For Benny

Now, I know this has nothing to do directly with Catie except in a peripheral way because the events are part of our shared lives, but two of my three children are getting married this year; my daughter in July and my middle son in September. Part of the planning for my daughter’s upcoming wedding has meant trying to capture a visual collage of her life up to now. Meandering through old photos has starkly resurrected so many memories, from the chubby folds and creases of infants, the chocolate-smeared faces of toddlers and the tears of teenagers, through so many interwoven chapters of beginnings and of endings.

I realized, with some surprise, as I searched through the haphazard collection of photographs that – although there aren’t many images of them – most of my adult life has been filled with animals of one species or another despite my protestations that I was ill-equipped to living with and caring for them. When I was growing up, our pleas for a puppy went unheeded, and all my brothers and sister and I learned about pets came from watching Lassie on television.

When I was a young mother living in a small Saskatchewan city, we lived in a narrow two-storey house with an enclosed veranda that sagged at one end. It was the third house from the corner on a street with cracked sidewalks, crumbling curbs and shaded by overarching trees. Up the tall poplar tree on the boulevard out front Sammy the cat climbed and wouldn’t come down until the neighbour rescued him from his anxious perch while the children and I held our breaths on the ground below. He was our first pet.

We tried to nurture hamsters even though I wasn’t partial to rodents. The first escaped from his cage in the third floor apartment where the children and I later lived. I succumbed to more pleading when we moved to Alberta but the second one we bought tumbled from a perch and smacked his head during the fall. My oldest son cried and held him in the palm of his hand. The other two children wept too and I phoned my husband at work but the hamster gave a last shuddering breath before any of us could decide what to do.

“No more hamsters,” I said.

There was a cat named Bailey. She was part of a pair the children and I bought from a pet store when my new husband was out of town one weekend; the other kitten we named Barnum. My husband swore never to leave town again.

Barnum suffered from wanderlust and ran off one day; he simply never returned. Bailey however was a skittish cat who was afraid of the world and never tried to go outside. She hid in the basement when people came over and peed on blankets and would only allow the children to pet her. She wasn’t that old when she died of what we’d later learn was a urinary tract disease. She crawled one night into our bedroom and I found her on the floor by our bed; we’d been going to take her to the vet that morning. We hadn’t realized how sick she had been.

Not long after, my husband and I stopped at the humane society after work, “just to look,” and came home with two orange kittens we named Oliver and Dodger. When my oldest child moved from home, Oliver roomed with him. Dodger was a big tabby charmer and acted more like a dog, who cuddled and came running when called until he discovered by chance – like Barnum before him – how easy it was to escape through window screens. He dashed out through the patio doors one evening and didn’t come home in the morning like he had always done before. My frantic daughter made posters with Dodger’s picture and our phone number and I photocopied them at work and she taped them to the poles of the neighbourhood street lamps. Someone called a couple days later and said he’d found the body of large orange cat in his window well; the man thought he’d been struck by a car.

“No more cats,” I said.

My son at fifteen – the confused, unanchored middle child – made a decision to live with his father in another province and a different time zone. The trailer -loaded with his backpack and report card, his bike and his basketball, soccer cleats and hockey helmets and pads – rolled out of our driveway on a Saturday morning. Later, I stood in his bedroom and stared at the empty dresser by the unmade bed and the pinholes in the walls where posters of hockey stars and models had hung.

Even Benny wondered where he’d gone.

Benny was the family’s first dog- a soft-eyed brown and white English Springer Spaniel. She was there for most of the children’s youth, their adolescence, through Bailey and the hamster and Oliver and Dodger; through graduations and a death in the family.

The children and their stepfather brought Benny home as a six-month old puppy with promises that they would look after her. I didn’t love her as much as she deserved. Oh, the pithy excuses I made. She had a strong odour, she made messes in the house and ate my shoes and she shed and wouldn’t stay off the furniture and my resentment increased with each passing year because of the promises that weren’t kept by others in the house. The older she got and the more work she demanded and the busier everyone’s lives became, I was the one who walked and cleaned up after her. She was thirteen years old when she died in 2003.

I wasn’t prepared to miss her presence in our home, the galumph of her arthritic gait, her snoring, her strong doggy smell. But I did. And mixed in with the sorrow was shame for all the times I had thought her such a pain. All she’d ever asked for was love and affection.

“No more dogs,” I said. “I’m not a dog person.”

But just months after she died, along came Catie. She was intended to be a surprise Christmas gift from the children, but my daughter left an ad on her bed with a red circle around “Golden Retriever puppies for sale.” My husband left it for me to decide what I wanted to do. Did I want another dog or not?

I uncurled the fist that was my heart. I don’t know how or why it had gotten so tight. A year after Catie, there came Riley. They sleep on my bed; Catie has her own couch. Sometimes they make a lot of noise and a lot of mess and they’ve really cost a lot of money, but they make me cry and laugh and they’ve helped make me a better person.

As much as we often would like to, we can’t rewrite history. I can’t rewrite all the times I’d thought Benny a nuisance and a burden, all the times I’d been impatient and complaining and so grudgingly took her for walks.

The other day I was thinking I would like to take all my regrets and blow them into balloons and release them, bobbing and sailing, one-by-one, into the sky. One of my balloons has Benny’s name on it and if her spirit is somewhere close at hand, I hope she knows I’m sorry I was often so cold. I like to think she loved me anyways.

She would have loved Catie and Riley too.