Tzippy was making so much progress! We’d gotten to the point where she was able to walk up and down the two steps in front of our building, and even to follow me down the walkway to the parking lot, reluctantly. But her favorite thing, by far, was the return trip home. Each week, when we came back from therapy, she’d wait impatiently in my arms as I carried her up the steps from the parking lot to the walkway, and as soon as she was able to put her paws on solid ground she started to pull me towards home, smiling and looking back at me every once in a while as if to ask what was taking me so long. I was feeling so good about her progress that I’d even started my next experiment, expanding the trail of chicken treats in my room all the way to Butterfly’s old doggy steps, to try to convince her that stairs aren’t so scary.
But the process was interrupted when Tzipporah got sick for a few days and needed three separate baths to get clean and had to avoid all treats until her stomach settled down. For a while there I was too busy scrubbing every square inch of carpet to focus on anything like training. As a result of all of those baths, Tzipporah developed a strong antipathy to being in the same room with me for the next few days, and then continued to watch me carefully for any sign that I was about to dognap her back to the bathroom sink. Part of the problem was that she was at full fluff, just days away from her grooming appointment, so there was a lot of hair to clean, and part of the problem was that she already hated bathtime before any of this happened. I had to wash her bed and blankets a few times too, because she kept racing back to her safe place to hide from the hated baths.
Once her stomach had settled down, though, and she could stand to be in the same room with me again, we took her out for a walk, past the parking lot, around the corner, and up the street to the Seven Eleven. Tzippy was not at all sure about this new adventure and needed a lot of reassurance to keep going up the hill, stopping to check on Grandma every few seconds and then standing and shivering to let me know that I was asking way too much of her. But, again, as soon as we turned back towards home, she ran ahead gleefully leading the family along the right path. She was even willing to walk on the grass in the backyard in order to visit Grandma’s vegetable garden at the far end of the yard.
We celebrated these great accomplishments by sitting on Grandma’s bench for a rest and almost as soon as we sat down, Kevin the mini-goldendoodle came running out for a visit. We hadn’t seen him and his parents in forever, so we all caught up while Tzipporah sat on my lap and Kevin sat politely in front of my legs, catching up on all of the petting he had missed.
When it was time to go back into our building, I tried, valiantly, to encourage her to walk up the stairs to our apartment, but Tzipporah seems to think the stairway looks like Kilimanjaro and refuses to even lift a paw towards the lowest step (you would not believe the crazy eyes and flying paws that greet me when I attempt to lead her forward). But she has conquered so many other challenges this year that I’m hoping those stairs will eventually look less like a mountain and more like a manageable molehill. Though it will probably be a long time before she can see a bottle of doggy shampoo and a bath towel without flinching. Me too, baby girl. Me too.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my 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?
rachelmankowitz 