U9O.net: You and I Know.

If you were to ask me 8 years ago, back in 2000, how things would be in 2008, I would probably have had a hard time coming up with anything, let alone have the imagination, nor the maturity and wisdom to even get close.

9/11 hadn’t happened yet, my parents were still married, and I was busy charging money to my credit card. I had just landed my first paid web design and Flash job during the summer and was making an incredible sum of money for the time, and spending it almost as fast by travelling, eating out, bleaching my hair blond, and partying.

I had just purchased an expensive sony digital camera, with an unheard of 64 megabytes of memory and 3x optical zoom, and one of the first cameras to feature carl zeiss lens. Eagerly I stepped out to the wincingly scorching July summer to take what I envisioned would be “real” photos of our black pug puppy Rosie. I often envisioned how Rosie would be the ticket to my becoming the hit with the opposite sex, and I would often take her with me to the mall, fruitlessly wondering when a girl was going to notice the pug, pet her, and then invite me over for some sort of alcoholic beverage and to sleep with her, if she so wanted. I left the older pugs at home, as they weren’t puppies.

My nose crinkling in the dry valley heat, I softly put her down, her legs dangling, slid the plastic switch on the camera on, set it to the black-and-white setting (one of the first built-in digital effects), as that automatically makes photos more “real” and “artistic”.

She, like me, stuck to the grass, as we were both barefeet, and gingerly tippy-toeing on the hot concrete driveway in front of our home. Her figure was lithe and her movements tentative, as she was the runt of the litter– and the only survivor. Her personality would always be tentative, submissive, shy, albeit extremely intelligent and loyal. As a puppy, she was tiny, and is small even today. Her tongue always sticks out slightly in a juvenile way.

This summer, I moved back home with my mother a month ago, a different home, while I prepare to move into my new place in downtown next week.

A few weeks before I moved back, I had slowly started moving small items not in storage to my mother’s home. I welcomed Rosie as she initially barked as me before sniffing at me to reawaken some part of her memory. Her eyes lit up and she promptly had a seizure, urinating on the floor. Horrified, I gasped internally, before my mom gently told me she was prone to having seizures when overly excited. Pet her gently, my mother advised, and she’d be fine. So I did.

It reminded me of an old Winston Churchill poem:

POOR PUGGY-WUG
Oh, what is the matter with poor Puggy-wug
Pet him and kiss him and give him a hug.
Run and fetch him a suitable drug,
Wrap him up tenderly all in a rug,
That is the way to cure Puggy-wug.

The first night I slept in my sister’s room, Rosie begged at my bed for me to pick her up (she’s not the most athletic dog anymore) so that she could lie down next to me (as dogs are social creatures, used to sleeping in packs). It was hard to refuse, my memories going back to that summer, and the recent memory of her gasping for breath, her eyes milking over. My mom, a stickler for cleanliness, and a general perfectionist, was apalled at the sight of dog hair on the sheets, but relented. “Sometimes I let her sleep with me when it’s cold”, she conceded.

It was difficult to refuse every other night, her paws scratching at my hand if it peeked into her vision, and her labored breathing and panting reminding me of time past. Then it became to the point if such that I refused, I was afraid she might have another seizure.

What made it worse was when I went home one day, she rushed out of the door barking at a small blue-jay. The blue jay dived at her, a small 3 inch bird, in fury, with her small claws extended (My mother explained to me later that the 2 birds had nested there for years and had altercations with the dog before). Rosie ran all the way back in the house and had another attack.

It was impossible to not immediately pick her up and spoil her after that.

Soon, my mother was complaining that Rosie would not sleep in my mom’s room anymore, on a yellow duck pillow. My mother eventually threw it into my room to encourage the dog to sleep on it. As I left early in the mornings to go to work, my mother told me she’d cry for 30 minutes, and then wait patiently next to my shoes (“her nose is right inside your shoe, smelling your stinky feet, awgh!”), until I went home 10 hours later. “It’s like she’s in love with you or something!”, my mom groused, with more than a hint of envy, as she’d yell at the dog while she fed her. “it’s not even likes he feeds you!”, admonished my mother, “I do!!”

I had opened up some old wounds for my mother, the high-achiever, but never the easy-going one, well-respected, but never well-liked. “How come she likes you so much?”, she complained to me once. “I pet her and I rub her belly and I massage her legs, because she’s old and she seems to have problems with it”, I replied.

My mother just nodded and sighed.