It's Taken Four Dogs to Raise Me.

Better to be 44 than not. It's as close as I've ever come to being the perfect age...and pretty soon, another year'll tick off and I'll have to change my tune to something like, "Better to be 45 than not. It's as close to being the perfect age..."


I used to see the guys that worked for me, twenty-somethings with new families and barely enough money to pay for them, and think, now that's the way to do it. They'll be able to throw or kick balls in the back yard until dark and take Tae Kwon Do kicks to the gut without having to gobble handfuls of Naproxen and Vicodin at bed time to calm a throbbing shoulder or neck. They'll be forty something when the kids move out, I thought, still kinda young.


But me, I had waited until I thought I was absolutely sure I could afford kids--their illnesses and their time. And I think that was better. By the time we had a couple, I was nearly ready. My wife had prepared me for a lifetime with someone who can't return things from whence they came and non-sensible arguments about butter and egg placement in our first refrigerator. But a few dogs may have taught me more about how ready I really was.


By the time we had kids, I had already figured out that maybe it isn't the end of the world that the boy liked to break everything he touched, that the girl constantly spilled everything she ate. Maybe I wouldn't yell at them when my brush disappeared, or when all the batteries  inside our various remote controls turned up missing, and the little trap door on the remotes--even some of the irreplaceable remotes disappeared.


And to think I made it to the ripe old age of 32 before I was calm, quiet and collected enough for children. Oh, I guess I still yell--I like "grandiose" gestures, but it's more for show. When I'm dead serious not much is said but a choice curse-word followed by the yank of the Wii's power cord, or the flip of a breaker thus shutting down an entire floor's electrical flow. Then I'll repeat, "Mom said it's time to eat!" or "Mom said it's time to study!" or "Mom said it's time to get up." or "Mom said it's time to clean the rat cage." I can still get things done...but no more stomping.


I know I'm more patient these days because of the simple fact that through a congenital, Mothershead "defect", there has almost always been a dog around to gauge my personal growth. I cringe at how I treated my first dog Duffer when I think back to the days in High School when, after I had put up a half a mile of fence to create a pen, I was allowed to pick out a "free" dog to call my own. Later, when I "moved out" unexpectedly before the end of high school, her life was a downward spiral that was caused by my own abject poverty--it was horrible to live and to see.


The days where I'd have to choose between gasoline (to get to work) or dog food were always towards the end of the week just before paydays. My dog who had never slept outside in her life was forced onto a chain in my new roommate's back yard. As lonely as I felt, it was Duffer who showed it, vocalized it, so that along with my isolation, I also got to enjoy some higher levels of self-loathing.


She couldn't be helped, but when I found a household that accepted dogs into the home to renters, we moved in expecting to live out our gravy days together, but it didn't last. One of us had fleas and they spread to the entire household which we shared with Jim and his horribly disfigured Himalayan cat. I honestly don't know where the scourge had come from, but we were blamed and asked to leave again. I just didn't have it in me to chain her outside again that being the one condition of letting us stay.


From there, I had to, hat in hand, go back to my parents and pass her off to them. She didn't fare much better there, but at least she was fed, and had a home. She even got to visit my college dorm one day, for an illegal bath and an unexpected run after a squirrel on the weekend-deserted campus of UNCG. The college in which I was accepted two weeks before school started in '89 because, at the whim of my father, I was deemed worthy to come back to the fold and receive his tuition money and blessing, until....


My girlfriend graduated and sadly, couldn't hang out in my dorm room all year like she had my junior year (maybe the only benefit to being an RA was the single room) and was going to get an apartment. Well of course, I invited myself along and we made plans to share a life together like 22 and 23 year olds do all the time. But pops didn't think so. In fact, suddenly, he felt like I should actually pay for the education myself from there on out--not because I was going to live in sin with the love of my life, but because I had made the statement that college life was "a gravy train with biscuit wheels" which he didn't like one bit.


So I quit.


I moved into a apartment to live in sin with the love of my life, and I settled into working residential construction though for the first time in my life, I was not hanging up my tool belt in the fall to return to school. From there I got us evicted playing music too loud--it was an old white guy who'd replaced the fun loving black folks whom we loved as they never complained about my music. And in turn, we didn't mind a young Otis coming over to hangout with the cats whenever he wanted. They had left suddenly and secretly probably days after a pretty intense stove top fire gutted their kitchen neither telling management or local firefighters!


So after sharing the shame of eviction, we found a tiny house to rent and then did something crazy. We eloped in a not-so-secret ceremony with a Justice of the Peace in coveralls doing the honours and dad actually springing for the 35 dollars owed as I'd left my checkbook at home. Luckily we had driven up to Martinsville, Virginia where getting hitched was 25 dollars cheaper than in NC. And from there, we bought a neighbor's house just down the street from the rental and I vowed to get a dog.


By now, we're a bona-fide couple, so all dogs are going to get three names and health care and as soon as I can, I go to the pound and grab a broke-eared, Basenji-Lab mix and gag when she barfs in the truck on the ride home. I was a 20 something with a dog named Mary Margaret Mothershead. She was to be a lonesome thing, so in short order we "rescued" (that's another story) a rat terrier for "Maggie" to play with and called her Melinda Kay Mothershead, our Molly.


Now, I had had the job, which blossomed into a career and budding corporation of my own, and the times in the white house were peppered with loving dogs and the first "apartment" cats and we were one big hairy family. The dogs had run of the place, slept with us off and on, and did as they pleased enjoying food scraps and finally, steady, decent health care.


I remember letting Maggie out one morning and watching helplessly as she sauntered into the road and not looking both ways was grazed by a passing car--the kind of car that really does come out of nowhere in that pre-dawn darkness that only construction workers and school teachers know. Scooped up into arms, my little 33 pound Maggie, "lifeless" and bathed in my tears, was awake and barfing in the truck before we even got to the Emergency-After Hours Vet Clinic.


A sleepy-eyed vet looked at my dog jogging around the waiting room for two seconds and said, "She's fine." I wasn't sure. "Look, her nose is bleeding, don't you want to take an x-ray?" He turned his back on us and said, "If you leave now, I won't charge you 100 bucks," and we scooted out the door. The guys at work were sympathetic to say the least--especially after I reenacted the tearful march holding my imaginary, "dead" Maggie in my arms for them to see.


The whole time with these dogs were extremely happy and gratifying for me, and I thought at last I was ready for children. Only rarely did the selfish Brett rear his head with an ugly, "Go on!" when I was eating or ready for a dog looking for a pat on the head (or snack) to leave me alone. Of course, being ready for kids is different from actually producing them, and I've mentioned how that was before now.


After a whirlwind of paperwork, and the selling of a house, the moving into then out of an apartment, and the subsequent moving into another rental house--all within six months--we were parents. And the dogs went right along with us bearing the brunt of a new indifference due solely because of our growing family. I was about to fail my dogs again. I was about to become a cowering cliche when faced with the "dilemma" of having our old children with four legs compete with a new son, and surprisingly, another baby, a girl, to come.


I can remember having to go to work one morning before dawn and letting two dogs, who'd obviously just been sprayed by a skunk, back into the house--I just had to go to run the crew. I didn't have time to stop and hose them off or dunk them in V-8. There was just never any time for anything but work and/or kids. See, Emily was born shortly thereafter, so "then there were two", sixteen months apart.  And then Maggie lunged at someone, a little boy, and though both were safely on opposite sides of a closed sliding-glass door, mothers saw, and wheels started turning.


When I came home from work and Maggie was gone, I was too tired to even put up a fight. I knew it was a conspiracy the likes of which I hadn't seen in my family since I was 13 and my very first cat was found mauled and dead in the woods by my parents who thought it wise not to tell me until I was a grown man. And, since we still had Molly, I quietly, and guiltily, accepted Maggie's fate as my own failure. There were times when I groused at the two dogs for panting on me, or begging for food, and I feel bad that I could somehow be that gruff with them verbally, but they were the ones who "took it" when I couldn't tell the baby's to "Go lie down!" or "Git!"


A few years pass and we moved into a house we vowed to not live in longer than three years. It has been our home for twelve. Naturally, Molly came with us, and slowly while we lived (and while some of us grew) there, she, and the apartment cats got older and older. And one by one they would pass until even Molly, my last chance at redemption for Duffer and Maggie, my last parental aid, was failing and needed help. She needed the kind of help they only get once and I didn't let her down.


Of course, this whole time I'm kicking Molly off the bed at night for years and years, my kids are turning into these little people--getting taller, smarter, and more vocal. They crack jokes, they use my own twisted logic against me. And like I mentioned before, they help destroy almost everything I let them come into contact with. But what's saving them? What's keeping me from eating them, yelling at them, or shooing them away when I think I'm too tired or too busy to listen to them? They're my dogs now.


Sure, it helps that the kids have brown eyes, brown and black hair like a dog, but the kids also have a dog's caring, wanting-to-please look in those eyes. So what I do now is make sure I avoid the same baleful look Duffer gave me as I left her in a lonely back yard coming from my children if I were to ignore their voices. I see the kids smile at me, approaching to beg for my last bite of a Hershey Bar or last piece of gum and I give in at last so I don't relive seeing Maggie drop her head and slink off after I had said, "Git!" And when one of the kids wants to sleep in my room, more often than not I relent, not wishing to relive seeing Molly waddle off to her corner dejected and hurt after getting the boot.


My dogs had taught me how not to parent, and showed me how things could be if only I would let myself behave like a father, and pack leader I guess. Doing right by these dogs now, though too late, I realize that there really is plenty of time for everyone, and always room for one more. Possibly making us the luckiest dog owners in the world, that old gene and a dog-less house sent me to the pound for one more chance recently. Sadly, this poor dog would only get one recycled name purloined from a cartoon monkey.


Steve has come enjoy the kind of life a wiser 44 year old can give to her. She's the dog that'll help me atone for every sin I've committed against her kind. She's as precious to me as one of two-legged kids I have, and I only have to watch her stare out the window watching for the school bus at four o'clock in the afternoon to know that she loves them as much as I do. Grab one of my kids gruffly and she'll let out a low rumble belying her smallish size.


So finally, I feel like I'm doing okay, even now knowing that there's room for improvement with the kids and the dog. As their math homework gets harder and I humbler, I tend to shrink away from them when I hear book bag zippers in the kitchen. Maybe if I had my own textbook. When I know my tubby dog needs and wants to go for a walk oh so badly, sometimes I act like I have too much to read, or write, or even, watch on TV. Steve doesn't know I don't have to watch TV to survive; she's cool like that.

But maybe best of all, since Steve's been such a joy, I know that if one dog is good, then two is bound to be better. It's been along time since I've heard eight paws charging my way through the house after the expectant, "Daddy's home!" call. And it's been a while since Steve frolicked in some grass with one of her own--even though I count myself and my family as just that.