Family

Fending Off The Inevitable

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on August 11, 2011, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

The moment you realize you’ve slowly become your parents is always a surprise; my moment arrived when I told my wife we’d joined a boat club. While I’d never made a secret of my desire to get out on the water, she reacted the same way my mom had years ago when my dad announced he’d just bought the family a boat. An odd smile formed on her lips as if forced to appear at gunpoint.

“Really?” she said. Just like Mom once did. “That’s interesting.”

Women are smarter than men; all the women in my life, at least. In the second week of August, however, the brutal heat and humidity of Fairfield County can lead otherwise reasonable men to ignore the wisdom of these women and seek refuge in the comforting arms of material excess. For some it’s a red convertible, for others a shiny new motorcycle; for the Walsh family, it’s always been boats.

Growing up, my six brothers and sisters and I were prisoners of the thermostat. Because my dad didn’t “believe” in air conditioning any more than he believed in swimming pools or Bigfoot, the summer heat reduced us to boneless, moist clumps of flesh draped over the couches like melted chocolate. When he told us about the boat, we felt as if Moses were leading us out of the desert. My mom stood stoically to one side, no doubt mouthing a silent rosary in anticipation of the future headaches in store. While my dad was trying to recapture his glory days in the navy, my mom would be saddled with the practical realities involved in readying seven kids for an afternoon on the water with this unapologetic perfectionist who’d never owned his own boat before. While he climbed up the tiny flybridge to steer, it was she who’d have to cram the brown bag lunches, sunblock, blankets, and seven kids into the tiny galley below deck every time it rained.

When we arrived at the Housatonic marina for our maiden voyage, we caught our first glimpse of the new (used) twenty-four foot cabin cruiser—or at least what had been one in a previous life. It bobbed sadly in between the majestic boats on either side, as lifeless as the floating bunker fish that surrounded it. These being the days before they cleaned up Long Island Sound, this was a far cry from “sailing the ocean blue.” My mom’s eyes began to tear up, but I couldn’t tell if it was the smell of the fish, low tide, or the sight of the boat.

Dad christened his dream boat “The Irish,” a loving nod to our family heritage, ignoring the somewhat checkered maritime history of the Irish themselves. He’d soon discover the irony. Out of necessity, my dad required that we immerse ourselves in nautical jargon. There was no front or back of the boat; only “fore” and “aft;” no left or right side, only “port” or “starboard.” We learned quickly not to speak of the “bathroom,” and even quicker not to complain about it. “It’s not supposed to be comfortable,” he’d explain. “It’s called the ‘head’ for a reason—now use your head next time so you don’t have to go to the bathroom on the boat.” When the “head” wasn’t working (which was pretty much the entire time we owned the boat), he suggested we “go for a swim” if we couldn’t hold out until we returned to the dock. Needless to say, the Walsh kids rarely swam too close to one another in those days, just in case.

As the summer wore on, my dad demanded we leave earlier and earlier for our trips on the Sound. Most assumed this was a practical matter: when something went wrong (as it often did), it dramatically reduced the time we had to wait to get towed back into shore. The Coast Guard was always very friendly as we chatted on the short ride in: “We didn’t know the radio was broken until we tried to get help, after we figured out the sonar was broken, after we hit the sand bar.”

The real reason was simpler: The Irish had no reverse gear, and my dad didn’t want anyone to see what we were doing to their boats as we left the docks. My brothers and I would line up on either side of the boat and push it out of its slip, inevitably bouncing off the boats to either side in the process. “Fend off!” my dad would scream, each of us assuming he must have been talking to the others. It turns out that “fend off” means to keep pushing the boat away from the other boats, but we just assumed that’s what the bumpers were for. Putting the Irish to sea was like playing a giant game of bumper cars, only with more cursing and a lot more smoke. One could be forgiven for assuming the Walshes were shoveling coal for fuel with that giant black cloud billowing from the engine.

Things weren’t much better coming back into dock, but we grew adept at pulling ourselves into the slip by grabbing the boats to either side. It was awkward if their owners were on board, but we smiled our way through it. Each trip was followed by a total scrub-down of the boat, nine people worn by hours on the water in cramped quarters now secretly humming “It’s A Hard Knocks Life” and praying for rain the next week. After two seasons of fending off the inevitable, the Irish came to permanent dock in our back yard, killing a large patch of grass underneath in symbolism so strong I am almost reluctant to include it here.

Still, on a sweltering August afternoon, I can’t help but think it might be time to get a boat. Maybe if it’s cheaper than the convertible, my wife will let me.

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As Easter Approaches

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on April 21, 2011, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

This past Sunday marked the beginning of Catholicism’s “high holy days” with Palm Sunday, a day that commemorates Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem and eventual showdown with Pontius Pilate. It is one of the six Holy Days of Obligation in the Catholic Church. These mark important events that merit participation in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. On Holy Days, much like Sundays, Catholics are supposed to refrain from unnecessary work and attend church services. As a child, Palm Sunday meant three things: we got the brand new parish calendars (with the dates of all the upcoming parish league basketball games), we received our palm fronds (plastic-like, yellow-green leaves that we formed into crosses and put over our beds), and finally, that Easter Sunday was only a week away! For Catholic children who’d been forced to give up something meaningful for the 40-day Lenten season that culminates on Easter morning, this was the light at the end of the tunnel.

I grew up believing that the Easter season was chock-o-block with Holy Days and the dreaded weekday masses they entailed. My mom pulled us off playgrounds for masses on Ash Wednesday (the start of Lent which finds Catholics receiving ashes on our foreheads while praying for strength in preparation for Jesus’ death and resurrection), Holy Thursday (the day on which Jesus and his disciples have the Last Supper), and Good Friday (the day on which Jesus was killed). It was only while looking into joining the seminary after college that I learned that none of these days required us to go to mass. With seven rowdy kids on her hands, my mom kept up the ruse in a desperate attempt to save our souls through overexposure.

She also “suggested” the items we give up for Lent each year, and inevitably that meant no sweets at all. By the time Easter Sunday rolled around, the Walsh kids were irritable and jumpy in the throes of sugar withdrawal; we counted down the hours like addicts outside a methadone clinic and dreamed of the baskets of candy that waited for us upon our return home. Because my mom forbade us to touch them until after mass, we spent our morning trying not to hate the children snacking on chocolate bunnies in the pews around us.

How the crucifixion of Jesus Christ has been marketed into a festival of marshmallow chicks and egg-shaped chocolate lorded over by a giant rabbit is beyond me. Even as a child with a harelip who should have seen this animal as a role model, I saw little value in the Easter Bunny. He doesn’t even have an opposable thumb! Easter celebrates our victory–through the death and resurrection of Jesus–over eternal death, but all the Easter Bunny does is hop around and hide eggs. I was never even clear on whether the bunny was the one leaving us the candy baskets in the first place, so weak was his connection to the holiday. Still, you don’t look a gift-bunny in the mouth, especially if it means free candy.

The Lenten season culminates with the Holy Day of Ascension, commemorating the bodily elevation of Jesus up to Heaven of His own will forty days after rising from the dead. As a child, this was always the most pertinent symbol of the power of Christ, mostly because of a picture in my Junior Bible. It showed Jesus flying straight up into Heaven as his disciples watched, amazed, from the ground. Organized religion needs more pictures of their figureheads flying into space or lifting heavy objects, especially when competing with bunnies carrying baskets of peanut butter eggs.

To this day my mom can’t quite remember all the days she arbitrarily assigned to Holy Day status without Papal knowledge. More likely than not, she probably took our moral inventory and made it up as she went along if she began to fear for our eternal souls. In later years I learned the term for how my mom took us on these unannounced trips to the church for confession or extra masses: intermittent reinforcement. Because we lived in fear that we could be dragged in front of an altar at any moment, we had to make sure we kept our sinning in check.

Whether you are celebrating Easter (Christian), Mahavir Jayanti (Jain), the Theravadin New Year (Buddhist), the Lord’s Evening Meal (Jehovah’s Witness), Hanuman Jayanti (Hindu), Passover (Jewish), the First Day of Ridvan (Baha’i), or any other religious holiday during these two weeks, I wish you and yours a wonderful observance. And, if permitted, maybe a few of those peanut butter eggs…

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“The Lights of Christmas”

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on December 23, 2010, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

My wife loves me.

Mostly.

It’s the middle of December that makes her wonder.

“You see what the neighbors put up this year in the front yard?” she’ll ask. I know where she’s going, so I feign temporary deafness. “Big ‘ol inflatable Santa,” she’ll continue (she’s on to me). “Little elves pop out of the back of the sleigh with a stack of presents. They put out three more light-up reindeer this year, too.”

“Hope Santa’s got something to help cover their electric bill,” I mutter, but she’s way ahead of me.

“You know, at 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour, it’s not all that bad. My mom’s c7 lights (handed down to us on a faux garland), plus your dad’s c9 lights (handed down from my father, quite possibly borrowed from Thomas Edison himself), the 2 strands of 150 mini-lights that we wrap around the trees, 2 strands of LED lights and 2 LED light bulbs only eat up .15730000000000002 kilowatts. That comes out to $0.0325611 an hour. That’s 18 cents a day, $5.40 for the month.”

My wife is far more intelligent than I; with a little math, she’s exposed me for the Grinch I’ve slowly become. In my defense, I wasn’t always this way. I still remember driving with my parents to church every Sunday leading up to Christmas, my brothers and I judging each house’s seasonal decorations and declaring a winner before we hit the parking lot of St. Pius. Reindeer on the lawn were nice, but reindeer on the roof? Bonus points. Each year saw more lights, brighter lights, until for those few weeks a year we were like Alaskans bathed in 24-hour light.

The history of light-up decorations is a recent one. Before the twentieth century, most people didn’t put their Christmas trees up until December 24th because of the fire hazard they represented. (Be sure to read Stratford Fire Marshall Brian Lampart’s article on holiday safety in the December 9th Stratford Star.) In the middle of the 17th century, people attached small candles to the ends of tree branches with wax or pins. With the advent of electric lights, people started putting them up earlier and keeping them up later. By 1882, Edward Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison, hand-wired 80 red, white and blue bulbs and wound them around an evergreen tree. The tradition really took off after President Grover Cleveland set up a lighted Christmas tree at the White House in 1895.

Early bulbs needed to be wired together by professionals until 1903, when American Eveready Co. came out with the first Christmas light set that included screw-in bulbs and a plug for the wall socket. Still, the person responsible for popularizing Christmas tree lighting in America was a 15-year-old boy named Albert Sadacca. After candles on a tree resulted in a tragic New York City fire in 1917, Albert convinced his family to paint and string their novelty lights together for use on Christmas trees. Albert soon became the head of a multi-million dollar company, and neighborhoods across the country began a front yard decorating competition that continues to this day.

If you need proof, walk along California Street toward Barnum Avenue at night. Thousands of blinking, twinkling lights vie for attention with inflatable reindeer and giant candy canes along a Christmas corridor that houses on both sides have spent days preparing. Notice the cars that slow down to take in the view, the families that stroll through the neighborhood with dazzled kids in tow. In a season of excess, these displays offer so much for so little.

And so I got a few more strands of light this year and strung them up with a little more care. I won’t win any contests, but for $5.40 maybe I can add some holiday cheer to my neighborhood. I wish you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season.

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“Wampum Doesn’t Grow On Trees”

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on September 16, 2010, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

It was while riding atop a withered horse at a painfully slow trot through the cheering throngs packing either side of Main Street that I saw it. Leading my horse by the reins in the front of the Memorial Day Parade, dressed in full feathered headband and faux-leather Native American garb, was my dad: Big Bald Eagle.

And he was crying.

Not the flowing, girlish tears I’d cried earlier that day when I couldn’t find my 3rd Year White Feather for my headband. No, he cried the subtle tears of that lone 70’s commercial Indian on the side of the road after seeing a driver toss garbage out the window. Even in that pre-pubescent moment of drunken adulation, astride my trusty steed and waving to the frenzied crowd in my Native American splendor, this was a total shock.

This was not a man who shed tears.

Was it the culmination of centuries of pain inflicted on the once-proud Native American nation? Was it a swelling pride in the fact that his son had finally gotten a chance to ride one of the rented horses for our Indian Guide tribe in the parade? Could it have been the crushing irony of a third-generation Irishman and his son in face paint and feathers leading a parade that celebrated the military deaths of every American except the people we’d stolen the land from in the first place?

Turns out it was hay fever.

My dad was severely allergic to horses yet never said a word about it as I pleaded each year to be one of the riders in the parade. The slogan of the Indian Guides, a program for fathers and sons sponsored by the YMCA, is “Pals Forever.” My father more than lived up to that.

An operations manager for General Electric with a wife and seven kids to feed, time was a precious commodity. Still, we never missed our bi-monthly Tuesday night gatherings of the tribe, a group consisting of nine hyperactive sixth graders and their bone-weary dads. The meetings would begin with the Chief asking one of us to beat the Tribal Drum, once for each of the four directions of the earth and for each boy present. After the prayer to the Great Spirit, the Wampum Bearer collected the tribal dues from each brave. My dad, brilliant with money, was the logical choice for Wampum Bearer.

Wampum was the money we were supposed to earn through our chores for the week, a kind of kiddy tithing we offered up to the tribe. Like the real world outside the tribe, it was an imperfect system. Dave Crowe’s mom gave him five bucks allowance each week for doing nothing, while my dad parceled out my weekly twenty-five cents as if he were donating a kidney. As we placed our wampum in the Wampum Drum, we had to say how we earned it. Dave would mutter, “I took out the trash all week,” even though we all knew his younger brother did. When I got up, it sounded like a Red Cross disaster plan: “First, I repainted the bathroom radiators and put a new coat of varnish on the porch. Then, I cut up two cords of wood and stacked it under the deck for the winter. Next, I cleared the woods around our house of any fallen branches or dead trees. After that…”

My older brother, Golden Eagle, would usually interrupt. “But did you finish cleaning the woods, Little Bald Eagle?” he’d ask.

You always had to tell the truth around the Sacred Circle. “I apologize to the tribe for being boastful,” I’d reply, shooting daggers at Golden Eagle. The other braves would look awkwardly away, avoiding eye contact. There but for the grace of the Great Spirit go I…

Once I asked for a raise in my allowance. “Wampum doesn’t grow on trees,” my dad replied sagely. He gave me an extra nickel a week. He could easily have caved in (like the rest of the dads), but he was teaching me something.

Next, each brave would grab the Talking Stick and give his Scouting Report, our progress toward the next bead, bear claw, or Feather Class. After the old and new business (the Indian Guide Handbook says it all: “Keep all business short”), the centerpiece of each tribal meeting was arts and crafts. Some fathers went all out, spending hundreds of dollars on drum skins and balsam wood projects that would have put the Museum of Natural History to shame. One dad provided the makings for real tomahawks, and another proud papa provided each brave with a handcrafted totem pole to paint!

My dad showed us how to make a stick that, when rubbed, made a tiny propeller spin.

Not exactly head-turner, but it fulfilled his uniquely personal tribal craft code: it took a long time to make, required little setup (and even less cleanup), and had a flashy name. The “Gee-Haw Whimmydiddle Stick” was the staple craft every time the Walshes hosted the tribe. Craft time was followed by refreshment time, which consisted of screaming kids running around the caffeine-addled dads with Twinkies in their hands—just like real Indians!

I never knew he’d spent days researching how to build this Appalachian contraption in the days before the internet.

We’d close with a final prayer to the Great Spirit. I remember asking my dad why we prayed to Jesus on Sunday but to the Native American god on Tuesdays. “In your mind, just change Great Spirit to Jesus,” he replied. Wow, I thought—if only those early Native Americans had known! This really could have saved them some trouble.

It’s only now that I appreciate how much he did for us in our time in the Indian Guides. He showed his family what true sacrifice and commitment meant, refusing to miss meetings despite his exhaustion after long hours at work. He made his children a priority, even when it meant dressing in costume and face paint with a string of bear claws around his neck. He stood by me even as he sneezed and coughed his way down two excruciating miles on the Memorial Day Parade route. He never complained, because that’s what big braves do for little braves. He did it my whole life.

I still have my headband. I still know the words to the “Pals Forever” camp song. As I think back on that day, it’s my turn to shed some tears. My dad, Big Bald Eagle, is my pal forever.

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“The Retail Queen of Fairfield, Connecticut”

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on July 22, 2010, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

It is the day after Thanksgiving, and the masses descend upon the local retail outlets like water from a burst dam, flowing like lemmings through the aisles in a pre-Christmas frenzy. However, one woman in a lonely corner of the grocery store is not there to shop. She waits patiently at the Returns counter with a turkey, or at least what’s left of it after her husband and seven kids had attacked it twelve hours earlier. The skeletal remains were easy to slip into the small plastic bag—even the wishbone had long since been taken out and snapped.

“It went bad,” this woman says to the lady behind the counter, sliding the carcass across the counter. Only a pro walks into a store and demands her money back on a turkey without any meat left on it. Janet Walsh is a pro.

My mom understood the craftiness one must adopt when trying to feed a family of nine each day. The family checkbook was packed like a musket with coupons skinned from local newspapers. Trips to the grocery store were military operations as seven kids invaded the unsuspecting stores offering samples on Saturday afternoons—who needs lunch when you can wolf down eight tiny slices of pepperoni pizza and wash it down with a thimbleful of the newest Coke? Our family did not merely buy in bulk; we stocked up as if winter was coming to Valley Forge. Each grocery trip ended with a game of culinary Tetris, where we’d stuff three separate freezers and two refrigerators with surgical precision. There was no rummaging through the fridge in my family; asked what was for dinner that night, my mom’s answer was, “Whatever’s up front.”

It was not uncommon for a loaf of bread to lie frozen in state like Vladimir Lenin for up to a year before it was discovered in the back of the freezer. She’d thaw it like the wooly mammoth on those National Geographic specials, using a hair dryer to separate a few pieces for school lunches. These clay pigeons with peanut butter and jelly slathered all over them sat in our lunch pails like a muttered apology, still frozen by the time our class had lunch.

“It keeps the sandwich fresh,” she’d say as we showed her our chipped teeth.

What the poor lady working at the Returns counter that day couldn’t know was that my family lived on food that had long since passed its expiration date. She viewed the freezer as a time machine, cryogenically preserving batteries, cheeses, cold medicines, and milk that would make the folks at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not take notice. In fact, there were three types of milk in or refrigerator: the “good” milk (within a week of its expiration date), “mixing” milk (older, used on cereal or in recipes), and “sour” milk, which would only be so designated when something inside it tried to bite you.

“The date is only a suggestion,” my mom would say whenever we brought it up. “They just want you to buy more.”

Local shopkeepers were talked into 10% discounts for the privilege of clothing her family.

“I have a carload full of customers in this family: growing children who like to buy new clothes!”

They agreed to the discounts, never realizing that this woman put clothes into a rotation that would be the envy of the New York Yankees. Each outfit bought for my oldest brother and sister filtered its way down to the youngest in a kind of corduroy waterfall, and all our class pictures looked as if we’d just pasted a new head on last year’s set. Being the youngest boy, I was always ten years behind the fashion, a Fonzie t-shirt in a sea of Gap mock turtlenecks. You could pick a Walsh kid out of a crowd because of our awkward Frankenstein gait, a result of my mom’s decision to sew massive patches on the insides of our pants and shirts to make sure they’d last to the next sibling. Where most kids wore clothes, we wore armor of reinforced nylon and denim that restricted our range of motion to that of the Tin Man.

“You just have to work them in a bit, like your baseball mitt,” she’d say.

As we grew older and more conscious of our fashion maladies, she picked up toddler Izod shirts or tattered Garanimals attire at consignment shops and sewed the telltale lizard onto the discount shirts she’d bought at K-Mart. “That’s strange,” my friends would say, “I always thought the alligator was on the other side!”

Growing up with my mom, one learned that opened bags of candy on store shelves were considered “samples,” and that any expensive item mistakenly placed in a discount section must now be sold at the discounted price. Four-dollar wine became vintage when poured into a different bottle. There was so much bread in the meatloaf that we didn’t know whether it should serve as the inside or the outside of the leftover meatloaf sandwiches.  Clothes could be “rented” from local stores for special occasions and returned the very next day as long as you pinned the tags to the inside sleeve and kept the crease. Armed with a receipt and the original bag, there was nothing you couldn’t return.

Her ability to make the most out of little is surpassed only by her incredible ability to make her family feel loved. She never missed an opportunity to tell us how much she loved us, even during times we’d given her little reason to. She made prom dresses and dozens of Halloween costumes from scratch even as we complained that everyone else’s mom bought them new ones. In an age before carpooling, she drove seven kids to tennis matches, swim practice, track meets, ping-pong clubs, soccer practice and extra help after school. She made midnight calls with a cold washcloth and Vicks Vap-O-Rub when we were sick and showed up to every banquet even if you only got the “Participant” ribbon.

How do you follow an act like this? I’ll thank her the only way I know how: I’ll allow my kids to use up all my gas when they borrow the car. I’ll remind them of the high holy days and forgive them when they forget the holiest day of all: my birthday. Most importantly, I’ll teach them about the way life should be lived. They’ll learn about laughter because they’ll grow up listening to a lifetime of stories around the kitchen table. They’ll learn about the importance of family because they will know that your family is the one place in your heart that is always open. They will learn about love because their grandparents gave it unconditionally.

And I’ll wait in line at the grocery store Returns counter with a half-eaten holiday turkey in the original bag, receipt in hand, and wonder how the heck she ever managed to pull this off.

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“Puppy Parent Scum!”

ZuZu Walsh

At the dog park, it’s inevitable. “Where did you get your dog?” someone will ask as our dogs do a little butt-sniffing. It’s as if I just drop-kicked Santa when I say we got her from a breeder. My wife will chime in that we tried to find one in the pound first, but we can see the judgment in their eyes.

As a white male in America, it goes without saying that I’ve had to fight prejudice and discrimination as I’ve clawed my way up to the lower-middle. The latest obstacle the Man has placed in my path is the stigma attached to acquiring a dog through a breeder rather than a shelter. These days, skipping the local pound is akin to gut-punching a nun.

My wife and I have always looked to rescue abandoned dogs; we’ve volunteered at the local shelter, participated in supply drives, and served on the planning committee for a new shelter in town. We loved the feeling that we’d given a second chance to our dogs, and it allowed us to endure the endless airings of Sarah McLaughlin singing “In the arms of the angels…” over the pictures of neglected pets that dominate late night television commercial breaks.

Then we got ZuZu.

ZuZu is a blessing. She is also a veterinary Black Hole. Unsure of her age or her breed (mostly Cocker Spaniel-ish), our vet informed us on our initial visit that she had horrible ear problems. This was followed by a crippling skin rash that necessitated an extensive drug regimen after a blood sample yielded no fewer than three pages of things to which she was deathly allergic. The Cocker in the Plastic Bubble cheated death, and outside of the telltale baboon butt where she’d permanently scratched away her fur, her skin specialist declared her out of the danger zone. However, she could only eat dry venison dog food. Not only did this ruin any chance of her ever becoming a vegetarian like all the fashionable dogs, it also required us to order this special blend through our vet.

At two, she began biting mercilessly at her paws. Over time, despite a wide variety of trimming, nail clipping, and massage, we had to order special booties to keep her from nibbling them into bloody stumps. She goose-stepped around the house for a while, clearly annoyed at this 80s-era velcro fashion statement. The urge to chew on them went away after a few months, and eventually we mothballed the booties.

At six ZuZu broke her back, apparently as she engaged in the dangerous activity of… lying down. She couldn’t take a step without pain, and after much hand-wringing we agreed with her back surgeon: she needed surgery. She came through like a champ, and we learned how stupid we could feel for passing up pet insurance. At almost five thousand dollars, it was not as expensive as the years of special food or the years of extra vet appointments, but it hurt. At seven, we noticed her having difficulty holding a tennis ball in her mouth. She soon had trouble eating. Another visit to the bone specialist revealed that her jaw was locking up. Our vet revealed that her range of motion was about 30% of what it should be; in his experience, she’d eventually be able to open it less and less until she could no longer eat. He had no idea how this had started, but the prognosis was grim. He could break her jaw and see if this allowed her to eventually open up all the way, but something else happened that ruled this out.

We were scraping together some money for her jaw when she had her first heart attack. We rushed her to the emergency vet on call, put her on an IV, and waited for the cardiologist to give us the results of the tests. The good news was that she would be able to come home with us in a few days. The bad news was that this was due to the fact that she probably had around six months to live. The drugs he’d normally prescribe for her heart would seriously compromise what turned out to be an already damaged liver. In the end we settled on a cocktail of drugs that helped her heart but weakened her kidneys, then switched to drugs that helped her kidneys but failed to address her heart. We went back and forth on this in order to assure she had some quality of life in the time she had left. However, it also meant that she’d never survive a surgical procedure.

We were all surprised when her jaw magically opened wider and wider in the following weeks. The drugs pushed her well past her expiration date, and our vet asked us if he could perform an autopsy after she died to see how this dog tip-toed around Death like Ginger Rogers.

Last year she developed an abscessed tooth, but we all figured the penicillin would clear it up. Of course, it didn’t; she required surgery before the infection reached her brain. Our vet made it clear that she might never wake up from the anesthesia, and the pressure on her heart might be too much to overcome, but she faced certain death if we ignored it. I dropped her off in tears the morning of the surgery, saying my goodbyes and thanking her for all she’d done for us. Sure enough, I was able to pick her up the next day; like Tupac, she’d dodged another bullet. Also like Tupac, there were more in store for her.

Our vet showed me the piece of jawbone he’d removed; it was likely bone cancer, and there was nothing he could do if it was. For once, this allowed us to save the money on lab fees.

Having just passed her tenth birthday in June, ZuZu now waddles around on her ankles and elbows. The ligaments around the joints have completely atrophied—she can bend her paws all the way back to her forelegs in defiance of God and physics. None of her band of specialists can explain how this came about, and we’ve had to remind our vet to let us know when we were keeping ZuZu around more for us than for her.

The fact is that we’ll do anything for our dogs, including almost $200 a month in pills alone. Just like my grandma, ZuZu has a big blue pill box with fourteen compartments, two sets of pills per day. This on top of prescription food, checkups with all her specialists (she has more than we do), and the recently christened ZuMobile, her three-wheeled doggie cart that allows us to include her on our beach walks.

We could put a kid through college on the money we’ve spent on ZuZu, but we wouldn’t change a thing. She’s the best. Still, I’m frustrated that I find myself stumbling over words to justify our selfish decision to protect ourselves from another round of Kevorkian Roulette. Of course I’d rather save a poor dog from the local shelter. However, I also have to refrain from taking on the collective responsibility of all the crappy pet owners out there who neglect their dogs. Couples who arrange for surrogate parents to carry their child aren’t made to feel as if they’re kicking orphans in the nuts, so maybe you could cut us a break?

Ideally, we’d all have to apply for puppies; if you screwed up, you’d never be allowed to have any more. You’d have to pay puppy support if you lost custody. And every scum-sucking maggot who mistreated their pets would automatically be sent to the Karmic Wheel, reincarnated as a dog or cat themselves. Or, even worse, Carrot Top.

Until then, we decided to find some healthy dogs and responsible breeders so we could afford to give our next dog the life it deserves. We’re not evil. Pinky swear.

Now, can we get back to casting aspersions on the training skills of the other dog owners at the park like we used to?

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