Dachshund Jailbreak

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Friday, November 4, 2011

Dogs: I have had three dogs during my fifty-two years of existence—Alfie, Jazz, and Lila. Baby books: My mother compiled one about me. I, at the tender age of ten, made one that documented Alfie's puppyhood.

Here I am at twenty-three months. It is from my baby book.

Alfie

Our first dog was a gift from my parents. My brother was twelve, my sister seven, and me ten. Having a canine-a-phobic father and a germ-a-phobic mother, my brother and I were astounded when they told us that their friend's dog had pups and that we could choose one for a pet.  

Having recently gotten over my fear of dogs, I was thrilled with the prospect of having a devoted four-legged chum. My parents soon drove us over to the Cohens' whose mid-size French Poodle had had a litter of pups. I cannot remember the bitch's name. I do recall that Mrs. Cohen ushered the mom dog out of their chilly wood paneled basement rec room so that we could select one of the pups. The Cohens' were exotic. They had modern art paintings and sculptures purchased from the local museum store adorning their walls and occupying entire tabletops. Due to the Cohens' obvious level of sophistication, my ten-year-old mind figured that the pups were well bred and highly refined. The puppies were mutts, part Poodle and part indeterminate terrier. We picked out the "cutest," but had to wait a couple of weeks before the pup could leave his mum.

My brother came up with a name for the puppy—Alfie. A few years earlier, the movie "Alfie" starring Michael Caine and Shelly Winters came out. The title song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David was a chart topper. It got lots of airplay on AM radio in 1970, even though the movie came out several years earlier. Once the puppy entered our lives, we often crooned, "What's it all about Alfie?"

On the day we brought Alfie home, Mom listed the rules. "The dog stays in the basement. You kids are going to play with it after school.  And, your Dad will build a pen for the dog." My brother and I tacitly understood that Mom was certifiably unreasonable. Our basement was cold in the winter and damp in the summer. On exceptionally rainy days, water seeped in and spread across the black and white checkered linoleum squares. "Never mind her rules; she'll change," I believed. "Why should anybody want to keep a pet in a dungeon?"

Understandably, alone in the basement, Alfie whined, barked, and relentlessly slammed full-body into the cardboard clad wood-frame pen. Mom eventually caved in and allowed the dog to spend his days upstairs, confined to the kitchen. This made life better for all of us. Still, at bedtime, a family member would lead Alfie by his collar to the basement pen. My dad built it out of remnants from the playpen my siblings and I hung out in during our infant and early toddler stages. The pen was rickety and weird. It had a hinged gate with an eyehook to lock the dog in.

Alfie did not have a serene life. He did not relish being alone in the kitchen when we were home, and he did not enjoy being cooped up in the basement at night and during the daytime when everybody was out. It is no wonder that he destroyed the kitchen cabinets by incessantly scratching and clawing at them from sheer boredom. Sometimes he would manage to get into the cabinet where we kept the garbage. We would then scream at him and scold him by forcibly tapping our index fingers against his sensitive nose shouting, "Alfie, that's a no; that's a no-no!" Obedience school or even getting a book about dog training eluded us. The dog's shortcomings, according to my parents, were purely the result of "bad genes."  His coat was hopelessly matted and he stunk. Still, I loved him.

A few years later, we moved across town into a four-bedroom tract home in a new neighborhood dotted with spindly trees and well-manicured lawns. Mom declared that the dog would not be moving into the "new house" with the rest of the family. My dad placed an ad in the classifieds, "Dog for sale, $25." One man responded to the ad; he brought his three-year old daughter to our house to look at the doggie. Alfie immediately humped the little girl. The man pulled his daughter away and left without saying much. The last time I saw Alfie was before I went to school on the day that the movers came. When we arrived home from school, Mom cheerily announced that one of the moving men took Alfie home with him. "Why would anyone take a stinky, matted, neurotic dog into their home?" I thought, "Alfie went to the gas chamber." Thirty-three years passed before I was to have another dog.

My Baby Book and Lila

My mother compiled baby books on each of us. My brother's was yellow, my sister's pink, and mine 1958 green. My baby book remained in mint condition until about five years ago, when a dog that we rescued from the pound named Lila chewed up the cover. Luckily, we discovered the book before the dog destroyed it. (I will not reprimand a dog for committing a crime in the past, not even if the past amounts to only ten seconds. Dog brains are unlike human brains. For canines, cause and effect occurs at a different level of consciousness than it does for humans. Simply put, dogs do not think as we do.) Although Lila was intelligent, cute, and confident, she did not respond well to training. She bothered our longtime pet dog Jazz, and one day bit our daughter. That was the final blow. We took Lila back to the pound. The SPCA filed a report with the sheriff's department and quarantined her for thirty days. I assume they euthanized her. Ironically, after I discovered Lila's mischief, I found the baby book that I had made for Alfie, unharmed, sandwiched between the middle pages of my baby book.

Baby Books

Baby books are handy tools for archiving important milestones in a young person's life. I am glad that my mother did this for my siblings and me. It is funny how each successive book got thinner than the previous. My older brother's is thick with pictures, tidbits, and certificates. Mine, a bit thinner, contains a lot of facts and pictures about my life until I reached the age of four. My little sister's is thin. I think Mom had her hands full raising three children and did not have the time or the energy to record data about polio booster shots, height and weight. By about the time my sister reached the tender age of two, Mom ran out of steam; she ceased recording first times for this and first times for that.

As a ten year old with a penchant for facts, figures, and photography, I took on the task of making a baby book for Alfie. I used the baby books that Mom had made as a template for Alfie's book.

Teeth

To get a good picture, I had to remove the Scotch tape that secured the tooth onto the page.  The tooth broke in half when I picked it up.

Toys

Interesting coincidence—notice the illustration of a baby reaching for the toy dog. Stuffed dogs were among my favorites. I think that loving dogs is part of my DNA. I do not know from whence it came. I have read that certain traits skip a generation, or two or three.

We gave Alfie a toy, a skein of multi-colored yarn, when he was a couple of months old. I cannot recall how many days, weeks, or months it took him to shred it down to "the last piece."

Jazz

Thirty odd years after Alfie disappeared from my childhood, the idea of getting a dog became a topic of conversation between my wife and me.  It took several months of Saturdays and Sundays checking out pounds and rescue shelters to find a good dog. We wanted a gentle dog that would be a good companion for our three-year-old daughter Helen, a pal to motivate me to go on walks and stay fit, and a friend for my wife, Sara, who grew up with many dogs. One day, Sara and Helen visited a rescue shelter a couple of miles away from our home in Boston. They walked down the narrow aisle that separated the two rows of kennels in the darkly lit cement block chamber.  Amidst the cacophony of barks, yelps, and whines, they noticed Jazz. Unlike the other dogs, Jazz appeared mellow and alert. She sauntered over and put her nose against the cage so that Helen could touch her snout. Since Jazz had only arrived at the shelter the day before, she was not yet eligible for adoption. The obligatory observation period, three or four days, was not up. That night, Sara and Helen mentioned that I might want to stop by on my way home from work the next day to check her out. I did; I noticed her gentle and alert demeanor too.

I read the paperwork on the clipboard that hung above her kennel. It said Jazz was a year old and that the family that had adopted her six months earlier returned her a few days ago. Their reasons: 1. Unable to house-train; 2. Chews up the wooden fence in the backyard. Her chart included phrases like, "loves to please," and "gentle temperament." A couple days later, we dropped by the shelter and hung out with Jazz. We filled out the paperwork, and I signed Jazz and me up for an obedience class. The next day, I picked her up on my way home from work. Within a week, she learned to go pee-pee and number two outside.

We love Jazz dearly. Although she does not have a baby book, we have scads of pictures of her and anecdotes galore. We did not compile a traditional baby book for Helen either. Helen is an ongoing project. However, Sara has been maintaining a notebook of notable "Helenisms" ever since we brought her home from the hospital. Somewhere in our home, there is a cache of her baby teeth. As for Alfie's baby book, I took pictures of him with my official Cub Scout camera. After the Lila incident, I removed the photos from Alfie's book for safekeeping. The adhesive from the Scotch tape was eating the prints. I have no idea where they are. When I find them, I will include them in my next tome on dogs and baby books.