It Is, Has Always Been, and Always Will Be

Felix and '95

Due to the graphic nature of the following story, reader discretion is advised. Just to brighten an otherwise dark piece. I will intersperse the narrative with two phrases from two of my favorite books: “So it goes.” from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and “Sorrow floats.” from John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire.

It Is, Has Always Been, and Always Will Be

I was visiting a classroom today to install some important software on a teacher’s computer. This particular installation, one of many this week, was taking a very long time so I ended up leaving to do another one and then coming back to check on its progress. On one return to check, the teacher and I began one of those polite but meaningless conversations.

I’ve always noticed in conversations that if something is really bothering a person, they sometimes just have to bring it up, to get it out there and in the open. This lady felt so moved today.

She said, “I’m a little down in the dumps today.”

“Why’s that?” I replied.

“We had to put our dog down last night.”

“Oh I’m very sorry to hear that. That’s so sad…How old was your dog?”

“She was twelve, but she was a black lab…”

“That’s not too old, but I’ve heard that labs don’t always live as long as other breeds…”

“Yeah well, this was certainly unexpected and it’s left us all in the doldrums today.”

“I understand, we’ve had to put a dog down before…the pain does go away. But it will take time.”

That conversation made me start thinking about pets that I’ve had over the years and some of the tragic ends that befell them. For some reason, pets aren’t very lucky living with me. For those with a morbid curiosity, I’ll recount some tales of lost pets.

When I was a young kid, we always had cats around the house. The mother of these cats was mostly a very fertile young cat we named Winnie, Mama Winnie. Now Mama Winnie would have many litters of cats in her time, and she outlived every one of her many babies. Most of them died on Cove Road right near our house. They would invariably get caught crossing the road just on one side of the hill after spending the evening hunting mice, and they would get caught by a car. Sometimes they’d limp home-injured and broken while other times, they’d end right there on the highway. Each time death struck, either my father or my oldest brother would go out and reclaim the body and a proper burial would take place out in the backyard near the garden. Taffy was my favorite cat when I was a kid. He died in that horrible manner. So it goes.

Wags, our family dog when I was a teen, lived a very long and prosperous life. As he aged, he became deaf and mostly blind. One day he was accidentally backed over by a car. That was a tragic ending. So it goes.

Back in the early 70’s, my brother discovered a mother cat and two kittens under the pool at North Lakes Swim Club in Roanoke. This family was wedged under the concrete pool walkway in a tiny opening near the chlorine tanks. That close proximity to the leaking tanks had almost sealed their eyes shut and this poor family was really suffering. My brother rescued the mother and the two cute tabby kittens. We named her Claudeen (Clawdeen) and her two kittens were Missy and BJ (Big John). BJ became my favorite cat and all three led relatively uneventful lives with only a few scrapes with cars. Claudeen went on to live with my sister at college and beyond. Missy lived a very long and natural life at our home for almost twenty years. BJ, however, met the highway near Bonsack, VA. His loss saddened me. So it goes.

Once I married and had children, the pets began to follow. We were especially good about winning gold fish and having them die within a week or two. We once had a couple of these county fair goldfish in a big ten gallon tank, and one the kids alerted me that one of the fish was wallowing around fitfully upside down. My kid and my niece, Jacque, were very distressed and wanted me to do something. Without really stopping to consider whether or not it would work, I grabbed a straw from a kitchen drawer and began what can only be described as mouth-to-gill resuscitation. Miraculously, after a few repeated puffs of air directly in to the poor fish’s gills, that little fella turned himself over and started swimming around normally. My kids were amazed and my niece, although now in her twenties, still brings that story up from time to time. That fish died a few weeks later of the same mysterious malady. I tried my straw trick again, but it didn’t work. Sorrow Floats.

Sorrow floats. John Irving in his modern masterpiece, The Hotel New Hampshire, filled his pages with dark characters with many secret soulful closets. In addition to dancing bears, Irving tossed in a family pet aptly named Sorrow. Whenever Sorrow appeared in the story, something horrible or tragic happened. Sorrow lived a very long, smelly, and pitiful life before finally expiring as I recall, yet his dark and quirky family decided to preserve the old boy for all time by having him stuffed. After his return from the taxidermist, he became the property of one of their strange children who would not allow himself to go anywhere without Sorrow. The family decided to take a plane overseas and the boy took Sorrow along. Predictably the plane crashed; everyone was killed. Much debris was found from the plane but rescuers were most surprised to find the stuffed dog in one piece. It seems that Sorrow floats.

The first pet my wife and I got was a big ole tabby cat we called Bo (Bogens). Bo was huge, weighing in at 20 pounds during his large years. We later learned that Bo, while adopting us, actually belonged to my farmer neighbor who called him “PoJo.” I remember I found that out one time when I stopped by my neighbor’s farm to let him know that his chickens were destroying my garden. I knocked on their kitchen screen door. I could plainly see old farmer Dean sitting in there having a drink of some dark liquid when his rather large daughter, Jackie, came to the door. Before I could introduce myself properly, Jackie blurted out, “You’re the ones thats gots my PoJo.”

I mumbled some incomprehensible reply then she went on with the history of her PoJo. How she had adopted him, gotten him neutered, moved him from Charlottesville to her daddy’s farm, etc. Finally, I blurted out, “I’m sorry (I think I’ve apologized more in my life than most people…when I foul someone playing basketball, I apologize) Well do you want him back?”

“Naw, I reckon not. He nowheres come here when he’s got all that good food over there.”

[pause]

“Actually Mr. Dean, I came over to let you know about your chickens.”

Mr. Dean, a wrinkled old man with no teeth wearing dirty bib overalls piped up, “What about ‘em?”

“See they’ve been running loose in my yard and eating up all the seed I put down in my garden.”

Mr. Dean paused as if very seriously considering what I had to say…

“Well then…shoot ‘em and eat ‘em. Jest shoot ‘em and eat ‘em!”

With that he turned back to his dark liquid refreshment and Jackie said her goodbyes. I walked on back to the house and shooed those chickens away yet again.

(Readers: Use caution for the rest of this piece)

Bo lived a long and very happy life with us until his last few weeks. He was probably about 20 years old when we think he died. We never actually recovered his body. For days he had pretty much parked himself on our deck, without energy enough to even think about moving. We knew the time was coming rapidly when we’d have to put him down. In fact, that very day, we decided that the time had come for us to have Bo depart us. The day took a strange twist, however, when we noticed flies landing on poor old Bo as he sunned himself on the back deck. He seemed more tired than normal and made no attempt to shoo them away. More and more flies hovered around him seemingly by the minute. Finally, I went over to him to see if there was some kind of problem that I could spot and when I lifted him to look at his belly I found a gaping open wound covering most of his stomach area and it was loaded with maggots, thousands of wiggling maggots, hatching into flies before my very eyes. I’ve never seen anything like before and never hope to seen anything like it again. The vet was closed for the evening and we vowed right then to put him down the next day first thing. I probably should have put him out of his misery myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that to my friend. He seemed content enough in the early evening. Unmoving, very weak. We wondered if he would last the night. Late that evening, he began yowling. That was the last we ever heard from him. Some time during the night, Bo managed to lift what was left of his body off the deck, crawl to the backyard fence, somehow scale it, and disappear in to the woods near our house. The next day we expected to find him passed away on the deck, but we never found him. So it goes.

Vonnegut used the phrase “So it goes” in his novel Slaughterhouse Five to connote death, dying of any thing- living or non-living. From Billy Pilgrim (optometrist, soldier and main character) and the Tralfamadoran’s (his bizarre multidimensional space aliens, perspectives; past, present, or future exist on the same plane. There is only what is, and what is has already been written in the layers of universal history. So when something dies, they simply say, “So it goes” to mark that event, knowing full well that it is, has always been, and always will be.

Then, of course, there’s the sad tale of Felix and ’95. These two golf course tabby’s were adopted by my niece (the fish girl-Jacque) and my son, Sam. Jacque named hers, Felix, while Sam named his’95, since we found them in 1995. They were really cute kittens and both kids really enjoyed playing with them every day after school. We’d leave the garage door open for them to come in, get milk and food, and to sleep on the couch or rag piles. They loved it there. One afternoon, we were driving back from school, and we were met in our driveway by Jacque. She was distraught. Felix lay dead beside the drive, gutted by some animal. The murder had just happened when Jacque and her mother drove up. They saw two emaciated coon dogs chasing 95 away into the woods. Apparently, these killers had stumbled onto our property, smelled the cats, and attacked them in the garage.. Everything in there was in disarray. Obviously, the kittens put up a good fight, but Felix was nabbed by one of the beasts and dragged into the yard while 95 tried to make a break for it. We don’t think he made it. We later learned that the same coon dogs killed a cat on the other side of the golf course later that very day and also attacked the cat’s owner. Luckily, those dogs were captured and held in confinement for thirty days. I believe they were later released back to their “owners” who petitioned the court claiming that they were valuable hunting dogs. We looked for 95 for weeks and my son was heartbroken. 95 was never found. So it goes. (**details of that event are sketchy in my brain...I'm sure that some family member will help me get the correct story...reflecting on what I wrote the following morning, I seem to recall that '95 survived the attack by scaling a 75 foot tree. We called a woodsman to climb and get him. '95, always a bit skittish after that ran away one day when dogs appeared in our yard again...either way...so it goes)

My last horrible pet story involves an innocent soul, Champ the dog. Again Jacque plays quite a large role in his story. I must note that Jacque spent most summer days with us at our house while her mother, my sister-in-law, ran the neighboring country club’s pool. Also, Jacque spent many months living with us when she was much younger. She’s very much like my other daughter. Jacque and the rest of the pool kids found Champ running loose near the golf course one summer day in the mid 90’s. Jacque and Sam thought it would be a good idea if we immediately adopt this German Shepherd-like mutt. He certainly was friendly and a lot of fun, so it didn’t take them long to convince us.

Just before we were set to move to Roanoke in 1997, Champ began experiencing seizures. It was so scary to see him just drop and convulse on the floor. He’d loose his bowel control and slobber all over the place. When the seizure relented, he’d stumble around blind and deaf for a few minutes before gradually recovering his senses. Our doctor placed him on Phenobarbital and later on a combination of Phenobarbital and Potassium Bromide (KBr). These are quite powerful drugs and I suppose they extended poor Champ’s life a few years. However, in 1999, Champ began to experience seizure after seizure, even on the highest doses of medication. At that point, we crossed the line and had to put the guy down. I remember taking my kids with me, Sam and Callan, to give him rest. He was being racked with seizures every few minutes, so we had to time our trip to be able to get him to negotiate that last walk. I remember the vet, misty-eyed, giving him a needle to put him to sleep; then inserting the final needle to stop his heart. By this time we were all crying as he peacefully left his riddled body and his family, whom he loved very much. For I believe that a dog can truly love. I’ve seen it in their eyes. Champ passed. Sorrow floats.