RIP Miles

"Anyone without the excuse of a dog should be handcuffed and searched for loneliness."

                         -Stephen Dunn, poet

 

I admire those who take into their lives a troubled animal.  I had three adopted dogs until a few months ago . . . Miles, Leo and Georgia.  Miles was a black lab mutt I adopted after moving to this town years ago.  I somewhat embarrassingly named him after Miles Davis because I was on an intense bebop jazz kick at the time.  He used to be like a child to me until my daughter was born.  About a year ago he developed congestive heart failure.  He was choking and suffering tremendously, so I had to take him to the Vet.  And there in front of our town’s tobacco spitting, ten gallon hat wearing, large animal Veterinarian (the spitting image of Baxter Black), I wept uncontrollably because I would not return with Miles that day. 

 

"Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone - rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains.  Dogs."

                      -Jim Harrison

 

We also have Leo, another stray who wandered up as a puppy to my niece’s garage sale in 2001.  Leo is large and resembles white wolf, so he quickly outgrew my niece’s small house.  So we’ve had him ever since. 

He used to be a powerful, handsome and beautiful creature until he somehow hung an ear on the fence in the back yard, causing a hematoma.  It swelled up like a pin cushion, so I took him to see Baxter.  And now he has one ear standing proud and tall like a timber wolf’s, and one that flops and sags like a Labrador’s.  Poor Leo. 

I used to have an old vintage trailer sanctuary on some land near Taos, New Mexico.  I took Leo out there once in my brand new Subaru.  Just before coming home, I stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank.  When I returned after paying for gas, Leo greeted me in the window with a big grin, wagging his long tail.  I didn’t think anything of it until I opened the door. 

You see, Leo is claustrophobic.  And in the span of a few minutes, he cracked the front windshield, chewed a giant hole in the back seat, swallowed the gear shift knob, put tooth marks in the steering wheel, shredded all four head rests, severed the rubber seals around both back doors (not sure how he did this, because the doors were closed) and to top things off sawed in half the driver’s side seatbelt.  Needless to say I drove the 9 hours back to Oklahoma without a seatbelt to rhythmically annoying ding, ding, dings all the way home. 

Lucky for me I have good insurance.  They paid the $3500 damage with only a hundred dollar out of pocket deductible.         

 

Leo

  

And then there’s Georgia, our most recent adoption.  My daughter and I rescued her from an organization in Seminole two years ago.  Evidently she wandered up to the local Sonic drive-in, emaciated and wanting for food.  Some lady working the night shift took her in and named her Georgia after her home state.  When we went to pick her up, she asked if we were going to change her name from Georgia to something else to which my daughter replied that Georgia sounded just fine.

Miss Georgia