A Dog Decade
Feb. 1st, 2011 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogDon't know about you, but I know exactly where I was ten years ago today:
It was for a deposition in a thoroughly horrid case I was handling, involving slow-moving tugboats and dolphins. (Not the Flipper kind; this kind.) I'd previously done depositions of my own client's people at a dock office somebody found for us on the shore of the Hudson River, with Eleanor's then almost-new car getting its whole right side almost sheared off by a passing truck on Route 17 en route to it. The tugboat captain had to be deposed at a later time, though, so what better place to do it than the opposing lawyer's office in the World Trade Center?
I either stayed overnight with, or made an early-morning visit to, my old friends Ruthie and Frank down near the Village, their baby girl almost a newborn, then headed toward the Towers. I hadn't been in for years, and security was much increased after the 90s bombing. Everyone was photographed and badged in order to get anywhere in the tower.
The deposition was dull and uneventful, and I caught my flight, or possibly even made the seven-hour drive in record time, to get home to a suddenly less-empty house.
----
Weeks before, Eleanor talked for the first time about adding a dog to our menagerie. She was doing outdoor work back then, and thought a dog would be good company on the drives and at the homes. That never happened, but something far more amazing did: Tasha came into our lives.
She was a lab-mix, not quite a year old from what anyone could tell, and had been found loose on the streets of Cheektowaga. Worse, there were signs she'd been abused, or at least severely neglected, in her short time on this earth. She showed signs of some training, but also more sinister signs of someone doing that training who didn't like how well she was doing. (Vets would later comment on the shape of her head suggesting maltreatment, and we've found a BB bullet embedded in her side.)
Eleanor and Em made the pound visit while I was away, and fell in love. They brought her home, and went to job and school/afterschool. I came Home Alone to a dog who'd never met me before and who, we suspected, was a fear-biter. So I did the logical thing: I fed her. She's never even looked at me in anger in the ten years since.
One by one, the three cats learned to get along with her. In time, we introduced her to our neighbor's Dalmatian, the perfect companion because Woody was far more submissive than any other dog she'd ever meet. When his health failed a few years later, we adopted a second dog, who instantly became Tasha's BFF and has remained so for just about eight years now. Three more cats have come since then, and three have left us, all of them learning both her limitations and the warmth of her fur and her very deep-down heart.
People, generally, don't do as well. It was a human, after all, who did what only she knows and still fears. Deep male voices (Eleanor's brother, for one) freak her incessantly. And yet she's come to accept Emily's boyfriend (a pretty mean baritone) as one of us in the past several months, shamelessly play-bowing for him and mooching his food.
She's now approaching 11 years old, if not already past it. Her routines are getting a little high-maintenance, cry-begging for food an hour or more before feeding time in the mornings and constantly whining to go out in the evenings. Yet she still looks as trim, and as gorgeous, as the day she came home. Can ten years of love make up for nine months of pain? Only she knows for sure, but we think it's a pretty good bet.
Just over seven months after that day, Woody's owner called the house to tell us to turn on the television, and see the horror that had hit lower Manhattan on that 9/11 morning. The set was in my office back then, and as I took it all in, Tasha was lying on the floor, oblivious to it all. "You have no idea how lucky you are," I told her.
As this week's events unfold, I think she still is.
It was for a deposition in a thoroughly horrid case I was handling, involving slow-moving tugboats and dolphins. (Not the Flipper kind; this kind.) I'd previously done depositions of my own client's people at a dock office somebody found for us on the shore of the Hudson River, with Eleanor's then almost-new car getting its whole right side almost sheared off by a passing truck on Route 17 en route to it. The tugboat captain had to be deposed at a later time, though, so what better place to do it than the opposing lawyer's office in the World Trade Center?
I either stayed overnight with, or made an early-morning visit to, my old friends Ruthie and Frank down near the Village, their baby girl almost a newborn, then headed toward the Towers. I hadn't been in for years, and security was much increased after the 90s bombing. Everyone was photographed and badged in order to get anywhere in the tower.
The deposition was dull and uneventful, and I caught my flight, or possibly even made the seven-hour drive in record time, to get home to a suddenly less-empty house.
----
Weeks before, Eleanor talked for the first time about adding a dog to our menagerie. She was doing outdoor work back then, and thought a dog would be good company on the drives and at the homes. That never happened, but something far more amazing did: Tasha came into our lives.
She was a lab-mix, not quite a year old from what anyone could tell, and had been found loose on the streets of Cheektowaga. Worse, there were signs she'd been abused, or at least severely neglected, in her short time on this earth. She showed signs of some training, but also more sinister signs of someone doing that training who didn't like how well she was doing. (Vets would later comment on the shape of her head suggesting maltreatment, and we've found a BB bullet embedded in her side.)
Eleanor and Em made the pound visit while I was away, and fell in love. They brought her home, and went to job and school/afterschool. I came Home Alone to a dog who'd never met me before and who, we suspected, was a fear-biter. So I did the logical thing: I fed her. She's never even looked at me in anger in the ten years since.
One by one, the three cats learned to get along with her. In time, we introduced her to our neighbor's Dalmatian, the perfect companion because Woody was far more submissive than any other dog she'd ever meet. When his health failed a few years later, we adopted a second dog, who instantly became Tasha's BFF and has remained so for just about eight years now. Three more cats have come since then, and three have left us, all of them learning both her limitations and the warmth of her fur and her very deep-down heart.
People, generally, don't do as well. It was a human, after all, who did what only she knows and still fears. Deep male voices (Eleanor's brother, for one) freak her incessantly. And yet she's come to accept Emily's boyfriend (a pretty mean baritone) as one of us in the past several months, shamelessly play-bowing for him and mooching his food.
She's now approaching 11 years old, if not already past it. Her routines are getting a little high-maintenance, cry-begging for food an hour or more before feeding time in the mornings and constantly whining to go out in the evenings. Yet she still looks as trim, and as gorgeous, as the day she came home. Can ten years of love make up for nine months of pain? Only she knows for sure, but we think it's a pretty good bet.
Just over seven months after that day, Woody's owner called the house to tell us to turn on the television, and see the horror that had hit lower Manhattan on that 9/11 morning. The set was in my office back then, and as I took it all in, Tasha was lying on the floor, oblivious to it all. "You have no idea how lucky you are," I told her.
As this week's events unfold, I think she still is.
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Date: 2011-02-01 05:44 pm (UTC)