Zoe II

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My driving trip to visit friends in Denver was the first I have made in a while without a dog. Zeke was a good traveling companion, and I miss him. Since he died I have taken the seat cover off the back seat, for the first time since I bought the truck. Of course I didn’t bring any of the paraphernalia needed for traveling with a dog. And I had no intention of getting a dog any time soon.

So, all of my friends, who are also dog lovers, suggested that we visit the Dumb Friends League of Denver, a no-kill rescue shelter, to check out the dogs. They had been looking at the online pictures and selected a few to view. I agreed to go see the dogs on Thursday, but I had to constantly remind them: I was going to look at dogs, not for a dog.

The Dumb Friends’ facility in Denver is impressive. It is modern. Each dog has its own large enclosure with glass front so the dogs don’t have to listen to the constant barking of other dogs. As in most pounds and shelters, most of the dogs were pit bulls or pit mixes. Some lay listlessly. Some stared hopefully at passersby. We looked at a couple of medium-sized, non-pit dogs, but neither was really my type.

On Friday we went south from Denver and happened to stop at the Dumb Friends Castle Rock branch, where they had recently taken in a dog they thought was a German Shepherd-Doberman Pinscher mix. Now, it just happens that Leah’s favorite breed is thea German Shepherd, and my favorite breed is the Doberman. But still, I was not at all convinced that I wanted another dog, no matter how appealing it might be.

We signed in and asked to look at this particular dog. They brought her into a visiting room, and we all checked each other out for a while. We took her outside to let her run around in an exterior enclosure. Then we went back inside and I said I wanted to adopt her.

Her name is Zoe. The Denver Dumb Friends had transported her from a shelter in Oklahoma, where, apparently, the general population takes about as much care of their dogs and cats as they do in Georgia, which is not much. The Denver shelter people knew nothing about her history, only that the Oklahoma shelter had given her a rabies vaccination. One of their vets examined her and found her to be in good shape. They found a scar that indicated she has been spayed.

They thought she was a Shepherd/Dobie mix, but didn’t really know. The German Shepherd part is obvious in her head and coloration. The Dobie part is not so obvious.

Zoe in the car

She has been with us for about 24 hours as I write this. In that time she has shown herself to be a very good dog. She gets along with everyone she meets. She is interested in other dogs, but not overly so. She has met Elroy, the elderly dog that looks so much like Zeke. Elroy is not amused with her presence here, but Zoe has been carefully avoiding him whenever she can.

She asks to go out to relieve herself, which is a big deal. She actually stepped into the bathtub to get a bath — all the dogs we looked at had a peculiar, unpleasant shelter smell. She did not like the bath, but she tolerated it.

The only real problem so far is that she has a very strong prey drive, so she is very interested in small animals that run. And, unfortunately, that category includes cats.

She is constantly in motion, walking around the house, checking out everything and everyone, looking for food, avoiding Elroy, so it has been hard to get a good photo that is not blurred. We took her for two good walks on Saturday, which apparently tired her enough that she actually plunked herself down for a while.

This is the best way to show her size at this point.

She is about 80 pounds, and long and lean. She may be part Doberman. The tail looks Dobermanish, a hard judgement to make given that undocked Doberman tails are so rare. One woman who saw her on one of our walks said she looked like a German Shepherd/ Doberman mix, so maybe she is.

It is possible that she is a little over a year old, as the shelter says, but it is also possible she is a little older. It is also possible that she is a little younger, which means she may not have reached her full growth.

Her manners are not good. She tends to want to eat food out of your hand just as you are placing that food into your mouth. She pulls too much on the leash. But these are things that she can learn about as she lives with us.

She slept by my bed Friday night in a bed we made from a foam pad and a fleece throw. She was calm, and slept the night through, only stirring to circle and lie down again, as dogs usually do.

At this point she usually comes by to check on me on her rounds, and seems concerned when I close the door into the bathroom, so even at this early stage she seems to understand that we are going to be a pair.

I bought her a good collar and two types of leashes. She has a food bowl and a water bowl for the almost 1400-mile trip back to Georgia. I have told Leah that I will not be coming home alone, and she seems OK with that. She is a little worried about how Zoe and Mollie will get along, but I think we can convince Zoe that Mollie is part of the pack.

The shelter named her Zoe, so we could change her name if we wanted to. I was concerned that Leah wouldn’t want to name her Zoe, since that was the name of the cat she had when we got married, and who disappeared in the night a few years ago. But she seems OK with that name, so I guess we’ll keep it.

I’m looking forward to some things. I hope Zoe and Sam become friends and can sleep and play together like Sam and Zeke did. I hope that Zoe becomes a part of our family. So far she seems like a very good dog.

Littleton

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I am in Littleton, Co, right now, visiting old friends. Leah, unfortunately, had to stay at home with Sam and the cats.

I arrived at my friends’ house around 9:30 local time on Friday after an almost 900-mile drive from O’Fallon, Il, where I had spent the night after driving from the New River Gorge in West Virginia. The weather along the way was quite nice, and it continued into Saturday.

On Saturday most of us went to see a car museum and then to a brewery, where they were having an animal benefit. There was a big crowd that had spilled outside into the bright and warm afternoon. There we sat and (most of us) sipped a beer while watching the people, the dogs, and this:

A French bulldog disguised as a mountain lion.

The weather has turned cold and snowy, resulting in this scene in my friends’ back yard on Monday.

Today, Tuesday, the snow is around 4 or 5 inches deep. There is light snow falling with more expected through the day. The roads are slippery enough that a trip to see a motorcycle museum in Colorado Springs this morning was cancelled, along with some school and work. My weather app tells me it’s 17F now in Littleton, while it’s 67F back home in Georgia. We’re going for a high of 19F, and a low tonight of 9F.

My friends have a dog, Elroy, whose picture I have posted before. Here he is getting ready to go outside for a quick bathroom break.

Poor Elroy is suffering from arthritis that makes it hard for him to walk and painful for us to watch. He’s snoring right now on a pad next to where I am typing this.

I have remarked before on how much he looks like Zeke. When I hear his nails tapping on the floor I expect to see my old dog.

Old river

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The New River rises in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Boone, NC, flows within the crests of the Appalachians through Virginia and then into West Virginia, where it passes through the New River Gorge. It is thought to be a very old river, maybe only as old as three millions years, maybe as old as 320 million years. Some people think it is the second oldest river in the world, but some think perhaps it is not even the oldest in North America. My brother Henry subscribed to the  very-old school of thought.

Henry wanted his ashes scattered in the New River because he wanted to be as close to the creation as possible. That has not been done yet. I’m not certain that his wife will ever do it. It’s a long drive from Chattanooga. We have not had any communication with her since the summer after Henry died, so we don’t know what her plans might be.

But for me, it was time to do something. So I scooped up some ashes from our stove and put them into a small cardboard box. Then, on Wednesday, I started out for the New River Gorge Bridge.

I got there too late in the evening to do anything, so I spent the night in a hotel not far from the bridge. Thursday morning I drove to the visitors’ center on the north side of the gorge to get a look at the bridge and the river, far below. Pedestrians are not permitted on the bridge except for one special day every year, and this was not the day.

A panorama, looking both up and down the river

I viewed the bridge from the overlook, and then drove the narrow, winding road down deep into the gorge. At the bottom of the gorge there is an old bridge that was once the only way people wanting to go from one side of the gorge to the other could go.

I crossed the wood-floored bridge and parked on the other side of the river. Then I walked out onto the bridge to take a look. The new bridge is so high above the river that it’s hard to see the scale. But Henry was not interested in the bridge, only the river.

The old bridge at the bottom of the gorge

I helped a couple of women get some photos of themselves with the bridge in the background, and then waited for them and one other tourist to leave. Then I opened the box of ashes and scattered them.

There was a steady breeze from the east. It took the ashes away. They billowed out in a thin cloud that almost sparkled. I had wondered whether I would have any sense of Henry, despite the purely symbolic nature of the act. But I did not. I thought to take a photo of the sparkling ashes, but by the time I got my camera out the cloud of ash had dissipated and disappeared.

Then I thought, that was like Henry. The ashes were there in a cloud, and then they were not. And Henry was here, with us, and then he was not. That was the closest I felt to him.

One day Henry’s wife may decide to take Henry’s ashes and scatter them into the river, and maybe she won’t. Maybe she already has. If she hasn’t, maybe she will ask us to come with her. And maybe not. However that happens, I think I have done my duty to Henry and his memory.

A treasure trove

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My Uncle Tommy, my father’s much younger half brother, died in April. A few weeks after he died, Leah and I started meeting his wife, Micki, for our regular Wednesday lunch of huevos rancheros. A couple of cousins are now joining us, so it’s a nice get together for the two of us.

Micki has been clearing out a basement full of Tommy’s huge collection of stuff. Occasionally she finds something that she doesn’t want or doesn’t know what to do with. One of those things was a laundry basket full of photo albums. The photos are almost all of my immediate family, plus several albums of photos my father shot while in Europe during World War II. Micki gave them to me Wednesday after our lunch.

The labels read “France – Germany, September 1944, May 1945” and “Belgium Germany, France England, May 1945 December 1945”.

The most amazing thing about the photos — or at least one of the most amazing — is that I have never seen the vast majority of them. In fact, I had no idea most of them even existed. I am almost certain my brother never got the chance to see them either. Leah and I looked at some of the albums, and I am entirely blown away by the photos. There are photos of my father as a young man, my mother as a kid, my brother and me as babies, family members I didn’t know, and baby photos of my nephews. There are photos of the kindergarten “graduation” my brother attended in 1952 and that I attended in 1955. There is my first-grade class photo. There is a photo of my father’s father, a man whose image was completely unknown to me until recently.

I can hardly wait to go through them in more detail and pick out some to scan.

I have no idea why my uncle had these albums at his house. The most likely explanation is that at some point my parents gave them to my father’s mother to look at, and they somehow ended up at her house when she died. A few years later her husband, Uncle Tommy’s father died. I suspect that Tommy cleared out the house when the estate was settled and took them home, maybe thinking he would give them to my father later. Based on their condition and the way they smell, I suspect that he put them in his basement and forgot about them.

You can be sure I will share some of them here.

Magic levitating maple leaf

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I was coming back up the mountain with Sam a few days ago when something caught my eye. It was a floating maple leaf.

It reminds me of the end scene for Forrest Gump, where a feather floats up and away. In this case, it wasn’t just the wind. The leaf was attached somewhere by an invisible line spun by a spider. It was flying like a kite. But it was pretty cool.