Goodbye, My Lady

I've known this post was coming, but I never wanted to write it. There's no way to say what I have to say without tears, and there's no way I can draw positivity out of it.

I know that death is a part of life, and I understand when I bring a pet into my life that she is likely to leave life before me. But "nature" and "reason" are incomprehensibly small next to the constant realization that I am never going to see Old Lady Cat again.

While she's been going downhill for some time, the final descent was steep indeed. She ate virtually nothing from Sunday until Tuesday, and although she seemed to rebound on Tuesday night, by Thursday she did not even wish to be petted, and turned her face to the wall.

Little Girl's daddy offered, as he did with Little Gray, to take her to the vet on this one last trip. I hope, if she could understand what happened, that Old Lady Cat would forgive me for letting him. I tried for so long to do what I thought my strong lady would want, but at the very end, I couldn't feel what that was.

I'm not writing this in my usual place, biking away and contemplating how to say things just right. I think there isn't any right way to handle a dying pet ... there is only what you can do. It doesn't ever feel like enough.

I just miss her so much. Fifteen years was a good, long time. But it wasn't enough, either.

Goodbye, my lady.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

I know there are dog lovers out there who think that Bad Dog's blog moniker is nothing more than the unfortunate by-product of a disturbed, cat-loving mind. No dog, they think in cuddly-puppy thought-bubbles, could be bad—perhaps misunderstood or misinterpreted, but certainly not "bad."

While I certainly don't put Bad Dog on the same red-hot pedestal as Cerberus, neither is she the simple by-product of my cat-centric world-view, or Little Girl's daddy's training (or lack thereof). No, from the moment we arrived at the Billings, Montana airport to claim—as the weary service-counter attendant described her—"the whiny one," Bad Dog was distinctly different from other dogs I have known.

She has always been brilliant: I don't dispute her intellect. But she's also always been less interested in pleasing people than in using them to further her own interests, most of which revolve around filling her belly or exercising her jaws. And she seems to be of the same, mistaken belief as many politicians in that she thinks that next time, she's not going to get caught.

"Next time," not unlike tomorrow, never quite seems to arrive, but that does not concern her.

I've become more adept at dealing with Bad Dog's transgressions than anticipating them. As I've said before, as pessimistic as I typically come off, I'm really not that good at it. I explain her—particularly to Little Girl—as more of an imp than a devil, because in my increasingly rare, kinder moments, I do believe that she doesn't intend to cause us people pain ... we just get in the way of her own desires and she forgets about our feelings.

But it's really hard, when confronted with the circumstantial—but overwhelming—evidence of Bad Dog taking very blatant advantage of Little Girl's kind offer to sleep on her bed, to gently advise a screaming-teary Little Girl that "Bad Dog didn't mean to make you sad."



It's also hard, especially now that several weeks have passed since the demise of so many of Little Girl's treasured Littlest Pets, to prevent my warped sense of humor from overtaking me. So I just gave up and let it.

It started when I saw this lobotomized cat figurine:



and thought: "You know, we could use this to sprout some of Little Girl's daddy's prairie plants this spring."

This sort of stupidity naturally led me to ponder how the rest of these creatures could be recycled, or (failing any silly brainstorm in that vein) what they resembled, or (because, while that got me farther than recycling did, it didn't get me all the way to the end of the line), what Bad Dog might have been thinking when she was downing them.

Just be glad I didn't take pictures of the bits that came back up, eh?

I thought that this bird's body:



could be combined, Frankenstein-like, with this dragonfly's head:



to create the world's first DragonBird.

That's as far as I got with recycling. One very small planter, and one freak-creature. Hey, I never said this was Einsteinian in its brilliance! Give me a break: you see what Bad Dog left me to work with here!

This pancake-creature was the one that we saw most often in the barf-piles that returned to haunt Bad Dog—you know, should there really have been any doubt about who was to blame—over the 24 hours that followed the slaughter of the leaders in the "Littlest Pets" gang:



All I could think of when I saw this one was "Tragic-Accident Persian." Which, sadly, is what I think of when I see Persians in general:



This mangled sled led me to wonder where in the "Littlest Pets" world the vicious, Venus-Flytrap of a tree that it obviously hit was located:



And this mostly-reassembled dog brought me back to the transporter accident with which Star Trek: The Motion Picture opened (and seriously, that traumatized me SO BAD when I saw it—at age 11 or so—that I could not imagine how any of those characters ever managed to set foot on one ever again ... holy shit, Captain!):



I figure the edging on this one looked like floss-potential, because if there's one thing Bad Dog insists up at the end of a fine plastic meal, it's good dental hygiene:



Little Girl, I must tell you, was not AT ALL amused by my planter idea, although I did wait several weeks to bring it up to her. (Needless to say, I didn't mention any of my other thoughts concerning the remains of the other brutalized "Littlest Pets" to her.)

However, she was charmed by—and eagerly assisted in—my idea to "book" the canine mastermind (or not) behind the crime.

At first, Bad Dog didn't take it very seriously:



But by the time we got to the profile shot, she realized she was in some pretty deep shit:



(Although all you soft-headedhearted dog lovers should know that the only sentence she got was to be banned from Little Girl's room. Because the judge assigned to the case—that would be Little Girl, and don't whine to me about bias and prejudice and that kind of nonsense, because frankly, I was ready to sentence her to a return to Canada when I heard her whining clear across the freakin' terminal the very day we picked her naughty dog ass up—is a softie herself.)

Making a Statement

There are several reasons why it should not come as a surprise that Little Girl recently received her first prescription for glasses:

1. Her daddy wears glasses.
   
2. Her mommy wears glasses.
   
3. The optometrist has been saying, "She'll need glasses someday." since he started seeing her in kindergarten.

And yet, when Little Girl told me one evening a few weeks ago that her teacher had moved her to the back row in the classroom—because she's tall—and now she couldn't see the blackboard, I was surprised. Maybe that's because:

1. Her daddy didn't need glasses until high school.
   
2. Her mommy didn't need glasses until high school.
   
3. The optometrist said, "Her vision has improved!" when he last saw her.

Regardless of the anyone's expectations—or lack thereof—however, at the exam I requested as soon as I heard Little Girl's complaint regarding blackboard blurriness, the optometrist was politely firm that this time: there was no "optional" status attached to his scribbled recommendation.

"I'm not surprised," I lied. And then said honestly, "We'll have this filled right away."

And so we did, just yesterday, enlisting The Exotic Neurotic for fashion consultation. While we waited for her to arrive, I turned Little Girl loose in the Quickie-Glasses Mart, reasoning that regardless of the hideousness of whatever she finally selected, if she would wear them, I would be pleased. Even if I was blinded by pink, which was, of course, her first thought when she learned she would be getting glasses:

"Can I have pink?"

The Exotic Neurotic, of course, could be counted upon for full honesty in relation to the suitability—or not—of eye-wear, or any other -wear. Fortunately, Little Girl also held The Exotic Neurotic in high glamour regard, which was why it was so vital that she attend the glasses-selection process. Naturally, I'd already primed Little Girl on the subject of glasses selection:

• Its importance to complement a variety of other attire.
  
• Its importance to enhance her facial features.
  
• Its vitality to not break our minuscule budget.

To her credit, Little Girl appeared to understand these constraints, and even find them acceptable. And yet, she was immediately drawn to a perfectly repulsive pair of exceptionally HOT PINK frames, with heinous yellow accents, and it was all I could do when she professed her love for the nasty-ass style, to moderate my reaction to:

"Oh my! Well, remember those, but do try on some other frames. You never know what will look good on you, and you really must try a lot of other styles before you pick."

(Little Girl's daddy, when I asked him later to imagine the first frames that Little Girl had been drawn to, summed it up exactly when he said, "Liberace glasses.")

So while I paced, sampled a few frames myself—my prescription had been revised on the same occasion that Little Girl's had been given—and repeatedly checked the clock, urging The Exotic Neurotic with prayer-like devotion to arrive NOW! NOW, please NOW!, Little Girl did do that, and eventually made her way out of the children's frames. Many of them were, in fact, too small for her, and a harried saleslady took a few minutes out of her racing day to point Little Girl in the direction of some transitional-sized frames.

Thank goodness she did.

By the time The Exotic Neurotic arrived—right on schedule, I should add ... hers, not mine—Little Girl had amassed a set of six frames, in which the first, frightening pair were miraculously not included. The Exotic Neurotic appreciatively approved three of these, steering Little Girl with subtle gentleness that she did not show ME, and deemed her overall selection as, "Very nice!" and the three finalists all as "Cute."

With the set thus narrowed and all of them making precisely the statement that girly girls everywhere adore making, my Little Girl quickly finalized two, and gleefully bounced off to observe the selections of others, while The Exotic Neurotic turned on to me.

"Is that the only pair you're going to try?" she inquired archly, sampling a few herself.

"Well, what do you think?"

"They're okay, but try these ... and these ... and these ..."

And so it went, with more laughter and bluntness than with Little Girl, but with just as much care and sensibility.

"I guess it comes down to what sort of statement you want to make," she said towards the end.

"I told you I was okay with 'Librarian,'" I replied, glaring at her from behind a particularly heavy set of frames.

"Fine, but you should at least aim for 'Sexy librarian.' Now, these," and she slid on a pair and looked haughtily upon me. "These say, 'Brainy, but a little dirty.'"

"Umm." Try as I might, I could not make the connection.

The Exotic Neurotic took pity on me and handed me another pair, which I tried on, and found rather disconcertingly stylish.

"That is 'Nerd chic.'"

"Umm. Okaaaay." I reached for the pair that had won the most favor with The Exotic Neurotic prior to this strange Statement Assessment phase of the glasses-selection process. "And what do these say?"

The Exotic Neurotic studied me carefully, her hand on her chin, her eyes narrowed, her every facial muscle expressing careful consideration. And then she said,

"'Works at Corporate, blogs at night.'"

Guess which pair I went with?