Last Bus to Crazytown

My husband and I are empty nesters. Our youngest child went off to college in the fall and last winter, anticipating this event, I did what any hormonally imbalanced woman would do.

I went down to the local animal shelter and adopted a rescue puppy.

And this is not just any rescue puppy, mind you. This is a rescue puppy with plenty of emotional baggage. (Think Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) It seems our shy puppy, only three weeks old, had been found huddling with his three siblings under a bush on Christmas Eve after witnessing their stray mother get hit by a car. One of the puppies had already died of exposure. The others were taken in by a loving foster mother who rose every few hours for three weeks to hand-feed these poor orphans.

We named him Yoshi, which means “good” in Japanese.

We were as anxious as any new parents might be to raise this one right. We bought every dog-rearing book we could find. We’d had dogs before when the children were small, Jack Russell “Terrorists”, my husband called them, but we’d been too harried and over-burdened as parents to pay much attention to the dogs.

Yoshi has a group of plush animals, his “babies”, that he sucks every night as he’s falling asleep, as diligently as my children used to suck their thumbs. He rides with us in the car, goes for long walks in the park, sits between us on the sofa at night watching television.

Worrying about his socialization skills, we took him to the dog park. He didn’t do well. He seemed horrified by these strange four-legged creatures that bounded over, intent on ramming their noses up his ass. He sat down abruptly and leaned against my leg, humiliated and confused.

Thinking he might find a better class of playmate, we took him to a local doggy daycare. The woman in charge, who my husband fondly calls “The Commandant,” stuck him alone in a room with a large, overly friendly Doberman. (She raises Dobermans, of course). When Yoshi squealed in fright at the slobbery advances of the Doberman, the Commandant claimed that he was a “fearful dog” totally unsuitable for daycare. “You have no way of telling with these mixed breeds,” she told me. “Why he’s the way he is.”

Did I detect a bias against mixed-breeds? Oh no she did – ant.

I insisted Yoshi be given a week’s trial. As far as I was concerned, he showed more intelligence than any of these over bred, muscle-bound, pedigreed dogs she seemed so proud of. Every morning Yoshi rose and when told he was “going to school”, pranced, tail-wagging with excitement, toward the door. Every day at naptime I picked him up from daycare, hopeful that he’d managed to make a few friends. On Friday, the Commandant crooked her finger and indicated I should follow her into the office. Yoshi was being expelled. He had only made two friends but they were in the little dog class and he was too big to play with them. The big dogs didn’t like him. He wasn’t a team player.

I came home with a lump in my throat, imagining Yoshi friendless on the playground. Sitting by himself at the lunchroom table. Not being invited for slumber parties at the more popular dogs’ houses.

“Never mind,” my husband sniffed. “We both know Yoshi is gifted. He’s too intelligent and sensitive for those other dogs.”

I blew my nose, pouring us both a stiff drink. “Do you think we should adopt again?” I asked . “So he won’t have to be an only dog?”

Indian Princess

As children, my father always told us we had Cherokee ancestry. This wasn’t too hard to believe as my brothers and I had round Charlie Brown heads and, what the neighborhood kids liked to call, “Chinese” eyes. My brother’s nickname was Kato and mine was Suzie Wong.

We weren’t just Indian; we were Indian nobility. We were descended from a Cherokee princess, according to my father. He was a large somber man with a Gaelic temperament, meaning that one moment he would be weeping over a particularly beautiful verse of Yeats, and the next roaring in rage over a bicycle left in the driveway. He was a college professor struggling to earn his Ph. D with a wife and three children in tow, and often seemed to be walking a tightrope between hope and utter despair.

My mother, a sweet Southern girl, ruled him with an iron fist although he was unaware of this, of course, as the fist was clothed in a soft downy glove. Direct confrontation was never my mother’s style. She could soothe and cajole my father out of his moods with a skill I’ve only seen matched by The Horse Whisperer.

In those days my father was on a ten-month teaching assignment, meaning he spent a month teaching at a summer camp for forestry students and the remaining two months of the summer traveling with his family. Our travels, regardless of the mileage involved, were always done in an automobile where my brothers and I, endlessly bored, would devise a series of rough games to keep us occupied. The backseat was divided like Gaul into three parts; as the eldest, I took the section directly behind my father where I could mock him with impunity (and where the belt, should he loosen it and begin to flail over the seat back, could not reach); my middle brother took the middle section with two borders to defend; and my youngest brother, who was prone to car sickness, hugged the far door.

The summer of my twelfth year we took a trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota. My father had brought along Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for his light summer reading, a horrific account of the massacre of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children by the U.S. 7th Cavalry, and as the vacation wore on he sank deeper and deeper into one of his black moods. We watched anxiously as my mother tried, and failed, to bring him out of it.

“Oh look,” she said, clapping her hands gaily. “A trading post. And they have real arrowheads! Let’s stop, shall we?”

“Three hundred men, women and children,” my father said, eyeing us gloomily in the rearview mirror. “Promised a reservation and then hunted down like dogs. They were our people.”

“I thought we were Cherokee,” I said.

“Three hundred people murdered in cold blood.”

“They have ice cream!” my mother said brightly. “Who wants ice cream?”

Later that night, in the adjoining room, we heard my parents arguing, one of the few times I’ve ever heard my mother raise her voice. As we were leaving the next morning, my father said, “Where’s my book?” He had left it on the nightstand, where sometime during the night, it had mysteriously disappeared.

“Where’s my book?” he repeated, eyeing my mother suspiciously.

She returned his gaze evenly. “Today I thought we’d have a picnic,” she said, smiling. “Won’t that be nice?”

I have no idea if my father ever finished the book. He never spoke of it again and not long after this vacation he stopped telling stories of our Cherokee grandmother, the Indian princess. Even now when I’m at my parents’ house I search for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee on the bookshelves, but I never find it. It seems to have disappeared into my family’s past as mysteriously as our Cherokee grandmother.