Monday, January 15, 2017.
The Dog And Cat Blues.
Mary Ann is trying to get her 340,000-mile car ready for a trip to Washington, D.C. in a couple of days. She is going to the inauguration of her hero, and she doesn't want to take her relatively new (as what else could it be called, compared with 340,000 miles) BMW, the car she recently bought from Jude. She plans on driving all the way by herself in a single day. That's her style. My comparatively sane daily mileage is about 500 miles. That's not enough action for her to put up with that snail's pace.
The radio station, in celebration of MLK Day, is running on sports today and doesn't need me. I go to lunch solo at Zea, where I have the seared tuna salad, the hummus, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
When I get back home, MA asks whether I have seen the dog Susie. I have, when I fed her this morning. But now she is missing. And then, we discover that Susie is under the house. I know right away what caused that. She's afraid of fireworks, thunder, and gunshots. Someone was blasting away with the latter earlier today, and it was loud and long enough to make Susie take hiding.
Writing about this now, it doesn't sound awful. But it is. There is no easy way for the dog to go under the house, which means that she may not be able to get out. Susie's vision is not great, and it's getting dark outside.
This is the second pet rearrangement in the past two days. Yesterday, the cat Valencia somehow managed to climb up into a set of outdoor rafters on one end of our house. The rafters top out at about twenty feet. Once again, I know what caused this. The dogs were chasing Valencia earlier today.
How to get this one down? I think about leaning a big ladder from the ground up to the rafters. Mary Ann deems this nuts, but I give the plan a try. I haven't really begun when I see that Valencia has made his way through the network of rafters to arrive at a balcony. He manages to remain adhered to the rafter--he's almost walking sideways--and from there he makes it to the balcony. We open the door and he comes inside.
As if proud of his acrobatic daring, Valencia performs the same high-wire act again in a couple of days. Perhaps it's a salute to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, which announced today that it will end its circuses forever this spring.
In the night, I begin thinking too much about Susie, and what would be the repercussions if she can't find an escape from under the house. Without food or water, she might die. Which means I'd have to crawl to her resting place and drag her carcass out. At four a.m., I go outside to see if I can lure her with lights to a spot big enough (barely) for her to exit before. . . well. . .
But I don't see her or hear her. I keep looking, making ever more noise. Mary Ann is awakened. She comes outside to ask what I am doing. I describe my strategy for extracting the dog. She says, "But the dog came inside about two hours ago."
I feel like a fool. But that embarrassment is surpassed by my relief at being able to forget this crisis and get back to sleep. Which doesn't happen for awhile, and leaves me enervated and dazed all day. What a waste of a day off.
Susie won't give me the courtesy of telling me how she got under the house in ther frst place, nor how she got out. But once again we see that this is one savvy animal. Her survival as a stray until she found us twelve years ago keeps serving her well. She's even beating cancer with it.
