Welcome, Bentley!

Bentley arrived yesterday. He is a six-year-old Bengal kitty who was being fostered to save him from being euthanized.  He's amazingly sweet and affectionate, shy and curious.  Bentley is taking his time settling in with our dog Sallie (age 7) and our two cats Cosmo (age 20) and Fiona (age 10).

More Pet Pics (some repeats?)

Pics of Our Zoo

Sallie

Fiona

Cosmo and Fiona

Sallie and Cosmo

Why the Title, Katherine?

I launched this blog May 31, 2007 as a way to separate my "fun" writing from my more serious pieces on Tenacious Poodle (originally entitled "Luxurious Choices" to match my old website's name).  While I like the title "Bull Run Writings," mostly for the alliteration and memories garnered at Bull Run Regional Park, I find there is not much writing going on here and that it's certainly not all about Bull Run, perhaps because initially, I was merely attempting to escape my obsession with Manassas Battlefield and redirect my attention.  I soon discovered, however, that the historic and hiking experiences I had in Manassas were not those I found at Bull Run.

Bull Run Regional has a history of its own, and it's left in me indelible memories of digging in the sand playground with its unique concrete tubes, swimming and splashing in the water park and toasting marshmallows at night next to our camping cabin.  The trails, alive especially during Bluebell season, provided Shiba and I hours of easy strolling.  (In fact, someone even wrote an article about the park and interviewed me, asking questions about why Shiba and I walked there.)  Wading up to our knees in the cool creek, seeking salamanders, spotting minnows and other small fish and collecting fresh water shells have been part of our Bull Run experience.  And yet, I've not written about these adventures for a long time.

I have taken plenty of photos, however.  In fact, you will discover at least half of this blog is devoted to photos of family, friends and nature, as well as short vacations.  But again, not much writing has been posted, and for that, I feel a bit guilty about abandoning the original purpose of this blog.  I feel bad for it, like it's lonely or something.  Ridiculous, right?  However, writing is a living thing, a fluid thing, similar to things in Bull Run Regional Park.  Photos, kids' quotes and art are also alive in their own way, but the name of this blog is misleading, and I don't like to mislead people. 

I could change the name name, maybe to something like "Inspired by Bull Run Regional."  That would have the alliteration I like, as well as the accuracy I'm seeking. I'll think about it, brainstorm, as writers are wont to do.  Then I'll decide.

In fact, I think I just did.

Sallie and Cosmo

And the Goddess Inu Ascends

We live and breathe her always, Shiba, otherwise known as The Goddess Inu.  All our love, our cherished dog who lived a 16-year happy life.

Called by Breed: A Shiba Story

Called by Breed

The sign says, “If you didn’t call, you don’t belong here.  Turn around and leave.”  It makes me wonder if we should.  

The road had turned us upside down, from the exit off a rural highway, up a steep and hilly incline of a small mountain, around a wide corkscrew towards the top of a place where the breeder lives.  Hers is the last house on the left.  It is already dusk, so we can’t read the number.  We take a chance and get out.  It is chilly.

The woman who opens the door is stalky, short, with a brief shock of dirty blond hair.  She doesn’t smile, but opens the door and tells us to come in to the lighted living room hall.  There are shot guns hanging on the wall.

The dog we want to see is in the kennel out back.  “Let me get my flashlight,” she says.

We have no right to be looking at dogs.  I am pregnant.  We live in a cheap, one bedroom apartment, and that, only at the mercy of a kindly landlord.  My husband is unemployed.  The car is not ours.  It is a used Toyota Tercel leased for $100 a week from a place called Rent a Wreck.  Our car burned up in a fire on the side of the road.  It made the front page.

The ad said, “Free Shiba Inu.”  I didn’t know what that was, but on the phone, the lady had said the dogs look like little foxes.  Here’s the address if we wanted to come and look.  So we are looking.

She returns with the flashlight and leads us outside.  We walk on a gravel path towards a barn.  To the left, a group of five or six German shepherds strain against a chain link fence, their bark, I am sure, not worse than their bite.  I would move closer to the right, but there, behind another fence, is a five or sixsome of Rottweilers.  I don’t know much about Rottweilers, but the lady says they make excellent guards.

The barn has a padlock.  Inside smells like straw and dog.  There are no lights.  The lady points her flashlight up where a large kennel has been mounted.

The dogs look strange—short, with thick manes of red-gold fur, curly tails and sturdy feet.  They do this prancing thing, back and forth.  They aren’t particularly interested in us.  “These are the males.  They need to be socialized,” the lady says.  “Here’s the one in the paper.” She points.

The dog walks funny, trying to prance but can’t quite do it.  “What’s wrong with him?” I ask.

“He has hip dysplasia.  He’s okay, though.”

“Oh.”

I wander a little, looking at the other dogs.  I see a wooden box on the left. There is a light over the box, and when I look in, I see a small female, indeed, the size and semblance of a fox.  

She is beautiful.  Her hair is the same color as the others, but there is less scruff at the neck.  Her eyes are black as the inside of the barn but as wide open as the moon.

“Why is she in there?” I ask.

“She’s the runt.  She needs the heat lamp.  I’ll step outside and let you and your husband talk.”

We do.  I am serious.  We can’t take an injured dog.  It will need medical care and we can’t afford it.  It’s irresponsible for us even to be looking at dogs right now, never mind one with a birth defect.  My husband wants one, though.  Okay.  Then what about the little one?  She seems healthy.

We call the lady and ask about the runt.

“These are purebreds.  They all have their shots.  They are $700.”  She hadn’t planned on selling the little one yet.

We don’t have $700.  

I tell her why we don’t want the boy.  I tell her I am going to have a baby in a couple of months and we want a dog for the baby.  We are in a small apartment and we read that Shiba Inus don’t bark much and are good with kids.  The baby Shiba is adorable.

The lady says she can give us the runt for $150.

We go inside to sign papers.  I am afraid.  We might not be able to pay the rent on time.  We shouldn’t be doing this.  Our friends know we are broke.  They lent us money.  We will have to lie, tell them we got the dog for free.  

My husband says we should do it.  We’ll never again get an opportunity to buy a purebred at this price. 

“We’re not going to get rid of her once we get her,” I tell him.  “She’ll be part of the family.  We’ll need to take care of her.”

He writes the check and the lady goes back to the barn.  We wait outside.  

The lady carries the dog and hands her to me.  My body is shaking, and so is the dog’s.

We are in the car.  The dog lies on my belly.  She is warm and extremely shy.  “She just needs to be socialized,” says my husband.  

We call her Shiba because that’s what she is. I like it because, growing up, I had a dog by that name.  I know it’s silly to call a dog by its breed, but I don’t care.  

That was more than fifteen years ago.

As I write this, Shiba is curled up on the couch, her paws tucked in like a fawn’s.  She is grayed and she is blind.  She hesitates when walking downstairs, testing each step before she moves.  When we call her, she doesn’t know where the voice is coming from and wanders around until she figures it out.  She jumps when we pass by her because she can no longer see or sense when we are coming.  I’ve taken to warning her, but she is a little deaf.

She comes to my desk chair and gives a communicative whine when she wants to go out.  She likes the small backyard where she has spent most her life.  It is familiar to her and she can make her way around, even in the dark.

Sometimes I am on the couch and she goes to my chair.  She stares at it and whines.  “I am over here, Shiba,” I say.  She doesn’t hear, so I get up.

Shiba has lived through two moves cross country, two children, now teens, a divorce and remarriage, several cats and, for the last four years, one other dog.  She has always been the Alpha.  She loves cheese and short walks in daylight.  She still prances.  And I recall how she came to live with us, within our hearts, those many years ago, when our family was young and poor and struggling as an injured dog.  How we all have grown healthy since then.

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt

August 19, 2011

     

Fiona, My Desk Kitty and Editor

But when she is in a bad mood, LOOK OUT!

Curious Things About Shiba

I've been thinking for awhile that I want to start a little memory log of Shiba, especially now that she is getting older (14 this year). Sure, I have some pictures from her puppy hood on up, but you know how pictures only tell part of the story. There are things I want to remember that can't be shown with pictures, especially when you have a dog that is frightened of digital cameras. I am not sure why she is--perhaps it's the high-pitched sound of the camera turning on. In any event, here are some things I want to remember, and I will add to them as I do with my kids' quotes.

--Shiba used to sit on my belly when I was pregnant with Erika in 2006-07. Shiba is six months older than Erika.

--Shiba used to try to lick Erika's diaper (a sure sign it was time for Erika to be changed).

--Shiba wore a diaper herself the first time she went into heat. I cut a hole out for her curly tail. Poor thing wouldn't even walk with it.

--When one of my best friends, Jorge, lived downstairs from us, he would knock at our door. I would yell, "Get in here!" in this hag-like voice. Shiba would always bark. Up until about last year, even when no one knocked, if I yelled "Get in here!" in that voice, she would still bark.

--Shiba used to get on her hind legs and slurp Alexandra's messy hands when Alexandra was eating in her high chair. She did the same thing to Erika. I've got photos of the girls crying a couple of times because they didn't want to share their food.

--Shiba doesn't just play. She prances, jumping sideways from two feet to two feet, left to right. One day, she pranced like that in a diagonal direction all the way across the room.

--Sometimes, Shiba sits with her paws folded in front of her. She looks like a fawn.

--Shiba likes to sit on the top of the couch and look out the front window.

--Shiba loves cheese more than anything in the world. Don't ever say "cheese."

--As noted above, Shiba hates the camera, so it's hard to get a nice photo of her with us. She shakes and shivers and runs out of the room when we turn the camera on. This has gotten worse the older she has grown.

--Shiba had terrible breath, so we took her to the vet when she was 12. She had 14 teeth removed. Even so, she tries to bite Sallie, our much younger, much bigger dog. Sallie just wags her tail.

--Shiba plays "dominatrix" with Sallie. She whips her but around, hitting Sallie on the side of her body and on the side of her face. We call this "numchuck butt." Sallie just stands there. Sallie had the same reaction when Shiba mounts her face.

--When my brother Michael used to live with us, Shiba would steal his underwear. Michael didn't like this.

--Shiba likes us to chop up her meat and biscuits into smaller pieces. If we don't, she carries the larger pieces around the house and whines. She has done this all her life, even before she had bad teeth.

--Shiba once or twice buried a hot dog under our bedroom pillow.

--For some reason, I started this thing that I say in a bad English accent: "There is a new religion spreading across South Africa, one in which we worship the Goddess Inu. Let us prostrate ourselves before her and recite the mantra: (in super high pitched voice) INU! INU!" When she was younger, Shiba used to prance when we did this.

--The "Inu bark" is a particular sound reserved for begging when we are eating on the couch in the kitchen. Shiba will stare at us as we eat, and if we ignore her, she abruptly does the "Inu bark."

--In the summer when Shiba sheds, she forms clumps on her hind legs and on her butt. These are fun collections to pull out. They come out easily, and they are easy to dispose of. However, she doesn't really like our grooming her. Neither does she enjoy being brushed.

--Shiba doesn't like baths. In fact, she just doesn't like getting wet. Usually, I shower with her. After I let her out of the shower, she prances around and then runs all over the house. She is very excited because she knows she will be rewarded for her patience, usually with cheese.

--Shiba has always been a runner. When we lived in Massachusetts, she frequently would get off a leash or find a way out of the fence and take off. She would return a few hours later. She did the same thing when we moved to Virginia. The longest time she was ever gone was over night a couple of years ago. That night, it poured rain (Shiba hates to be wet, remember) and the next day, we frantically hunted the neighborhood for her. This evil lady yelled at us to get off her farm property, and I told her we were looking for our dog. She kept yelling. (I wanted to smack her, but I was with the kids, so I behaved.) Someone in an adjoining neighborhood sent us in the right direction, and when we caught up to her, she came right to us. I picked her up, hugged her and cried, even though she smelled like horse manure, she was filthy and I was wearing a nice blouse. She never tried to run away again, even though she got a thorough bath afterward.

--Shiba's only other attempt to run out after the episode described above was when we had the massive snowstorms this past winter. She and Sallie had been cooped up for days with literally only a thin path allowing them into the backyard. We left the front door open for a minute, and Shiba casually walked out. She made her way to the end of the sidewalks and "did her business." Alexandra ran out and Shiba came right to her instead of her usual running further off. I think she really was just having some cabin fever.

--Shiba sleeps at the end of our bed by my feet. She is often the reason I get a terrible night's sleep, since I am always worried about accidentally kicking her off the bed.

--Shiba is mostly blind. We keep a light on all night long so she can see where to get on and off the bed. She usually jumps on a stool at the end of the bed, and then she jumps onto the bed. One night, she got confused and jumped onto a chair near the sewing machine. She looked around and whined, not knowing where she was. Poor baby! I had to rescue her.

--Shiba has always been terrified of storm drains. Whenever we walk her and pass by a storm drain, she pulls hard enough to choke herself in an effort to cross the street. We don't know why.

--Before going to sleep, Shiba has to groom the quilt.

--Shiba has to shake after anyone pets her. And she's like a cat. She only wants you when she wants you.

--One of Shiba's favorite places is David's parents' house. She loves their backyard. Her other favorite place to visit is David's brother's house where there is also a big yard. In each place, there are other dogs, so Shiba can feel superior as she is wont to do.

--One night in bed, my husband farted so loud that Shiba growled at him.

_______________________________________________________
Dec. 27, 2012, we had to have Shiba put down. She was blind, deaf and had little to no sense of smell. She had arthritis and kidney disease. She lived 16 years and 4 months, a good long life, but how we miss her. I've built her an alter (http://bullrunwritings.blogspot.com/2012/12/and-goddess-inu-ascends.html). There is a short video of her on YouTube (http://youtu.be/G8Kt1fepuL8).  Every breath we take is full of her and the love she radiates. Thank you, Shiba, for all you gave us.

More Fun Photos

In order:

Smithsonian
Bull Run Regional Park
Bull Run Regional Park
Cosmo and Sallie: Buds

Merry Christmas!