Lemon Beagle

My husband and I have recently downsized from a four bedroom home in the suburbs to a two bedroom condo downtown.  We have done this to “simplify” our lives, but also to prove to ourselves and our families that we are still young and hip enough to enjoy an urban lifestyle.  A lifestyle that puts us within walking distance of numerous restaurants, galleries, and bars, not to mention a neighbor who sings Italian arias while strolling with his dog, and Carl, the local homeless man, who pushes his shopping cart down the middle of the street every morning at eight o’clock.

When my three grown children announced they would be spending Christmas with us in our new place, we enthusiastically looked forward to showing them our hip new crib.  When they announced they would also be bringing their dogs, I was less enthusiastic.  “Oh, we’ll be fine,” my husband said, indicating I was being overly dramatic.

My son had recently adopted what he called a Lemon Beagle, which I had never heard of, that was going to be flying in with him from San Francisco. 

“So you’ll be carrying him on the plane?” I said, imagining a cute spotted puppy that would fit neatly between his feet.

“Oh no,” he said.  “I’ll have to crate him.”  And then he quickly changed the subject.

Imagine my surprise when, three weeks later, I saw him unloading what appeared to be an elephant crate from the back of my car.  My husband had driven down to Atlanta to pick up my son and his Lemon Beagle, which is apparently code for a cross between a pit bull and a Great Dane.

His name was Finn and he was adorable but clumsy, knocking over furniture with his tail which he swung behind him with the velocity of a bull whip.  My dog, Yoshi, gave him a wide berth.

I rose early the next morning determined to take Finn and Yoshi for a walk. 

“Are you sure you want to do that?” my husband said, sipping his coffee at the breakfast bar.

Undaunted, I set out.  What I soon learned is that, although it’s relatively easy to walk one dog on a leash, it is less easy to walk two.  Especially two that have a combined weight of well over one hundred pounds.  Dogs in a pack constantly jostle for dominance, trying to be the lead dog.  Added to the fact that I was walking both on retractable leashes that were quickly entangled, I soon found myself being dragged along the sidewalk like a musher racing across the frozen tundra of the Alaskan Iditarod. 

This would have been enough to discourage any sane person, but I was determined to go on.  I had a point to prove.  I wasn’t the same old Shrinking Violet I had once been; I now ate oatmeal and miso soup for breakfast, stayed away from saturated fats and dairy, and meditated twice a day.  I could handle walking two dogs along a city street.

It was in the second block that the real trouble began.

By now my pulse had begun to pound ominously in my ears.  My breathing was ragged and strained.  We scooted past a row of neat bungalows set back slightly from the sidewalk.  The middle house had a neatly manicured lawn, with baskets of flowers and ferns set out strategically around the base of a large oak tree.  Various whirligigs spun in the breeze, and a ring of colorful garden gnomes peeked roguishly from between the baskets of ferns and flowers.  It was the kind of yard that announces, “No Dogs Allowed” by its very neatness.

Finn, who had apparently never seen a garden gnome, decided he didn’t like the looks of these strange creatures, and lunged suddenly to the right, bellowing and knocking over baskets and whirligigs with his tail.  Yoshi sprang to the left.  I found myself being dragged, spread-eagled, toward the massive oak and began to shout, “No, no.”  Finn, panicked at the tone of my voice, began now to run in circles, catching two of the larger ferns in his leash which he dragged behind him like a conveyer belt. 

“It’s okay, puppy, it’s okay,” I shrilled, trying to calm him down.  He continued to run in circles, wrapping the retractable leash around his legs until, finally, tied up like a rodeo calf, he lurched to a stop, and fell over.  Taking advantage of his immobility, I glanced over my shoulder to check on Yoshi. 

He was taking a huge, steaming shit in front of a basket of fake petunias. 

It was at this moment that I realized my left arm was numb and one eye was fluttering like a bad circuit.  It occurred to me that I might be in the throes of a medical emergency.  I imagined the couple who owned the house returning in the evening to the wreckage of their carefully-tended yard.  I imagined garden gnomes and ferns and whirligigs scattered in disarray, two dogs hog-tied and squealing, and a middle-aged woman, dead of an apparent heart attack, face down on the lawn. 

I fell on my knees, hard, at the base of the tree, and began hurriedly to set up the fallen gnomes and fern baskets.  Then I gathered Yoshi’s warm excrement in a plastic baggie, untied Finn, and turned and limped quickly for home.

I imagined the couple returning home to find that their garden gnomes had been vandalized, checking their surveillance tape, and uploading it to YouTube, where it would become an instant Internet sensation.   I imagined my children’s friends calling. 

“Dude, isn’t that your mother?”

My husband was still sitting at the breakfast bar when I limped in.

“That was quick,” he said.  “Did you have a nice walk?”

I said nothing, handing him the leashes, and turning, hobbled toward the bedroom to take a nice long nap.

Parental Guilt

When my youngest child was in kindergarten she used to squint when watching TV. For some reason this annoyed me.

“Stop squinting,” I would tell her and she would oblige, stationing herself about ten inches from the screen.

Now if she’d been my first child, I would have immediately, obsessively worried myself sick. But as she was my third, I went on folding clothes, or making dinner, or doing any of the thousand other chores that having three children under the age of twelve entails.

When she was in second grade I received a rather stern note from the school nurse telling me she had failed her eye exam. I was offended. What was she implying, that I was an unfit mother? Determined to prove her wrong I took my daughter to an expensive ophthalmologist.

“Legally blind,” was his expert opinion. “With astigmatism in the left eye.”

I was shocked. No one in my family wore glasses and only one sister in my husband’s so the thought that my children would have anything less than perfect eyesight had never occurred to me.

When we walked out of the doctor’s office, she in her new coke-bottle glasses, my daughter looked up into the trees and exclaimed, “Look, mommy, I can see the leaves!”

(Insert knife here and begin slowly to remove my heart.) To this day, if I’m ever asked to cry on command, I have only to relive this anguished and guilt-ridden moment to comply.

I was telling this story to some friends over cocktails (only when I’ve been drinking do I tell this one), when my friend, Donna, said, “Oh, I can beat that.”

I was dubious. Donna is beautiful, tall and slender, always stylishly dressed and made up. She’s married to a stockbroker and has raised three handsome sons, feeding them organic meals long before it became the norm. I have always considered Donna to be, well, perfect, and I would hate her except that she is nice and very funny. So I can’t.

Anyway, she was out to dinner a few months ago with one of her strapping six foot four inch sons when she noticed him holding a glass with one of his pinkies stuck out like an English lord sipping tea.

“Why are you doing that?” Donna said. “That looks silly.”

“Oh well,” he said. “Funny you should mention it. Do you remember that time in grade school when I closed my finger in my desk and I came home and told you, and you said, Oh, just put a band aid on it. It’ll be fine. Well,” he held the stiff pinky up for her appraisal. “Now, I can’t bend it.”

“Are you telling me it doesn’t bend at all?” Donna said, horrified.

She rushed him immediately to the only doctor who could see them on short notice which happened to be, ironically, her son’s ex-pediatrician. He examined the frozen pinky and then remarked, sadly, that if she’d brought the boy to him when he first injured it he might have been able to minimize the tendon damage, but now it was too late.

Now whenever Donna sees her son drinking beer with her husband or sitting down to family dinners and holding a glass, she notices that little erect pinky and feels as if he is giving her a middle-finger salute.

I guess the lesson here is that despite our best intentions, we sometimes fall short in the parenting department. And with enough love, time, and psychotherapy our children will overcome their physical and emotional handicaps and forgive us.

Eventually.