Bob's Bookends

In October of 2012, Bob the labradoodle came to live with me.  At that time, I was deciding whether to add him to my brood or help find him another home. Within minutes, there was no question. Bob was mine and he wiggled into my heart forever. His presence brought me a kind of joy I didn't know was even missing from my life.

His first family was going through an amicable separation and divorce. Alan was a working dad and Jena was a stay-at-home mom, and new challenges transpired with her returning to school and him assuming more parenting duties on his weeks with the kids.  At a year and a half old, Bob would add to their challenges exponentially, and no one was sure who should take him. Their black lab Alli was mature enough to go with the flow and either accompany the kids with each weekly transition or stay with Jena. My offer to try on Bob was accepted because they knew I loved dogs and as a friend of the family, he could still be in their kids’ lives.

When Bob died on Friday, the frantic search for old pictures and records began. Jena went through her old Facebook posts and couldn’t find record of it. She admitted that she probably didn’t say anything to many because she didn’t want people giving her a hard time about adding something else—an unruly puppy—to her already chaotic life.  Although she and Alan decided together to add him to their family, Bob was her idea. She was always searching for a something to fill voids she couldn’t quite explain.

In mid August of 2011, Jena loaded a puppy crate into her kid-van in Pocatello and headed to Jerome by herself to get Bob. The three kids were 3, 6, and 11 at the time and Alli the black dog was 6. (They’d gotten Alli within two weeks of having their second child.)   Her drive presented precious alone time that was scarce in her life. She talks of how Bob picked her out. All the other puppies galloped and played and paid her no attention, but Bob came to her. He approached her.

She sang to him on the way home because he whined for his litter mates. He threw up in his crate, so she pulled over to clean it up. She used her Eddie Bauer pocket knife out of the glove box to cut an old quilt kept in the back of the van for picnics. She cleaned up his mess with half of the quilt and put the other half in the crate with him for comfort.

Alan and Jena named all of their animals after musicians. Alli was named after Alison Kraus and Bob was named after Robert Smith of The Cure.

Bob spent a lot of his puppyhood in a crate. The family would let him out to be among them and he was terrible. Stay-at-home moms with more than one kid can easily imagine the chaotic after-dinner scene with kids sparring and no one helping clean up and there’s whining about baths and bickering over toys and Dad has to go downstairs to finish up some work and the black lab is getting into the trash and the other dog, BOB, is on the counter—ON THE COUNTER eating the entire loaf of bread set for the kids’ lunches the next day. Things like that happened often, so Bob was relegated to the crate.

One time he ate the oldest’s beta fish and then peed on her bed—likely right before bedtime when there wasn’t time to wash sheets. He chewed cables in the back yard and ate kids’ sack lunches. He’d steal underwear and eat them and then puke them up on the carpet within inches from the easy-to-clean tile. They loved him, but he was A LOT. He needed time and attention and exercise, but so did everyone else in the family. They weren’t equipped to handle him while they were together, and it was going to be more difficult with them apart.

When he came to live with me, I had to introduce him to my 11 year old golden very carefully. She and her sister who’s 12 stay with me half the time and with my ex the other half, and they are so sweet to people, but terribly aggressive. During their first meeting, my golden lunged at Bob, and I stuck my leg in between them. I suffered a terrible dog bite square in my thigh. All of Quincy’s teeth punctured my skin and I couldn’t run or ride my bike for a week.

The dogs worked it out and Stacy and Quincy let Bob into their pack.

Bob would spend time playing with the goldens and playing with Alli, but the goldens and Alli never play together.  He was the diplomat.

He loved to hike and bike and be moving. It helped him to behave. Barely. He’d run the trails and City Creek with so much zeal that he’d knock down the kids if he didn’t see them around the corner. When he’d visit Jena’s house, he’d resort to his worst behaviors with the trash and food thievery. Kids and adults would scold and yell and lock angry stares with his guilty eyes while he’d slink away and scheme some more.

On the Friday he died, I had just let Bob and Alli out of the kennel for their lunchtime let-out. They were zooming around the yard—bounding and lurching and chasing like they always did. I went inside to make lunch when I heard Bob’s cry. I could see out the window that it was his neck. They probably collided in a perfect catastrophe. Bob’s neck was broken, and he was likely paralyzed instantly.

I called Jena. She was in class. I got Bob into the truck and picked Jena up on the way to the vet. She got in the passenger seat but after a block, she wanted to get in the back with him. He was fading. She tried breathing for him remembering mouth-to-snout tips she’d read, but it was useless. I could hear her crying in the back of the truck as I sped and when I stopped at the vet and opened the tail gate, she was sobbing over his lifeless body. Oh Bob. Oh Jena. He was with you when he came home and he was with you when he left.

The vet staff brought out a cart and got him in and they checked his vitals and he had indeed passed. The poor vet is new to their office. She was so kind and so tender and left us to be with Bob. We cried and pet him and took a few pictures. I texted Alan while standing over Bob. Alan is a no-nonsense, no-frills guy, so my text was succinct and to the point:

 

So Bob and Alli were wrestling in the yard. Bob broke his neck. He’s gone. Will you please let the kids know?

He responded with:

I’m so sorry. That is awful. You ok?

As condolences poured in via Facebook, I felt like I wanted to be around people. Alan called the brew pub to reserve space for a gathering that night because neither Jena nor I could imagine carrying on a conversation yet.  He said he’d come by and bring the kids. He also brought an iPad so we could run a mini slide show of Bob pictures.

While people were toasting Bob and buying me beers because they felt the joy and mischievousness of his spirit in my Facebook posts, Jena, Alan and the kids were there mourning, too. Bob’s death brought back memories of how he came to be Bob at a time when their lives and their family was very different than it is now. 

As over 200 comments of comfort and support for me came in after Bob died, Jena was experiencing more than I can imagine. She’s got her own loss in his departure, being with him at his beginning and his end. She’s got a guilt that she couldn’t be to him what I was; she wasn’t the one who told her boys he died; and that night at the brew pub, she watched the woman who Alan is now dating offer wonderful comfort and sweet solace to her sons. That is a lot of damn stuff to process in the passing of Bob.

Life is a constant series of taking hold and letting go. Deciding what we can handle and what we can’t. When to love and when to retreat. Making mistakes and making amends. Elements of Bob’s life had many people making these choices through pain and joy and hope and just doing the best they could.

As humans, I truly believe that we do the best with what we have. And what we don’t have. Right now I am sad—SO SAD! —that I no longer have Bob, but I’ll just keep doing the best I can. Bob became my dog and our bond was recognizable and indisputable, but his first family still loved and maintained their own bond. Bob was my souldog, but Jena was his bookends.

Jena and Bob "helping" me pack.

My favorite collage capturing his expressions.

Bob was their protector and their pal.

And even though he ate her fish, peed on her bed
and always went through her trash, the oldest
still loved him and took this picture on his last birthday.

Bob loved trips to patios. And me.

The pack of gold dogs at Bonneville park while the boys played.

Gee. Which one of the pack got into the kitty litter?

We all loved drinking fountain pictures.

Mountain biking break at Elk Meadows.

Bob was big, but he fit perfectly in my lap and in my heart.

Bob standing on a coffee table while they played.

What can I say? He stood on tables.

How napping with Bob in the house often went.

How waking up from a nap with Bob went.

Bob and his buddy Alli running at Alvin Ricken.

Bob and Alli at Bartz. They loved the space to be free.

This is how they played. And how Bob died. There was joy.

Resting together. 

City Creek hikes were EVERYONE's favorite. Bob was always a blur.

Always climbing and being together.

 

He loved cooling off in the creek by the bridges.

"I'm heading to the bridge. I'll see you later."

A Tub of Prunes

Yep. It’s January. Gray, grumpy and grumbling am I.  I’ve read up on seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and I am a prime candidate. My winter blues, however, could also be connected to my mom almost dying one January and then dying this month a year after that. I remember it all this time of year. While I may be remembered for my love of turtles, Wonder Woman or cow suits, my mom is remembered among a few for her prunes.

With debilitating heart and lung disease, my mother wasn’t able to return to the office during the last year of her life. Management let her work from home, and many accommodations were made. She called her lazy boy in the center of the house “mission control,” and with a card table on wheels in front of her and a plastic set of mini cabinets beside her, she had everything she needed within her reach.

She had work papers, pens, notebooks, files, white out and batteries. Her medications, the telephone, popcorn salt, the TV remote and medical tape for her oxygen tubes were right there. She also kept a supply of prunes in the bottom drawer of her cabinet because she ate a few when she took her medicine.

Her work arrangement only worked for a few months and she was told she’d either need to return to the office or retire. She wasn’t ready to go, and she cried, but it was time. She retired from Health and Welfare that late summer, but she kept her mission control set up and would write letters and watch CNN from the cockpit. Many of her colleagues continued to visit for weekly lunches.

She decided that the prunes in the cabinet were too far away, but she didn’t want the Sun Sweet tubs visible to guests. In a fit of crafty genius, she used left over wrapping paper from Christmas and my birthday to wrap her tubs of prunes so guests would think they were simply a decoration.

She had three friends who visited regularly and when they came for lunch the week before she died, she let them in on her prunes secret. The ladies laughed. After so many years working together they were at the point of discussing the importance of prunes and the measures taken to ensure their consumption.  

On a Saturday, Mom sent me to the store for groceries and the list included prunes.  She wanted to wrap them and give them to her pals as both a gag and a gift. I didn’t care for buying five canisters of prunes at a time, but it was better than when she sent me to the adult entertainment store to buy Chippendales birthday cards for her friends.  I’ll choose prunes over dudes in Speedos, thank you.

Mom died just hours after I unloaded those groceries. One of the hardest things I’ve done was go back to my childhood home the next day knowing she was gone from this world. I had to get a nightgown for the funeral home because Mom viewed death as an eternal nap, and she wanted to be buried in her best flannel gown. While wandering the house and looking at my pictures on the walls, mission control, and all of the signs of a former life, I saw the prunes on the counter.

On auto-pilot, I pulled up to the kitchen table to wrap them. This was the table where we played Trivial Pursuit for hours; where she wielded her red pen over my essays and scholarship applications and condemned “too much flowery language”; where we shared Thanksgiving dinners with wayward ISU volleyball players who couldn’t go home for the holidays. I’m suddenly panicking that I don’t remember what happened to that table.

I sniffled and cried in the otherwise silence while I made those canisters the most beautiful tubs of prunes ever to be. I placed a bow on them and when I got to the To/From tags, I lost it. The sniffles succumbed to sobs and I clutched all three canisters like they were all that I had left of my mother, and I was going to give them away. I wanted to keep them, but they were meant to be given.

That January was a ceremonious passing of the torch in a handoff of the prunes. When Mom was no longer there to wrap them, I had to. I have no idea how I managed, but I delivered those gift-wrapped prunes to her pals at her old office just days after she died. I imagine if Mom was here today and I brought up feeling grumpy and heavy, she’d smile, wink and say, “there, there, Honey. I’m sorry.” And then she’d hand me a tub of prunes.

Blue Lights Bleed

Last weekend, I could feel myself coming down with another mid-life crisis, so I headed to a car dealership.  While waiting as they searched their database, I had some time to browse Facebook on my phone. An alert zipped by. “Kerry Baxter is going to Blue Light Week.”  My pal Kerry also goes by Detective Sergeant Baxter. I clicked on “Blue Light Week” to see what it was.

“Replace your porch light with a blue light bulb for 1 week to honor all police officers that have fallen in the line of duty. These brave men and women have sacrificed everything for us so let's show our support. For all that are invited please feel free to invite anyone you wish. Let's spread the word!”

Simple enough.

The charming former jocks running the car dealership computers let me know that it’d take some time to see if what I was interested in was out there. They took my number and said they’d call me.

On my way home from the dealership, I needed to stop at the grocery store and I decided to go ahead and get a blue light bulb.  I don’t get to see my pal Kerry much, but last year when work had me in New England over a nine month stretch, I got to see her a lot. She was the first woman in New Hampshire to reach the rank of Sergeant, and is now a part of a detective unit investigating crimes against children and sexual assaults. She has been with the Mountain Bike Unit and Ceremonial Unit and received the Medal of Valor. And a little over a year ago, she begrudgingly paricipated in an unforgettable Cow Suit Saturday with yours truly. (I still can't believe I got her in a cow suit!)

We text a few times a week and talk a few times a month, but either of our schedules can alter that one way or another. She had been working homicides over the holidays, one involving a child. Uncannily she texted just as I was grabbing the blue light bulb.  She sent me a link to a New England news site: “Nashua mother faces murder charge in 3-year old’s death.”  They got their arrest.

Kerry can’t give me many details about her cases. After growing up with a mom who was a child protection worker, I know exactly the kind of depravity, senselessness and evil she sees in her job while I experience a little back pain and monotony with my cubicle privilege.  The control in her personal life makes up for her lack of control at work.

She irons all of her pants and dress shirts with razor sharp creases. She shovels perfect paths around her backyard for her dog to traverse after a snow storm, and her counters and medicine cabinets are pristine.  She doesn’t have ice cream and beer in the same day, and she works out at least two hours a day, not necessarily to stay fit for the job, but to channel everything into exhausting and mindless sets and repetitions. 

  

I intended to put my blue bulb in my front porch light, but I’d need a ladder and tools and I had ten minutes to get to the brew pub to meet a friend.  The sun was setting and I didn’t want to waste moonlight by waiting for the next day, so I put the blue light at my side entrance which opens to my kitchen and basement. After I got all gussied up to go out, I headed downstairs to empty the cat litter—because with three cats I do this 17 times a day now—and I halted at the sight of the cobalt glow.

It was so solid and steady. When I see blue lights, they are usually flashing on a police car or lining a runway. There’s usually something about to happen, but outside my window just past dusk, nothing was happening. At least not in my driveway. But somewhere in this country, at any hour of the day, something is happening involving police officers. 

I walked outside, took a blurry picture and sent it to my pal.

I’ve seen a few other blue lights at people’s houses this week, and while I can’t speak for the personal and specific reasons behind the others, I can tell you that my blue light bleeds into the black of night in honor of my buddy Detective Sergent Kerry Baxter and the many other solid and selfless, service men and women who do what they do. 

The Important Things

I began writing the gist of this column last fall, but it never came to fruition.  It’s apropos that I finish it on Day 1 of 2015.

Of the many out there, I enjoyed my personal “year in review” on Facebook.  My most “liked” photo was taken in August of 1952 on Pike’s Lake in northern Wisconsin.  It shows my mom at age 10 in a picturesque, perfect-form swan dive off of a rickety dock and makeshift diving board. Three other kids are waiting on the 10-foot platform behind her. I’m sure it was a gorgeous summer day on the precipice of fall, but the black and white photograph leaves it to my imagination.  A LIFE Magazine photographer was vacationing at a neighboring cabin and happened to capture the shot.

The picture is framed and hangs in the center of my house. It’s what I see when I leave my bedroom in the morning as I trip over the dogs and the new cat Phil (who’s doing great, by the way) en route to the coffee. Whether I consciously take in the sight of my free and flying ten year old mom and the other kids or only give them a glance, my mind sees them daily. Everyone in that photograph is now dead.

Right across from Mom’s swan dive in my narrow hallway is another purposeful centerpiece of my home. It’s an 8x10 print by Brian Andreas which reads, “Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.”   

This is starting to sound like the Robin Williams trophy case scene in Dead Poet’s Society.  That is the scene where he introduces the students to the Walt Whitman poem, “O Captain, My Captain.” Robin’s character Mr. Keating asks the male students to “peruse some of the faces from the past” in the black and white pictures enshrined in the trophy case. He tells them that those faces were once as young and vibrant as theirs, but now they are “fertilizing daffodils.”

Robin Williams’ death this year made me cry. Hard and often. His character in that movie gave a monologue about those old photographs that rings in my ears as poignantly as any parental advice ever did.  “They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable?  Seize the day, Boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

That’s pretty much the pep talk I give myself every New Year’s Day.

On this New Year’s Day, what have I done with my time so far? I set my sights on quality writing over coffee, some quiet to send New Year’s letters—because Christmas cards didn't happen, and a hunt for endorphins in the snowy sunshine.  This is hardly the quality I’d hoped for. The house has hardly been quiet, and endorphins continue to elude me. Exercise has to be more important in 2015 than it has in 2014.

Nope, I’ve spent the first morning of the new year trying to unlock the door to my girlfriend’s sons’ bedroom. One of the little twerps locked it on our way to a New Years Eve party. We discovered it at 10:30pm. She had to take a shuttle to Salt Lake at 6am for her grandmother’s memorial service in Texas and their dad has plans for the day before he picks them up this evening.  (Although I’m beyond positive he would come grab the kids in an instant if I needed him to.)

So, what’s the big deal if they can’t get into their room for a day? All of their Christmas toys are in there to entertain them and facilitate the quiet, and that’s where their clean underwear is. If I’m in charge of getting them ready to go to their dad’s, clean underwear is important!

I turned to Facebook. My friends sent YouTube videos, other tips, and an uncle’s phone number who’s a retired locksmith. Do you think he’d come over on New Year’s Day and not charge more than what  the Christmas toys are worth?  By golly, he did.  He made us important for an hour on his first day of 2015. Bless him. His fee was more than reasonable, but seemingly astronomical to the little door-lockers who've been silent since.

We've got clean underwear and a bit o’ quiet, and that is important and enough for now while I wonder what will bubble to the forefront of 2015’s other important things.