and so i live with my grandmother now. in some ways it is just as hard as i thought it would be. in others, it is even harder. and i could go on and on and on about the daily trials and frustrations and heartbreak but that would merely be a pebble in the massive mountain range of what it is like to live with someone with alzheimer’s. that, and i’d be repeating things i’ve probably already said and all i want is to be freed from the repetition – the repetitive questions, repetitive stories, repetitive actions and the repetitive bewilderment at trying to figure out how to navigate all of this. mostly, i’m just tired. every night i fall into bed in utter exhaustion, usually bursting into tears, sometimes tears of relief that another day is over, sometimes because i am so tired i myself can’t even think straight, sometimes because i have no idea what i am doing with my life, sometimes because that eternal question – who am i? – keeps surfacing, and other times because i actually really miss my grandfather. i still don’t feel like i’ve even had a chance to mourn his passing, because all of my energy has been allocated to other facades that needed shoring. i really don’t know what to do about much of anything, but i get up everyday (at 6am, when the granny’s feet hit the floor and she starts her shuffling about for the long day ahead) and keep trying.
and then there is jolly.
about a week before i arrived here, back to my homeland, my parents informed me that the eccentric old guy that lived a mile down the country road from my grandparents’ farm had passed away. his name was roger, just like my grandfather’s. i had never met this roger, but my parents were friends with his much younger brother and i had known him. this roger had moved back to his family’s land several years ago to retire and live in the country after having traveled and lived and worked all over the world. he’d had a dog, an old white lab that laid on the porch, or in his doghouse on the porch, or in the sunny spot in the yard next to the porch. the dog and he would take walks down the road, slowly, but surely, making their way about the world. now, though, the eccentric old guy was gone and the dog was left alone on the porch. my folks inquired of the younger brother what was to happen of the dog. the brother was looking for a home for the dog but in the meantime was going by every few days and putting a bucket of food out for him. my folks would see the dog whenever they drove out to my grandparents’ farm to check on it, since my now-widowed grandmother was living with them in town. they said the dog looked so terribly sad, never moving from the porch or the sun in the yard.
this made my heart very sad.
my mother planted the thought that i should take the dog to the farm to live with my grandmother and i.
no. no. NO NO NO.
i did not need a dog. i was going to have enough on my hands with my grandmother, with wilderkat, with training the grandmother not to let wilderkat out of the house where he was bound to be gobbled up by coyotes or foxes or lost forever in the woods behind the house. no. no. i did not need a dog.
though, yes, many times lately i had wanted to get a dog. my soul still had a gigantic larger-than-a-dog-sized hole in it since i lost my souldog mercury three years ago, and while wilderkat had filled some of that hole, there are some things a cat just can’t do-like being a dog- but, just as i had done when i had wanted to get a cat i talked myself out of it for a million different reasons because i thought i wasn’t ready. and whenever i had thought about how i could possibly partition my heart in some way so as to love both wilderkat and this dog-to-be, i couldn’t figure how to do it. wilderkat and i are such a pair, i just couldn’t picture how a dog would fit into our lives.
so, no. no. i did not need a dog.
especially not a large dog. especially not a large dog that most likely was not housebroken, a large dog that lived in the country and was not accustomed to a leash or a fence or a yard or being tied up or riding in a car. no, i did definitely not need a large free-roaming free-willed dog. while i still don’t know what will transpire here with the living situation with my grandmother and how long-or-short-term it will be, i still foresee myself moving back to a city within the next year or so and finding a place to rent with a cat was always hard enough. finding a place to rent with a large potentially-non-housebroken free-range country dog would be most likely impossible. my mother’s ploy of course was that i would take this dog in and then stay here forever.
for this reason alone, i most definitely did not need a dog.
but then the first time i drove past his house, and i saw his sweet sad dark-eyed face, lying there in his doghouse, face resting on paws, looking forlorn and devastated and uncertain as to why his pops had still not come home…my heart did that thing where it cracks open just a little more.
but still, no. no, i had too much i was overwhelmed with already. i did not need to add this dog to the mix.
yet, every time i took my grandmother to town, or every week when i took my one night away from here to regain a bit of sanity and escape into a quiet solitude somewhere, i passed the dog’s house. and as i came around the curve in the road my heart sped ahead of me and went towards this dog. he would lift his head at the sound of the slowing vehicle only to see that once again it was not his pops returning home so his head would plop back down onto his paws and i swear i could hear him sigh.
my mom was still on the case, feeding me tidbits of info, as much as she could garner from the younger brother for they knew little about the dog or how the older brother had even come about to have the dog. but we did learn that his name was jolly. jolly? well, if that just wasn’t a name that did not seem to fit his sad lonesome porch dog demeanor.
but then i started stopping to say hi to him whenever i passed his house. i would roll down the car window and shout out a “hi jolly!” and he would look at me quizzically, plopping his head back to his paws and retreating into his forlorn state.
and as much as my heart aches for my grandmother who has lost her husband of 65 years whom she never spent a day without, my heart ached for this lonely dog. it was just making me nuts.
so i had my parents inquire about the dog some more, and i just felt so torn about what to do. i REALLY didn’t need a dog, seriously, i REALLY didn’t. i tried to convince two different friends that live somewhat near here that they needed this dog but they both claimed they didn’t really need a dog either (though both have fatefully ended up with dogs in the weeks since…hmm….) and so one day i stopped at jolly’s house to talk to him, to ask him what HE wanted to do. i got out of the car and approached him, he was lying in the sun next to the porch, and he kept his head lowered and questioned my motives. i got low and started talking to him, and the more i said and the more times i said his name, the harder his tail thumped on the ground. finally he just burst towards me and took every pet and hug and bit of love i could give him.
oh my.
that should have sealed the deal but i still wasn’t sure. i just hadn’t convinced myself that i could be a responsible dog owner at this particular juncture in life.
i took the granny to meet him and even though she would admit that yes she had been wanting to get a dog and that this seemed like a nice dog, she would then shift gears as she so often does and say that she didn’t want a dog. so i knew bringing him to live with us was going to be a big challenge since any change in her routine unleashes a barrage of continuous repetitive questions and stresses. even before my granny had alzheimers she was a fretter. fretting runs in our family’s genes apparently. if there isn’t something to fret about, that in itself is fretted about. so i was terribly unsure as to how such a major change in her life would work out. just as i am so terribly unsure about most everything these days. and of course i too fretted – would he be a good dog?, how many trips would i have to take the mile down the road to retrieve him from his old home – because i was certain he would wander back there in his lonesome despair?, would he bark through the night and wake the granny and then set us all off on some unknown path of dealing with her mid-night confusion?, would i be able to find enough in love in me to truly give him a good home – for now and in the future?. good lord, i had no idea about any of this, and so much more.
i was heading out on a bit of a trip on my night off and i stopped and talked to him and petted him more on my way down the road and while he seemed rather certain that i was alright, i still had my doubts about myself.
then again, when don’t i.
so i told everyone i had to think about it.
and of course i had to talk to wilderkat.
he has a history of abhorring canines, fangs bared, fur bristled, deep gollum-like howl emanating…it’s not good. but, wilderkat is mainly an inside kat unless we go out for walks in his harness (which we had been doing here, him actually hiking in the woods with me some. hooray!) and jolly was clearly an outside dog so maybe it would be ok, for now, but what about the future…?
wilder did not seem too keen about the idea when i proposed it to him. but when i explained how jolly needed a home, just as he had once needed a home, he really couldn’t quite refuse now could he?
so i told all concerned parties, “yes”. though it was probably more like a “yeah, ok, i’ll take this dog…but…i really don’t know about all of this…{i really don’t NEED a dog!!]”
and so two saturdays ago my dad drove me down to jolly’s house in his truck, so we could load up the dog, the doghouse, the food bucket, the water bucket, the bags and cans of food and anything else that had been jolly’s. the whole kit and kaboodle as they say. by then he was used to me, he came right over and took the dog biscuits i offered and thwapped his tail all over the place and soaked up lots of pets. but when my dad came near he cowered. in fact he hid under the porch. dad stepped away and i went about gathering up the doghouse and getting it into the truck. jolly was very confused. his house! where was his house going?!? he didn’t want to be anywhere near my dad, but very much wanted to be close to me. but he did not want to get into the truck. i sat and talked with him, petting his big head, telling him that he could come and live with me and not be so alone, etc. but he still wouldn’t budge. so i went and got the leash i had been using for wilder’s walks and clipped it onto his collar. and ZOOM, he headed straight for the truck. he jumped right in and off we went. apparently i just need to learn his language. this action means we do this thing, stop with all the talking. which in a greater picture, is what i am trying to do with my grandmother, since there is no conversation to be had or reasoning or remembrance, it’s all about reading her moods and signs and getting through each day trying to figure out this strange new language, and keeping my tone and mood calm and positive at all times since that is mostly all her own mind can read of me. we set up his doghouse on our back porch, fed and watered him, he met my mother and the granny again, stared through the window at the cat and he even finally warmed up to my dad. and then he went from person to person to person and back again, sticking his big head on a lap and pleading for as many pets as he could get.
and that was pretty much that.
i tied him up to the porch post the first night, on a long rope, only to discover him in a rather stan-laurel-ish predicament the next morn, ridiculously tangled around all of the porch furniture. so after that he has been free to roam. but, you know what, he doesn’t want to go anywhere, except wherever i am. or granny. if she walks out to the road to check the mailbox, he goes with her. if i walk down to the creek to look for fishies, he goes with me. in the mornings i go out with him to the big yard down below the knoll that our farmhouse sits on, and we run. well, i stumble, he runs – and runs and runs and runs, big ears flopping, big goofy grin beaming, zooming his silly self all around in the grass. he has this thing where he walks one foot away at all times, never bumping into us and never ever jumping on us. even if he is running full speed across the yard at me, he will hit the brakes two feet away and come to a complete sit right in front of me. yet he knows no commands and hasn’t the slightest idea what the word “sit” even means. it’s almost as if he’s trained himself to be the bestest gentlest most lovable dog a person could happen to invite into their lives. he lies next to me while i am cleaning out my grandmother’s overgrown flower beds and trying to get them back to their former beauty. he sits and listens to her while she chatters away endlessly at him and a few times i have noticed that he will let her lean on him when her balance wobbles. he’s so incredibly careful around her and if i am working in the garden and she has gone around the house to find something (not ever remembering what she went for of course) he gets this torn look, “shall i stay here with the girl, or go check on the granny?” and he chooses wisely, he goes and checks on the granny, then walks her back to where i am. it’s really quite incredible.
we found out later that in fact his name is not jolly at all, but jello. but he responds to jolly just as well and i can’t see myself calling out the name jello so…jolly it will remain. he also isn’t old, but maybe somewhere between 4 and 7. he also had a reason for cowering when he met my dad. apparently when his roger rescued him from the shelter it was quite obvious he had been abused. the story was that it took jolly and roger a long time to work through all of jolly’s fears. i notice it more now, how he slinks away when someone picks up a stick or a gardening implement that is stick-like (a hoe, a rake, a shovel), loud noises send him slinking into his house, loud voices make his legs quiver, unknown men make him lurk in the distance until i tell him they are safe, a thunderstorm one night had him huddled into the corner of the front porch terrified and the afternoon thunderstorms find him in his new safety den tucked way back under the old corncrib. during a particularly bad storm the other day we brought him in the house, the only time he’s ever shown interest in being inside, and he stood in the tiny breakfast nook room frozen and scared. wilderkat even came in to check on him and sat under the table and just watched him, no claws bared or hackles raised. this was astounding. they were sitting merely a foot away from one another and wilder was not in attack mode. wilder sensed jolly’s fear i do believe and didn’t want to do him any more harm. this gives me great hope for a possible friendship, or at least an ambivalent tolerance.
someone hurt jolly. and yet somehow all he wants to do is exude love and happiness. which makes him an awful lot like me. he just wants to love, and hopefully be loved even just a little in return. which is pretty much how i’m trying to get through the world, however badly i may do it.
and now when i approach the bend in the road where jolly once lived i no longer feel that heavy hurt in my heart, where i felt so sad for him and so unsure about what to do about any of it. now, before i even know what’s happening, i realize i am radiating an inner and outer smile, because jolly is no longer alone. and i am no longer feeling so alone in dealing with this drastic change of life that i am currently living. jolly has brought something very good into the fray. and that curve in the road means i am only one mile away from seeing his big sweet face. he always comes bounding to greet me. and the other day when i loaded him up in the old volvo to take him to the vet to be checked out and get some shots because we have no vet records for him and have no idea what his history is, it truly was an absolute joy in my soul to look back and see his big lunky white head smiling and panting and looking out the windows, all stretched out there in the back of the wagon on mercury’s old dog bed. i have a sweet big-souled white dog in my life again. and as much as i still miss my souldog, crying even now while writing about him, mercury would be pleased about jolly.
so, as it turns out, jolly actually is quite jolly, and i did very much indeed need a dog.
