Category Archives: memoir

The Yarn Exploits

Posted on August 26, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

I started knitting when my brother’s fourth child was about to be born and needed a blanket of his own. This was about four and a half years ago. I ordered a copy of Knitting for Dummies, because Mom knew how to knit but wasn’t sure how to explain it all to me.

Cricket was still teething. She was five months old and had just finished unraveling a wicker garbage can and eating her way through a miniature pumpkin. So when I dropped my pretty wooden knitting needles on the floor, she saw them as an extra special gift, for her. I kept the remaining shard of wooden needle to remind me to use metal or plastic in the future.

Then Cricket moved on to the yarn. She jumped onto my lap and grabbed the ball of yarn in her teeth and ran with it into my mother’s room. She ran under the bed, leaving a lengthening trail of yarn in her wake, creating a cat’s cradle that wound around the legs of the bed, over to the sewing machine and, eventually, ended up wrapped around Cricket herself, until she couldn’t move for the string around her legs.

That was at least better than when a ball of yarn fell to the floor and I didn’t notice, so instead of running away with it, Cricket chewed on it in peace under my feet, and used her paws and teeth to unravel it until she’d made the yarn into a nice comfy, wet pillow for her head.

Cricket can be anywhere in the apartment, and if I start to knit, within seconds, she’s at my knees, asking me to make room on my lap. Then she leans against my belly and lifts a paw, to push the knitting away. I wonder if she thinks the sweater I’m working on is the equivalent of another dog that I am petting, instead of her, because she asks for scratchies and hugs and if I try to go back to knitting, she puts her paw up again and pushes the yarn and needles away.

I’ve made a lot of knitted blankets and sweaters since then and in every one there are strands of Cricket’s hair, or drops of her spit; like a blessing.

 

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Cricket and the Brown Mouse

Posted on August 19, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

            A few years ago, I walked into the kitchen and saw a tiny brown mouse eating from Cricket’s food bowl. Cricket had left half of her breakfast scattered on the floor around her bowl, trusting that she could come back to it later if nothing better came up in the mean time. But there was this tiny brown mouse, holding a twig of her dry food in its hands and getting ready to nibble. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first, because I’d never seen a mouse stand still like that, not with a human and a dog nearby.          Finally, Cricket stepped forward and gave a low growl. Not the bark she’d have handed the mail man, but a warning none the less. And the little mouse backed up, dropped the food, and ran away. Clearly it was a baby mouse, just learning the run and hide rules of the tribe.

There may have been mice over the years, but I hadn’t seen them again, until I recently noticed mouse droppings in the corner of my bedroom, near the stairs. Then mom heard scritch scratching overnight in her room. And then we saw a brown mouse scamper behind the plant table in the kitchen. So Mom went to the store to buy mousetraps.

Once, when I was a kid, we had a glue trap. The guy at the store had recommended it as more humane than the regular mousetrap, but then I saw a mouse caught on the glue. It was still alive, but struggling to get free, and with each movement it became more trapped. I almost threw up, and then I cried inconsolably. Mom promised me she’d never use a glue trap again, but she made no promises about regular traps. Because you’re just not supposed to accept having mice in your house. It’s not clean, or healthy, or polite.

Mom put out the new traps, but because we hadn’t used them in years, she’d forgotten how to set them correctly. She placed one on a paper towel and shoved it under the plant table, and the next thing we knew, Cricket had pulled the paper towel out and eaten the cheese, leaving the trap unsprung.

The way Cricket barks at humans and chases squirrels outside of the house, you’d think she’d notice, and mind, the presence of tiny interlopers, especially near her food or by her bed. But she hasn’t been barking at them. They must have been around for months before we noticed, and she never told us.

I wonder if she’s friends with the mice behind our backs, bringing them food, tossing them a ball every once in a while, acting as guard dog for them when humans come near.

But maybe they’re just too small to seem like a threat to her. She doesn’t bark at ants either.

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Walking with Cricket

Posted on August 12, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

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Cricket and I used to do a two mile walk around the neighborhood, when the weather was right and we’d been cooped up too long in the house. I’d fill a bag with her necessities: a Tupperware cup full of water, extra poopie bags, and a paper towel or two in case of emergencies. Cricket knew that a bag like that signaled a long walk and once she had her leash on, she raced down the stairs with the leash flailing behind her and jumped up to reach the door knob with her nose. She had to wait for me to turn it, though.

The first few minutes of the walk were a blur of effort for her, dragging me, like a horse with a plow, past the corner and down the block until we had truly reached THE WALK ZONE, which was at least a block past the shorter PEE ZONE. Then Cricket could focus on her sniffing without fear that it would all end too soon.

Walking smoothes out her brain chemicals, and the neighborhood fills her up with smells and experiences that keep her mind busy for hours afterwards. She doesn’t mind hot weather, or cold weather. In fact she would drag me out in ice and snow if she could, though not rain, raindrops are like poison darts on her head.

Walking with Cricket helps to calm me down, too. If I wake up anxious, which I usually do, with twenty different ideas of what the day should hold running through my head, I take Cricket out for a walk, and burn off the extra energy. Walking with Cricket, instead of on the treadmill, has the added benefit of forcing me outdoors, where there are beautiful things to look at. My neighborhood is especially beautiful, filled with dogwoods and maples and birds and flowers, and the ground isn’t flat, so when we go up and down the hills, we get a whole new look at the view.

I still try to take Cricket out on her walks around the neighborhood, but in the forty-five minutes it used to take to do two miles, I can barely do one. Some days, I just walk slowly. Other days, my legs go wonky, and I look like a marionette. My hands curl up and my face twitches. On those days, walking uphill is like climbing Kilimanjaro and walking downhill is a race against gravity.

The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me, but Cricket doesn’t mind if I walk funny. She runs circles around me when I’m slow, and gets twice the exercise in the same amount of time. Or she goes out with her Grandma, and barks all of the details of her adventure to me when she returns.

I wish I could put her on the treadmill to help her burn off the energy left over after her shortened walks. I worked on that with her when she was little. I built her up gradually, from standing on the unmoving treadmill, to walking at the slowest speed for two minutes. But then, abruptly, she changed her mind about the experiment. Maybe she decided that she didn’t like the ground moving under her feet, or she didn’t see the point of a walk with no peeing component and nothing to sniff.

My dream is to be healthy enough to take Cricket out for the longest walk she can stand. She will empty her bladder so completely that even she can’t believe she has any more pee left to give. She’ll drink all of the water in her Tupperware cup, and meet as many dogs as she can. And then, without any prompting from me, she will look up and say, Mommy, I’m ready to go home.

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Cricket still seems like a stranger

Posted on August 5, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

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Cricket still seems like a stranger. I don’t know how to explain this. I love her, and I miss her if I’m away from her for a few hours, and I’m jealous of all the time she spends with Mom instead of with me. But when I’m sad or angry or lonely, I don’t see an echo of it in her face. I feel like when I look into her eyes, we are not really seeing past the surfaces of each other. We are not soul mates.

When Cricket first came home, I was addicted to the digital camera, trying to capture every different look on her face, so that I could get to know her: the way her lower teeth jut out so she looks like a fighter, the places where her hair is curly and where it is straight, and the wide variety of her different chirps and growls.

I know which foods she likes, and how small the first piece of a new food needs to be in order for her to try it. I know how often eating a small piece of cheese will remind her that she has dinner in her bowl.

I know that she will wait for Grandma on the second step from the top, and cry to be picked up when Grandma comes home, and then scrabble to be put down just as quickly. I know where she hides her treasures: under the second pillow on my bed, in the corner of my couch, under Grandma’s bed, behind the cushion on Grandma’s chair.

I know that the sound of the treadmill puts her to sleep. And unzipping the guitar bag makes her angry.

But we haven’t started to look more like each other over time, or developed similar mannerisms. We are nothing alike, and that makes me feel like I’m the stranger, and I’m the one who doesn’t belong.

But I still love her. And whenever I forget that I love her this much, she sparks again. Like when she waits for me at the front door, with her face peeking through the curtain. Or when she runs upstairs in the morning and jumps on my chest to wake me up so we can spend the day together.

I wonder if Cricket keeps a list in her head too, of all of the wacky things she knows about me: the way I smell in the morning, the careful way I pluck goop from the corner of her eye, the look on my face when I see her at the front door.

I am nothing like her, but she loves me anyway. I think I’m okay with that.

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Vacation with Cricket

Posted on July 29, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

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            We took Cricket on vacation to Lake George one weekend, a few years ago. She slithered out of her car harness within the first thirty seconds of the trip, and then stood with her front feet on the seat divider and barked at everything she saw out the window for the six hour drive north.

            We found a motel that accepted dogs and wasn’t too expensive. And then we risked walking around town, but Cricket barked at everyone. Little children hid behind their parents. Grown men laughed, until they realized there was real bite behind her bark. We stayed in after that. Cricket spent the whole night standing on my bed, barking at every noise in the motel, and jumping on my feet like an alarm clock with sharp toenails.

            The next morning, we walked behind the motel, where there was a tiny scrap of beach, with a dock and a few boats. We rented a row boat, two oars, and three life preservers. Cricket was not thrilled when one of the life preservers was wrapped around her waist, and she held onto my shoulder and dug in with her nails when I tried to carry her into the boat. Water is not her favorite thing, even tiny bathtub shaped water or raindrop shaped water, let alone a huge lake full of the wet stuff.

Once we were safely in the boat and away from the dock, though, she settled down. Pretty soon, she fell asleep to the lapping of the lake water at the sides of the boat. I was still antsy. I worried that we wouldn’t recognize our particular dock once we were out into the belly of the lake. And I worried that we’d lose an oar and I’d only be able to row in circles and never make it back to dry land. But once we were out far enough, and I couldn’t see the crowded line of beaches with the crowded row of motels behind it, I started to relax. I didn’t feel guilty or anxious or worthless or angry or frantic to accomplish something. Maybe if we had stayed out on the water longer, all of that noise would have filtered back into my head and found its normal level, but for a few minutes, there was peace.

When we rowed back to shore, I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet. I asked Mom if she would mind if we sat out by the motel’s pool for a little while before getting in the car for the ride home, and Mom and Cricket both agreed to the plan.

There were leaves at the bottom of the pool, and maybe some algae scattered around, so I didn’t have to actually go swimming. Cricket sat with Mom on a beach chair, and I sat on the side of the pool and dangled my feet in the water. It was the manageable compromise for me, between what I wanted to do (swim) and what I could tolerate. Swishing my legs in the water was nice.

I wish, instead of a vacation, I could move into a nice little house, with a washer and dryer and a dishwasher and central air conditioning, and a backyard pool, where I could swim without worrying who would see me. I’d probably still wear a t-shirt and shorts over my bathing suit though, just in case the back yard fence wasn’t high enough.

That vacation to Lake George was the last one we all took together. I get too anxious, about Cricket barking at strangers, about money, and about not getting enough work done to really enjoy the trip. But mostly, I have the same object permanence problem babies have. If you cover my eyes and I can’t see home, I’m not sure it exists anymore. Going away on vacation makes me think I’ll never be able to go home again.

So, Mom goes on vacations by herself, or with her friends, and Cricket and I stay home, and worry about her. That’s the manageable compromise we’ve come up with, for now.

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Abraham, the suburban pony

Posted on July 22, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

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  My parents had a pony named Abraham before I was born. The pony originally belonged to one of my father’s students, who could no longer afford to stable him in the city. So my father paid $50, and brought the pony out to Long Island in the back of a van. The name Abraham was supposed to signify that he was the first animal in the family, or at least, the first male animal, which, to my father, meant the same thing.

            My parents seemed to believe that a pony would fit right into the suburbs. This was forty years ago, when Long Island was still developing, and looked sort of like the country, if you squinted. They kept rabbits and ducks in the backyard, along with the pony and a dog. They received a lot of complaints from the neighbors, especially about the smell. But my father would just ride around in the horse cart that Abraham pulled down the street, and ignore what anyone else had to say.

            The house had actually been built on a former horse farm, but by the time my parents arrived, the streets had been paved and the area had been developed into rows of suburban homes, with fenced in yards. Abraham’s stall was in the back of our garage, but he had free run of the backyard while my parents were at work during the day.

All of Abraham is a story to me, because he was sent away before I was born.

The neighbors were finally able to change the local ordinance to make keeping a pony in your backyard illegal.

            My mother met the veterinarian who agreed to take Abraham to live at his farm. She saw him loaded into a trailer with her own eyes. And she assures me that he was taken to an actual farm, though it sounds like one of those stories parents tell their kids when the dog dies. Abraham isn’t really dead, he’s gone off to live happily ever after in a place where he can really stretch his legs.

            There was a horse farm next door to our synagogue when I was a kid, and every once in a while one of the horses would be outside, and I’d reach through the fence to pet his nose, and I’d ask him if he knew Abraham.

            Maybe the Abraham stories explain why I dream of having a farm of my own, despite having no recognizable farming skills. Or maybe it comes from reading Charlotte’s Web so many times. I thought I was just like Wilbur, the little pig, when I was growing up. I was chubby and white and naïve and I could have used Charlotte’s help quite a bit. And maybe I thought that having a pony, and some ducks and rabbits and a few extra dogs in my backyard would have made me feel spectacular, just like Wilbur.

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Cricket’s English Comprehension

Posted on July 15, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

           

Sometimes I think Cricket understands full sentences. Like the times when she starts barking at her Grandma, trying to boss her around.

First, of course, I say “No,” in a firm, loud voice. But Cricket ignores the command and keeps trying to get Grandma’s attention. So then I tell her, in my conversational tone, that she’s being rude to her grandma and it is not time to go out or have a snack and she can rest for now. And Cricket listens to me, and stops barking, and crawls under Grandma’s chair to go to sleep.

Cricket knows the important words, like: walk, poopie, grooming, bathtub, chicken treats, cheese, out, go, sit, no, and Cricket. When we are out walking and I say the word “water,” she looks to the bag that holds her Tupperware cup full of water. If she hears the word “breakfast,” she will lick her lips. One time, when we were outside, I said the word “foot,” and Cricket lifted her back foot and stared at it.

            She has selective hearing, like any other child. When she’s exhausted, she’s less sensitive to words like “toy” or even “walk.” The “G” words almost always get through to her, though. If I say “grooming,” she runs to the bathroom and climbs into the bathtub, which is where the grooming happens. She loves grooming because it’s her most reliable source for chicken treats. She would prefer to stand in the bathtub and be fed treats without having to get a comb through her hair, but the treats make anything bearable.

When she is over excited, she can’t really hear me over the noise in her own head, or the screeching she’s doing out loud. When I take the leash out, she jumps two feet in the air, over and over, like a Jack Russell, and if I try to tell her to sit, so I can attach the leash, she seems to be screeching “What? What?!” as if I’m speaking French.

I remember seeing a dog on TV who could identify each of her thirty toys by name. Her dad, a psych professor, would say “fish” and she would dig through a toy box and come back with the fish. Cricket knows that “toys” are in her toy box or scattered on the floor, but individual names for toys don’t seem to be strongly correlated for her. If I say “Fishy” and it’s the only toy she sees, she’ll bring it, but if her birthday cake or purple dinosaur is near by she might pick that up instead.

She is very smart, but she has no interest in making the most of her potential. She’s not a working dog or a people pleaser. I wish I could accept this about her, but some part of me still dreams of index cards and word drills and Cricket hearing the word “fish” and digging through her toy box to bring me a fish. Because that would at least make me feel smart.

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The Story of Sticks

Posted on July 8, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

            Sticks was an awkwardly built, wiry haired white dog. She was about sixty pounds, with all of her weight in her sizeable trunk and nothing in her spindly legs – ergo her name, her legs were like sticks.

She lived in the house across the street from us when we first moved into the top half of a house on a hill. We’d found an apartment that would accept our dog and had a lawn for mom’s garden. There were signs that we would be happy there, with the smell of honey in the air, and the flowers starting to bloom in April. There was the librarian at the local library who smiled at me for no reason other than that she was a nice person. And there was Sticks, the calmest dog I’d ever met. I was used to black haired dogs, depressed dogs, angry dogs with psycho-social disorders.

            Sticks wandered down her driveway towards me and she looked like a ball of white steel wool. She wobbled a bit, but she never barked, and she almost purred when I scratched her head. She was sunshine. Not the bright hot sun that burns your skin and wears you out, but like the soft rays of early spring on your face.

            Sticks’ mom was in her late eighties or early nineties, medium height, white hair, and a little cushioned. She spoke with a German accent that made me unsure what she was saying. She lived alone in her house with Sticks and wasn’t up to taking her out for walks, and picking up poop, but Sticks was so well loved that neighbors pitched in, including me.

            A few years later, I noticed that I hadn’t seen Sticks in a while. And then we heard from her owner’s daughter, that Sticks’ owner was in the hospital with end stage cancer. When we asked about Sticks and where she would go, we were told that Sticks had been put down, because she couldn’t live on without her person.

            I couldn’t speak. I was so angry that no one had asked us if we would take Sticks in for her final years. I could have found a way to lift her up the stairs into our apartment if her arthritis made it too hard for her to climb. But no one had asked me, or warned me, and now Sticks was gone.

            I never knew how old Sticks was, or what her health problems might have been. It’s possible that she was on her last legs, just like her owner, but that’s not how the story was told. I’ve never heard of a veterinarian euthanizing a dog because her owner was dying. And Sticks was so sweet, and loving to strangers, could it really be true that her life wouldn’t have been worth living without her person? I don’t know. But the story haunts me.

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Cricket’s First Training Class

Posted on July 1, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

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Mom and I took Cricket to a puppy class at the local pet store when Cricket was three or four months old. I wanted Cricket to stop biting me; that was my most pressing goal.

All of the books said that it would be easier to train her as a puppy, rather than later on, and that I would be a terrible person if I didn’t teach her to heel, come when called, and pee on command. But for me, the thing I wanted most was for her to be able to make friends with other dogs, and people. I wanted her to be a safe companion for her young human cousins, and to not be as isolated as my previous dog had been, with her antisocial behavior and anxiety disorder.

I also had dreams of getting Cricket to do tricks, like ride a skateboard, or surf, or dance with me.

I loved meeting all of the other puppies in the class. There was a baby bloodhound named Baxter, and a pair of miniature Pinschers, and miniature Poodles, and a black Lab or two, and an older Maltese. But Cricket was not as enamored of them as I was, and she didn’t think the treats were worth working for. She ignored the commands and smiled at me and sniffed the shelves at the store and peed in the corners, and then we went home and she chewed through an entire wicker garbage can.

What I remember most about the teacher was that nothing she said made sense to me. I felt like I was listening to a foreign language I’d never studied, or trying to make sense of NASA’s instruction book for how to launch a space shuttle. I can’t tell you even now if that was because she actually didn’t make sense or if it’s because obedience training kills my circuitry.

The teacher had a way of taking my nervous, meant-to-be-funny comments and using them as lessons for the class. Like, I asked her, after a particularly grueling lesson, when do we get the magic pill that makes training just kick in, and she said, in all seriousness and pointing me out to the class, that there is no magic pill and training takes a lot of hard work.

The teacher was impatient with all of us, but especially with Cricket. She told us to flip Cricket onto her back and hold her down, as an intervention. We were supposed to show Cricket that we were in charge and resistance wasn’t going to get her anywhere. But all that did was to make Cricket more frightened and more resistant to the training.

I should have listened more carefully when the teacher told us that her mother used to hit her to keep her in line, and, instead of saying that her mother did the wrong thing, she said, mothers hit us because they love us.

I finally gave up on the class after the fourth week. The teacher had done her “intervention” one time too many and Cricket had learned to hide behind my legs whenever the teacher came by.

It all felt like a way to crush her spirit and mine. I resented the idea that Cricket was supposed to be a pod puppy, with no unique or rebellious characteristics left. And I was exhausted. So we left, and replaced training class with episodes of Dancing with the Stars. Cricket is great at the Tango.

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A Dog Named Rachel

Posted on June 24, 2012 by rachelmankowitz

 

            Before I was born, my parents had a dog named Rachel. She was a stray they’d picked up along the way, a black dog of unspecific origin. She was old by the time I came around, but there’s a story that when I was six months old, my mom called for “Rachel,” and the dog hobbled over to Mom thinking she was the one being asked for, and I crawled.

            I like my name, it’s a good name. There are a lot of biblical names with negative connotations, but mine is pretty clean and positive. So I should be happy.

            Except, my brother wasn’t named after a family pet.

            My father said the names were a coincidence. I was named after a great grandmother named Rachel, and Rachel dog was maybe named after Rabbi Ralph or one of the rabbits my parents kept in the backyard before I was born.

            There’s a Jewish custom, or superstition, against naming a child after a living relative. I’m sure there’s a long tractate somewhere explaining the reasons, but I remember being told that it was wrong to take a name from someone who was still busy using it. As if you’d steal some of their years along with their name. And Rachel dog was still alive when I stole her name. She didn’t live much longer after that, either.

            I feel like my father was sending me a message by giving me the same name as the family dog. He made a point of not talking about it, just leaving the truth in the background, for me to discover on my own and guess at the significance. It was a message he could hide from the outside world, who would only see the loveliness of the biblical Rachel, and never see the humiliation.

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