Betty Betty Betty
My entire family has now gone to the dogs. Carolyn, who always wanted a dog from the youngest age and was denied by circumstances, had to invent her own dog in her plush Stieff floppy-eared mutt called Ted. As soon as she was in her own stable home environment with her now-husband John, they went and got themselves a little black and white Havanese that they named Abraham Lincoln or Abe for short. Then there is my youngest son, Thomas (a.k.a. Tom, as he now chooses to go by). He and his now-fiancé Jenna talked actively about getting a little Yorkie called Hank, the name being the important element in the equation. When they finally chose to cohabitate, they went out and economically purchased a puppy that got billed as a Yorkie, named him Hank, and then proceeded to watch him grow into a nice, very rambunctious, but very different breed of dog…but one still called Hank. My son Roger, the oldest of the brood, was never terribly fond of dogs. In fact, it is fair to say that he distrusted dogs for the most part and tried hard to tolerate them when in their presence, especially if it was the dog of another family member. He married Valene some eight years ago and despite Valene being a real dog person, it was well-understood in the family that Roger would decidedly not be getting a dog into his life. That changed last year when he and Valene decided to adopt a little miniature dachshund named Pudding. Roger is now a devoted father to little Pudding and it is clear that his heart has thawed a great deal in general as Pudding has found a path into his heart.
Not unlike Roger, I was not much of a dog person. My childhood involved a dog that theoretically belonged to my sister Barbara. Unlike with Hank, we got Puddles knowing from the start that the product of a Labrador Retriever and a miniature Collie which were bound to produce something that would never be more than a friendly mutt. Puddles was a member of the family to the point of traveling with us from Madison to Middleton to Maine and eventually on the Michelangelo ocean liner to Rome, Italy. My mother was the real keeper and champion of Puddles over the years, and the one who literally farmed him out eventually (when we all headed off to college) to some friendly Italian farmer who lived in the countryside. Puddles had seen the world with us so wherever he spent his last days, he was a lucky dog.
Speaking of lucky dogs, Kim and I are now on our second lucky dog program. The first was the rescued Cecil, the full-breed (unbeknownst to us at the time of adoption) Bichon who pranced around New York City runways and seaports. Cecil passed on two years ago here in California and now has a memorial Bonsai Garden named in his honor. His place in our home has been taken by a little white senior rescue that had gone by Cheyenne at the shelter, but was renamed Betty for some inexplicable reason by Kim when she was brought home with her wispy, matted hair and snaggle-toothed look about her. Since then, Betty has become a part of our family as much as all dogs tend to do in their own ways.
Betty, who now looks much healthier and sturdier than the scraggly thing that walked in our door in mid-2020, still bears the psychological scars of the abused street dog she was in her younger days. I think it is fair to say that those memories have been erased from her active mindset, but the knee-jerk reactions will likely live forever in whatever version of the brain stem dogs have. We are told that Betty is about fourteen or so years old, but with strays like her that go through a rescue program, especially a senior dog rescue program, there really is no assured way of telling her age. From her various bumps and warts, I suspect she is closer to fourteen than not, nonetheless. The other thing that makes her seem her age is the combination of her preference for many hours of sleep per day and her general ditziness. Betty seems always to be in a general state of vagueness as to her surroundings and the goings on of life in our household. Some of that works in our favor since she is totally OK with whomever comes into our home and however many people are wandering about. All she wants to do is sniff people for some reason, but they could be stealing all our silver and she couldn’t give a hoot.
It is for all those endearing reasons that Kim and I find ourselves always saying in resignation and with some degree of pity for her, “Oh Betty, Betty, Betty!” The truth, of course, is that Betty Betty Betty has a pretty amazingly cushy life thanks mostly to Kim and her devotion to her needs. In the morning Betty Betty Betty jumps up on the bed via the ottoman and walks slowly up to Kim for a nuzzle. What used to be an insistence that Kim get up right away to attend to her needs has mellowed into a willingness to calmly sit and snooze until Kim has decided she is ready to get up. What I do with my morning is largely irrelevant to Beth Betty Betty. Betty Betty Betty then sits patiently on the bed for Kim to go through her ablutions and get dressed, whereupon Kim scoops up Betty Betty Betty in her arms and carries her into the kitchen. This is ritual and Betty Betty Betty both enjoys it and now expects it. There is the morning walk followed by the closely observed preparing of the breakfast that gets accompanied by the first shot of insulin of the day for this little diabetic dog.
The rest of Betty Betty Betty’s day is spent largely lounging somewhere between the living room and the kitchen with the mandatory afternoon nap on the bed, preferably, but not exclusively with Kim by her side. About the only interruption to this routine comes at midday and evening when Betty Betty Betty must, regardless of how full or empty her belly is at the moment (she gets a constant array of treat throughout the day), must pursue the opportunity to beg food from me. She can have a bowl full of food at her feet and still she has to beg from me. I am not stupid. I understand Pavlovian response and the fact that I have created this growling monster (she growls to get my attention) by virtue of all the table scrap feeding I do with her. That does not make me like it when the monster is growling at my door. I solve the problem in the least logical manner, by giving her a piece of whatever I’m eating (regardless of whether it is good for her or not) and then yell at her if she won’t stop growling for more. It turns out that the one thing that exceeds the ditziness and obsessiveness of Betty Betty Betty is my complete lack of ability to learn from my own canine mistakes.