AnimaMundi

What's The Matter With Aldo?

Things are still a bit hazy coming out of the swirl, but we are back home and we are all bushed. We picked up Aldo at our vet's in Albany Wednesday morning at 8 a.m. I didn't expect him to be so, well, lively. From the way the vet talked, we both were surprised. "It doesn't look good" was what we heard the night before. That and pancreatitis. Aldo was pumped and wanted out, period. He didn't "know" or "care" where we were taking him. He slept quite a bit on the way to Angell Medical Animal Center. He was on his momma's ("Aldo-will-be-the-death-of-me-yet.") lap. We both hadn't slept well the night before, but you do what you have to do. I felt better just seeing his joy at getting out. That made the drive easier.

The staff at Angell are the best. Everyone, and I mean every person whom we met, was congenial and helpful. Try finding that at most hospitals. Before we met Dr. Brom, an assistant greated us and looked at Aldo's charts that we had brought with us. She aptly remarked that French bull dogs are so stoic. So true, they are that and valiant to boot. Dr. Brom, who is a brother to our vet, Dr. DeVries in Albany at Parkside, was very clear and personable. After more tests and an ultrasound, an incipient ulcer or tumor was found in his stomach. We still don't know, neither do they. When we were at our hotel or the coffee shop, we received several phone calls from Dr. Brom telling us what Aldo had ate and his test results. Do you think that you would have received calls from your mother or father's doctor updating you on whether or not they had eaten that night? It's cliche, but true. Animal care is much better than human health care with or without health care bill HR 3200.

Angell is an enormous facility and, since our last visit in 2005, has added a new admission/discharge/exam room wing. To sit in that large light filled space and watch and listen, Kathy and I cried and laughed and wondered. They all sort of run one into the other after a while. The dogs and cats limping bravely in. The confident terriers prancing proudly to the check in line. One small dog grabbed its leash in its mouth and started to drag a woman out of the check in line out toward the exit! Everyone in the place laughed. Heartbreaking and thankfully humorous too.

 

Aldo is now on an appetite stimulant, an anti-pancreatitis pill and a stomach palliative for what they are treating as an ulcer. He is also on a special dry-canned food diet. He's not wild about the Hill's canned food, but he does like the dry. He can eat low fat prepared food like roasted chicken thighs marengo or court bouillon de poisson. Pasta is ok too and last night he downed more than a few penne, but it was the shrimp that he fancied.

The affinity between animals and their loving caregivers is much more complex and rich than we could ever imagine. Animals help us to connect with nature and our humanity. They don't proselytize. Their being is their way of speaking to our souls.

Aldo, Uncertainty, Waiting and More Waiting...

Sometimes I wonder how people survive. My friend Alfonso On-The-Wine-Trail-In-Italy Cevola down in Dallas has one good suggestion, resilience. Resilience is something that I believe is partially inborn and also acquired through experiencing life's ironic twists of fate with a sensitivity to the soul images contained within the events. If you are not resilient, then life's darkenings will not rest well with you. There will be dis-ease and all manner of weird symptoms. Trees that are not pliant lose limbs in the roaring howl out of the north, but for the most part trees bend. They bend to survive. They are poetic reminders of resilience.

I am not the most resilient person I know. Neither am I the strongest person I know. Right now our French bull dog Aldo is at the vets. His back bone is fused and his back legs are very weak. Aldo has always had eating disorders. He was born, among other wonderful anatomical omissions and horrors, without rear hip joints (try walking around without hip joints for a few days) and a diaphragmatic hernia. So you don't have to Google that hernia, it means that his intestines and stomach were located along side his lungs. This happened at birth when a $money$ breeder cashed in on the French bull dog demand. He was literally squeezed out of his mother's womb along with too many other puppies. We have heard from no less than four people in NYC who bought Frenchies from Pat Rauh formerly of Saugerties and whose dogs developed all sorts of endearing ailments like blindness and other severe problems. Aldo's mother died after giving birth to another enormous sized litter a few years after Aldo was born in 2003. Ah, the hindsight clues. I saw Aldo's mother when we went to pick him up on a bright summer's day. The bitch was frantic and looked like she had just survived Hiroshima. The dog shit in piles on the floor. The look in the breeder's eye and the way she nonchalantly spoke. Her husband was there but always kept himself far away from us. God knows where she is now since a few people tried to legally go after her. 

I don't know what is going to happen now. It doesn't look promising. Chronic is one word the vets use. They are not referring this chronic. It breaks my heart and it doesn't make it any easier to say to yourself that you knew it was coming. There is a certain sad resignation in the eyes of animals. They know more than we admit to ourselves. I have had other animals give me a certain look and I knew it was a good bye. Our cat, Cassim, gave me that look when he died peacefully in my arms one snowy night long ago. He looked at me, meowed and joined the choir. Our mammoth bloodhound's bloodhound, Sybil, gave me a look that is my photo bank forever. I don't need Flickr for that. She had drunk runoff from a swimming pool earlier that day. We didn't know the lethal chemicals were there. Too late, I caught her at it in the woods. She bled to death that horrible night after a vet told us something useless over the phone. At that point she might have been beyond saving. We'll never know.

So, I try to prepare myself for another loss that I know is coming. But for me, there is no preparing and gradual detachment. There is only the empty loss and remembrance of the habitual things and quirky habits that make Aldo so endearing and entertaining. The sound of claws on tile. The unmistakable bull dog breathing, sniffing and lumberjack-sized snoring. I said that I would never get a dog again and we didn't for twenty years. Time collapses and so do I, in way. It is all the little things that add up to a love and affection that you can't possibly convey to a person who has never loved a cat or dog or horse.

Then again, Aldo has fooled us in the past. He has a bit of the divil in him. At times when he would not get up from his bed to eat, he would all at once chase the hell out of our mostly Maine Coon if she sniffed his food. Sort of like a get-the-kitty Lourdes. They are really very fond of each other.

I could be writing this again in a year or more. I do not know. It is just that this recent advent of his not eating coupled with his relative immobility happened so quickly, coinciding with the onset of winter weather. Maybe it is an accumulated detritus of a breeder who never cared for the lives of the animals that she cashed in on. Who knows.

They say that old age brings wisdom. I don't believe this is always the case. I am no wiser now than at 25 or three days ago. I am no better at coping with the death and loss of any animal or human that I loved during my limited tenure here on the planet. I don't think it's a question of purely "coping". There are a lot of reverberations and connotations resonating in the word and more importantly in the whole experience of suffering and loss. The mercifully compassionate poets tell us. Pathos and acceptance. 

I remember someone remarking on the crying and carrying of an individual upon someone's death. Then, the next day the dead one was forgotten by this person. The one who never shed a tear at the funeral remembered the dead one everyday for the rest of their life.

As of 6 pm tonight: We have to bring Aldo to Angell Memorial in Boston in the morning. Our vet told us that it doesn't look good and that he can do no more for him here.

 

 

  

The Hurricane of '38

Last night I tuned into the PBS American Experience show on the Hurricane of '38 a little late. The moment that I tuned in the narrator, the great David McCullough, mentioned Watch Hill and Westerly, RI, the town I was raised in. If you look at a map of the southern New England coast, you can see that New London, CT and Westerly, RI stand a good chance of being in the path of a major hurricane coming up the Atlantic coast. In March of 2009, I was at the shore and took this photo of Napatree Point.

 
Below is Napatree Point before the Hurricane of '38.

"Rhode Island saw the greatest destruction, as wind and tide proved deadly. Along Fort Road in Watch Hill,the beach was swept clean of any signs of habitation. That area of beach has never been rebuilt...  

In New London, Connecticut, the tidal surge drove the five-masted school ship Marsala into a warehouse complex along the docks, setting off a short circuit and fire which consumed a quarter-mile area of the business district -- the worst calamity in New London since Benedict Arnold burned the city in 1781."

From the transcript: Patricia Shuttleworth (West Hampton, L.I.): "About 3:30 or quarter of four, my brother came running into the house, saying, "The water's coming up, the water's coming up." And at that moment, they had to make, again, split-second decisions about what to do with all the people in the house. So they put as many people as they could into that little five-passenger Ford which they had. Mother drove. She put grandmother in and her guests, Father and the other children, but they couldn't fit the help in, so they said, "You'll just have to fend for yourselves." And she said she would never forget the sight of them standing there, waiting, when the water came up."

"In Long Island on the storm's eastern rim, winds slammed into the land at 100 miles per hour. The seismic impact registered as far away as Sitka, Alaska."

My grandparents, my father along with his sister and brothers, were living in New London close to the business district at the time. My grandparents and father had emigrated from Sicily sometime around the end of WW I. I remember my father telling me of that fire, of how their home was almost lost to the inferno.

I also distinctly remember the aftermath of Hurricane Carol in 1954.  My father was a photographer and took me with him the day after the storm. I don't know what happened to those photos, lost to time I guess. But the images of destruction are emblazoned on my memory card. Rows of slabs where homes once stood. One of my aunt Celena's beach homes lying mostly intact on the opposite shore of a salt lake behind Atlantic Avenue in Misquamicut. A glass bottle of milk standing on a door step of a vanished home.

 

 

Sybil

This is our bloodhound Sybil, in August 1973. We had just moved to East Chatham-New Lebanon in January 1973 where we rented the first floor of a cottage owned by George Rickey.  This photo was taken in the driveway of that cottage using an old camera that my father had given to me. It was from another era and expanded from its case like an accordion. Shortly after we moved to the country from the big city, Kathy had located a reputable bloodhound breeder in Avon, NY.  One cold Saturday morning in February we got into our 70ish VW and headed west on Route 20. After a drive of more than 4 hours we arrived in Avon at the breeder's home located in a rural area some 50 miles due east of Buffalo. The woman who raised the dogs was very welcoming and friendly. After some kitchen chat, she led us out to the kennels for a look see. There were 8-10 six month old pups running around in a mass of loose bloodhound flesh that seemed to trail them and surround them. Back in her kitchen that was perfumed with the smell of pies baking in the oven, we sat and talked.  She walked to the door and went to the pens to let the dogs into the kitchen. We weren't prepared for the stampede of that many bloodhounds. It was wall to wall dogs and we were overwhelmed. Within 15 minutes all of the dogs were in crates or sprawled on the floor snoring. Except for one, Sybil. Dogs choose their future caretakers not vice versa. Somehow we managed to get her into the back seat of our VW beetle and headed east as the sun was setting. She was going to her new home. 

    

^{Sybil was our connection to nature when we moved to New Lebanon. She moved with a grace that can't be described by someone who is poetically dysfunctional. She was the first dog that I truly loved. Aldo is the second.}

^TBC

Bulldoggedness

Aldo is our French bulldog. Bulldogs are the incarnation of stubborn determination. They do not give up. Ever. No wonder they are the mascots for so many sports teams. Aldo will keep playing until he can't any longer. Despite the fact that he was born without any rear hip joints, he gives all he has. When he doesn't want to walk, he won't. He plants himself and takes root in the ground like a sapling. Try as you might, you can not put him on his back. It's impossible. When the weather is nasty like it was today, he lets you know that he doesn't want to be outside. He heads for home pronto after an obligatory raise of the leg or two. His stolid bulldoggedness is no match for me. Bulldogs are masters of resistance and tenacity. They know their power and advantage. Their low center of gravity enables them to see the world close to the ground. When Aldo wants to play, you play. It's impossible to do much else. He does know that I will not play when we are eating dinner. Before and after, I/we are fair game. He will retrieve a toy and remind you that he wants to play. Insistently. Persistently. Steadfastly. Nothing or no one that I know can outdo Aldo's ability to staunchly holdfast. 

Aldo's New Friend

Well, Aldo got a new friend just before Christmas at the winter solstice They are good pals now. The little creature has a few names: Stop!, Me-Me, Tiptina, Tina. She's part Maine Coon. We got her froma pet supply store that rescues cats from the Humane Society. They give her all her shots and spay the little critters. It's great the way animals can work it out within a few days where as most human beings have difficulty with each other for their whole earthly existence.

Aldo Pacino The Pygmy aka Queen Latifa

Aldo is very photogenic, as are most French bulldogs. K. has seen fit to adorn Aldo a la Queen Latifa. Number 8/20.

Find more photos like this on CLUB CHIEN

Aldo's Moving On Up, Hits Club Chien Homepage Slideshow

Aldo (#1 of course) is one of the French bulldogs pictured in Club Chien's "Oh Balls!" slideshow.

Aldo, Food and Customer Service

The Japanese know customer service. American companies are slow in getting the message, much to their detriment. I'm sure that there are many American-Global companies-corporations that provide courteous unstinting customer service. For instance, we have found that Cuisinart backs their products beyond the warranty period without question. A part has broken, a replacement is mailed out pronto.

Aldo, as some of you may know, was born with a diaphragmatic hernia. This has resulted in occasional digestive problems. K watches his diet closely and gives him the best food that we can afford or not afford. She recently went to PetSmart, a dubious retailer that has had various problems, to buy some dog food and redeem a coupon for a free 5 lb bag of Natural Choice from Nutroproducts. The salesperson at PetSmart (or dumb) refused to honor the coupon and voided it by writing in the merchant space and then crossing it out. K. was furious and complained, but to no avail. She then contacted Nutroproducts by e-mail and they telephoned her within a day. Jeff from Nutroproducts noted all the information and is going to contact PetSmart. In addition, he is sending us samples of Natural Choice for Aldo and a voucher to redeem for a bag of food for the little porker. This is good customer service. The product is good and the company backs it up to the hilt. Square biz.

Aldo Misses Frenchie Halloween Parade

Since Aldo does not travel well, like  a delicate fruit or baby vegetable, he missed the NYC Frenchie meet up Halloween parade on Sunday October 28th. "Hi, Frenchies! Sorry I couldn't make da' parade."