Someone to Watch Over Me

Saturday, April 17, 2010

In terms of home improvements on this day, there was actually only one small one. One little pig. With wings, no less.

But it meant a lot to me, as you will see.

But I digress. There were no porcine premonitions as our day began. So let me begin at the beginning...

We started off our morning with a trip to Kingsley School to check out their annual carnival, and met Nyika, Talya, Kai and Kayla in the parking lot as we pulled up. Ayize was so gleeful to see the girls. He and Kai held hands and tromped in like they owned the place.

Cute handmade signs hung everywhere.

Admittedly, we've been a bit spoiled by previous Evanston elementary school carnivals and were expecting it to be (1) outdoors and (2) a bit heavier in the bouncy-house department. It was unfortunately a little sparse in the physical activity area, much to our dismay, since our active kids were ready to rock and roll -- but it was a cute and sweet little homegrown school carnival nevertheless.

Jeanine and Brady met us as we were just inside the door. Perfect timing.

We wandered around near the entrance a bit, but there were so many sweets for sale: cotton candy, cupcakes, cookies, jelly beans, and all within toddler's reach, that we quickly looked for a refuge. We noticed signs directing us towards the gymnasium so we headed that way in hopes of finding some activities tailored to hyper young kiddos.

Voila! We hopped in line for an inflatable slide, each toddler holding on tightly to their tickets for dear life.

In the end, only Ayize and Kai braved the bouncy slide, but Kayla and Brady watched from below and enjoyed the view.

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

Hopping off the end of the slide into the bouncy base, one fist aloft in the air in a show of Toddler Power!

I had to drag his butt outta there after the fourth slide down, when we ran out of tickets. He was not a happy camper.

Hee hee hee, every school fundraiser loves to have a punishment place where you can send a troublemaker of your choosing (for a price, of course). I was sooooo tempted to pay three tickets to send Ayize to the dog pound for whining about leaving the bouncy slide, which at this carnival, was a corner of the gymnasium bordered by a million weighted balloons set a few inches apart to resemble prison bars. Luckily for him, we were all out of tickets. Still, it was pretty funny to see the usual suspects -- good-natured teachers -- sitting on their chairs in ticket-bought time-outs for such offenses as "giving too much homework".

We wandered down the long hallway towards the exit doors, aiming for the playground to burn off some steam, but we made a few "pit stops" along the way so Brady and Kayla could spend the tickets they saved by not doing the bouncy slide.

Brady dug this ball toss.

And he was a whiz at the duck pluck, too.

The kid manning it was really kind and took pity on Ayize so he let him have a go for free. So sweet! Then both kids rifled through the assorted boxes to choose their prizes. Picking which color plastic dump truck they wanted (keep in mind that the things were plastic, flimsy, and about the size of a dime) managed to take more than triple the time of the game itself!

Brady won big at the wheel of fortune and chose this red jumpy bug, which he proudly showed off for the camera.

The kid running that game also felt sorry for Ayize (how embarrassing, he managed to look so pathetic despite my attempts to quickly move him past the carnival area), so he was also given a spin. He chose an orange bug as his prize and then proudly demonstrated how they work for Jeanine and Brady's benefits -- he has been a huge jumpy bug fan since a year ago last Easter when he won one at the Evanston Ecology Center's egg hunt and insisted on learning how to work them. 15 months old and already stubborn as all get-out. But on the bright side, the hard work paid off and now he is virtually a jumpy bug pro!

Pop!

Everybody gave this poor game a wide berth...

...even though the potty looked (relatively) new! LOL

We finally made our way outside to Kingsley's awesome playground. All the kids ran to the play structures and started climbing and sliding -- all, that is, except Ayize, who hopped on the metal table instead to give us his best imitation of a life-sized chess piece.

A new skill set! He definitely couldn't climb these things last fall -- they are really wiggly and swing and sway quite a bit as one climbs. He didn't get too far but I was still super proud to note how much he's grown and changed since less than six months ago, wowzas.

Talya and Nyika had a "get to the top" race and I caught Talya's victory on film.

I lay down, pretending to tan in the clouded and limited sunshine as a joke, and when I sat up, my back was covered in woodbark. Ayize came over and declared, "I help Mama." Then he began to meticulously brush off and remove all the chips from where they stubbornly stuck to my knit hoodie. It was so sweet! Talya captured the moment on film.

That afternoon, after Ayize's nap, we headed to the library to return some books and check out an old Disney DVD as a special treat (he really likes bizarre 1930's and 1940's Mickey Mouse cartoons, go figure) and it turned out to be "Library Week". There were some fun doings outside the library and up and down Central Street in celebration. Fun, fun, fun.

We wandered around checking stuff out, then went across the street to visit Mille Fiori, the lovely garden shop where my friend Sarah works. She was on duty, hooray, but we hardly even had time to say "hi" before Ayize got into trouble by chasing down the house cat and harassing her (a sweet feline, but a bit leery of kids).

So we headed out, but not before I made a total impulse buy -- this adorable winged-piggy bird feeder which resembled (to my odd mind) my beloved old Alfie, rest her soul. I'll let you be the judge of that, after examining the following pieces of submitted evidence:

Exhibit A. Oink.

My eyes fell on it as I was dragging Ayize out of Mille Fiori and I literally turned around, placed his butt on the counter, barked, "Don't move!" at him, and marched over to scoop up this little garden bird feeder. I even started tearing up as Sarah checked me out.

"Doesn't it look just like Alfie?" I asked her anxiously.

"Well...uh..." she muttered, and I cut her off, characteristically (I have really bad manners, especially when I'm amped up -- but be assured, I'm working on that).

"I mean, Alfie, right?? Exactly like her. Same face and all. Crazy right?"

"Ummm...well, maybe..."

"And how lucky that I found her spirit, right here in your store, and now she can come live at my new house and be the guardian of our garden. Perfect, right?"

"Yeah, okay, well..."

"Thanks, Sarah! (hug, hug) Thanks a million, I'm taking her home right this second!"

With Ayize's hand in mine, and clutching my Alfie/winged pig in the other as if for dear life, I scurried out of the store, hell-bent on bringing my little girl home.

[It should be noted here that Sarah is a dear, dear friend and one of the kindest people I know. Hence, her ability to overlook my certified craziness (let's just call it 'quirkiness' here, and cite artistic license)! ]

Exhibit B. Alfie.

AKA Biddle. AKA Bids McGee. AKA Little McBiddle Plays the Fiddle.

Originally named Alf, however. So named by the volunteer corps at the animal shelter who took her in one weekend morning and (a) mistook her for a male, plus (b) thought she resembled the alien Alf (an acronym of Alien Life Form, from a circa 1980's TV sitcom):

The name stuck (well -- a variation, that is) even when I came to the shelter to assess her a few hours later and pointed out their gender confusion.

But what I couldn't make them see was the their species confusion. Alien? What were they talking about?? Clearly, she resembled a cute little piglet. (It should be noted that she entered the shelter with, among other major health problems, a serious case of mange, so what little hair she possessed was on her head and then placed around her body in spots, and was short, stiff, and prickly, like the hair of a pig.)

Let's just flash back to Alfie as she looked then (actually, after a few months of intensive medical care and TLC in my home, and a little hair growth):

Hmmmm. Okay. Maybe the Alf contingency had a point.

Anyhow, my digression has now gone to the outer limits.

So to return to the new house...

Here is my Alfie/winged pig in its new place of honor -- the corner of the back porch. You can see the greenery behind it, and my flowering magnolia.

It is now our official guardian of the garden, indeed!

Also, the deluxe wild bird food you see in the pig's proffered leaf was bought at CVS on our way home. While we there, we also grabbed this little wind chime for $7.99 -- cheap, but has a wonderful, subtle tinkling sound, and I liked the way the colors (purple, blue and green) go with the rest of our yard "decor" (flowers and paintings alike)!

Here is the wind chime in its new home (at left):

To the right of the wind chime is an old sort-of-chime, anyhow, it is rusted but lovely, a kind of bells-and-old-nails sculpture. It hung by the back door of the house before but had to be moved when a porch light was installed. So I moved it to the center of the three garage hangers.

And to its right is our beloved bird, left behind by the previous owners. She just somehow wore out day, and I arrived to find her lying on the ground, so sad! So I carefully cleaned all the leaves and old muck out of her and re-threaded a new wire hanger and now she has the place of honor, closest to the garage door, so I can see her every time I walk in and out.

This perky daffodil popped up in the middle of the garden, in a bed of day lilies. Obviously a transplant from anther area along my neighbor's fence. I was so happy to see her smiling face! And she lasted and lasted and lasted...she stuck around for several weeks, long outliving the rest of the daffodils I saw around our neighborhood. And she attracted many friends, including a gynormous newborn butterfly...but I will save that post and the accompanying photos for another day.

The bleeding hearts we had first spotted a day or so before were now really flush with health and bursting at the seams. So beautiful!

Ayize discovered this painted tin butterfly (I think it had hung in the basement by the water heater but the Nicor guy had removed it and put it down somewhere when he performed an inspection earlier that week) and ran all over the garden with it joyously. When he finally put it down, I had to think hard about where to hang her.

She was one of a flock that had hung in the yard before on a sculpture of the sun, but she looked so forlorn and alone when I tried to hang there now. So I settled on this spot, on a pair of nails, on a border fence with some goodly shade. She is now nestled between a painting propped up against the same wall and a hanging piece of seashell art, with a large leafy canopy above her from a climbing plant, and she appears quite cozy there if I do say so myself.

This was the last of the trifecta that hung on my back porch prior to the light being installed. My best guess is...an old-fashioned shoe brush (the kind people used to use to wipe off their feet before entering a house) with the bristles long-ago deteriorated and gone (?).

I didn't have a place for it, but Casey, one of my electricians, thought it was pretty cool so he stuck it in a back part of the garden as a little decorative border and it remains there to this day. It just kind of fits there!

Anyhow, we stayed and played at the house until the sun went down, then headed home. Ayize ate dinner and hit the sack, but I couldn't sleep.

It was a gorgeous night. The crescent moon hung in the blue blue blue sky over my parents' gazebo and the breeze blew warm winds softly over my face. I sat on the back porch and listened to the night sounds and thought about a lot of stuff. Including Alfie. Dorky as it sounds, I was really happy to have found that odd little pig. Yes, it is just some manufactured thing off an assembly line, and probably there are 12,437 other ones like it in gardens all over America. But whatever -- it was the only one in the shop that day, and I felt like finding it was meant to be.

I had been feeling a lot of melancholy at leaving behind the home where I had raised, loved, and lived alongside so many great pet companions. I suppose on some level I had even been wondering (crazy alert, consider yourself forewarned) if their spirits might be feeling a little bit abandoned. I know, I know, I know...

But all that was washing away like the tide. I suddenly understood on some level that the love I shared with all my beloved "babies" has never, and will never, die. Alfie, and all my other wonderful friends -- dog, cat, bird, fish -- live on in my heart, and as long as my heart moves on to the new house, or to wherever else we may go on this long life's journey, they will always "move" with me.

Okay, enough with the spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Just wanted to explain why my crazy self would be out taking pictures of the sky and a gazebo in the middle of the night in my parent's backyard. It was -- for me -- a very healing and calming epiphany, and I snapped the photo in part so that I would never forget the scene before me that helped guide me through a little moonlit "meditation" to this wonderful realization.

Anyhow, before this post gets altogether too "heavy" (actually, it's probably already too late for that), have a gander at this silly video. We've been watching a lot of the old Winnie the Pooh episodes lately (Ayize even tries to sing the theme song) and it recently occurred to me that my little Biddle was the ultimate Tigger. She lived in the moment, and every day was filled with simple joy -- especially when that day involved (as it usually did) an outing to the dog beach!

And finally, I'll leave you with these pictures, since an unexpected garden purchase sent me down this path of paying tribute to my adored Alfie.

Here was my girl on a warm fall day in 2002, just a few months after rescuing her. She was not really "mine" yet, but despite my protests that she was just a foster dog, everyone around me seemed to believe otherwise.

Hmm, I wonder why...

And yes, she was asleep. She had a penchant for falling asleep anywhere. And I mean anywhere! (Kind of like Ayize). Including in my arms on the dog beach, after tuckering herself out with some good scampers.

I was perpetually carrying her to the car and laying her on my lap before driving us home!

And here she was in the summer of 2006. I had spent a long weekend in Marquette, Michigan with Ayize's Baby Daddy (pre-Ayize) and when I called home to check in during the trip, her "Grandma" (my mom) told me how morose she was. She always took separations hard and got very shy and introverted when she was left for more than a day, as was the case on this trip. But the minute I came home, she bounded up to me, tail wagging furiously.

I sat down to greet her properly and she suddenly stopped all her shenanigans and quietly lay her head on my shoulder, just like she used to when she was a baby at the beach. But this time she didn't fall asleep; she just burrowed her head against me as hard as she could, and I swear, I could almost hear her purring. We stayed like this for quite some time and eventually my brother walked by and snapped this photo (he was visiting from Oregon that week, thankfully, or I would never have had this -- my favorite photo ever of the two of us).

Our first dog beach visit together, on January 29, 2008. Ayize was 6 weeks old. He'd just had his IV removed and been approved for outings. That day, we had some wackily-mild weather so we decided to take advantage of it. My dear friend Tina Marcotte had gifted us with (among other things) this awesome Baby Bjorn, and this was the first of dozens of dog beach visits where it came in super handy.

Monty had passed away a week before and I missed him so much. It was difficult to be at the beach without him, but somehow very healing as well -- the kindness of our canine-loving friends went a long way towards making it a better experience than I had ever hoped for.

Note little Alfie, my right-hand (okay, left-hand) man (okay, girl). She was not quite sure if she approved of us taking "her" baby out in the wide world just yet.

Fast-forward a few months later to March 25, 2008. We were back at the beach.

Ayize was getting "the business" from Liz, Beth and Peter.

His faithful guardian made sure to keep a watchful eye on the humans holding "her" baby, lest they suddenly try to make off with our precious cargo.

Two guardians, on this brisk but sunny day in early May.

Special kisses for Ayize from Alfie. What a relief for her that it was finally Mama holding him this time!

Her usual position, standing guard. Because you just never know who might be sneaking into our backyard and trying to make off with our little guy!

Early fall. His first visit to the dog beach where I let him sit down by himself and play with sand. I didn't have to worry because we were the only folks on the beach, and because Alfie was there, to keep her ever-watchful eye on him.

Late November of 2008. I was clueless as to the terrible truth that in just one and a half months, she would slip out of my life as quietly as she had slipped in.

Beautiful blue skies and several inches of snowcover everywhere.

We were playing in the yard together. Ayize was napping and I had made snowbank paths for the pups to wander around. Alfie had been acting a bit off, but she got quite perky on this day, playing in the yard. I had no idea that we had less than six days left.

Back to happier times -- October 2008. Ayize said his first word: "Ah-fee." He had managed a few close approximations of "mama" before that, but on this day, he was as clear as a bell, and he continued to use her name appropriately thereafter.

I was thrilled!

And even before that, Alfie brought Ayize almost as much joy as she brought me -- as this video attests.

My girl! How I love and miss her.

Alfie developed a fast-moving stomach cancer around Christmas of 2008 but she showed almost no symptoms. Still, my gut kept telling me something was terribly wrong.

Just before Christmas, I took her to McCormick Animal Hospital, one of my jobs, for her second set of x-rays in a few months. These, like the previous series, showed no abnormalities, and a complete blood panel also returned as normal.

A little under four weeks passed, and I was still concerned. I brought her back to the vet's for a third set of x-rays. This time, though -- much to my shock and horror -- her abdominal x-ray showed a giant mass, consuming almost all the space inside her stomach. With a sinking heart, I looked at the film sitting starkly up against the backlit viewing panel; before my veterinarian friends could fully inform me of the results, I was already sobbing.

It was dinnertime, and McCormick was closing. I took her x-rays and headed straight to Animal 911, an emergency room for animals where I also worked. They repeated her x-rays with a different technique and suggested immediate emergency surgery. The likelihood was that the cancer had spread too extensively to save her, but perhaps we would get lucky and it would be an encapsulated tumor -- not likely, considering how aggressively it had grown -- but worth at least a try. I held her in my arms and kissed her head over and over, crying, as my beloved co-workers (one of them being Diana, Ayize's godmother, and one of my best friends) placed an IV and readied her for surgery. As her eyelids closed and she fell into unconsciousness, I stroked her head and kissed her furrowed brow over and over and over.

In just a few moments, the doctor -- an old friend -- called me over. I knew already from reading her expression over so many years that the news was not good. She informed me gently that the tumor had invaded multiple organs, and that her stomach, intestines, bowel, and bladder were hardly functional. How had this happened so fast?? She had been eating and drinking normally, even up until that morning. I suppose there's no accounting for a faithful dog's will to live, but I was overwhelmed with not only grief, but also guilt, that she had lived this way for anywhere up to a month, and that I had somehow missed the fact that my baby girl was dying before my very eyes.

I took a moment alone with her sedated form to say goodbye. I couldn't believe she would never wake up again. It was exactly one year to the day that I had lost Monty, and the anniversary of that alone had brought me to unimaginable limits of grief. Now it would be a double death anniversary.

I said my goodbyes and with an overdose of anesthetic, she peacefully padded out of this world and into another, hopefully one where old friends Monty and Digby were waiting for her, hopefully one that resembles something like the world's largest dog beach. Hopefully one where I will see her again one day.

I held it together at the vet's (well, perhaps my friends would disagree with me on this point), but the moment I got into my car, I completely lost control of myself to wracking sobs. It seemed so damned unfair. She was only six and a half years old, and despite being given a guarded prognosis her whole life, from injuries she sustained through abuse before she had even reached five months old, I'd never truly believed she would die young. I railed and raged and wailed.

It was nearly eleven o'clock at night. I drove home, completely spent. I thought back to earlier that morning, around 6:30 a.m. She had asked to go outside. It took her awhile, and she didn't seem to be pottying, but in the dark of that early winter morning, I couldn't see much of anything. She just seemed to be pacing and circling randomly for a few minutes. Then she re-entered the house, shook off the snow, and resumed her post in the kitchen, lying on a bed of blankets near the heater. The day had been busily spent with the baby, and then in the afternoon, when I'd had that nagging feeling about her again, we'd been off to the first of the two vets. What had she been doing outside?

I entered my house and in an effort to answer that question, and to get myself together, I walked to the back door and opened it. The cold air hit me like a wall, thankfully numbing my inflamed face. I flicked on the backyard light and looked outside, expecting to see...I don't know, what? Footprints from that morning, some tangible remnant of my little girl lost?

And there I saw, at my feet, Alfie's final foot-tracks. I could hardly believe my eyes. My sweet girl had left me with a final gift -- what appeared to be nothing less than an angel to my eyes.

I look at this photo often, and it never fails to remind me of my favorite saying (oft-quoted by me, so apologies if you've heard it before, but on this occasion, so very fitting):

Dear Alfie,

You were a small piece of heaven come to me in furred form. I was so blessed to have enjoyed your company for six and a half delightful years. And I'm so happy to have found my little pig with wings, a lovely reminder of you, who watches over us as we start our journey in this new home.

You are missed, but we will meet again, my sweet angel.

All my love,

Mommy