S n a r k A t t a c k

The Reign of White Wrangler Jeans Stops HERE!

As it turned out, the day of the baseball championships fell squarely in the middle of the county fair, meaning that I was basically living on the fairgrounds while still going to baseball practice. Why? Because like the scamp that I was, I wanted to make a few bucks blowing the farmhands. Oh, I keed! Actually, sadly, it was so I could be close to my lamb, keeping him clean and working with him, the woolly meat puppet. We were all doing that. Scores of little 4-H'ers, running around in the livestock pens, hosing off our pigs, steer and lambs, feeding the horses handfuls of alfalfa hay and then smelling their noses. And befriending the carnies.

We slept outside near the livestock barn, and as a result of excellent planning, our little campsite was downwind from the livestock, thus ensuring that we could hear and smell every exclamatory gastrointestinal event emitted from the 200+ animals. Viva nature!

The livestock show covers two days. The first day you show your animal and get judged on your showmanship, which is to say how well you keep your sheep in the dark about their impending doom, and then separately get judged on the quality of the animal, on a scale from Delectable to Merely Okay With Enough Sauce (see 'impending doom,' supra). For these affairs, we'd get fancified, country style: white Wrangler jeans, white dress shirt, green kerchief and a little green 4-H hat (covered sparsely in my case with sewing and cooking achievement pins). We looked like members of the Klan, leprechaun division.

So one day I'm dressed in my finest whites, and Enos has been fluffed and carded, and I've applied shoe polish to his hooves and cleaned his ears with baby wipes until he is gleaming. He is the ne plus ultra of Suffolk sheep. I'm beginning to believe that he might not be the spawn of Satan after all. We trot out to the ring with about a dozen other kids and their paltry excuses for animals and the show begins. It's like a dog show, except with sheep. Very much like a dog show starring only Komondors.

Enos is a gem. No humping, no peeing, no embarrassing pooping in the ring (like some other future Easter dinners I might mention). He is, for once, a sweet, docile lovable animal, who responds to my commands and nuzzles my hand when I pet him. And I win. Large.

(Okay, second place, but still.)

It's about this time, between showing him in the ring and showing him at auction the next day that it hits me: I never, ever should have given this animal a name.

Game Day

Frankly, I remember very little about the actual game, only the impressive chalk lines and the attendance of people we didn't know. It was my taste of the big time. And then we lost, fairly soundly.

What I do recall is my mom driving me back to the fair in her impossibly sporty Datsun hatchback and us getting a flat tire. This would be before cell phones. I just remember someone picking me up to get to the fair and me, running late now, frantically getting ready for the auction. I was in my show whites and about to walk to the barn to get Enos when my parents arrived. My dad had picked my mom up on his way back from the vet.

We were standing next to a spigot, and for reasons unknown, the water at the fair was weirdly sulfuric so the air had a tang of rotten eggs in addition to the usual barnyard smells. People had already started loading up their Winnebagos and putting away the cots and sleeping bags. I had my silly little green 4-H hat in my hands and my dad said he had some bad news about Pookie.

Earlier that day, Dad had taken the puppy in for his checkup and the moment he put Pookie down on that cold, metal examining table, Pookie ceased breathing. He just stopped. He was a defunct pup. No more. An ex-pet. And that was it - nothing could be done. The vet was standing right there after all. If anything could be done, he surely had done it.

At this point my team lost, my dog was dead, and I was late in getting Enos from his pen for the auction. Two down, one to go.

I got Enos and put his halter on and led him to the auction ring, standing at the gate until my name was called. I took off his halter, hung it on the fence and led him in, emerging in a sawdust-covered ring in front of grandstands filled with bidders. I recognized friends' parents, my elementary school principal and his wife and a few other people I knew from town. My name was announced over the speakers and the auctioneer went to work: "Do I hear two bits?"

I was showing Enos off like we were in the show ring, mostly because I didn't know how else to be. The bidding went up. He got something like $2.40 a pound, a fortune for me (I later learned that the winning bid was held by an auto parts store in Linda which would also get a framed photo of me and Enos, a standard 4-H auction perk). When it was over I thought there'd be a moment - or something - to say goodbye to Enos. To the extent I'd ever considered it, I figured he'd be in his pen and I'd say goodbye and walk away dramatically framed by the livestock barn. Instead I was hustled out of the ring and towards another gate where someone holding two cans of spray paint - one blue and one orange depending on which slaughterhouse he'd go to - put a stripe of blue paint on Enos's back and pushed him into a chute.

And that was it.

So the next time I'm walking my dog, and someone comes up to me and describes how their dog died, I will consider it my duty to sit them down and tell them all about the day I lost the championship game, watched my lamb get led to slaughter and learned that my puppy, Pookie (if ever a Pookie was), entered a vet's office on his own steam only to depart to that giant shag rug in the sky.

Yes, Sanitary Hose

Little League out in the sticks was a dusty affair played on hardpan under a boiling sun. You know you're out in the middle of nowhere when waiting for the cropduster to pass overhead - thus distracting every outfielder - is a coach-approved hitting strategy.

I remember few wins, losses or game-saving plays, instead choosing to recall ancillary aspects of the game which had nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with the snack bar and running around like sugar-crazed 10 year olds. Which we were, thanks to endless sad melty snow cones (mostly syrup), Jolly Rancher Watermelon Stix (inevitably dropped on the gravel) and the Devil's Work, known commercially as Fun Dip. If they've invented a more perfect sugar delivery system than Fun Dip, I've not encountered it. It was basically a stick made of sugar that you used to - yes! - dip into the pouch and get a teaspoon or so of pure sugar, colored in such a way to suggest to our young palates the flavors of Pink, Purple and Blue. It also had the wonderful effect of preparing us for a future addiction to chewing tobacco and a lifetime of insulin shots. Fun Dip, indeed.

Sometimes we took time out of our valuable running around time to watch the games. I do recall that there was excitement one year when Chris Cross (his real name) was playing catcher in my brother's game and someone slid hard into home and Chris, a husky boy, held his ground admirably, thus breaking the other player's leg in two places. We talked about that for weeks.

(There is an excellent chance that I wasn't actually there.)

My brother being four years older than me, I followed in his footsteps in everything, especially things that were likely to result in an imminent dousing with Bactine. He was a pitcher; I would therefore be a pitcher. And I was, and that was my last chance to do so, because when you turned 11 they made girls play softball and I never found the knack for an underhand pitch.

This was our year, which began like any other: at Ray's Tires & Sporting Goods. Yes, this is where we got our tires rotated and where I could, had I been of age, purchased a shotgun. Being a mere ten years of age, I instead picked out a new Rawlings glove, a batting glove and a new pair of sanitary hose. Which are really just queerly thin socks. So odd to wear hose in a baseball game. Kind of asking for it, really.

As the season progressed, it was clear that our team was awesome. So awesome, in fact, that we won lots of games - and with every level of play, we were awarded these delightful pins (again with the pins) which we all dutifully affixed to the fronts of our caps, thus ensuring that if any of us took a ball to the head that we would, in addition to a concussion, have several hard-earned indentations in our foreheads from the backs of the pins.

We were awesome and fearless.

July dragged near and we were headed towards the very fancy TOC, also known as the Tournament of Champions. Which, as we later discovered, is really just a Tournament of Champion (and Some Other Teams Who Lost). The fields got fancier, with real dugouts, real umps in black (and not somebody's dad) and actual chalk baselines. And no cropdusters.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, Pookie was still falling all over the shag, though looking less like a puppy and more like the dog he'd never be, and Enos had gone from a scrawny 68 pounds to a considerable 150. Enos was overweight, actually. Too bad you couldn't lose weight being ornery otherwise he'd've been the Kate Moss of Suffolks. But you couldn't. So in addition to practicing with my team, I had to walk him around town on a leash to get him to lose weight. Specifically, lose fat and gain muscle. He was to be judged at auction for his value as meat. And I'd be judged on how well I helped him become a better meat specimen. We worked for hours on 'showmanship,' where I'd practice putting him into a particular stance so the judges could examine him better. I'd wash him until he was blindingly white, then shear him and card his wool until he looked like a cotton ball in black heels.

Well, you spend enough time with anything, ornery or no, his vile attempts at humping me on the junior high track or no, and you develop a strange affection for the animal. And so it was.

And so it was that the TOC was scheduled for the same day as the 4-H livestock auction. And the same day that Pookie would be going in for a routine checkup at the vet.

I Pledged My Head to Higher Learning and All I Got Was This Stupid Sheep

5th grade was the year I had a cast for six months because someone, and I think you know who I'm talking about, does not do things half-assed. I'm going to break the leg and break it clean through and require half a year in a cast: first all the way up to my hip, and then later just above the knee and then another couple of months with a cast just up to my knee which was great because then I could ride my little black dirt bike around town while wearing a cast. How great is that? And it was great until I was tooling along at a pretty good clip and my still-casted foot flew off the pedal and I, which is to say my crotch, was propelled squarely onto the bar. I actually saw stars.

So 5th grade = leg. 7th grade was the chicken pox (and the year I lost in the spelling bee because I couldn't spell peccadillo), and 6th grade was the year our regular teacher got sick with 'women's troubles' and we were left with a sycophantic long-term sub who let me and my friends play Spit all day long in the back row. Meaning that 4th grade must have been one of the years that I was in 4-H.

For you city folk, 4-H is the rural version of a gang. Except instead proving yourself by getting the crap beaten out of you by your would-be brethren, you have to do something even more humiliating, like walk a sheep on a leash around town while it tries repeatedly to hump you in front of your friends.

Stupid sheep.

One lousy truck does not make you country, and we were not considered country. We didn't have a farm, or livestock or any of that. Not like my friends who had farms and ranches, and worse, had farm and ranching chores. My best friend grew up on a farm, and sometimes I'd help her with the more satisfying work, like trolling the sloughs on their property to pick blackberries which we did until our buckets were full or we got the trots, whichever came first. Sometimes I'd help feed the bummers, which is what everyone called the lambs abandoned by their mothers. We'd fill a giant glass Pepsi bottle with formula and fit it with an enormous red nipple, then swaddle and nurse these tiny orphaned lambs to health. I thought they were the cutest things I'd ever seen, which is why that last scene in Rosemary's Baby has special resonance for me.

When I was ten, all of my friends joined 4-H, so I did too because everyone seemed to be having so much fun. There was a pledge involved and a slightly less paramilitary bearing than the Girl Scouts and we didn't have to fight over getting badges. We had pins. And to get pins you did exciting 4-H activities which were suspiciously similar to housework.

You can imagine my shock when I found myself in a sewing class. I had crocheted with my Nana when I was younger and that seemed to go without incident, i.e. no eyes gouged, nothing fatally poked, etc., but I had had a recent setback with a macrame kit that Aunt Louise gave me for Christmas. In my stubby little hands, what had begun as a hanging plant holder quickly deteriorated into the Ultimate Cat Toy. It never stood a chance.

Our big sewing project was a purse. Those who know me will be shocked to learn that my fashion sense has greatly evolved since then. For my purse, I chose what can only be described as If Irish Spring Were a Fabric, You Would Definitely NOT Like It Too. Given an entire store of fabrics from which to choose, I went with something that I thought would be in keeping with the 4-H theme (a four leaf clover) and would be considered by some to be 'sassy.' In reality it was a cheap cotton/poly weave of very fine green and white stripes. The end result was not so much purse as a cloth envelope whose particular Butterick pattern seemed designed to heighten the psychadelic effect. Just opening and closing it at the hoedown caused the band to jam for forty minutes straight as my second grade teacher Mrs. Dunbar just twirled away yelling out for "More ganja brownies!." Well, not really. I got my pin though, and was well on my way to 4-H superstardom. Pledge my Hands to greater service, indeed.

(I later dismantled the purse by using the only worthwhile sewing tool to my 10 year old sensibilities: the stitch ripper. I had a field day with the crotches of my brother's shorts. All summer long he'd bend down only to discover cool breezes made possible by my quick work with the stitch ripper. !Zorro Lives!)

After sewing (and a fiery cooking episode I refer to as the Caramel Lesson), it was time for the livestock component of 4-H. No dictatorship this, you got to choose which kind of animal you wanted to raise. These are your choices, from descending order of size, and my reaction:

Steer: No way.
Pigs: Gross.
Goats: Too creepy.
Chickens: Too weird.
Rabbits: Cute, sure, so maybe... and no. No way.

This is my reaction to sheep:

Aw, look at the cute didum sweetum bummer. Who wants a bottle? Who wants a bottle? You do! You do!

And so I chose horribly wrong. Mom said I should've gone with rabbits, because "that's where the real money is." My mother's name is not Vinny.

We took the truck over to my best friend's farm where we picked out a lamb using a highly scientific method based on body type, the size of the ram that sired him, and so on.

That was the plan, anyway. We just took the first one we managed to wrestle - sorry, rassle, into the truck. For reasons which are lost to history, I named him Enos, though I spent most of the summer calling him the 4th grade equivalent of Shithead, for he was the orneriest, meanest, dumbest thing to come off a farm until Dubya came along. Enos never missed a single opportunity to knock me on my ass. All I kept thinking was, "Wait until July 28th, my friend, and you shall fetch me a pretty penny at auction, and then you shall meet your doom at the hands of John, the Country Butcher." (I didn't really think that. I was in 4th grade and wasn't exactly a far-sighted child, which is why I never anticipated how much work it'd be to take care of a rotten farm animal while playing with my new puppy, Pookie. Remember Pookie? Come on, people. BTW, there really is a guy named John who runs the Country Butcher up in Linda, and I have to say that he makes a pork loin that's so succulent that you'll wake up craving it.)

And then, of course, that summer I was also playing baseball. But more on that later.

The Truth About Cats and Blogs

So.

The dog was on vacation for a couple of weeks in Tahoe with my parents. Sort of a loaner dog for them, as my dad's lab died over a year ago. As he says, a boy needs a dog, especially in Tahoe where everyone, it seems, has a dog. Given that I still very much would like to remain in the will, I do not point out that this boy just turned 64. So. Dog on vacation, and now dog is back, looking relaxed.

The thing about having a dog in the city is that it's so public, and people say things to you - they engage you - in ways they never would if you were walking alone. Things like, "Hey! Your dog just took a crap!" or "Hey! Your dog just ate my kid's eclair!" (I live in a very fancy neighborhood.) And then there's the very sad Story of How My Own Dog Died, also known as the Your Dog Looks Just Like My Dog Who Died of [Insert malady here, but I'll bet you cash money it's gonna be cancer]. The final chapter usually goes something like this:

Sad Interjector and Ruiner of My Nice Stroll Along Fillmore: How old is your dog?
Hapless Woman Who Was Totally Minding Her Own Business and Not At All Catching Her Reflection in Shop Windows to Check Out How AWESOME Her Hair Looks: She's going to be seven next month.
SIRMNSAF: Oh, my dog died of [insert malady which rhymes with, oh, let's say 'lancer'] when she turned seven. (beat) Yours looks good though.

And so that got me thinking that maybe I, too, have a tale of how my own dog died, and that maybe - just maybe - I should share it with you. N.B. My current dog is still alive and kicking. Well, not so much kicking as snoring.

Herewith:

The Saddest Day of My Life (Thus Far)

I suppose the fact that I named him Pookie was the first sign that things would not end well.

If the teasing by the other puppies didn't kill him, some karmic delete button would. He was the color of butterscotch and the size of a can of cranberry sauce. (The big size that you get for Thanksgiving, not that little one, unless of course you have those sad little holiday dinners with just yourself and the old man and maybe some nice lady you met at the Shop-N-Save, in which case the small can will do.) I'm not sure what breed Pookie was as he never got big enough to really look like anything other than a puppy (foreshadowing!). He had a huge barrel chest, sort of like a canine John Goodman, and when he ran his chest would hit the carpet and he'd spin out. Oh, my, would that just send us into paroxysms of giggles. Of course, I was only about 11 and didn't know what paroxysms of giggles were, so instead I simply wet myself from laughing so hard.

This is an excellent opportunity to point out that this was the early 80's, and that we still had shag carpeting. My folks had obviously splurged at some point because unlike everyone else (back in the 70's), ours was two-toned. Living room was a dark yellow and light brown combo which was excellent for hiding Cheerios, vomit and doomed puppies, while my grandfather, who was apparently some sort of aged swinger, had red and pink shag which regularly and efficiently devoured his glasses, pills and Miscellaneous Old People Accoutrements.

The carpet was hideous, and yet there I was, clamoring to be the one to - god help me - rake the shag. I was obsessive about it and became freaking Nadia Comaneci: I did handstands, crawled on the floor and climbed on furniture, the last bit enraging my mother because you bust up one lousy end table and suddenly you're Gallagher and the world's your watermelon. All this in order to achieve what I considered to be The Perfect Rake. You think you know what that means, that I went all Major League Baseball in the living room and created complicated patterns including an ill-fated let's-rake-the-floor-into-a-Magic-Eye-formation ("What is that? Why, it's Tommy Lasorda!"), but the truth is that I sought to leave no evidence of raking, only perfect, perky shag.

I have fond memories of that carpet, including the time I was very little and had just learned a new word. I was rolling around on the floor taking my new word for a spin when my father walked in and said, "Don't say dammit." Well. You tell a bratty little kid like meself something like "Don't say dammit" and you know exactly what happened next: "Dammit."

Oh, he went into an absolute fury. His face turned red, his eyes started bulging and he shook violently all over. Into what I'd now call paroxysms of giggles. I think we both wet ourselves a little that day.

Sweet, sweet memories.

As for Pookie, well, more on him later.