to take in other things he does in life, but he only has one now. Dino. Dino is so gigantic you almost can't believe he is real, and when Kevin is gone, Dino takes all those things that represent Kevin to him- the TV remote, Kevin's pillow, other things, picks them up gently in his mouth and makes them into a pile to lay on until the real Kevin gets home. Dino is a purebred with papers that got involved with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Daisy is half yellow lab, her other half is made up of pitbull and chow. When Nicholas brought one of the puppies and said he and his girlfriend couldn't keep two in the apartment, I said no. I had Jack and I was just getting to the point where I could spend the night someplace with the girls and... he was so cute. Not to live here, just I hadn't played with a puppy for so long. I forgot how they were. He said he was on his way to the shelter with him, and thought of us because he needed a home and my girls needed him. I sent him away. A few hours later I made him bring him back. We named him Dixon. Dixon Lucas-- my oldest daughter's boyfriend is a Star Wars freak. He named his dog Chubaka, although I always get mixed up and call him Chubasco. Anyway, Dixon sleeps on the bottom of the girls' bed and he not only lets them pet him, he will paw the covers off them if they don't. Dixie Lou. Dixie Doodle. Sometimes just Doodle. He comes to all of them. I never knew Jack could growl like a large dog. He bats Dixie all around his muzzle making hollow sounds and Dixon just closes his eyes and whines, pushing his face closer to Jack as if he can't help himself. So Dixie Doodle has been the hardest dog to housetrain that I've ever encountered. I've had lots of dogs, all my life, they were all puppies when I got them and I've NEVER had one this hard. Stand out in the rain and snow for 15 minutes waiting for him to remember why he is out there, come back inside and turn my back for a minute and suddenly smell something foul drifting in from the living room. I have resigned myself to buying paper towels by the case. He is a big, goofy sweetheart but apparently has a bladder the size of a peanut. He is also a little over the top on everything else-- he barks at anything passing down the street as if it is an intruder with one foot in the door, jumps up with both paws on my shoulder while I am sitting at the computer and bangs me on the back of the head with the remaining shreds of a toy he has destroyed, wanting me to play with him. He thrives on approval, but I find myself having to make things up to give him that approval because most of the things he spends his time doing are not something I would necessarily reward him for- my mother's Victorian Duncan Phyfe sofa is now a sort of cross-section for any reupholstering class to study the anatomy of the original upholstery in every layer of stuffing and padding all the way down to the frame, the wool oriental carpet I bought just before he came has been folded up so long the creases will probably never come out, yet he manages to climb on top of it to have a potty accident so the tell-tale puddle is not on the floor... I can't go on. But he is our sweetheart and doesn't have a mean bone in his body. So when I volunteered to foster a dog, I told them I had a big back yard with a six foot board fence, and a "high energy" large dog that I would not want to subject any dog that had been badly traumatized, or injured, with. I know they rarely get a situation like this as a resource for their larger foster dogs. The contact person I have been working with at our Humane Society is Cathy. I really like her. Already I can see the difference between her and I. I am someone who has just begun this, very enthusiastic about what can be done, wanting to save every dog and dreaming up unreasonable schemes to make that happen. She is someone who has been doing this a long time, and doesn't necessarily like it that we can't save every one, but who puts her efforts into saving every one we can. She truly cares about them all, and is one of the rocks that is the foundation of this shelter. She seems to juggle many things in an amazing way, and at the same time is practical. She first had Australian Shepherds she was going to bring, but must have found another place for them. She had a Neapolitan Mastiff from a breeder, whose story broke my heart: a breeder bust where there were several and they were in pens so small these dogs didn't know they could stand all the way up. I was waiting for her to come but something happened and she ended up at an Adoption Center where they wouldn't release her. When I asked about her, Cathy said she wasn't doing very well there and she felt she would have done better with me. It makes sense that if a dog has been in a pen all her life, she would need the love and affection of a family to help her adjust to finally being out of it. I felt badly about that. I hope she is doing better, or that they may have released her to another foster home if she is having trouble at the Adoption Center. Best would be if she found her forever home. Thursday a week ago, I got an email that the Katrina pets were on their way back from New Orleans. Cathy asked if I would take a full sized Collie. I emailed her back and said yes, or I would take whatever they wanted me to foster that would best make use of the resources I could provide. Mike felt the household didn't really need another dog, or even the one we had, but he understood the need and was behind me. He had told me I could foster ONE, or that he would find a way that I could get down to New Orleans and help with the animals for ONE WEEK. I really wanted to go down, but I knew if I made a commitment to fostering a dog, and the dog and cat and girls in school and everything I had already commited to, that I wasn't going down. So, I talked him into going with our daughter Morgan and me to pick the collie up. He didn't want to go. I found out why. As soon as he got in the door, a big blonde Golden Retriever started barking in his cage and mashing himself against the side. When Mike went over to pet him, he just pushed himself up against Michael's hands and fell in love. It was mutual. Meanwhile, a female pit got her paws through the cage bars and started pawing at Mike's leg to be petted, and a whole double cage full of Beagle puppies were wiggling and whining, and a greyhound started barking... he can't stand to see them all in cages and needing attention. He asked if we could take the Golden that he was still petting through the cage. I said, "Instead of the Collie?" He said, "No, this guy, too." Cathy said we could take him, if we could get him to his Monday appointment to be neutered. While Mike went down to get a large crate to put in the back of the truck, Cathy told me that this dog had been found in a ditch nearly dead. When Nicki, the rescuer, had seen him lying there, she thought he might already be dead, but when she walked up to him he raised his head. He was wearing a blue collar with a little piece of rope tied to it, and Cathy said they didn't want it taken off. Nicki wanted the collar, just like it had been when she found him. Later I found out why. When the owners evacuated because the area was flooding, they left him tied to the fence. He chewed off his rope to escape the flood. When she found him, he was emaciated and dehydrated and exhausted. She brought him back to Noah's Wish staging area, and when she called the owners to tell them she had saved their dog, they said they had been hoping he had died. I was dumbfounded when she told me that. I asked her why they would say something like that, she said apparently they didn't want him anymore. I said I knew Mike did. She warned me not to let him get too attached, because he was not available for adoption. A sister-in-law of one of the board of directors had put a reserve on a Golden. When I got back to the truck, Mike said he was calling him Buddy. I told him the story Cathy had told me about him, and Mike said, "He's not going anywhere. He has his home." I warned him that fostering meant that we agreed it was temporary and we had to surrender him if they asked us to, that a lot of these pets had owners who were looking for them and even if Buddy didn't, that was part of the agreement of fostering. When we got him home and into the back yard, Mike brought Dixon out on his leash. Instantly Buddy turned into another dog, growling and snarling and trying to chew his leash off to get at Dixon. Dixie responded in kind. Michael took Dixie into the house and we brought both wire crates into the yard. We put Buddy in his, and I went into the house to bring Dixon back out on his leash. Unfortunately, it was dark and raining and I was so disturbed by their reaction that I slipped on the next to top step and bumped down every step on my butt. That hurt! We put Dixie in the other crate and I left them snarling at each other with Michael there, to go get the Collie. Morgan went with me. I thought I must be crazy to be considering bringing a third dog into a situation where it wasn't working out with the two already there, but I went. When I got there, the second convoy had finally arrived. This is the one they hadn't expected, didn't have fosters for. They had been held up by a storm. Cathy brought the Collie out on a leash, pulling her most of the way. He is gorgeous. Looks just like Lassie, tri-colored with a big white ruff, dainty feet and legs, a long, delicate nose and huge plume of a tail. He jumped up into the truck and promptly fell asleep. Both these boys had just taken a 10 1/2 hour ride up from New Orleans. We discussed names. We decided on Gumbo for him, coming from New Orleans. My parents used to spend 6 months every year in New Orleans, from January to June, and it was the time they seemed really alive. The rest of the year they spent farther north where they had raised their family, they took care of business, went to Jazz festivals, my father brought the umbrella dance to St. Louis. He was known as Gumbo, both there and here. Every day, he sat down at the piano that now sits in my living room, and played, "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" The St. Louis Jazz Club sent a Dixieland band to play at his funeral, and put up a memorial for him because he brought the umbrella dance to St. Louis. I thought it was a nice tribute. So our collie is Gumbo. All the way home, I wondered how we would work this out. Cathy had told me to call and she would find another place if we had problems. I pulled in the driveway and Gumbo was ready to jump out. Morgan was right behind him, wanting Daddy to see our new beauty. Mike asked her to keep him in the truck just a minute, grabbed me by the hand and told me to look inside the fence. I looked at the crates, they were empty... here came Dixon and Buddy racing around the yard, playing and nipping at each other as if they had been raised together all their lives. Michael said he just had to talk to them reasonably without all those female pheromones flying around. Huh! He said he had opened each of their doors slowly, petting them both and talking to them, letting them both know that the only way they were getting out was if they were going to settle down and get along. I think Buddy must have had some really hard times with other dogs down there. He is as sweet as he can be, I have never seen that scary side of him again. When we let Gumbo into the yard, he immediately stole top dog position, lifting his leg higher and marking territory, prancing around the yard with the others following. They just fell into line. It is as if they are still the puppies and he, the older, wiser dog that plays with them and puts up with their puppy antics to a point, then lets them have it. We are dealing with three unaltered male dogs and sometimes that back yard is just one big cluster#$%&. Over the weekend, Cathy called to see how things were going. I told her everyone was really happy, and she told me she was about to make Mike a whole lot happier. She said that the sister-in-law or whoever she was that had put the reserve in on the Golden, had wanted a female. YESSS!!!! How silly of her, how lucky for us! She said that if this woman had seen how gorgeous Buddy is, she would have changed her mind and wanted him for sure, but she just decided sight unseen. If she cared so much about that, it feels as if he sort of came to us and chose us in a way... if she hadn't specifically requested a Golden he would never have been on the transport, but if she had said she would take a male he would still be "unavailable". She said also that Gumbo is an owner surrender and asked if we wanted first choice on him. I said "Consider him adopted". He has a bit more of a lonely feel to his spirit, as if he had been closer to his family and might still be remembering and missing them. He is so well mannered, and obedient. Some of that might be attributable to his inherent good breeding, but someone has worked with him and taught him things. I feel sad if this family who loved their dog felt forced by circumstances to give him up, and they may be missing each other. Gumbo is very friendly and seems happy here, there is just something a bit held back that there is not in the other two. Jack keeps waking up into a worse nightmare than the one before. First Dixon, now two, count 'em, TWO more strange dogs in his house. At night I close the doors where the dogs are sleeping so Jack can have some time to prowl his house and check things out. Last night he brought a mouse and laid it under my chair while I was typing. The little thing was in shock, otherwise I think uninjured. I put it outside. I didn't mean to be ungrateful... sorry, Jack!

We call him Gumbo. He is an aristocratic sort, came into a yard full of male dogs and instantly established himself as the boss. Not a bully, simply doesn't suffer fools gladly. Unfortunately, Dixon at times qualifies under that heading. Gumbo, for all his aloof dignity, is a facelicker extraordinaire and rolls on his back to get his belly rubbed, waving his paws in the air in a decidedly undignified manner. 

This is Buddy. On a sweetness scale of 1 - 10, Buddy is a solid 25. 

My own blog... dangerous... possibly read by upwards of 7 people! Must... post... responsibly. Try... not... use... dots... as... punctuation... This blog (she announced melodramatically) will be about nothing-- and everything. I was once told by a therapist I was forced to see, long story, tell it sometime, that if she didn't have test results showing her my I.Q., she would probably think I was psychotic. She said that for the average person, daily reality is fairly simple to navigate because they only see one layer, maybe catching blurred glimpses of another at times. She said I seemed immobilized because I was seeing many layers of reality with equal clarity at any given time, which caused great confusion in finding a direction. I asked her if she considered herself one of those average people. She said life was fairly easy for her, reality simple. She was pregnant at the time. I asked her if, being pregnant, she didn't feel compelled to understand the fabric of the Universe from which this child inside her had come. She said no. I swear it. She dressed really well, in maternity clothing that obviously cost more than the pull fee, vetting and a week's board for a death row dog waiting for transport to a no-kill shelter. Her hair was cut and styled in a way that had to have a maintenance trim every six weeks-- good business. I studied it and gave my daughter the same haircut on a metal workshop chair in the backyard. I sent a comparable amount of money to the people who were trying to reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone. I am mentioning these things because they are the best way of explaining that trying to communicate with this woman, at least at this time in either of our lives, was comparable to those transmitters they have constantly putting out signals for beings from other planets. They do it, but they don't really expect to come in the next morning finding a "Hi, got your message, will be at your dinner party. Can I bring anything?" In her simple, clear layer of reality, she was the one in the position to make diagnoses, write recommendations for treatments, send people places to be fed psychotropic drugs so they could see things as clearly as she did. And she was right about me... it just doesn't seem that simple. Glad she had those test results, though, or who knows where I might have ended up! I tell this story in an attempt to explain that, like Mary Poppins, I never explain anything! And there the resemblance ends.