What with Cricket’s thinning hair, and aging temperature-control-system, and the onset of colder weather, plus a much-needed visit to the groomer, Cricket needed something to cover her up – both for warmth and for modesty. We already had one sweater: a red and black plaid one that came as a gift from our neighbor (when she realized it was too small for her brother’s dog) and that originally went to Ellie, who doesn’t really need or want to wear a sweater. Then I went online and found a white and grey cable knit sweater, so Cricket would have something to wear when the red and black plaid started to smell.
“Harrumph.”
Strangely, Cricket actually seems to enjoy wearing her sweaters, though getting them pulled on over her head can set off her panic response (aka biting), so we have to be careful not to dilly dally when dressing her.
“Harrumpherrumph.”
But even now that Cricket really needs to wear sweaters, because you can see all of her age spots and cauliflower bumps and pink skin shivering in the cold, I still can’t really go whole hog into dressing her up, because she wouldn’t put up with it, and because my mom would roll her eyes at me, and because I can’t actually afford it. And, really, Cricket and Ellie would much prefer having any extra money spent on food and treats than on clothes.
“I really don’t like clothes, Mommy.”
The thing is, I have wanted to dress the dogs up forever, but I felt guilty about it, because Cricket was so resistant to wearing jackets and harnesses, and Ellie and Butterfly, and Dina, all looked like they were being punished when they had to wear anything at all. But recently, Cricket’s friend Kevin, the mini-Golden-Doodle, has been wearing sweaters and sweatshirts all the time, and he looks so cute and cozy and loved! For Halloween he had an adorable hoodie with a skeleton painted on the back, and I felt like such a neglectful dog mommy looking at naked Cricket in comparison.
I actually hate dressing up myself, because it makes me feel self-conscious, and all of my body shame gets triggered. Instead, I live in a uniform of sweaters and jeans and sneakers, to avoid drawing attention to my body. When I see adult women all dressed up I tend to feel intimidated, and vicariously exhausted, and triggered into body shame just by looking at them. But Cricket and Ellie look perfect to me, and they are unselfconscious about their bodies, and I keep wishing that I could dress them up and live vicariously through them, and they won’t let me.
“No clothes!”
In the midst of my longing to dress up the dogs, I noticed a series of videos showing up in my Facebook feed starring a dog named Noodles. Noodles wears the most wonderful outfits, with chunky necklaces, and colorful glasses with beaded chains, and frilly shirts, and she has so many different hairstyles, and she just makes my inner little girly-girl swoon. The videos themselves are hilarious too: all about Noodles’ imaginary officemates and office politics, or that time she got drunk for her third (aka 21st) birthday.
So I scroll through Amazon for sweaters I wish Cricket would wear: sweaters with stripes and plaids and cables and ruffles and lace insets and skirts, and then I watch Noodles giving the camera side eye in her lacy blouses and braided hair, and for a few minutes I get to feel like the little girl I could have been, and maybe still am, deep inside.
There’s a little girl at my synagogue who has her own sense of style. One day she’s dressed like a widow from the 1920’s, with black netting around a small black hat on the back of her head, another day she’s a fluffy bumble bee, another she has pink hair and wings on her back. That’s not the kind of little girl I was, obviously. I was intensely conscious of how people looked at me and judged me, and more often than not I wore hand-me-down clothes from wealthier families, so I didn’t have a choice of what to wear. But when I see this little girl at synagogue, or Noodles on Facebook, or even Kevin in his hoodies, I imagine the joy I might have felt as a little girl, if not for the abuse. And seeing Noodles in her dresses and bows lets the little girl in me play dress up vicariously. And it’s wonderful! So watch out, Cricket. You may have to deal with more clothes sometime soon.
“Protect me, Ellie.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Cricket has a big mouth. I don’t mean anatomically, because she is a pretty small dog, eleven pounds or so, but she just won’t shut up. She barks at anyone and everyone who dares to enter her yard (it’s a shared yard, for the whole co-op, so people are always coming and going), and she yells at us for all manner of sins: like, not giving her more treats when she’s already had three, or not taking her out as soon as she wants to go, or not being able to figure out what she wants when she’s explicitly barked it at us twelve times in a row.
“How do you not understand me?!!!!!”
She doesn’t bark at her friend Kevin, the one year old mini-Goldendoodle. She usually just swats at him with her paws to try to get him to pay attention to her when he dares to lie down on the grass and chew on a stick. But she barks at her sister, Ellie, and at pretty much anything that moves.
If Cricket were more trainable (and she has proven to be distinctly untrainable), I would get her some of those floor buttons that have become popular recently in so many videos, where dogs are able to express themselves in English by pressing specific buttons with their paws.
The problem is that, if she could actually be trained to use the buttons, she’d stomp on them so hard, and so often, that she’d break the buttons for ‘out’ ‘treat’ and ‘lap’ on the first day.
Our neighbors, even the ones who like us, say, oh yeah, we heard Cricket through the window. We always know what Cricket is thinking.
But then, she curls up on her grandma’s lap, or next to Grandma on the couch, or in tiny ball in her own doggy bed, and she looks like the sweetest puppy on the planet. Even with her little pink cauliflower growths, and age spots, and thinning hair, she still looks angelic and adorable and incapable of being difficult.
But only when she’s sleeping.
I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when Mom comes home from her hip surgery in a few weeks. I’m pretty sure that I will be the lucky recipient of most of Cricket’s anger when I try to put the dogs in my room to protect the visiting nurse, or when Mom closes her bedroom door at night to protect her new hip from being used as Cricket’s sleeping spot. I don’t know how Cricket is going to survive, or how my hearing will survive, really.
It’s hard to be wholly negative about Cricket’s big mouth, though, even though she’s also used it to bite me a few times over the years (for daring to bathe her or comb her hair). She is a perfect example of how you can love someone who is deeply flawed. I may not love the barking itself, but I do love how adamant she is about being herself, no matter what, and I love that she knows what she wants and makes sure to ask for it. And while it would be nice if she could lower the volume, or learn from her mistakes, or compromise every once in a while, I know that’s not going to happen. And that’s okay.
The fact is, Cricket is going to be fifteen years old this July, and she is exactly the same as she was at six months. She has only intensified over the years, like a really stinky cheese. Luckily for both of us, I love cheese.
“Me too!”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
For Mom’s birthday this year I bought her a glider bench. She’s been wanting a bench in the yard for years, and in my endless random searches on Amazon I came across this glider (and a hammock, and a small green house, and a few other things I thought she’d like), and she went to the board of the co-op to ask if it would be okay to put the glider bench in the back yard, and they said a resounding yes. So I ordered it, and it came in two days, faster than expected, and I decided to put it together right away, in the downstairs hall, because the box was too heavy to carry upstairs. Mom helped where she could, holding this or that steady, but I seem to have a knack for putting things together with an Allen wrench and blurry pictorial instructions.
As soon as we finished construction and set the bench up in the yard, I ran upstairs to get the dogs (and our jackets, because it was getting chilly). The whole idea of the bench, or the vision I had in my head, was that Mom could sit on the bench and glide back and forth while Cricket spent hours (or minutes) exploring the yard.
Ellie guarding Grandma, and the bench
We attached a long rope to the bench and looped the leashes through it and sat down on the bench to see how things would go. Ellie immediately asked for uppies, but Cricket set off on her adventure. She was frustrated when the rope stopped before she could reach Kevin’s building (her bestie, Kevin, the mini-Golden Doodle), but she survived, and pulled the rope all the way in the other direction, expressing frustration again when she reached the limits on that side and couldn’t explore the back of beyond.
Cricket hitting her limit.
The glider bench is light enough so that the gardeners will be able to move it out of the way when they mow the lawn, though Mom was considering putting it right under the paw paw tree – to warn them away from doing any more damage. There really isn’t room for the bench under the paw paw tree, though, so maybe she’ll just sit on her bench, twenty feet away, and glare at them. She’s tiny, but she’s fierce when it comes to protecting her trees.
And she has a stockpile of allergy meds ready for just such an occasion.
I’m pretty sure there will be a significant amount of sewing done on that bench – especially now that she’s had her second carpal tunnel surgery, so she’s good for at least another year.
She also likes to do sun prints with all kinds of flowers and leaves, so she’ll have a comfortable place to sit while the sun does its work. She could even move the bench over to her vegetable plot (or, I could move the bench over to her vegetable plot), so she can watch her garlic grow. I prefer to sit in the air-conditioning and watch TV, but to each her own.
Ellie prefers watching her people.
I still wish I could set up a hammock for her, string it up between two of the tall trees the way she’s always wanted, but we keep deciding against it, because getting in and out of it would be difficult, and Cricket would be no help at all.
I’m not a huge fan of Mom’s birthdays, to be honest. Mother’s day is better, because it feels timeless and universal, but birthdays mean that she’s getting older, and I’m against that. I need my Mommy to live forever, and stay superhuman, the way she’s always been. Cricket and I are on the same page here. Cricket is as much in denial about her own aging as she is about her Grandma’s. She prefers to believe that time stopped the day she first met her Grandma and nothing has to change ever again.
Short of that, the plan is to revel in the ability to sit outside on the glider bench, two people and two dogs, letting time stop every once in a while. For as long as possible.
Puppy Cricket and her Grandma, the beginning.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Cricket had to get her teeth cleaned, and I was scared. The doctor first mentioned to us that Cricket’s teeth needed cleaning around two years ago, I think. It’s possible he’d mentioned it earlier, but if so, I blocked it out. We were able to put it off at that point, because Cricket was dealing with other health issues that were more pressing, but since she’s been doing better the doctor’s insistence has been growing. Both Mom and I have been concerned about putting Cricket through such a procedure, because of her age and because we’ve heard so many horror stories about dogs dying from regular teeth cleanings, because of the anesthesia. The doctor has tried to reassure us, and at Cricket’s most recent checkup he gave her a battery of tests to make sure she would be safe undergoing anesthesia, and the doctor said that he was confident Cricket would be fine. I wanted to be as confident as he was, and I wasn’t, but Mom and I decided to go through with the procedure anyway, because Cricket’s quality of life was in the balance. The pain in her mouth, especially when she was eating, and the bacteria running through her system, weren’t doing her any good. But I was still scared.
Cricket is fourteen and a half years old, and as of her latest checkup she was three pounds lighter than the fourteen pounds she’s weighed for most of her life; also, her eyes are a bit blue from cataracts, she’s on medication for incontinence, she seems to hear things that aren’t there, her hair is thinning, and, of course, she has bad teeth. When we first adopted her, I saw a chart that said that a Cockapoo her size would live around 20 years, but given the way she’s been aging lately, I’ve had to recalibrate my expectations. But even so, I’m nowhere near ready to lose her.
“I am a puppy. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cricket is a difficult dog, she demands what she wants in life and never tolerates no for an answer. She is prickly and feisty and temperamental and adorable, and she has only recently discovered the joys of play (with a Golden Doodle puppy named Kevin who lives in our complex). And no matter how often she gets on my nerves, I can’t imagine my life without her.
But I trust her doctor, and he was getting more and more insistent that a teeth cleaning was necessary for her overall health, and I could see his point.
Ellie was still skeptical.
I didn’t want to think about the small chance that she wouldn’t come back from the doctor’s office, but that was all I could think about. Cricket has never been a good patient. She resents both the illness and the treatment, and she absolutely blames me for whatever awfulness she’s feeling. I couldn’t even check her teeth myself, to see if the doctor was exaggerating about how bad it was in there, because she’d bite my fingers off. I wish I were exaggerating, but she recently bit me, hard enough to break through the skin on my thumb, just because I dared to try and wipe the goop from under her eye.
We made an appointment for the dental procedure for during the winter break and I crossed my fingers – or braided them like a challah – in the hopes that Cricket would come back from the vet, and come back in better shape than she’d been in for a while, ready to chew and bark and play for all she was worth. That was the result I wanted, and I did my best to follow Cricket’s lead and refuse to accept no for an answer.
“No is my favorite word, but only when I say it.”
The night before the procedure we had to put the food and water bowls away at nine pm, but Cricket barely noticed. Ellie on the other hand found the whole thing upsetting. And so did I. I had nightmares that whole night, and when it was time to leave in the morning, Ellie and I were wrecks, but Cricket was still fine. She was thrilled when Mom took her out to the car (so that I could put the food and water bowls out for Ellie), but Ellie was freaking out. Instead of eating or drinking, she stood by the door and cried as I left to catch up with Mom and Cricket.
I wasn’t freaking out, Mommy. I was just expressing my opinion.”
Cricket was her usual anxious self in the car, shivering behind my neck, because she knew she was either going to the vet or the groomer and both are horrifying. And, of course, I had a hard time handing her off to the vet tech once we arrived, especially after signing the card that said I knew she would be undergoing anesthesia and recognized the risks. I watched the vet tech carry Cricket inside (the vet still doesn’t let people in the building, only pets, because of Covid) and tried not to panic.
“What are we doing at the vet?”
By the time we got home, Ellie had pooped up a storm in the quilting area, and even after three treats and a lot of cuddles she still couldn’t settle down, shivering and breathing heavily in my lap. We both tried to take a nap, but the anxiety made it difficult.
The call came around Noon that Cricket was “Great” and that we could pick her up between three and five pm. I watched TV and did jigsaw puzzles and tried to believe that Cricket was fine, but I had convinced myself so thoroughly that her life was at risk that I really couldn’t take in the idea that she was okay.
We got to the vet at 2:45 pm, but the vet tech understood. The vet came out to give us the bill (oy), and told us that they’d had to remove 7 rotten teeth, and that Cricket would need to take antibiotics and painkillers for a few days. And then there was Cricket, trying to jump out of the vet tech’s arms to get into the car. We thanked the vet and the vet tech and Cricket climbed all over me and her grandma, ready to get the hell out of there. She may have been a little high from her painkillers, but she was herself, and kept climbing all over me, and around my neck, and back down to my lap through the whole drive, until her leash was wrapped tight around my neck, twice.
I’m sure it was unintentional. Or, I hope it was.
When we got home, Ellie had to check Cricket out and sniff her everywhere, while Cricket kept pushing her sister out of the way so she could get to the water bowl (though she was only allowed a few sips of water at a time). And then Cricket spent the rest of the afternoon barking and complaining, as usual, because she wanted more water, and she wanted treats, and she wanted…everything.
After all of the anxiety, and really expecting to get bad news from the vet, the idea that my fourteen and a half year old dog came through anesthesia with flying colors, and almost no after effects, feels like a miracle. And now she seems to be eating more and even starting to gain some of the weight back, and giving me hope that the original chart that said she would live to age twenty, might not have been so far off after all.
I really needed a miracle right about now, to keep me going. Leave it to curmudgeonly Cricket to make it happen.
“I’m looking cute.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Cricket has changed a lot since she started taking the DES (Diethylstilbestrol – a non-steroidal estrogen medication) last winter. First of all, the incontinence problem disappeared, which was the point of the medication in the first place. She takes her pill – buried in hamburger – every other night, and she hasn’t had an accident in months. But there are other changes too. For some reason, her voice is higher pitched than before. She’s always been loud and barky and anxious about strangers, but now when she screams at them her voice gets even higher. She’s also clingier, if that’s possible. She used to make do with sleeping next to her Grandma, attached like a barnacle, but now she tries to sleep on top of her, like a cat (she’s fourteen pounds, at most, so no bones have been broken in the process). She’s been very attached to Grandma since she was a puppy, but it’s a little more intense now. She even sits on Grandma’s lap at the computer now, instead of just on the couch, where it’s easy.
Cricket, the barnacle.
The big change, though, came up recently, when a new mini Golden Doodle puppy arrived at our co-op. Well, he arrived a few months ago as a little red ball of fluff, but he had to wait until he had all of his shots and did his potty training before he could meet everyone.
This is not Kevin, or my picture. But Kevin is this cute.
Then Mom came in one morning a few weeks ago, after taking the girls for their first walk of the day, and she said in wonder – Cricket was playing!
Cricket is fourteen years old and she has never played with another dog. Dogs have tried to play with her, doing their play bows and zooming around her, but she would just stand still and wait for it to be over, or hide behind one of her people, or just raise an eyebrow in disdain at the strange creature and walk away to sniff someone else’s pee.
“Harrumph.”
Butterfly and Ellie had both tried to play with Cricket over the years, and learned quickly that she couldn’t be bothered. And when we had other dogs over to visit, or she met dogs at the dog park or in the yard, she’d just sniff and be sniffed and then look off in the distance, bored, or confused about why the dog was still there, staring at her.
This is as close as Butterfly (top) and Cricket (bottom) came to playing.
The closest she came to playing was with her friend Teddy – a black miniature poodle she’d known since puppyhood – but they tended to play consecutively rather than together. Teddy would throw his toy in the air and zoom around the room and scratch his back on the floor, and then he’d go lie down and watch while Cricket did her own play routine.
Teddy and Cricket, tandem napping.
But with Kevin, the five month old mini-Golden Doodle, Cricket actually went into her own version of a play bow and hopped around with him. No one watching her could believe she was fourteen years old. Ellie, meanwhile, who’d had more than enough of boy dogs when she was a breeding mama, stayed back and waited for it to be over. She allowed Kevin to sniff her a little bit, but she really really wasn’t interested.
“Ugh. Boys.”
Kevin is a very social dog, and especially social with other dogs. He’ll tolerate a scratch on the head from a human, but he’s really dog-centric. His humans say that they struggle to train him with treats because he’s not food-motivated, but he’ll do anything for a trip outside. I’m sure Kevin’s playful personality plays a role in how Cricket is reacting to him, but I’m pretty sure the DES has changed something for her.
The thing is, Cricket had her spaying surgery when she was six months old, so she never had the surge of hormones rushing through her body. Now, the advice would be to wait until a dog is a little older before spaying or neutering, because it’s healthier for the dog to go through a few hormone cycles, but that wasn’t the advice when Cricket was little. So when she started taking the synthetic estrogen (DES) to solve the incontinence problem, that was her body’s first real experience with Estrogen, and one of the side effects, it seems, is that she’s learned how to play.
Cricket has had a full life with her people, and she’s had rich, complicated relationships with her sisters (Butterfly and Ellie), and she’s eaten all kinds of interesting foods and barked in all kinds of different places and sniffed a million different smells, and she chased sticks, and ran like the wind, and rolled in the mud, but I always felt bad that playing with other dogs wasn’t in the cards for her.
I had some theories: about her being the runt of her litter and therefore under attack from her brothers from day one and therefore not trusting of other dogs; or about her being the runt of her litter and therefore suffering from an unfinished nervous system that caused lifelong neurological issues that made her too hypervigilant and suspicious to play.
And now she’s fourteen, and she’s discovering how to play. She still has a lot of energy and, despite a number of signs of aging, she’s still young at heart, and my hope is that she’ll have plenty of years left to figure out what else these synthetic hormones can do for her and take them out for a spin.
Cricket practicing her play bow with the grooming brush.
Every once in a while I notice those signs that she’s aging – the thinning of her hair, the age spots and cauliflower-like growths on her skin, her skinniness despite eating plenty, the missing teeth in her smile – and I feel this void readying to open up, this reminder that Cricket won’t always be here. And then she barks at a leaf and hops across the lawn like a rabbit and then, out of nowhere she learns how to play (!!!!), and, for a few moments, she’s a puppy again, or better, she’s ageless and she seems like she will live forever.
These are my favorite moments.
Cricket is ready for more!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I was slow to notice the excess peeing. We have wee wee pads by the front door of the apartment, despite taking the dogs out four times a day, and over the summer we noticed that the wee wee pads were getting filled faster than usual. But I couldn’t determine which one of the dogs was peeing extra, and it didn’t really seem important, except for the cost of the wee wee pads adding up.
But then there were tiny puddles, not even puddles, just wet spots really, on the dog beds, on the couch, and Cricket was licking herself clean more often, and Mom was getting concerned. So we moved up Cricket’s yearly Vet appointment from December to November and had the doctor check her out. He did pee tests and blood tests and checked her ears (both ears were infected after so long without the hair being removed) and her teeth (a mess), and her spine (she’s had lower back issues in the past). But the Vet said she was in good health and most likely the problem was incontinence related to aging. He made an unfortunate comment about females tending toward incontinence in their older years, but at least he was awkward about it.
“Rude much?”
He prescribed a medication to help relieve the incontinence, and cleaned Cricket’s ears, and told us to schedule a dental cleaning, despite her advanced years (she’s thirteen and a half). He also told us to keep her away from the groomer for ten days, because of the medicine he’d put in her ears, even though a haircut was clearly overdue.
We started Cricket on the incontinence meds, twice a day, and watched for any improvements, but if anything the peeing issue got worse. We finally got her to the groomer a few weeks later and by then her hair had to be cut very short, but more than that, the groomer said that her pee smelled bad and the hair in that area was discolored and it seemed like an infection. We called the Vet and he told us to switch from the incontinence medication to an antibiotic for the next ten days.
But again, nothing improved. The pee puddles got bigger and more frequent. We were doing an enormous amount of laundry and found reusable dog diapers at Petco, but they didn’t work (the pee leaked through the hole left for her tail).
We called the Vet again and he suggested a urine culture, more sensitive than a regular pee test apparently, once she’d finished the antibiotics. We made an appointment for two days after the last dose of antibiotics, but then the snowstorm intervened and we got a last minute appointment on that Wednesday afternoon, right before the snow was supposed to start, with one of the other veterinarians in the practice.
Cricket was anxious in the car, as she always is before going to the Vet, and shaking, but when the Vet Tech came to get her through the car window, Cricket went without a fight. They only needed a pee sample, so we expected the visit to be pretty quick. I wandered over to the CVS next door to get some colored markers and butter cookies, to get me through the snow storm, and I was surprised that Cricket wasn’t back in the car before I was. Mom was starting to get a little bit worried about the delay, but not too worried, yet.
The substitute Vet came to my window a while later, after the snow had started to swirl. I didn’t recognize her with her mask on, even though we’d met her once or twice over the years. She wasn’t acting like herself, though. She was sort of hysterical. At first I thought she was telling me that Cricket was a difficult patient, which I knew very well, and that Cricket had been anxious during the procedure, but then the Vet said, “I thought she was going to die!” and everything changed. She said that Cricket had peed all over the place, including all over her, and there was blood in the urine, and then she seemed to go into shock (Cricket, not the Vet) and, the Vet repeated, “I was afraid she was going to die right there!”
I was having a very hard time following her narration, because it was out of order and unexpected, and it seemed like the Vet was angry or scared or something else I couldn’t pinpoint, and I couldn’t make sense of any of it given that Cricket had only gone in for a urine culture. She told us that they’d been sitting with Cricket in the office, monitoring her vitals, and she was going to give Cricket subcutaneous fluids, and medication for shock, and then she could let Cricket sit with us in the car, as long as we didn’t leave.
Cricket came out in the arms of the Vet Tech, looking listless and frail. She sat on my lap and seemed to weigh nothing at all. I kept talking to Cricket and petting her and trying to reassure myself that she was going to be okay, but I really wasn’t sure. I could feel the pocket of liquid under her skin from the fluids. Mom and I went over the things the Vet had said and shared our confusion. I was on the edge of tears, constantly rehearing “she’s going to die!” and Mom was trying to keep things together and stay calm, but it was rough.
Gradually, Cricket started to recover and look around. When she climbed behind my neck, readying herself for the drive home, I knew she was out of danger, but we still had to wait for an okay from the Vet before we could leave. She came outside as the snow was getting thicker and she checked Cricket’s gums, and looked in her eyes, and said we could take Cricket home as long as we promised to call in half an hour with an update, or else she (the Vet) wouldn’t be able to get to sleep that night.
“Grr. Times two.”
It took most of a day for Cricket to recover from her urine culture, but she did recover. We ordered new diapers, measured to fit Cricket’s shape and not just her weight, but with the delays in shipping for Christmas we had to make do with spreading towels everywhere for a while. It took five days to get results from the urine culture – positive for two infections – and a prescription for a stronger antibiotic. There was no explanation for the episode at the Vet’s office, though. And it was still unclear if the incontinence was caused by the infections, or if the infections were caused by the incontinence.
I kept thinking about my friend Teddy, the black miniature poodle, who died over the summer at age fifteen from a sudden onset kidney disorder. He was a little bit older than Cricket, and had a little more blindness and deafness going on, but still, his death was unexpected. I’m not ready for Cricket to be an old dog. The way she allowed me to put the reusable diapers on her scared me – normal Cricket would have tried to rip my fingers off for trying such a thing. She even let us wash her, occasionally.
Teddy and Cricket, a few years back.
The new diaper arrived, a light pink with Velcro straps, and Cricket let us put that on her too, though she made it clear that it was not her preference. There was only one diaper in the package, instead of the three we expected, so there was still a lot of washing and drying to do, with one memorable night spent hurrying the process with a hair dryer.
About a week into the second course of antibiotics Cricket woke up shivering one morning, similar to the way she’d done during her Vet visit for the urine culture. We sat with her and massaged her back and whispered to her until she seemed to be okay, and then we called her regular Vet. He said to take a video if she had another episode, but he wasn’t too worried. He was more concerned with her continuing pee puddles and he wanted us to start the second incontinence medication right away. Mom drove to the Vet’s office that afternoon and we gave Cricket the first dose of DES, a synthetic estrogen meant to tighten the urethral sphincter, with her antibiotic and hamburger, that night.
Within twenty four hours of starting the DES Cricket’s puddling stopped. It’s possible that the antibiotic finally kicked in at the same time, but the correlation with the start of the DES was convincing. Cricket got through a whole night with a dry diaper, and then a whole day without a diaper and without any accidents. We put the diaper on her for the next two nights, just in case, but she had figured out how to take it off and she would leave it, still velcroed closed, on the edge of Mom’s bed while she went to pee on the wee wee pad.
She’s feeling much better, and she thinks she still deserves hamburgers every morning and very night, despite finishing the second course of antibiotics. She’s back to peeing only on the wee wee pad and outdoors with no accidents. But, this was not the answer I was hoping for. I wanted so badly for this to be a one-time infection, because incontinence, while treatable, is a sign that she is really aging now. I want to celebrate and feel the relief that she is back to normal, or normal for Cricket, but I’m worried about what might come next.
Ellie has found the whole situation confusing. On the one hand there have been many more treats to go along with Cricket’s medications (hamburgers, peanut butter, chicken livers, anything to get Cricket interested), and Ellie always gets her share, but there’s also been a lot of extra attention going to Cricket instead of to happy little Ellie. For example, Ellie was very jealous of the diaper. For a while there she reminded me a lot of Dobby the House Elf, from the Harry Potter Books, desperate for a piece of clothing of her own. But then our neighbor found out that the sweater she’d ordered as a Christmas present for her brother’s dog was too small for him, and she offered it to us. Cricket, feeling much better already, refused to put her paws through the armholes to try it on, but Ellie was thrilled! Finally, a present just for her! She wore it for a night and a day and had her picture taken and celebrated with some zoomies out on the lawn. The only problem with the sweater is that it covers all of the places where she wants to be scratched and petted, and she eventually decided that scratchies were more important than fashion. So the sweater has been put aside, awaiting the next snow day, when she can wear it out in public and run around in circles and get all of the attention she craves.
“I have clothes!”
I’m sure Cricket will be fine with that. Maybe.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
One night at synagogue, I was sitting behind a grandmother and granddaughter, ages 65 and 8, approximately. They were both impeccably dressed, hair specially done for the evening. They wouldn’t have been chosen for a greeting card, or a commercial, as the ideal of a warm and sensitive grandmother offering safety and sweetness and cookies to a patient loving child. They were more like an ad for a department store, selling stylish clothes for women of every age. But as I sat there, the little girl picked up her grandmother’s hand and began to investigate. There was that puffy vein on the back of Grandma’s hand and the little girl pressed on it with her thumb, and rolled it under the skin. Then she pinched, gently, some of the skin on Grandma’s hand, and pulled it up like a tent, and then massaged it back into place. Then she ran her fingers over the lines in the skin, and the bends at the finger joints.
All the while Grandma relaxed her hand and allowed the investigation to continue. She didn’t grab her hand away, or hiss at her granddaughter to stop it. There was something so full of love in this interaction, even more so than later on in the service when they wrapped their arms around each other during the standing prayer. And it all made me think. Older women are always made to feel decrepit for their aging skin. Moisturize! Try Crepe erase! Collagen, plastic surgery, face tape! But this woman’s hands were being lovingly explored, seen as one more fascinating thing about Grandma, not to be criticized or avoided, but to be touched and manipulated and loved because they belong to Grandma. As if the granddaughter was saying, these hands make me feel safe and attached. These hands belong to my grandmother and therefore they are beautiful.
Cricket and her own Grandma
We have all of these ideas about how a woman should look, and how her skin should feel, and what color her hair should be, and what size her body should be, but children know better. They believe that whatever you look like is beautiful, if you are the one they love. Everything about how you look and smell and sound reminds them of who you are, and how you feel about them. They want to touch you and see you, not a perfected image of you.
I think this is what we love about dogs too. They don’t care if our skin is tight or loose. They don’t care if we are fat or skinny or in between. They care if we love them, and pet them, and feed them. They love the sound of our voices and the smell of our skin.
“My Grandma is beautiful.”
I want to remember this the next time I feel the need to berate myself for my body, my face, my clothes, or anything else imperfect about me, but I know, even as I write this down, that I am forgetting it, or forgetting to believe it.
I was so proud of myself. I went a million miles out of my comfort zone to set up the writing workshop on aging at my synagogue. I wrote a heartfelt proposal and sent it out for people to read. I presented the proposal in person in front of 20 or 30 people, and got an extraordinarily positive reaction, and six people signed up for my theoretical workshop on the spot. I sent emails and coordinated, and negotiated, and scheduled, and got furiously to work planning my first workshop session, and five people showed up – only two from the original list. But five people was good, and people talked and wrote and stayed for an hour longer than I expected. The next time there were four people, and the time after that only two, plus me.
After three sessions, I took February off from the writing workshop – because so many people were snow birds escaping the winter in New York, and because I wanted to be a snow hermit and hide in my apartment. The anxiety I felt before each class was debilitating, even though the classes themselves were a lot of fun. I could barely move on a Wednesday after a Tuesday workshop. Three naps instead of one, and a long list of self-recriminations about things I should have said, and shouldn’t have said. I spent the extra time reading for, and planning, new lessons for the rest of the sessions. I drafted and revised and cut and pasted until the writing prompts and the writing samples came together in perfect symmetry to get to the heart of a subject within an hour and a half. I talked up the workshop at the next Engaging with Aging meeting, and to whoever asked at other events.
Me, napping.
Me, trying to reach out.
And when we came back from break, there were three students, then two, then just one, my mom, my loyal mom. People asked for my forgiveness for missing classes, for forgetting, and overscheduling, and having bridge at exactly that time and day. Intellectually, I knew they weren’t rejecting me, or saying anything about the quality of my work or what I had to offer. I knew that I’d done a good job, planning lessons and prompts and being supportive and gentle and only pushing a tiny bit when I knew someone was ready to go a step further. But how can you be a teacher without students?
Butterfly wanted to help.
Even Cricket felt bad for me.
These are good, solid, interesting people, with stories to tell and a lot of strength and survival skills and knowledge to share. And yet, the idea of waking up in the morning and choosing to go to a class where you will have to write about yourself, as if you matter, as if someone else should care what you think, no, that they can’t do.
One woman told me that what her sixteen-year-old grandson wanted for his birthday was for her to write down something about how she and grandpa got together and stayed together all those years. And I thought, wow, what a lovely and loving thing for a sixteen-year-old boy to ask for, and she thought, Oy, can’t I just give him money?
I ended the writing workshop in April, a month earlier than expected, and people kept asking me if I would start it again in the fall, maybe on a different day, at a different time, for a wider audience. I was tempted to try again, but also gun shy. I didn’t want a repeat of that experience of sitting in a big empty room, staring at the clock, hoping someone, anyone, would show up. Maybe if I could have brought Butterfly with me, to sit on my lap and calm me down while I stared up at the clock, but she sheds, which means she’s not hypoallergenic and therefore I’d be treifing up the library at the synagogue for people with dog allergies. And Cricket, the non-shedding dog, would be barking and growling, and scaring the nursery school kids into cowering under their tiny tables in the classroom next door.
Cricket has a bark to scare small children
Butterfly is all hair all the time
I went to the next Engaging with Aging meeting, after the end of the workshop, because I’d gone to all of the previous meetings. I sat and listened as the discussion wandered and flailed. They needed some way to disseminate information, to share the advice they’d gathered from each other, and from the social worker at the Jewish Community Center. But how?
I didn’t mean to speak up. Words just started coming out of my mouth. Why not write up personal stories, about how you’ve dealt with a particular aspect of aging, what you learned, what you struggled with, where you went for help, and put it in the newsletter, or on the website. Maybe telling stories in order to help someone else is going to make it easier for people to open up. Within minutes, I had volunteered to interview, edit, and encourage people to get their stories down on paper. I’ve never been a journalist. I’ve done very few interviews. How did this happen?
So, this is what I’m doing next. I am not at all comfortable out here on this cliff, but it’s an opportunity to do something new, and something satisfying, that might actually help people. Wouldn’t that be great?
I started a writing workshop on aging at my synagogue. I didn’t plan to do this. I just went to a meeting on aging because it looked interesting. I had the idea that this could lead to visiting people at the hospital, or reading to patients at nursing homes, and could count on my application for graduate school. My ideal would be to walk dogs at the animal shelter, but I don’t think they’d count that as social work. I could be wrong.
So I sat in the meeting and listened. Stories flooded the room: of women at sea after the death of a spouse of fifty years; women manipulated by insurance companies while signing papers at the hospital; women looking for help for their parents; women wondering how to help their friends. The meeting was very low on men.
I took notes and listened and felt the chaos roll over me.
The decision at the end of the first meeting was to have a second meeting, and a third, and a fourth if necessary, until some ideas could start to coalesce.
I went home, exhausted, and fell asleep, and then went on with my life, writing for the blog, going to class, writing my research paper, studying math for the GRE (because not only did I forget every bit of math learned in high school, but I have even lost my short term math memory and I forget it all over again each day.)
I don’t remember looking over my notes from the meeting. I just thought about one of my synagogue friends, recovering from back surgery, and I thought about my great aunt Ellen and the interviews I did with her a few years back to try and catch some of her magic on paper, and I thought about the short memoir my grandfather started before he died, giving us a glimpse into his childhood. Bits and pieces of the stories people had told me over the past few years of Friday nights at synagogue started to bubble up. I wrote a few notes to myself about people whose stories I’d want to read, but told myself it was just a passing idea, and I’d never have to follow through and actually talk to people.
I’ve learned so much from keeping a blog and writing memoir. It forces me to really deepen into my life, to settle into the crevices of it, and not just feel like I’m a character in my own imagination. I feel like I am taking good care of myself by writing about my life, instead of letting the moments disappear into the ether. I especially like that I have a chronicle of my dogs’ lives. I don’t worry that I will forget important things about them, the way I did with previous dogs. It felt so painful to forget things about Dina and Delilah, as if I was disrespecting them, and the value of their lives to me.
Delilah the Doberman
Dina, pensive.
Butterfly and Cricket
I found myself writing notes for an idea of a Friday night service where people read their own stories to the congregation. And I thought about how I could make that happen, or at least help people to write some of their own stories down.
I wrote a proposal, feeling very self-conscious and a bit like I was walking into a black hole from which I would never be able to return. I would be shunned from my synagogue. They’d hate me for thinking I was so special that I could teach anyone how to write; they’d resent me for thinking I had anything to offer. I could barely breathe.
I sent the proposal to the woman who runs the aging meetings, and she loved it! And then she sent it to the social worker helping the congregation, and she loved it too. And when I read it to the group in person at the next meeting, face turning purple, hands shaking, I got applause, and six people signed up to take a writing class with me on the spot.
I think I could be good at this, but I’m still terrified. Every step forward feels like jumping from one cliff to another. I’m thinking about how to help people who have trouble seeing, or trouble with arthritis so that writing or typing is difficult. I’m thinking about how to help people who are not natural writers, but would be great interviewees. I’m thinking so much that I have little pieces of paper floating around my room like confetti. Butterfly is loving that.
rachelmankowitz 