My pets: past, present—and future?

I figured if I was going to start a blog on animal issues, I should begin with writing about animals in my own personal life.  My pets.

Or, if you prefer, my companion animals.  I know that some people are not fans of the word “pet.”  And, by the way, I often wonder if I am their pet, since I do everything they ask me to do.

I am not sure what all the arguments are for and against the different terms.  I do know that all the animals with whom I have shared my life are beloved family members—as they should be everywhere and for everyone.  My heart is saddened to think of any animal who endures a lesser fate.

My first pet as a child growing up in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. was a collie named Sam.  Purchased from a breeder in Fairfax, Virginia in the late 1960s, the Lassie lookalike was a sweet dog whom I dressed up for many snapshots that I still have. 

When I was thirteen, I spent almost the entire summer between eighth and ninth grades out of town.  Upon arriving home, I was informed that Sam had been ill for much of the summer and he was being kept alive for me to return so I could say goodbye to him. 

I remember Sam lying on blankets or towels on the basement floor and trying to get up to say hello.  I believe he had hip dysplasia; he had lost the ability to use his back legs.  Later, I stayed home with my great-aunt while my parents took Sam to a veterinarian for euthanasia.  It was the first time I said goodbye to an animal companion and I still remember vividly watching through the window as my parents loaded him in the car.

A few months prior to Sam’s death—almost as if uncannily coming along to ensure our family would not be without an animal at home—a stray cat came to our door.  Prior to that, my mother had said that if she ever got a cat, she’d want one that looked like Morris, the spokesfeline for the Nine Lives brand of cat food.  Lo and behold, the yellow stray was the spitting image and he was promptly named Morris.

Morris was a bit feral but could still be a loving cat.  He was especially close to my father, who would say in later years that Morris would leave the house early in the morning and come back at night in time for bed.  I think Morris thought he ruled the block and I would see him pop up in neighbors’ yards all the time.  He would frequently get into fights with other cats and his veterinarian once commented that Morris had one of the biggest medical files in his clinic.

That cat enjoyed ripping paper, whether it was a brown grocery bag or wrapping paper.  He would tear open his Christmas presents and somewhere I have Polaroid shots of his daringly smug and somewhat haughty face next to a small pile of shredded holiday gift paper.

More than fifteen years after Morris came to our family in the late 1970s, his health failed and he had to be euthanized.  The cat arrived when I was in junior high school and by this time I’d finished with my master’s degree.  I remember my father calling my D.C. apartment to suggest I come to my parents’ house to bid Morris farewell.  He and Morris were true buddies and I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad quite as upset as when Morris died.

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, I became interested in getting a dog.  I bought a couple of books and read up, long before the Internet was available.  A few years after that, once I owned a condominium where I could have a dog, I started a serious search.  I was sure I wanted a pug because that breed didn’t need a lot of grooming or exercise—perfect for a city apartment. 

Ignorant as I was, I began looking through the want ads of the Washington Post.  I was stunned at the prices.  This was 25 years ago and I remember one breeder asking $800 per puppy.  I had decided I wanted two puppies so they could keep each other company during the long hours while I was away from home working.  At the same time, I was planning a trip to Europe and thinking I could use $1,600 for the vacation.

One evening over dinner, I was complaining about the prices to a friend and he asked why I wasn’t going to a shelter to adopt.  Aha!  A light went off.  He was 100% right!  Why had I not thought of that?  That weekend, I went to a D.C. shelter for the first time—and sort of fell in love.  I saw dogs—and cats—whom I wanted to bring home right away and felt such an outpouring of affection, pity and empathy for all the animals there.

Later, I decided to adopt a dog who seemed so sad at the shelter.  So unloved, so withdrawn.  The little black dog showed little interest in our pre-adoption shelter interactions but I determined this was the canine most in need.  There was also an older beagle who seemed like she really needed a friend. I filled out my paperwork that I was interested in one of these two dogs and went home, waiting for the home inspection the shelter required prior to adoption.

As for the home inspection, I remember musing to myself about whether this was what Joan Crawford had to go through to adopt Christina! During the interview, I kept worrying what words that I was saying might disqualify me to be a pet parent.  And was my apartment clean enough?  Should I set out a vase of fresh flowers?  Or wear something like an “I LOVE DOGS” t-shirt?

At some point after that, the adoption counselor contacted me to say that he thought neither dog would be a good fit and that he’d seen cases of prospective owners wanting to be Florence Nightingale to forlorn cases.  Often, he noted, these matches did not work out.  He was also concerned that the beagle’s baying would be an issue in my condo. Furthermore, she was covered in what were likely cancerous growths.  He suggested coming back to the shelter and looking for another dog.

I ultimately decided on a wheaten terrier mix who was matted and covered in motor oil while in her run at the shelter.  But she was outgoing and upbeat.  She had a goofy personality and I named her after Daisy Gamble, the Barbra Streisand modern-day character in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the “go-alonger”—not after Jay Gatsby’s voice-like-money obsession.  That was October 1995 and Daisy lived until April 2009.  Loving soul that she was, she licked my hand repeatedly as we sat in the back seat during her last car ride on the final afternoon of her life, in spite of how poorly she must have felt.

I truly fell in love with Daisy and through her I learned so much about animals, as well as about caring, kindness, partnership and being, as they say, in the moment.  Her first days in my apartment were rough.  I left the closet door open once and she chewed many of my shoes.  She pulled down a ficus plant and moved it around such that dirt was everywhere in my living room.  And she barked and made messes while I was away at work.  I was concerned I’d made an unfortunate mistake.

Too embarrassed to bring her back to the shelter, I tried briefly to find her another home.  Fortunately, however, I kept her and she became a wonderful companion.  In one of our city walks, a man came out of a Safeway insisting that Daisy was his lost dog Choo-Choo; I can’t remember how the conversation ended but there was no way I was going to give her to this man—or anyone else.

A year after adopting Daisy, I went back to the same shelter and brought home another dog half her size.  She was a little shih tzu mix who was underweight and whose coat was scant and coarse.  She had been returned for excessive chewing a year after she had been adopted as a puppy from this same shelter. 

When I brought her home, I wanted just the right name and it took me a while to come up with something.  My across-the-hall neighbor, who sometimes babysat for the dogs—whom I now referred to as The Girls (yes, with a capital “T”)—said that if I didn’t select a name soon, he was going to start referring to her as Little Bit.  I ultimately decided on the name Roxanne for her so I could call her Roxie. 

This appellation was a nod to yet another movie character, Rocky Balboa, because when Roxanne was excited, usually about food, she would energetically dance around in a circle and jump up in the process.  This reminded me of Sylvester Stallone on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I shared my life with Roxanne for a little more than eleven years.  Although she came to me withdrawn and uninterested in giving or receiving affection, she blossomed in time.  I used to call her the Goodbye Girl, after the Marsha Mason character in the Neil Simon movie, because whenever she sensed I was leaving home and she was not going along, she would tremble pathetically.  The lyrics of the David Gates theme song for the film fit her to a tee.

After Roxie and then Daisy passed, I had six months without a dog.  This was 10 years ago.  My “pet-free time,” as I referred to it then.  Of course, it is wonderful to have pets but they do require a lot of extra work, time and commitment—and they can be expensive.  I was in no hurry to adopt from a shelter again, although I always knew I would.  Then, all of a sudden, I went to work for a shelter where I could bring a dog to work.

I decided on a little white dog, about ten pounds, who is either fully or mostly Maltese.  She had been rescued from a puppy mill bust in or near Staunton, Virginia.  All of the dogs from this bust were named after Virginia counties for their temporary shelter names.  She was Fairfax, which was a perfect fit since I’d grown up and lived much of my life in that county.  I then named her Ginger because it seemed to reflect her spicy and not-all-that-sweet demeanor.

I reflected later that she was the only dog I’d not named after a movie character and that if I had truly given her a film-role name that fit her, it would have been Miss Piggy.  Ginger—whom one friend called Hoover because she was like a vacuum cleaner to food set down on the floor—was estimated to be age seven when I adopted her.

Illustrating how she must have been treated in the puppy mill, Ginger was a scared, reserved, quiet dog, who was not the least bit effusive in her relationships with people.  The first night I brought her home, she did not move.  I gave her space by putting her in an open bathroom on a blanket that night and she was in exactly the same spot the next morning.  I doubt she slept.  In the next month or two, she tried to escape the apartment more than once, tore down low-hanging window blinds in an effort to get out and would sit in empty corners rather than interact with me.  It took her a while to get used to walking on a leash and entering a room if I was anywhere near the door she had to go through. I joked at the time that she took all the fun out of getting a new pet.

Her disposition led the shelter where we went each workday to request that I give her back, deeming the adoption a failed match.  I was devastated.  Here I’d devoted my career to helping animals and I couldn’t make a success of giving a loving home to this one traumatized dog!  But I prevailed with promises to work with her more and I still share my life with her.  It was ten years ago this month that I adopted her and I recently celebrated her seventeenth birthday. 

While she still has never overcome her general reticence and skittishness, she has come a long way.  She’s never licked me in the face but that would be just too close for comfort for Ginger.  On her sixteenth birthday last year, my mother made her a ground-beef cake in which we put sixteen candles; I posted on Facebook that Molly Ringwald should eat her heart out.

About four months after I adopted Ginger, someone alerted me that a dog who could be her twin had come in to the shelter.  She had a funny, low, hoarse bark that upon hearing it, I knew would be perfect for apartment life.  Neighbors wouldn’t be able to hear that nearly as much as a typical little-dog yap.  Also Maltese, or at least Maltese-ish, she was emaciated and had huge round eyes.  She reminded me of Audrey Hepburn so I named her Holly, after Miss Golightly, another one of my favorite movie characters.  Her voice, however, suggested that Bacall might have been a better name.

Holly has always been a quiet, demure, dainty creature, never one to take the lead or be anything more than gently kind and hesitantly joyful.  Sort of the Jan Brady of the group. She had been adopted from a shelter and found as a stray months later, which is how we first met.  With Ginger, she became the new set of The Girls.  In February, I will be able to celebrate ten years of life with her.

In 2015, after I bought a new house in Norfolk, I decided to adopt two black male cats to complement my two white female dogs—a co-worker of mine used to call them “the white girls”—but later decided on acquiring another little white-haired pooch.  Such dogs are quite popular at shelters and don’t last long on the adoption floor.  I looked online and found what I was looking for more than a hundred miles away but ultimately settled on a little dog who was brought to Virginia Beach by a veterinarian-led rescue group transferring in homeless animals from Southern locales where the surplus of homeless pets is high relative to the number of potential adopters. 

A little poodle who weighed only six pounds, she was high-spirited and affectionate from the git-go.  Photos showed that she’d been brought in to a shelter in Odessa, Texas as a severely matted stray.  A family with young children in Odessa fostered her for a week and I periodically update them on how this tiny sprite is doing.  I even mailed back her original harness that they’d given her along with a lock of her hair.

By the time I first saw her, this dog was a shaved-down, lamb-like baby whose haircut made her seem like a shrunken Bedlington.  Her exuberance is infectious and four years later, she has become even more fun-loving. 

I named her Zuzu after George Bailey’s adorable, pig-tailed daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life, a name I’d wanted to use for years.  It fits her so well.  Only six years old, Zuzu is a wee imp who likes to ride in the car behind the backseat against the window, rather, I think, like an even tinier version of Queen Victoria, surveying her realm and subjects as she rides through the streets in her carriage.  The Girls are now a trio.

I often wonder if Zuzu will be my last dog or even the one who will survive me.  I am only fifty-five years old but one never knows what will happen.  Whether Zuzu does or doesn’t survive me, will I see her again in what we think of as the sweet hereafter?  And what about all the other pets in my life—including Sam, who was euthanized more than forty years ago—will I see them again?

When I wrote a newspaper column about animal issues, I wanted to do one column on whether animals had souls.  My plan was to interview different members of the clergy in Norfolk to see what they thought about this topic.

Anyone who’s ever interacted with animals knows there is more than just a tangible body there.  They give and receive love while developing deep and warm relationships with us and each other; that’s more than many humans can say for themselves, whether they would admit it or not.  Certainly, animals have a soul, right? 

I suppose that depends on how one defines a soul.  Some may argue that even humans don’t really have a soul—that having some sort of spirit which ascends to Heaven is simply a comforting myth.  I don’t pretend to know the answer; in fact, no one knows the answer, despite what sincere, deeply felt faith may inspire many of us to believe.

Animals are said to cross the Rainbow Bridge when they die and that they’ll be waiting for us on the other side of the bridge when we die.  Then, we cross the bridge and are happily reunited.  A comforting fairy tale, to be sure.  

Actually, I am all ready to exchange Heaven for the Rainbow Bridge at any time.  Not that I will likely have enough karma brownie points for either destination.

Recently, I wrote an article about a woman close to my age and her mother who lived in the Northern Virginia neighborhood where I grew up about the loss of their brother and son, respectively, when he drowned at eight years old in 1971.  The boy was my age and I vaguely remember him from second grade.  In the course of interviewing the sister, who has since become a good friend, she raised a point about death I have now pondered many times. 

When she was a child and people would tell her that she would see her brother again one day in Heaven, she would wonder if he would still be age eight, as he was when he passed, or would he be grown up like his sister all these decades later.  Or would she be five years old when they met again, which was her age at the time that he died.

I guess that Heaven, if you believe in it, can defy Earthly confines like chronological age.  It can be anything that anyone wants it to be. 

As I’ve thought about the Rainbow Bridge lately, I’ve wondered if I would be thirteen years old again when I see Sam again or in my twenties when I see Morris again or, perhaps, in my forties when I see Daisy and Roxanne again.  And will they be healthful beings as they were when they were young or will they be the older, infirm pets whose lives were ended as acts of mercy?

I am not sure what will happen to my soul—if I have one—when I die, but, like all of us, I would like to see my beloved animal friends again and happily spend eternity with them.  Along with so many people whom I’ve loved, of course.  I’m supposing the good, kind humans will be at the Rainbow Bridge, too. 

Saint Peter may not be there to greet but maybe one of the shelter dogs or shelter cats whom I remember but didn’t adopt—like Landon and Lucas, the two black feline brothers whom I nearly took home in Norfolk because they’d been in the shelter together so long due to their lack of sociability—will be there for a welcome.  It would thrill me to know all those animals had gone on to a terrific life on Earth with a wonderful, loving family.

Yes, when the time comes, I will gladly take a one-way ticket to the Rainbow Bridge.  My bag will be packed—with lots of pet treats to hand out.