In the Ruff

Last week I went to visit my mother.  I missed her and hadn’t seen her since Christmas but experiencing a dreadful stomach flu I had to cut the visit short. When you’re sick, there’s nothing like your own bed and for that matter—your own WC.  Recently, being in a somewhat gloomy disposition, or perhaps because were in tax season, or in spring— a time in which my allergies go bezerk, or just because I’m battle-scarred, I was convinced that something disastrous was going to happen.  I anticipated a litany of things, in a Woody Allen sort of neurotic way, but what I didn’t expect was that days before the trip, I walked downstairs and found my beloved dog Coco lying motionless at the foot of the steps.

I’ll interrupt myself to say that she is now fine. She had a fever. She’s cured and sitting right next to me. However, I didn’t know that at the time and there are few problems more terrible than seeing your beloved “best-friend” staring at you mournfully and trying to figure out if you should go see a vet.

But the point of all this is that as I was sitting at the vet’s office, clutching onto Coco’s paw, I was thinking about how if it hadn’t been for her, I might not write for literary magazines. She’s always been a tad high-strung, but when we first got her she was an absolute lunatic. My husband had to walk backwards into the house because if Coco saw him full on she started to pee.  So at one point, when she was at the vet and doing her best to climb onto the poor man’s arms, the vet mentioned that there were tranquilizers for dogs that worked in much the same way as they did for people.

That fact stayed with me and a few days later I had visions of a woman who starts to move her head side to side as she is trying to decide whether or not to take her dog’s medication. Something in the humor and tragedy of that moved me, and that was the start of another short story. I went back and read through the opening scene with a roar and thought of how wonderful it is for writers that we get to write about those we love—furry or otherwise.

So, thank heavens Coco is okay. And I had a great time in Los Angeles.

How about you? Do you ever write about pets?