Ragamuffin

Ragamuffin

A ragamuffin usually refers to a dirty and unkempt child, a waif, an urchin or a guttersnipe. It comes from a combination of old English, referencing the rags that adorn such a child and perhaps embellished by the Dutch from the word muffe, which means mittens. Those children with ragged mittens are ragamuffins. For some reason in Jamaican slang, a ragamuffin is a street tough, so less pitiful and more tomcat mongrel. Our little Betty girl is a mongrel. Kim had her DNA tested and she is a blend of some fourteen breeds and as such is more mutt than not. We did not get Betty for her looks. She was only fourteen pounds, have been bulked up from the eight pounds which was her weigh-in weight at the shelter. Her while hair was sparse and irregularly matted. Betty was also blind as a bat, so that led to her being somewhat antisocial in that she kept to herself at the shelter, just for safety I imagine.

Betty has been with us now for sixteen months and she is weighing in at about nineteen pounds, but still looks lean with only a slight belly bulge. Her hair is thicker, but still wispy. We restored her sight by cataract surgery, so she can see well enough to get around and find her way to the dinner bowl with ease. All the fine food and rich eating (no dog has ever starved under Kim’s care) has driven up her insulin dosage, but generally she seems fit and healthy. But then Betty is over fourteen years old, which means she is in the twilight of her years. We knew this when adopting her, but were determined to make her final years enjoyable for her and I believe we have done just that.

The eye condition requires that Betty still get a half dozen eye drops per day. She doesn’t seem to mind too much since Kim gives her a treat with every dose. ANd Kim has become quite proficient at getting most of the drops into Betty’s eyes. But Betty is still an animal and eye drops are still at least mildly annoying and require some eye rubbing. Betty is very big on rubbing her snout against the furniture as a way of scratching her eyes and the area around her eyes. The combined result of all of that is that Betty has developed a sort of raccoon-eyed look with discolored hair around and especially below her eyes. It exaggerates her eyes as you might imagine, but doesn’t seem to bother her otherwise.

When we have guests over, Betty is well-behaved so long as no one tried to pet her too much. She is wary of strangers petting her. It must register as a possible new ownership transition and she has no intention of losing the gravy train she is on with Kim. You can’t reason with Betty to tell her she ain’t goin’ anywhere, but that doesn’t get very far. Instead, we just tell people to let her sniff them and that she will eventually warm up to them when she considers them non-threatening. So, mostly, she just wanders from one person to the next, quietly checking them out, probably in hopes of there being some food for her in the offing.

We try to keep Betty clean and tidy when people are coming over, but its difficult. Cecil took a bath and a haircut well and fluffed up like a white cotton ball. He got himself dirty enough fast enough, but he looked showroom good for a while. In Betty’s finest moments she still has those dark circles below her eyes and the combination of her long-legged shape and her wispy while hair makes her a bit of a PigPen at the best of times. Even with a little pink flower on her collar, she always looks at least five degrees off top dead center. Some of that is her distracted and vacant look. She never really seems to know what’s going on. If you call her she will start by looking in the opposite direction and only eventually figure out which direction you are calling from. I suppose it might be because her vision does not involve any lenses after the cataract surgery, so her visual acuity is only so-so at the best of times. But I just think she is old and ditzy, like the grand dame she is in dog years.

Betty’s day starts at about 6am when she gets up at the foot of our bed (she doesn’t seem to like sleeping in a dog bed, so the carpet or the cooler flooring is her preference. She will stomp around for a while shaking her collar to let us know she’s awake and then she will lung repeatedly at the bedside and ottoman to rub her snout and presumably wipe the sleep out of her eyes. After a few stretches she gets the gumption to jump up on the ottoman and then the bed to come up and wake up Kim. Sometimes she’s impatient for whatever is next (I can’t tell if she knows its breakfast time or needs to go out). But sometimes she obliges and will go back to sleep for a bit curled up next to Kim or me. When Kim is up Betty will bound off the bed, sometimes hitting the cut-off ottoman and sometimes not. She does not seem to lack energy at that moment and literally dances at Kim’s feet as though to say she can’t wait for her day to begin. After a morning walk and breakfast, she is done in. She drags herself into the bedroom or onto the living room rug and falls into a deep slumber as though she hadn’t slept in days.

By lunch time she will rouse and come looking for one of us in hopes of getting some food. She will growl and do a dance at my feet to get my attention until I give her a treat. She may hang out indoors or Kim might take her out to the garage to sit in the sun, but by mid-afternoon she is once again spent and in desperate need of another nap. Her favorite napping occurs on the bed with Kim when Kim goes in for an afternoon nap. She sprawls herself out over my half of the bed and is at her most content of the whole day. Dinner time is a big event and it too is followed by another nap before its eye drop/ treat and then bed time again. That is her routine and her day. Betty gets that changed up if we need to take her somewhere or she needs to just go with us somewhere we are headed. She doesn’t love the car, but it quickly becomes another place to nap in her car bed. On cross-country trips she can easily spend sixteen hours in there with only a few breaks to pee or stretch.

No matter what time of the day I see Betty, she is in some degree of disorientation. If I pull up next to her when she and Kim are out for a walk, she stares off wondering what’s going on. If I come home and it wakes her up, once she realizes I am not Kim, she is at a loss for what to do or where to go next. The only bit of concentration I see in her is when I have food of some sort. She is then absolutely rapt with attention and will even jump up half way onto the sofa to make sure I know that she is ready for a bite of whatever I have. I know that’s what dogs do, but Betty has raised it all to a fine art. Now whenever I see her, my first reaction is that she is a ragamuffin. She always looks slightly unkempt and hazy. Her right snuggle tooth just adds to that affect and she occasionally forgets to put her tongue all the way into her mouth so its stuck out ever so slightly. Maybe in the Jamaican sense she learned all this when she had to tough it out on the streets of L.A., maybe she’s just old and not altogether there at any moment. But I think she is just a ragamuffin at heart and lucky for her we respect that about her and are more than willing to put up with her eccentricities. Betty, Betty, Betty…