The Three-Legged Prairie Dog

Some day, while settling into a roomy leather chair across from a famous book reviewer clad from head to toe in tweed, he will lean forward in curious expectancy and eagerly ask, “Ms. Dolack, what exactly happened in your life to give you the power to write with such raw and searing emotional depth?’  He will pause, anticipatory, his words spoon-like in the air ready to consume my piping hot bowl of an answer as I lean back and allow a slow smile to spread across my face.  “Ahh,” I will respond.  “Well.”

Of course, this is what one calls a fantasy.  The more likely scenario will involve me sitting in a rusty wheelchair with colored pencils holding my thin grayed hair back in a bun as my great grandchildren whisper to one another, “Why is she so crazy? She’s creepy.  I think she might be dead.” Then they will shrug and take their futuristic wireless controllers and roll tiny metal cars with bizarre electrical chips over my feet, boney hills in the landscape of children’s toys. 

Either way, the questions both have the same answer. 

What makes my caged bird…so deranged?  To what can I trace the loss of my emotional innocence and stability? I’ll tell you.

It was the three-legged Prairie Dog. 

Also, probably everything related to Disney.

Growing up, I was something of a naturally sensitive child.  Before I even knew what the underdog was, I was rooting for her/him/it.  And life was fine with that, especially because life kept handing me the underdog and asking me to love it. 

I mean this in the most literal sense.  If there was a dog or another animal that Mama Nature had somehow separated from the litter for being, well, not one of the fittest, it found its way into my arms.  With every opportunity I spit in the face of Darwin, though unfortunately, Darwin occasionally won out.

For example, my friend Catherine recently pointed out that during one summer when we were particularly into reptiles, we had dually convinced our parents to purchase us newts.  Of course, I managed to pick the one with the bleeding, gaping wound on the top of its head.  I’m fairly certain the store owner tried to discourage me from buying it, but I was dead set on spending my seventy-five cents on THIS NEWT.  While I can’t remember how long the little bugger lived, I do recall that I named it Donny after one of the New Kids On the Block and much like Donny, it suffered from below normal intelligence, gyrating its hips only capture a fly dinner or I’d imagine, consider setting itself on fire and just ending it all.  Its head never did stop bleeding and it eventually succumbed to the continual blood loss regardless of how many bits of toilet paper I placed, yarmulke like, on top its visible skull.

Among my other pets, I had a goldfish named Jaws that spent the bulk of its life in a Groundhog Day cycle of swimming in circles and attempting to commit Hari Kari; a frog I tried to help escape into the real world by releasing it into our ‘fancy don’t touch’ living room; a rabbit that essentially had nothing wrong with it, so again I tried to release it into the wild, only sending my mother on a frantic dash through the woods behind our house shouting that a domesticated rabbit had no business trying to survive in the rough forest preserves of northern Illinois.  She turned out to be correct: the rabbit did eventually keel over from a heart attack after a coyote apparently got too close to his cage.  There was also a hamster that I creatively named ‘Muffin Cupcake,’ who died of an overdose of carob on Christmas Eve-though I still harbor suspicions that after the fiftieth time escaping from its cage and scampering through the nice furniture, my mother didn’t actually take out back and shoot square between the eyes with a potato gun.  

It was around the time of Muffin Cupcakes’ demise that my mother finally relented out of sheer pity (what she would later come to realize was a horrible mistake) by taking me to our local pet store.  Jungleland Pets wins the worst misnomer for any store as I would suggest that something along the lines of, ‘Mickey’s House of Hell” a more appropriate descriptor. Everything, and I mean everything about the shop was depressing.  Nestled between the Service Merchandise I once swore to have spied David Koresh post Waco and a decrepit Jewel food store, Jungleland Pets made the amenities of a touring circus appear lavish by comparison.  Truth be told, if the owner hasn’t been apprehended by authorities for the illegal transportation and breeding of rare animals by now, he most likely overdosed on poppers in the back of his ancient Buick LaSabre in a CostCo parking lot.

Upon entering the store, one was greeted with a foul tempered monkey who screamed at visitors and threw feces in the general direction of the counter.  Unlike most children who have a fascination with monkeys, I was not one of them.  After nerd-like engrossing myself in various Michael Crichton books and convincing myself that if I came too close to the monkey I would inevitably suffer some horrific fate whereby my skin would slowly melt off my face while boils took control over the rest of my body, I kept a safe distance.  That said, in hindsight if I were a monkey trapped in a cage in the middle of a strip mall in Nowheresville, Illinois, I’d probably throw my poop at people, too.  Just for the hell of it, at least.

A tertiary walk around the store revealed the standard array of pet shop wares: dogs of overpriced breeds, rat-like ferrets, fat gerbils, suicidal looking fish, large spiders and an oversized snake that I secretly hoped would one day bite the store’s proprietor directly in the face.  Yet on this particular visit, the store boasted an exotic and rare treasure: four or five prairie dogs.  Housed in a glass case that had probably recently held sewer rats, the prairie dogs tumbled and played among the woodchips.

“MOM!” I screamed  “I NEED THEM ALL!”  Understanding at even that young age that prairie dogs were social animals, (that I needed very badly to begin construction in the basement on plans I had recently mapped up on my chalk board to be something like a Prairie Dog Wally World) I knew the four or five needed to be kept together.  Surely, they weren’t selling them…separately?

I peered closer into the cage as one prairie dog meandered over to the glass that separated us and stood on its hind legs, awkwardly positioning its body against the divide.  Placing its paws to the glass like a tiny prison inmate absent a small black, phone, it beckoned me closer.  I aligned one hand with one paw, another hand with the....  And there it was, the prairie dog was missing a leg.   

Separated from the herd of its happy prancing peers, it seemed to look directly into my soul and telepathically whisper, “saave me.  Saaave me.”

Recognizing the crazed look that overtook my face, my mother quickly ushered me out of the store.  ‘They need to be together!’ I sobbed, and my mother, always the protector, promised me that they would indeed be sold together to someone who had the resources to actually build the prairie dog amusement park of my dreams. 

Which is why I’m not certain why I was allowed to go back to the store one week later.  Immediately rushing to the glass cage, I was horrified to discover that indeed the prairie dogs had been sold.  All but one.  My three legged friend sat alone in the corner, sighing. 

To do this day, I wonder had my mother agreed to purchase the prairie dog, my childhood attention span would have grown tired of the animal; its three legged allure worn off, my desire to save overtaken by my desire to for a new pet.  Probably not, and yet my sensitivity tripled. 

Disney movies no longer became enjoyable films with personified animals.  Instead, they morphed into gory nightmares: Bambi’s mother shot, Dumbo’s mother tortured?!   Mufasa brutally murdered.  Benji? Forget it.  Half way into the movie I had to be driven home since my sobbing was starting to bother the other children in the theatre.   Reading Where the Red Fern Grows was akin to water boarding; I honestly think I would have preferred to have my little cuticles slowly cut, toenails gradually lifted of my pinkie toes than read a book wherein the family pet is shot and buried.  And it wasn’t just Disney flicks that incited my animal sensitivity, but even an innocuous display: a stuffed animal sitting alone on a toy store shelf, for example.  While the average person sees exactly that, a stuffed animal, I saw a baby orphan, flies swarming around its face reaching out to me and whispering, ‘saaave me.’

I gave up eating pork of any kind for three years after watching the movie Babe, resuming again in college when I discovered that bacon was the miracle cure for hangovers. 

It wasn’t until I was older and long post college that I indulged the glory of the Internet and its valuable pet finding services.  Each weekend as I visited my parents, I lobbied for another adoptable pet, preferring of course those whose eyes had been gouged out, or necessitated a sort of amateur wheelchair to get around and the apex: any animal that had been shot or stabbed-bonus points if it required an amputation or a voice box.  

This is, of course, how I met the tiny love of my life, Gilda.  While researching disabled pets, I stumbled upon the  toothless wonder that is she and without hesitation drove the fifty miles, best friend in tow-check in hand, to pluck her from the cage that sat atop the kitchen table at a Doberman rescue.

But the addition of Gilda to my life did not quell my need to painstakingly research and torture myself with disabled pets; in fact it only enhanced it.

Once, while reading an article about an elderly dog that had gone blind and was looking for someone to love him before he ‘crossed the rainbow bridge,’ I broke down into such hysterics that one would have thought I just witnessed a brutal crime scene. 

Which makes this emotional affliction all the more bizarre; I will watch (indeed prefer) films that focus on intense gun shoot out action, serial killers, horrific blood and guts scenarios, but put me in a theatre where Toy Story is playing and one cartoon gets its feelings hurt, and I’m a goner. 

‘How is it that you can watch that stuff?’ my mother asks as I gleefully describe the latest episode of some crime drama, and I have no explanation.  Indeed, before bed when I can’t fall asleep, I will find the latest episode of 48 Hours Mystery and drift away to crime scene photographs.

Once, while working on a crime documentary at a factory production company of sorts long before Kurtis, I was chastised by a project manager for leaving out a bloody autopsy photograph while she was giving a tour.  Since I really rather didn’t like this woman, I took out two more and left them sitting at a desk opposite her office for a period of weeks, she unable to touch them because it was necessary for us to display them just so for the cameraman.  

Of course, had she been a Basset Hound expressing some distress, I would have hid the photographs immediately.

‘Don’t you have trouble falling asleep?’ I am often asked.  But the truth is, nothing puts me to sleep better than two detectives talking about a triple homicide.  My dreams don’t really seem to turn to nightmares either.  Just the other night after falling asleep to a particularly greedy crime caper about a husband suspected of killing his wife, I dreamed that Barbra Streisand and I were breaking into homes, not to steal anything, but just to peek around.

“What if we get caught?” Barbra nervously questioned.  “Oh Barbra,” I sighed with knowing authority, “You’re Barbra Streisand.  Who would call the police on you?” And together we laughed while prying through a middle-aged woman’s St. John suits.

Maybe I just gravitate more toward underdogs, especially those in the animal kingdom, because unlike your average person, they wish no harm: don’t make the same mistakes, don’t usually fall victim to greed or envy or anger of judgment.  They may be a little different, but they reach out to each and every one of us and seem to say, ‘love me.  Just because.’ 

Well, except for Cujo.  He was a jerk.

So it was recently after taking in a day at the beach, that my husband suggested we beat the heat and check out a new release at the theatre that my bizarre emotional affliction was revealed.  Knowing that the two of us have exhausted every available comedy (the only genre of film on which we can both agree), I am fully aware that he will suggest we see the new Pixar film.  I freeze.  It is though someone has walked up to a tiny child and suggested that ‘we watch this funny movie about clowns called It.’ After much convincing, I finally relent, but only after he promises that he will not balk when I order the large popcorn with extra butter.

As it were, after battling the lines to the theatre and finally finding my husband who has saved us seats, the lights dim and I hear Morgan Freeman’s voice.

This is OK.  I am OK, I breathe to myself at the same moment that I swear God itself decides to play an evil trick on me.  There splashed across the screen, a small child runs over to the beach where he tries frantically to pull plastic off a baby dolphin’s tail. 

‘You’ve got to be f@$#ing kidding me,’ I think out loud, much to the harsh stares of the parents of the four year old average demographic in the theatre. 

Morgan Freeman crosses the screen and places his hand on the boys’ shoulder, ‘Son,’ he says ruefully, ‘I think we’re going to have to cut it off,’ and gestures to the dolphin’s tail. 

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!

And what ensures is two minutes of pure torture in which Morgan Freeman and the boys father work together to form a prosthetic tail for the incapacitated dolphin who has been given one percent change of survival.

‘Don’t die, Snowball, don’t die,’ the boy sobs and I swear the child actor looks into the crowded theatre and winks at me like the Devil itself.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY! The script on the screen soullessly shouts.

Yeah, I’ll bet it is.  I’ll just bet.

My husband looks over at me and I am sobbing hysterically, methodically shoving huge handfuls of popcorn into my mouth like a temporary gag so as not to let out an audible whimper.  He thinks it is sweet, I know he does.  He thinks he’s married such a sweet woman, one so consumed by hypersensitive empathy that she cries over Morgan Freeman dolphin movies and cartoon cars that get their feelings hurt.

And it is fine.  I will let him think that for a while.

The truth is, I don’t think he quite understands the river that runs beneath the surface of my tears.  A river that winds and turns with scattered patterns, one that has caused me to be consistently drawn to the underdog to the point of insanity: placing vegetables on the shelf together so they don’t get lonely, scouring disabled pets well into the night as a murder mystery plays on my headphones, tirelessly rooting for the Cubs, just to name a few.

So I suppose some day when I am asked ‘how do you write with such empathy?,’ or ‘why are you so crazy, great grammie?,’ I will answer: it is because in so many ways for so many years, I have loved the three-legged prairie dog.  And it has taught me all I need to know.

It Feels Like a Remedy

There are moments in life where the incredible happens: when you receive something that you’ve only ever dared to wish for in the very quietest parts of your subconscious.   And even then, the thought is fleeting.

I used to crinkle my nose at the word, ‘settled,’ but of course I had the rare ability to shun settlement in pursuit of unsettling the world at large.  When you are young and have a home that brims with love in which you can always return, adventure is far less daunting.  Knowing that you can simply return to a place where your bedroom remains nearly untouched since high school days, where the same birds return every summer and gather in gossipy groups on the lawn, where with every Spring green vines snake up the side of the porch with an upward sisyphus-esque journey, fully aware that by the time the crisp Autumn air starts to sneak around the corners of brick walls their upward journey will promptly  reset for the following spring-well, it’s comforting.  It makes exploration less frightful and I am sure that Columbus and Magellan had a place they kept in a tiny treasure chest in their head, revisiting when the seas became stormy, the dark water stretching endless. 

Therefore, my time spent in Los Angeles-which now seems worlds away-felt much like one would imagine stepping into a television set, (if those 1980s music videos had made honest such travel possible).   There were perfectly oblong shaped pools; deep suits mingling with flipped flopped sunglassed boys on the same patio where Jayne Mansfield had once claimed a chaise.  There were elderly bellhops in legendary hotels who, recognizing the constant saucer plate eyes that give us recently relocated Midwestern girls away, had taken me aside and pointed out bathrooms where Marilyn Monroe had once stripped down to nothing and trounced out to the pool as though she were standing in her own, heavily fenced back yard.  There were late nights on strips and sunset was not a time of day, it was a place.  Palm trees tapped my windows to signal a rainfall and giant boulders took the place of benches on rocky beaches, where with my right hand placed visor like over my eyes, I would spend early mornings watching my friends as they crested over waves like seals.  During the days, I directed people I’d only seen through my television set to my various bosses' offices, asking, ‘would you like a water?’  Then returning to my desk as I tried to shake the fact that I had just spoken to real people and not cardboard cut outs come to life. 

I have sat on a rooftop of my friend’s hilltop house, drinking syrupy red wine while marveling at the brightly lit Hollywood sign to the left.  A deer grazed before us and my friend shuffled the pages of his latest novel.  The landscape looked as though God had opened up a pouch and scattered it with diamonds and the air was filled with opportunity that both intrigued and frightened me. I was swept into an impromptu tango across the wooden floors of Humphrey Bogart’s Wilshire home the same night I shared secrets with a West Hollywood Drag Queen.  Life was eccentric, and frankly, that eccentricity was the only thing that kept me afloat, made me feel comfortable- made me feel, somehow safe.  It is within that living, breathing bazaar that I felt at peace.  I was not alone.

But eventually my settled place called me back and I returned to Chicago.  My Dionysian life suddenly took a turn, as days and nights were spent behind desks, working among reporters, journalists, cameraman…. If there was a story to be covered, we would cover it.  But unlike Los Angeles, a city bathed in fantasy and fiction, these stories were all true.  High rises and hipsters, deadlines and the occasional drudgery.  I ran from relaxation about as quickly as I ran from men; one relationship to the next, each lasting only so long as the next commercial break. 

Too bold, probably naïve, I had an eye for danger and a need no different than eating or sleeping or breathing to prove myself capable of overcoming peril.  I dipped my toes in gang-swept waters and marched across mental and emotional plains of earth where the platelets below the surface constantly threatened to shift.  Ironically, I told myself that I was conquering my fears, proving myself unshakable, when in reality I was just using hazardous procrastination to avoid meeting up with my greatest fear of all: accepting myself enough not just to actually feel loved, but to give it back in return.

At that time, while standing in the middle of a ghetto known for it’s near constant drive-by shootings and grabbing on to a drug dealer by the collar of his shirt, warning him against ‘speaking to his mother that way,’ while teetering around in black stilettos like some off-kilter dandelion I felt oddly safer than, say, sitting down to a dinner in which red wine might  cause me to lower some of my defensive walls and just…be honest with who, exactly, I was.

I was called a workaholic many times, cold and sarcastic with too many nights felt ripped from the bindings of a Tennessee William’s play. 

But then there were the saving graces.  Friends.  But the word doesn’t seem to fully encapsulate the sentiment, so family.  Sitcom-esque in the perfection of our dialogue, in the lighting of the scenery, the staging, the action, and the eventual dénouement.

Without them, I struggle and struggled deeply.

Yet, now, as my bare toes scrape against the rough brick of my new porch, I call these memories to mind: coasts away from all those safety nets, watching as a third party as the home I once knew as my lighthouse among all these occasionally rough watered adventures is neatly packed and shipped away.  To another house up north of which I am fully unfamiliar. 

And I find myself here: smack in the middle of a heat wave in just about central Virginia.

How in the world did I get…here?

Allowing my mind to wander, I ponder this as I unsuccessfully attempt to coax my dog in from the one hundred degree heat of our back yard.

Before now, there were the urban porches and the Baz Lurman-esque landscapes, but today there is simple brick and the sound of a determined Bumblebee flitting past my head.  Even more odd, I find myself admitting that this place, this home, is that which I’ve always dreamed: those days in the hills, those nights in the office.

Here, wrought iron windows inlaid in wooden fences reveal overflowing gardens that lead to bricked patios and brightly colored umbrellas.  There is a lazy river that winds throughout town, old mills now converted into bistros and condos boasting river front views.  The only competition in the neighborhood exists between antiques stores.  There is even an old drug store with a soda fountain that delivers delicious Green Rivers, Black Cows, Root Beer. 

My days, once spent cramming in thirty seven hours of work in a twenty four hour period, are now spent on other pursuits: working with children in an adoption agency, writing, researching and occasionally padding down to the local library, a pre-Civil War mansion that stores books in every crevice, including the fireplaces. 

It is the kind of place where I imagine women find solace after traumatic events: the death of her husband, a divorce, an empty nest. Or where families flock, seeking character while trying to escape the confusion and cookie cutter streets of nearby Washington D.C. and its surrounding suburbs.

In the local bookstore, a gaggle of elderly men meet, all wearing hats that designate their time of service in one of America’s military branches.  Last week, local baker Mary Sue made brownies and they sat around the table discussing their book of the week, ‘How to Write a Sentence,’ by Stanley Fish. 

After the meeting, I ask two gentlemen if they enjoyed the book.  One wrinkles his face in knots and tells me it was superfluous, while the other, laughing, grabs at his chest and mimics falling backwards.  I find out that the former gentleman is a retired FBI Agent, the latter, a professor at our local university.  A jovial argument between the two breaks out and I realize that they still wear their former careers like the ranks emblazoned on their hats.

There are fresh vegetables and flowers to be purchased in the every day Farmer’s Market down the street.  I pick up some cucumbers and end up giving a few to my neighbor, ninety three year old Virginia Smith.  Who greets me, as she greets every one that comes to see her, ‘I’m just Virginia loving Virginia!’

But more importantly, there are hundreds, if not thousands of stories to be written here.  It is the type of town that begs a writer to discover, to settle in to one of her hundred year old houses, grab a typewriter and just release inky thoughts through his or her fingers. 

It is the ‘Some Day,’ wishful place: something I realized quite quickly after moving here from our old ramshackle hovel in Northern Virginia. 

Again, it is when I try to usher my Gilda dog in from the outside as she lies on her back and suns herself in a sliver of flashing white when all these thoughts above rush through my head like a tidal wave.  Gilda lifts her head, narrows her eyes, sighs, and then lowers herself to the ground once again.  I shrug my shoulders and smile, resigned to stay outside and watch her for a few more moments.  Just a few.  And yet, there’s something about the way her head drops against the cool of the brick that relaxes me and de-clutters my thoughts. 

It is amazing how life can give you exactly what you’ve needed and wanted for so long, even when you’ve pushed and resisted and tried unsuccessfully to run kicking and screaming in the other direction.

I lean my head back and let the sun wash over my face, imaging the freckles that will start to appear and spread across my cheeks in moments.  It feels like a remedy.

Settled can be a lovely feeling.