What Is This Thing Called DOG?

With apologies to the great Cole Porter:

What is this thing, called dog?
This hungry thing, called dog?
It eats, it poops, it sleeps like a log,
What is this thing, called dog?

Oh, what is it I am supposed to do?
It doesn't speak when I most want it to!
It gets me up at the crack of sweet dawn,
And tries to pee on my mean neighbor's lawn.....

Gosh, what is it I've done to deserve
This four-legged sheer bundle of herve,
It thinks I am it's servant, I know,
It wants to go wherever I go.....

If you can find me out in this fog,
If you can empathize with this blog,
Please send poor me a wise word or two
And help me out with  my new poochie-poo.

Well, we moved my friend Magge into a beautiful home where she will spend her final days in a peaceful and loving situation and, after a year's worth of crisis management, personal life adjusement, shopping, medical visits, Hospice arrangements, breaking through denial, getting relatives over here from Germany, not to mention finding friends to walk the dog in the a.m. and the p.m. because I've been too fagged out to do it all.......as of two days ago, I found myself ending up with The Dog.

Her name is Tess. This situation is nothing new to me, it has not been dumped on me, I volunteered.  When the question of, "Who will poor Tessie go to?" came up, I practically jumped up and raised my hand and exclaimed, "Me! Me! Poor Tessie shall go to ME!"  Well, okay, I wasn't THAT enthusiastic, but I was affirmative, by which I mean,  I was kind.  After all, Magge and Tess had lived with me for nearly a year in my old house in Bremerton, after Jim died.  Tess had sat in on hundreds of therapeutic sessions.  My patients loved her.  In my own way, I loved her.  What was not to love?  I didn't have to feed her, I didn't have to walk her, I didn't have to clean her, I didn't have to pick up her steaming poop when it hit the ground of other peoples' lawns......I just opened the door to my office, the next patient walked in and sat down, I introduced Tess, they said Oh, how pretty, I beamed at her good manners (she bites people on bicycles but not people who simply come in and sit down) and it was easy.

It was so easy.

So now I am nearly unable and practically unwilling to grasp, much less to accept, what is happening.  In the present tense.  Because here I am.  With Tess.  And, at least for three and a half days each week, I am on my own.   

Jim and I had dogs, but they were OUR dogs.  WE walked them.  WE bathed them (in the bath tub, with me sitting there in my bathing suit and our black lab, Dakota, her big eyes rolled back in her head like one of those hysterical-to-the-point-of-madness horses you see in the movies) flailing about in the water), we took them to dog-trainers, we took them to vets, we put them in excellent kennels, we did it all TOGETHER, until Dakota (the last dog and the one we loved the most) got sick and Jim got sicker and finally I had to take Dakota in and have her put down by myself.  Jim, he was too sick and had gone too deeply inside himself with his Mesothelioma, to be too cognizant about Dakota's whereabouts.

"Where's the dog?"
"Gone."
"Gone as in 'not in the room' or gone as in 'not in this world'?"
"The latter."
"Oh. Well. Sure did love that dog."

Well, folks, sorry, but that's the way farmers and railroaders and cowboys talk, when they're dying and their dog gets gone-dead-gone. Which brings it back to me.  Because I feel a little scared and lonely right now.  Like I won't do it right.  Like I'm going to forget something important.  Like, walks.

Like, how many walks is she supposed to get in one day?  I've been getting up at 8 a.m. and giving her anywhere from a twenty minute to a thirty-five minute walk - - and then, in a few hours, Alan has been giving her another twenty minute walk - and then she gets a walk around five o'clock, which is a longer walk -- and then one more before bedtime.  And how much food does she get?  Magge fed her once a day.

Once a day!  What kind of a life is that?  Once a day!  Really?   That awful dry stuff mixed with, what, a half a can of that slimey-looking canned stuff that makes me want to urp?  I can  barely handle the spoon after I slide it out of the can.  God.  That canned dog food is SO awful.  Should I be making my own out of cooked chicken and rice and, maybe, chicken broth? A little basil? 

WHA'??????????

The other thing is, that Tess never looks like she's having any fun.  Magge never played with her per se,  she doesn't know how to rough-house, not that I get very rough, but you know what I mean, I mean she absolutly NIPS if I get too physically playful with her and I DON'T want to encourage the nippy-tendency - - and I DO like to be cuddly and playful with dogs - - so - - folks, I think what I've got on my hands here is a dog that just wants to sleep and eat and walk and sniff and be petted on occassion, and that's.....it. 

And that's a LIFE?  It sounds so TRIVIAL! 

I know what you must be thinking, you must be shrugging your shoulders and saying, not unkindly, "What does it matter to YOU, you're not Tess, YOU'RE not a DOG!"

Well, thank you very much, I KNOW that. I KNOW I'm not a dog.  But I can FEEL.  I know what FUN feels like.  And I know that Tess doesn't look like she's having very much fun.  And, yes, I took her to see Magge, but she didn't look like THAT was very much fun, either.  For either of them.

So there.

Okay, this is so new I guess I'll just play it be ear until I better know what I really am up against.  She's nudging me in my crotch right now, which is SOME kind of sign,  it means she wants something, surely some kind of attention.  I think I'll take her out for a pee-break.  In my own little over-grown backyard, thank you very much.  Before my Tuesday five o'clock comes.

In the meantime, DO, if you have any at all to give, send me some advice. 

That's why I ask the Lord
In Heaven Above.....
What is this thing....
Called.......
                   ..............(love) DOG?