Cookie

In 1979, my grandmother and my uncle purchased a business.  It had once been a thriving kennel, breeding cocker spaniels and poodles and boarding the hapless pets of even more hapless humans.  At the helm were two elderly sisters.  They were getting along in years, and they were not small, delicate people.  It was no longer easy to clean the floor—even to see the floor beyond their considerable and frighteningly garish housedresses—to see to keep the handwritten ledger books, or even to toss the dead puppies over the fence. My mother’s youngest sibling, Bill, had been employed there in his early teens.  Despite the less-than-appealing elements of the job, he had enjoyed it.  We were close in age, if not in temperament, and we’d spent hours walking along the drainage culvert between his neighborhood and the mall, daydreaming out loud about what life would be like if we had a kennel of our own.

Wishing to help her only son to find his niche in the world, my grandmother moved quickly in response to the news that the massive sisters wished to sell the business. The day we took possession, there were two dogs in the kennel.  I was fifteen, Bill seventeen.  We bounded across the threshold, flush with the pride of ownership.  Well, Bill and my grandmother were owners. I was just an employee, but I was still excited.

The smell just about knocked us back out the door.  Butch the Bassett Hound and Arky the St. Bernard looked hopefully up at us from the urine-soaked linoleum.  Cleaning had not been the ladies’ forte.  The next day was my first in charge of the afternoon kennel shift.  I let the dogs outside into their runs, poured oatmeal-colored cylinders of kibble into the rusty tin feeders, changed the water in their water bowls, and then scooped the outside runs.  Reflexively holding my breath, I stepped back into the building.  It seemed as though it should have taken longer.  What had I forgotten? I stood in front of Arky’s pen and asked him.  He looked down at his feet, and I remembered.  Mopping.  I was supposed to mop the floor!  I knew I had missed something.  I might not be the employee of the year just yet.

Butch was picked up by his happy owners in another week, and they promised to bring him back the next time they went away.  Arky’s owner, it turned out, really didn’t want him any more.  He was huge, well over a hundred pounds, with a long, silky coat, a playful disposition, and jowls dripping with green-tinged slobber. She paid for him to stay with us for another full year, during which his health declined despite our ministrations.  We loved him; he was our silly companion through long days of work and reconstruction. 

It took us a while to renovate the original structure. We started inside, replacing the redolent wood with chain link panels, then ripping up the decaying linoleum. After quite a lot of scrubbing, we slathered the floors with a few coats of marine epoxy paint and hoped for the best.  Before the two new buildings that followed had even been bid, before we had managed to replace the crazy quilt of scrap wood, chicken wire, and chain link that made up the outdoor runs and the yard enclosures, we had a special guest. 

            Cookie was a Maltese, all silky white hair with little black button eyes and nose. Cookie’s family had left her in our capable hands while they vacationed in some delightfully dog-free location.  They had not looked back.  Cookie was not pleased. 

In her view, confinement was confinement, even in a suite as gloriously spacious as the new Steward Kennels had to offer.  Never mind that she had a soft bed, room service, and spacious accommodations indoors and out.  She did not have her family, and she did not have her freedom.  She could not seem to make us understand that the situation was untenable. She decided to demonstrate.

One evening in her outdoor run, Cookie managed to wriggle out from between the wooden fencepost and the slightly bent galvanized gate.  Free from her cell, Cookie looked around to see what was next.  She catapulted herself toward the greenest pastures that she could see, which happened to be the front yard of the house in which I resided (and in which the kennel office was housed).  From across the yard, I saw the flash of white. Adrenaline coursed through me, and I shouted for Bill.  Cookie made short work of the gate into that yard, too, squeezing through before we could get to her.  What she did not know was that there were some maintenance projects long overdue in that yard. 

Bill and I dove through the gate after her as dusk was falling, afraid that she would be harder and harder to find in the tall grass that choked that mostly-untended piece of property. My grandmother lived downstairs, behind the office, and my mother and I lived upstairs.  Bill lived across the driveway, in an apartment he’d painted himself.  This was the explanation for the bathroom being electric lime, the living room gold, and the bedroom midnight blue. You might think that two teenagers, faced with a situation in which our livelihood and reputation was clearly and decidedly on the line, would call for help.  That didn’t really occur to us. The only other people on the premises were our mothers, neither of them experienced in canine retrieval.  We were the dog handlers, and we had better figure something out.

Our own dogs were the only ones who had ever used the yard, and they tended to stay pretty close to the house.  The fence was ancient, rusty, and sagging dangerously in places, held up primarily by the prodigious growth of honeysuckle that had practically swallowed it whole.  Our own dogs had made no attempt to breach the perimeter, so we had no idea how it would stand up to a determined escapee.  Not well, we guessed.

The sound that came next was remarkably clear and distinct. 

Glunk! 

Cookie had discovered something that even we did not know.  She discovered that the ground around the septic tank was somewhat unstable.  If one were a small dog, one could fall in, and one apparently had. 

It was a splashy sound, but splashing in something thicker than water.  It didn't smell all that great, either.  A string of profanity followed from Bill, who had almost fallen in, himself.  He described the situation to me, his voice cracking with tension.  I ran to the garage to find something, anything that might aid in the removal of a dog from a septic situation.

I found one.  I don't know why we had a fishing net, but we did.  I grabbed it and raced back to the edge of the hole. 

            More splashing ensued, and more profanity.  A dog-paddling dog in sewage is not as easy to catch in a net as one might imagine. I stayed a few feet away, ready to try to head her off if she bolted out.  I was afraid to come closer, ashamed for letting Bill do all the work even though he had warned me not to come near the hole.  He wrestled with the net. Finally, in almost full darkness, he pulled her out.  Reaching into the net in relief, he slipped his hand around her collar.

            Our small friend was not all that pleased with this turn of events, or any of the events of the last day or so. Cookie sank her teeth into his hand.  With a surprised bellow, he let go, and she was off.  Like a streak of liquid garbage, she shot across the yard toward the decrepit fence along the road.  We tried to follow, but it was overgrown with weeds and briar bushes, and we lost her. 

            A day went by.  We searched, we called.  WILM and WJBR offered free radio ads for lost dogs, and we ran ads immediately. Finding the dog was more important than not raising eyebrows by broadcasting our failure.  My four-year-old cousin, considered with great confidence by the family to have psychic powers, was consulted.  "Can you see a little white dog near grandma's house?  She's lost, and Uncle Bill is trying to find her." 

He shook his head.  He saw a dog, he said, but it was not white.  It was kind of brown. 

            Well, yes, that very well might be.  Is the dog okay? 

Yes. 

Where is she? 

She's walking down the road near Grandma's.

            I was a little bit sullen about this, because some people though I was pretty darn psychic, too, but it was the only lead we had. We walked up and down that road, and she did not appear.  We sat in the kennel office together until late that night, willing the phone to ring, worried about Cookie and discouraged about the whole business. Losing guests was probably not the shortest road to a reputation as the premier pet hotel in the tri-state area. 

But my cousin might not have been wrong, after all, because the next day, we received a call from the neighborhood just beyond ours.  Someone had Cookie. We called Cookie’s owner to give them the good news. They said that they would prefer to fetch her themselves, and they returned early from their vacation to retrieve one still-stinky but otherwise unhurt dog.    

            We had a cover built for the septic tank, but Cookie’s family never boarded her with us again.  Go figure.

Religious Education

            My cousin Jan was the sixth of seven children in a devoutly Catholic family.  They went to church every Sunday, attended Catholic schools, and did their best to follow the time-honored teachings of the church.  I was envious of the ritualistic conviction with which they did these things, and of the usually-cheerful chaos of a large family.  Jan, I thought, was envious of my apparent life of leisure, free from the restrictions against which she chafed.

            I loved to visit their huge—to me—stone house in Upper Darby.  From the end of their block you could look down the hill to the Philadelphia skyline, just a short trolley ride away.  Their street was shaded by a canopy of ancient trees, and life inside their home felt as solid as the stone with which it was built.

I usually visited on Friday nights, but the year that I was 10 years old, I stayed overnight on a Saturday.  Saturday was bath night and ice cream night.  Jan and I shared the bathtub with some difficulty, as we were both getting long-legged, and I marveled at the angry red line that ran from her shoulder to the base of her spine.  It was made redder with mercurochrome, making it look like the lips of a drunken woman who has recently re-applied her lipstick with less than perfect accuracy.  The injury was a cat scratch, the worst cat scratch I had ever seen.  The previous Saturday night, her younger sister had thought it would be funny—or a pleasant revenge for big-sisterly arrogances—to put the cat into the bathtub with Jan.  The cat had thought otherwise.  The cat had assessed the situation immediately, honing in on the obvious solution: use that girl, there, as a ladder.

It worked just fine.  He did not see what all the fuss was about.  There was screaming and howling and thrashing about, and he made for the gap between the door and the door frame.  By the time Jan’s mother reached the top of the stairs to see which of her daughters had murdered the other, the cat was in brother Daniel’s room, licking the guilt off his paws.   Looking at Jan’s back in the tub gave me occasion to reconsider my wish to have siblings.

On Sunday morning, everyone went to church, because not going to church was a sin. I did own a dress, although it was not exactly subtle and humble.  This was the mid-70's, after all.  It was emerald green polyester, with a wide elastic band of yellow and red stripes around the waist.  We had breakfast: a bowl of Fruity Pebbles cereal and a glass of Tang to drink. I read the explanation of the origins of Tang—supposedly created for the astronauts of NASA—on the bottle while we ate, and felt very space-age.  Neither of these food products were available at my house.

            Ten or fifteen minutes into the service at St. Lawrence's Church, I noticed that everything was starting to sound blurred, somehow.  My vision developed cracks in it, as if the whole world were an ancient, yellowed stained-glass window.  I said something to Jan’s mother about not feeling very well, and she ushered me outside.  No sooner did we get out the door but the Tang and the Fruity Pebbles were immediately dispatched into the shrubbery by forces beyond my control.  I stood, weaving, looking at the colorful result, and Jan volunteered the information that it was a sin to eat before Mass, too. 

            Thank you very much for withholding this vital information. Now you tell me!  In retrospect, I think that rule was about communion, which I did not take because even though I had been baptized Catholic—my mother thought it was all bullshit, but just in case she was wrong, she figured I shouldn't have to suffer for all eternity—I had not done the whole communion training and rehearsal thing.  Still, on this morning I thought that maybe the Blessed Mother didn’t have anything better to do than check her clipboard periodically and punish eaters of unauthorized breakfast cereals.  Or the Holy Ghost. Really, what were his responsibilities, anyway?  It all seemed very unclear. 

            So despite my yearning for union with the unseen, my wish to be enveloped in unconditional love and feel the true path of righteousness under my Converse high-tops, I did not return to a Catholic church for quite some time.