October 29

I never thought I’d be posting on here again. I thought the last one I would do would be for when Dip died.

When Piggy died, I decided to keep our memories of her private. However, I realized I’ve now buried three dogs in the past four years.

I’ve dug all their graves, and was immediately present when two of them were put down.

We didn’t know you as well or as for long as Dip and Piggy, but you deserve some kind of remembrance, Sunny, if for no other reason than so I can tell my children what you were like when their immediate recollections of you fade.

First and foremost, you were Abby’s dog. She’s the only one old enough right now to understand what happened, and she always said you were her friend. She wanted me to tell that to them so they would know in the hopes it would persuade them.

She’s having a very hard time processing everything and her Mom told me she went right to your grave after getting home from school.

She didn’t want to leave you this morning when she had to go to school and she knew it would be the last time she’d see you.

It is impossible for a child that young to understand all of the decisions that had to be reached in order to do the terrible thing we had to do this morning, and as an adult, I’m not even sure I understand everything or can justify it.

All I know is that I did my best and tried my best to keep you alive.

Still, there’s this nagging sense that we could have done more. We could have, but it was completely impractical. I did the best I could in a bad situation and it just didn’t work out.

The worst part was it wasn’t like Dip or Pig when we knew it was time and they already had full lives.

You were still so young, but the last couple of months had really taken their toll.

You had lost so much weight, you weren’t eating, you were lethargic, and you were pooping uncontollably everywhere in the house. It reminded me of what Piggy was like in her last days.

Yet, when we were getting ready to go to the vet, despite being sedated, you still managed to get up off of your bed and walk to the door and were wagging your tail when you entered the vet’s office, as if you couldn’t wait to see and smell what was inside.

You had an amazing sense of smell. Your Mom thought you were part hound and part cat.

She hated your ears though. She called them “wonky” this morning after you were gone and she was lightly playing with them. It was good to see she really did love you, though you made both of us so frustrated and caused so many problems.

But that wasn’t the real you. The real you was the dog we had for almost two years who was the most athletic dog I’ve ever seen. Who would easily clear our backyard fence without touching it with her feet. Who had a smile on her face as she was jumping back over. Who would ignore you when you called for her until finally cornered, then would roll over on her back and offer up her belly as if to say you were sorry, but you just couldn’t help it.

You wanted to run and jump and smell. And our yard was only so big.

I remember at the dog park when you scaled a 5’ high fence just to see a dog on the other side. No one had ever seen anything like that.

Or when my friend Dave M. brought over his Rhodesian and you two aerated the yard by your constant running.

Or taking you on a 5 mile run and you never slowing down once.

Or you and Lulu pulling on the leash every time we went by a sewer drain in order to see if any small fuzzy things were in there.

Or you going nuts when you caught the scent of that deer up on Moore.

Or the way your ears pinned back this morning on your final walk when you and Lulu saw that fox crossing the street down near Plum.

Or the way you hesitantly went into the cold water near Difficult Run in the fall of 2011, then plunged in and jumped around until you were shivering from cold on your first swim.

Or the way you would get so upset when we went to the playground and you were tied to the stroller and you wanted to come in. You would yip and yip and yip. There was no consoling you.

Or the way everyone would compliment how pretty you looked and ask what type of a dog you were.

I could go on and on and I hope to come back and add more memories because YOU WERE A GOOD DOG, despite what they decided.

It wasn’t your fault you were hard wired that way.

We thought we were the right parents for you, but you would have been best off on some farm with lots of room to run and chase little fuzzy things.

Some farmer would have loved to have had you.

Right now I’m still processing what happened. You were so robust before all of this badness started, but by the end you were skin and bones.

You didn’t like being confined. You could sense there was something wrong. So you stopped eating.

I wonder how much you really knew and how much your body reacted to it.

I was so happy this morning when you let me feed you the pill pockets that I had stuffed with smelly chicken skin. You really seemed to like that, and it felt great to do something, anything, to make you feel better knowing what was going to happen.

I tried to show you all of the affection I had neglected showing you previously in a very short period.

I tried to love on you as much as I could, with a rock sticking in my gut the whole time knowing each minute brought us closer to your death.

I let you come downstairs last night and lay between my legs while I rubbed your head.

It was so bony. I can still feel that bump on top.

I don’t want to forget all the mornings prior to this happening when you were the only dog in the house and you could come downstairs whenever you wanted, because unlike Lulu Fatdog, you didn’t caca and pee everwhere.

I’d be trying to wake up in the morning getting ready to take you for a walk and either be on the computer or on the john, and you’d walk up and flip my hand with your wet nose and demand to be petted. You wouldn’t take no for an answer no matter how mad it made me.

Then you’d take those long fingernailed paws of yours and lay them hard on my forearm and try to get as close to me as possible.

Some tried to misinterpret this as an attempt to show dominance, but that wasn’t it at all. You just wanted to be loved as fully and completely as possible. And to some extent I think we failed you.

We probably got a dog too early after Piggy died, but you didn’t deserve what happened. You were a good, sweet dog, and we want everyone to know that despite what they said.

You just didn’t have much of a chance, though we tried our best to give it to you.

I can’t make this any better than it is. It’s a completely shitty situation and I feel like we failed you. And it cost your life.

Then again, I have to remind myself you did what you did, even though that was just part of who you were.

I’m just at a loss on how to make sense of any of this and actually don’t think I have to.

But I didn’t want the end for you to be one of ignominy.

For the short time we had you, you brought much joy into the life of my family and we will miss you very much.

You will always have a special place in our hearts, and I only wish we could have done more for you.

Goodbye, Sunny. We do and did love you.

July 24th

Dip, you were such a good ol’ dog.

I’m getting teary eyed just writing this, and it’s not the beer, though it helps.

You had the softest ears. And a beautiful bristly belly.

We always said you would have made a good Mama dog, even though we’d had you fixed so you could never have puppies of your own.

You were Mama’s constant shadow. Everywhere she went, you went.

When she was living in the house in Richmond and had a bad night at the hospital, she’d lay in bed with her arm draped to the floor and rub your belly and tell you about her night. And you’d listen. And it made her feel better.

When your Mama and I got married, she made sure that I understood that I was also becoming you and Piggy’s Daddy, too. It was a package deal.

Before we had Abby and Naomi, you two were our children. Everywhere we went, you two went. You were a team – one black dog, one white dog.

You were so good together.

Now that you’re gone, Piggy is very confused. I’m not going to say that she knows you’re not here any more, but she seems to feel incomplete. Lonely.

You really brought out the best in her.

We used to love to take the two of you to the James River near Pony Pasture in the summer when neither of us had any money and cleaning off all of the goose poop and making a little spot on a rock was the easiest way to get cool.

For a champion waterdog who was rejected because she didn’t like to jump in the water to chase ducks, you sure proved them wrong. When we took you to the river, you couldn’t wait to dive in. You swam and swam. You were a natural.

We always used to laugh and say that you had fooled them. They could put all the shock collars on you that they wanted, but you got away from it. You came to us. And you were the happiest dog in the world.

We still hear your “thump, thump, thump” of your tail hitting the floor every time we walked by. Sometimes it would be so annoying. We’d say, “Dip! Stop it!” because we thought you were going to wake the babies up. But we couldn’t get too mad at you because we knew you were only doing it out of love. And because loving us was the only way you knew how to live.

Sometimes it was tough on you because of Piggy. We all know she’s a bit neurotic, and we know she aged you. Especially when there was a thunderstorm. You’d instinctively come to one of us and hide under our legs because you knew Piggy would be nervous and might try to bite you. Too many times of being locked up with her in the laundry room in the Richmond house and having her bite you on the ears and face while we were gone had taught you that.

You loved to go for a walk.

You’d get so excited when we’d get the leash and collar out that you’d drive us crazy. We’d yell at you. “Dip! Shut up! SHUT UP!” but you couldn’t contain yourself. You’d jump up and down and bark like an idiot. We’d tell the people in Cuba that your name was actually “Bobo”, which in Spanish means “silly” or “goofy”.

Your Mom named you. She said it was because Dip meant someone who was silly or goofy. When we knew someone wouldn’t understand what we were trying to explain, we’d just tell them that “Dip” meant you’d been “dipped in tar”.

Sometimes we’d grab you around the waist and hug you and shout, “BigBlackGIRL!”

Then, towards the end, we’d hug you while you were laying down and whisper in your ear, “Dip, you’re a good ol’ dog.”

You were such a good dog.

It was so hard to decide what to do with you. You meant so much to us.

I loved to get on the floor and wrestle with you and growl in your ear, knowing you’d growl back.

For a sweet ol’ dog you could be pretty yippy. I got nipped by you a few times and that made me remember that you were still a feisty ol’ thing.

I didn’t recognize it at first when you started breaking down. I thought you’d be with us forever.

Slowly, but surely, you started to go. You couldn’t hear, then you couldn’t see. I used to jokingly sing “Pinball Wizard” about you and say, “That deaf dumb and blind dog SURE PLAYS A MEAN PINBALL!” It was funny at the time, but for some reason I never thought it meant your time with us would be coming to a close.

You kept falling down and it was clear you didn’t really enjoy going for a walk as much as you used to.

Your favorite thing to do at the end was to just lay there.

You’d get excited when the leash and collar came out, but you couldn’t walk, honey. You tried your best, but every time I stopped you laid down.

You couldn’t get up in the car and I had to pick you a lot.

I am so proud that you made it back from Cuba.

You drove all the way with me from Miami to Jacksonville to Richmond in a mini-van. At first I thought pulling over every two hours was reasonable, but then I realized that I had to pull over every hour so you could go pee pee.

When we pulled into the gravel drive at your Mama’s house, I was so happy. I said, “O.K., Dip. Now you can die in peace.” But I didn’t really mean it. I had no idea.

So now you’re in a nice spot in MeMe and PawPaw’s yard. It’s real sunny, and you can hear the insects and the burbling of the fish pond and the trains when they roll on by.

We bought you a nice headstone from Orvis and it’ll look real nice when it gets there.

When Abby and I say our prayers at night, I always sneak in, “Say night-night to Dippy.” I don’t want to confuse Abby too much because she’s only three, but it seems like the only appropriate time to do it. She doesn’t realize what happened, and it’s better off that way. But she loved you, Dip. She loved you very much.

Dippy, we miss you so much. We’re so sorry we couldn’t do more for you. We want you to know that your quality of life was more important to us than your quantity of life. We didn’t want you to become a pin cushion. We know you didn’t like having your paws touched and we didn’t want to keep dragging you back and forth to the vet.

Towards the end, we saw how much traveling was wearing you out. When we saw you sprawled out in the hallway, halfway between the bedroom and the living room, we knew it was probably time.

Dippy, you were such a good dog. We couldn’t have asked for a better friend. We love you so, so much.

Goodbye, Dippy-doo. You were such a beautiful, beautiful girl.

We will love you always.

Love,

Mama, Daddy, Abby, and Naomi

July 16th

“Dewclaw, can I help you?” I said, answering the hotel phone in my most professional voice.

“Yes, sir. This is Ted, the hotel manager,” said a youthful voice attempting to be professional as well. “I’m following up on the voicemail I left for you earlier today regarding your pets…?”

I waited a few moments. “Yes?” I vaguely responded.

“Yes, sir. Well, you see, I’m calling regarding the linens and towels? When they were turned in there were large urine stains on them…? And when the towels and linen have urine on them we have to throw them away…? Because we can’t use them again…?”

“Yes?” I repeated again.

“Well, and you see, sir, if your dogs are using the hotel room to urinate in then they’ll have to be kept in a kennel because we can’t have your pets urinating on the floor of our hotel room.”

He sounded more confident this time. I didn’t like where this was heading.

I decided to play my fraudulent ace.

“What makes you suspect that it was ANIMAL urine on the towels, Ted?” I disingenuously asked.

“Uh, well, ummm, so that was…HUMAN…urine?” Ted stammered.

“I’m not sure, Ted,” I lied. “I have two small children whom I’m trying to potty train. It really could have been anybody in this family. Today’s been such a crazy day that I just can’t seem to recall.”

“Ummm, well, sir, we’d ask that you *ahem* try not to use the bath towels to clean up any more urine stains. If that’s all right with you.”

“It sure is, Ted,” I said cheerfully. “I assure you that from now on I will do my best to ensure that no one in my family uses any of your towels to clean up any urine. O.K.?”

“Yes, sir. Than you. You have a good night!” he happily replied.

“Same to you, Ted,” I said. “Good night.”

I hung up the phone and smiled at my wife who was staring at me.

“We’re not potty training any of the girls,” she said reproachfully.

“I know that,” I said. “But Ted doesn’t.”

(Strangely, my wife did not appear to be nearly as impressed with my little performance as I was with myself.)

July 15th

After two years of living in an isolated communist dictatorship, there’s something ineffably startling and wonderful about hearing the sound of a jet overhead that is comparable only to someone living in the Middle Ages observing a comet.

July 14th

Today was even worse than yesterday.

My parents are in the process of moving out of their old house and had told me they’d left behind “a few boxes” of items I might be interested in from my 38 years of being their son.

As I crawled up into the blistering crawlspace of their former home, I was confronted by at least half a van’s worth of formerly treasured memories, which was now useless and unwanted junk.

To get the crap out of their house, I had to hand the boxes down to my wife through a tiny opening surrounded by crumbly pink insulation. The difficulty of this process was compounded by the fact that my dad had told us not to mess anything up since someone had already bought the now empty house.

I was bending down through the crawlspace and handing my wife a plastic box when I felt the grip crumble in my hands. The box had no doubt been up in this attic for the past ten plus years in unimaginable heat, and it was about to structurally fail. I thought about bringing the box back into the attic to unload it by hand, but I had no time for any such emergency action as the box disintegrated in my hands and came down in a plume of dust, plastic, and old school papers around my wife’s head.

I was sweating profusely, we had just destroyed my parent’s formerly clean home, and I was at my breaking point. I started to scream “shit” and “fuck” when my wife reminded me that our child’s precious and sensitive ears were listening. I sucked in a deep breath, had a zen moment, and then began to methodically go through the rest of the boxes to establish what would stay and what would go.

This process was even tougher than yesterday’s as I had completely forgotten that I even owned the majority of the items I was judging.

Apparently I had assumed that there would always be a place for them and that there would never be a need to discard them. Now I was confronted with the fact that even familial love has its limitations and my parents wanted this shit out of their old house. Now. Immediately, please.

Among the items present were:

– Scores of now yellowing and tattered t-shirts from my college days at Virginia Tech, including possibly every single Sigma Chi Rush t-shirt from 1990-1993.

– Several dozen model airplanes and helicopters I had spent countless hours in my early teens assembling and painting by hand.

– Writings, drawings, poems, and reports for my three brothers dating back to Elementary School. The disturbing nature of their subject matter (monsters, football players, serial killers) was simply astonishing.

– Hundreds of hand-painted lead figurines for playing Dungeons & Dragons.

– A complete run of Playboy Magazine from 1990 to 1993.

– Three pairs of thoroughly used Army combat boots and uniforms.

– Hundreds of paperback books, including multiple novelizations of blockbuster films like “Raiders Of The Lost Ark”, “Star Wars”, and “The Empire Strikes Back”.

– Several dozen paperbacks of Piers Anthony, Lloyd Alexander, and H.P. Lovecraft.

– My trombone.

– What had formerly been my custom designed wrestling headgear, which was now a dessicated and crumbling piece of yellowing plastic.

It was all a bit overwhelming. I never knew I’d be forced to make a decision on these things so quickly, but yet here I was, hauling to the trash everything that had once been so near and dear to me.

Hours later I’d tell my wife that going though all of that highly personal crap over a feverish two hour period taught me two things:

1. That you really needed to stay on top of your personal crap and throw it away before it takes over your life.

2. That when we were younger, my two brothers and myself were really a bunch of weirdos.

Having sorted everything out, I threw it all into the back of the rented mini-van and went to search for a dumpster.

I found one behind the local Puritan Cleaners and began to drop everything in.

I took the paperbacks in a plastic milk crate and set them off to the side, hoping that some young, troubled teen might chance upon them, take them home, and be inspired as I once was.

However, the destruction of my personal history was interrupted by a worker coming out back for a smoke break, so I drove around the corner to the next closest dumpster and got rid of the rest.

I threw the Army uniforms on top of a pile of garbage, hoping that some homeless person might spot them and begin to rummage through them for goodies. Then I placed the box of Playboys at an angle that would be sure to attract the attention of some repressed deviant.

Satisfied that I had done all that I could for them, I took one last look at my memories, then jumped in the mini-van and hit the road back to DC.

I’m no longer the person I once was.

Sometimes seeing your former memories in their actual crumbling physical form is what it takes to make you realize that it’s really O.K. to move on without them.

July 13th

We went to the cottage to clean it out today in preparation for the big move up to NOVA tomorrow.

Contemporaneous of our returning from overseas, my parents recently moved from the house they’d been living in since the mid-1990s to a smaller but amazingly modern one-level in a maintenance free community.

During their move, they finally asked me to assume responsibility of things of mine that they’d been storing for the last 25 years. Since I’d had no real home in the U.S. for the past three years, and at the time wasn’t quite yet ready to get rid of these items, I had promptly taken these valuable possessions and stored them in the attic of my In-Law’s cottage for safe keeping.

However, since recently living in such cramped and uncomfortable confines, I realized that storing such useless junk was actually contributing to our misery, and today I finally had that moment of clarity that forced me to realize it was time to cut bait and dump them.

It was amazing how ruthless I had to be, as well as how little regret I actually felt when the time came to throw them away. What these items represented were highly sentimental and historic, and had once been my entire world. Yet, today? Today they were going straight into the trash can.

For example:

– A High School drafting project I spent countless hours working on in which we were tasked to construct our dream home. Mine looked like something from “The Addams Family”.

The teacher told us it was our final project and would count for 80% of our grade. Despite my best efforts, I never finished mine and he still gave me a B.

– My collection of cassette tapes, both store bought and mix – everything from the JAMC, bootleg versions of The Cult’s “Love”, Neil Young, to ska and punk.

Without hyperbolizing, these tapes were my constant companions through my teens and twenties, and I listened to them everywhere, from Richmond to Fort Bragg to Panama.

Whether I brought them with me in a Walkman to workout with in the gym, or if they were blasting from the speakers of my 1981 Dodge Charger as I pulled out of the iced-over parking lot of as I left wrestling practice, the music contained therein sadly but truly defined who I was.

– Dozens of posters and drawings that had decorated my bedrooms and dorm rooms since 1985, including one that showed a picture of a mug of urine-colored domestic beer and a bottle of aspirin that read, “Breakfast Of Champions”.

– A laminated Rolling Stone cover of Jennifer Anniston naked (circa 1996), that I used to bring with me out in the field when I was in the Army. (Don’t ask.)

– Every single birthday card, Christmas card, graduation card, etc. that had been sent to me over the past 15 years.

– A collection of matchbooks from New York to London to Beijing from every bar and restaurant I’d gotten drunk in.

– All of my notebooks and textbooks from every class and training session I have taken since Graduate School, as well as dozens of certificates and commendations, including several from High School for “Perfect Attendance”.

– All of the paperwork associated with the dozens of failed applications I sent out between 1997 and 2002 to try and get the type of job I have now. (I wanted to burn these immediately.)

– Letters from my local Congressman and Senators regarding my successful attempts to be allowed to honorably muster out of a bad experience with my local National Guard unit.

– Letters from the Shriners, Masons, and then-current President George H.W. Bush, congratulating me for successfully completing my Eagle Scout project.

– Etc., etc.

It was amazing going through this stuff, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why I still had it.

The new me would have immediately sensed that it was all so useless and would have shredded it immediately. But yet, I was being forced to confront an older, less cynical me, and the experience of seeing who I once was and what my memory had failed to mention felt both simultaneously nostalgic and unseemly.

You see, at one time these memories were the most important things in the world to me. They represented who I was, what I liked, and what I had achieved. In context, to throw them away would have been to destroy my history. But now, they were like millstones that were weighing my family down and needed to be discarded.

Now. Immediately.

So I took my time going through these items, creating a small pile for that which I actually wanted to keep and a larger pile of things I needed to get rid of.

I took photographs of some of the more sentimental items, bid them one last goodbye, then took them to the trash can and discarded them without a single pause.

These things were who I was at one time, but I’m never going to be that person again. With two small, beautiful children, know I’ve got more important things to do than spend highly valuable time pining over what once was.

Faulkner said the past is not dead, it’s not even past. This is true when you’re speaking about memory and collective history. But when you’re talking about the actual physical items that confirm that history, it’s only so much junk.

The future is tomorrow. And tomorrow I’m going to pick up the U-Haul.

July 12th

My wife was picking Magnolia blooms off the trees planted throughout the now deserted parking lot of the former corporate headquarters of Circuit City.

Before us were rows and rows of empty parking spaces. Tufts of grass were beginning to push up through the blacktop due to lack of use. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, not even a random security guard. The combined effect was something vaguely apocalyptic.

“The smell reminds me of when I was a little girl,” my wife said as she raised a bloom to her nose. I was reminded of a cemetery.

One of the first taxed jobs I ever had was working for Circuit City. I spent the summer of 1990 working in their warehouse off Thalboro Road, close to where Circuit City founder Samuel S. Wurtzel opened his first retail store in 1949.

At its height, the company was the largest electronics retailer in the country and employed 34,000 people. Now it no longer existed.

A sign on the front door of the headquarters alerted any unlikely visitor that the building was now the property of a court appointed receiver and that all persons interested in any items that had yet to be liquidated should call a number with an out of state area code.

“This American Life” ran a program a couple of weeks ago in which they ran letters sent in by former Circuit City employees regarding what it was like to be present at the ultimate demise of the company.

One of the interesting things they mentioned was that once the company was bought by liquidators, they actually raised the prices on all of their items, rather then lowering them as one would expect. The logic was that they knew people would come in looking for bargains, and that they could always lower the prices later.

It’s actually pretty easy to target the cause of the company’s failure. They were not as agile as new chains like Best Buy, and floundered due to overexpansion and horrible customer service. I, personally, had stopped shopping there years ago (despite loyalty to my hometown) because every visit to one of their stores felt vaguely ghetto-ish.

I can’t count the number of times I drove by this place when business was booming and saw the lot completely filled. Now the hulking monstrosity of Circuit City’s corporate headquarters on Mayland Drive sat silent and empty. I instinctively knew that each empty parking spot represented someone now unemployed.

My wife and I drove around to the front entrance one more time and she pointed out to me that someone had mistakenly hung the Virginia flag upside down on the flag pole. I thought about it for a moment before I suggested to her that some wisenheimer on his way out the door for the last time had probably deliberately hung it that way as a universal signal of distress.

I thought about other Richmond businesses like S&K Men’s Wear, as well as Qimonda over in White Oak, all going belly up this year, too.

The portents of doom seemed to be swirling stronger above my hometown.

“Well, it’s a real shame,” I said. “All those lost jobs…”

We began heading out of the parking lot. I corrected myself.

“Then again,” I said, “if Circuit City had better customer service and a better product, they might still be in business.”

My wife said she agreed with me.

We took one last look at the building, came to a complete stop at an empty 4-way intersection, looked both ways, then headed out towards the main road.

July 11th

We cross the Rubicon today.

Going to Carmax to look at mini-vans…

July 10th

We were sitting at a stoplight in our rented mini-van. There was myself, my wife, our two children, our nephew, two old and incontinent dogs, and a bunch of stuff from our fridge that we’d hurriedly thrown in brown paper bags at the last minute.

We’d just left the tiny cottage my In-Laws allow us to use when we’re in Richmond and were now on the road to see my parents, who we hadn’t seen in six months.

The cottage is comfy for two. Ridiculously small for a family who are constantly on the move like we are. There’s no room to put anything, and more and more crap just seems to pile up.

There was so much clutter in the cottage on this latest visit that I told my wife that I thought that we were perilously close to becoming one of those hoarder families you see on TLC.

As we tried to collect our breath at the stop light from this life of constant motion, I told my wife I didn’t see how other people could do this, let alone a family of four with two dogs.

For the last three years it feels like we’ve never been able to just get settled. We’re constantly moving from one place to the next, or preparing to move. Right now as I type this I’m in a hotel room looking at 15 pieces of unpacked luggage that will probably remain unpacked until we reach or next temporary hotel lodging on Monday.

Very soon I would like all of this to finally stop.

July 9th

967 miles.

Too much fast food. Too many sugary drinks. Too many pee-pee breaks for the dogs. Too much Ira Glass.

It’s good to finally be home (and to never have to go back there again).