BREAKING OUT FROM WRITER’S BLOCK
Queen Gypsy with her rescuer Maddy at their favorite spot, the beach.
Sorry for the long absence. I had a stroke a few months back, and that brought on a case of writer’s block that made me a reader rather than a writer. Several half-finished writing projects were put on hold while I gave in to enjoying the hard work of others. You see, reading is an escape from writing, and can bring fierce feelings of guilt in a writer. So what do you do? Ignore them as best and long as you can.
Leave it to the death of a dear one to shock you out of that block…jolt you back to the real life you’ve chosen for yourself. Last Tuesday we lost the queen of the family, our 16-year-old Golden Retriever. With many ailments and unable to rise, she was euthanized by a vet on our living room carpet while we watched through a downpour of tears.
A rescue, Gypsy had an unusual backstory. Our daughter Madeleine was driving through Compton one day and spotted an emaciated stray trapped between two lanes of moving traffic. An animal lover without equal, she stopped, parked, and, dodging cars, retrieved the filthy, bedraggled beast from peril, put the creature in her car, and drove home.
“You’re not bringing that animal into this house, Madeleine. We’ve already got a dog, a cat, and the canary. Take it elsewhere.” My patriarchal authority was on the line. That line was severed quickly. That very evening Madeleine and my wife Timarie tub-washed the dirt and grease off the pup; the next morning they took her to the vet where she was checked out. After de-worming and treating her for fleas, the doc told us she was un-chipped, malnourished, three to five months old, probably a Golden Retriever or a Retriever mix. She also had a slight limp from damage done in her right rear quarter, probably from a brush with a car.
Really? Could she be a pure-bred Golden…that can cost as much as $3000? Lost and not found by the owner? We decided to check on her breed with Mars Veterinary, which for a modest sum will examine a saliva sample and give you your dog’s breed from its DNA. I swabbed her mouth and sent the saliva off. Sure enough, she proved to be a purebred. Really? Running loose on the mean city streets? Somehow Gypsy Rose, as we named her, seemed to know she had aristocratic roots. When, with Madeleine’s loving nurture, she’d been rapidly restored to health, the dog wasted no time letting us know we were put on earth to serve her. Her sense of entitlement amused us all, but we went along with the gentle, amiable lady with a short but murky past.
Gypsy was true to her breed by being food-motivated, and she seemed to have a clock in her head. If meal time arrived and she hadn’t been fed, we could expect a volley of loud peremptory barks, ending only when she got her victuals. (Queen or not, she was also known to swipe a burger patty when no one was looking.)
She also had an advanced case of selective hearing. Summoned back into the house from her favorite front lawn lookout she’d feign complete deafness, but open a bag of corn chips two rooms off and she’d be at your heels in no time to claim her share.
I can’t personally verify this because I have a weak sense of smell, but the rest of the family was unanimous in agreeing that her golden coat exuded a sui generis sweet smell, like waffles in syrup. So befitting for one I came to call the Dowager Queen of Dogdom.
She was a stubborn monarch. She claimed the right to plop her bulk down wherever she pleased, which in the house was invariably the busiest junction between rooms, not to be disturbed. That earned her the position of the family’s middle linebacker. She also expected to be brushed and stroked often, and have all her other sybaritic wants met on demand.
On the plus side, she was serene, generous, gregarious, with not a mean bone in her body. She was both a people person and a dog person. Yes, she loved everyone…save employees of the postal service. Above all, she loved children, and her daily walks were slowed by much petting from neighborhood kids and more-or-less constant tail-wagging by her to acknowledge her adoring subjects. Halloween was her favorite day of the year. That’s when she would joyously greet the trick-or-treaters at the front door before bolting to the street to meet the parents.
Gypsy loved car travel. Like Chauncey Gardiner, she liked to watch—bicyclers, pedestrians a block away, passing cars (some deserving a rueful bark, no doubt triggered by that memory of a clash before we got her.)
Dog Beach in Huntington was her favorite travel destination. Indeed, it was the heart of her domain, where she would announce herself with a leash of commanding barks as she strolled through the crowd of lesser canines in their frolic. “Large Marge is taking charge,” was the way my wife put it. Eventually Gypsy would do her stately wade through the surf, head held high, ignoring dogdom’s hoi polloi milling about her in the foam. Times of great joy…to be remembered.
Here pictured farther north in Tomales Bay.
But all Queens are mortal. And Gypsy had more than a fair share of physical problems. The hip affliction from before we got her grew worse with time, requiring some expensive surgery that left her with an even more visible limp. And later, to my amazement, she became a factory for non-malignant tumors; from one of her surgeries the vet removed no less than 22 fatty tumors from her body. Yet she remained our stoic, uncomplaining queen.
In her final year Gypsy suffered increasingly from seizures in which her body went catatonic, punctuated with spasmodic thrashing, lasting from two to ten minutes. The final one came three days before that Tuesday when, encircled by members of her grieving family, she breathed her last breath. Some borrowed words from the Bard surfaced in my mind: “Good night, sweet Queen, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
If there is a dog heaven, Gypsy has probably arrived there by now and is standing in the short line reserved for royals, waiting to ascend the next vacant throne…to which she is certainly entitled.
