This is the unedited version of a chapter in my manuscript, Dillie the Deer, about the return of my cancer.
“I think my cancer is back.”
Dr. R didn’t believe me, but I knew in my heart it was.
“No, no,” he reassured me with a laugh. “You just finished radiation a month ago. You had thirty-eight treatments. That means you had thirty-eight CT scans as well. If it were back, we would have seen it.”
This was my radiation oncologist, the doctor in charge of the radiation treatment. My surgical oncologist had retired the day I had my sutures out. The very last thing he did was refer me for radiation treatment, a move I had originally protested.
“Why do I need radiation treatment if the cancer is gone?” I had asked him.
He hemmed and hawed and basically gave me the medical equivalent of the parents’ quintessential explanation “because I said so.”
What he hadn’t explained to me, but the radiation doctor had, was that my cancer cell type was a uniquely aggressive one, and nearly always showed back up angrier than before. By irradiating the sites where the original cancer had been, they could lessen the risk that it would grow back.
I was learning. One of my more recent lessons was that physicians are exquisitely bad at telling bad news to their patients. My original doctor had let the surgeon tell me that the cancer that he described as “slow growing” and “no big deal” was anything but, and the surgeon had let the radiation doctor tell me that the cancer was highly likely to come back with a vengeance.
One of my Ohio State professors used to always tell his captive audience of budding veterinarians that “Life is a learning experience.” Indeed it was, and cancer was the SAT’s.
Once I understood that my cancer was a bad one, I stopped complaining about the inconvenience of having to go up to the hospital every day when I should have been working, and the considerable embarrassment the treatments caused. On the day I received my diagnosis but had not yet told anyone, my practice associate Stacy had informed me she was pregnant and was quitting. She was kind enough to stay on duty until I was back to work after my original surgery, but as soon as I came back she had left. This meant that during radiation treatments my office could not see morning patients. It also meant that by day 38, when the side effects and fatigue the treatments cause were hitting me the hardest, I was working a ten hour day alone.
Really, though, the hardest part about the radiation treatment in the beginning was not the side effects at all, but the indignity. Despite all I had been through as a patient, I still had not learned to toss aside vestiges of human dignity.
I remember the stunned face of an ultrasound technician early in my cancer journey when I refused her request to let a male medical student be present during a very unpleasant procedure. She told me in a huff: “He is a medical student!”
I turned right to the barely-old-enough to shave future doctor in his fresh, pristine, not-yet-baptised-with-patient-blood virginal white coat, and told him firmly: “Here’s your first lesson. Your patients aren’t a piece of meat. We have feelings. We get embarrassed. And we don’t want men around when we do.”
That was before I had surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and even a DaVinci robot poking and prodding all over me. Even after all that, I still clung to the silly notion that my dignity was essential.
Radiation treatment beat that right out of me. By the time I was done with that little learning experience, I had been tattooed in places a biker chick would not allow, had a plastic mold of myself made so I could be affixed to a table like Hannibal Lechter, and had an entire cast of unknown male technicians moving me around a table like I indeed was USDA prime. I learned quickly that dignity during times like these only made it harder to endure. By the end of the treatments, the doctor started to say: “Now I am going to insert this ....”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Just throw a towel over my head and do it.”
Had that same ultrasound technician asked me at the end of radiation treatment if a male medical student could be present, a different person would have answered her. “Sure,” this new person would have said. “Tell him to bring his friends. And some chips. And a camera. The more the merrier!”
Once I had given up the silly quest for dignity, the hardest part of the radiation treatment was laying still for thirty minutes every day. I had a million things to do. I had patients I was working on, bloodwork to review, clients to talk to, employees to manage, bills to pay. I had all this hubbub going on with Dillie. I was teaching a night class and had lectures to prepare. I was designing a database for lost and found pets in the area and revamping the database I had created for the emergency clinic. I was a very, very busy person, yet every day I started my day by being strapped to a table and having to lay perfectly still.
I started to pass the time by imagining I was having a conversation with my dearly departed friends Pat and Dean. I missed them both terribly, and it was therapeutic for me to think of them and pretend Pat was telling me a joke or Dean was counseling me about a case. At first, I had to force myself to think about them, but by the end of the month, as soon as I got snapped into the table, they were right there, anxious to talk to me.
After that, any time I was on a CT table, they were immediately in my head.
This was no supernatural event. No ghost story. The Long Island psychic was not hanging about. I was conjuring them up in my head simply to pass the time. Yet, sometimes, my conjured friends took on a life of their own and said and did things I didn’t expect.
Pat reminded me one session about the last time we had all been together as a group. Steve and I had treated the staff to a night out, and rented a Hummer super-stretch limo to cart the whole gang up to see Larry the Cable Guy perform in Cleveland. Pat and her husband Dan, her daughter Sherry and husband Jim, Dean and Joan, Dean’s assistant Michelle and her husband, my nephew Matt and his girlfriend, some of the former employees from the ER, and Steve and I all climbed into the huge Hummer with a lighted dance floor in the center and went to see the raucous redneck comic.
“We were white trashing it style that night!” Pat told me unexpectedly as I lay on the radiation table. Her distinct gravelly laugh was as loud in my ear as if she were sitting right there.
Only a few weeks after that memorable staff outing, Pat took me aside and told me she needed to take some time off. She had been feeling run down and her chest hurt. She didn’t want to go to a doctor because she knew he would just tell her to quit smoking, and she didn’t want to hear that. She was just going to take it easy for a little while. By the time she went to the doctor, the cancer was inoperable. When she visited me on the radiation table, she was still wearing the pink bathrobe and big, fuzzy slippers she insisted on being buried in. “No fancy dresses for me,” she had said. “I am going to the afterlife in comfort.”
Then, just a few months after that, Dean was gone, too.
My own diagnosis came less than a year later. The past two years had been more of a learning experience than I ever wanted to have. Learning that people I loved that had so much life and energy could be taken away so quickly, as could I, was a lesson I had rather not had. I should have skipped class that day.
I began to actually look forward to my radiation treatment and that quiet thirty minutes where Pat and Dean came to me in my mind. By the end of the treatment, I didn’t have to try to force myself to think of them. They were there waiting for me. As soon as I laid on the table, I could hardly shut them up!
A month or so after I had completed the radiation protocol, the telltale dull but persistent pain reappeared. I knew it was the cancer. I knew it. I didn’t ignore the signs because I knew the pain meant the tumor was back.
The radiation doctor, though, was trying to convince me it was probably the gallstones they had seen on the scans, and sent me to a surgeon to have my gall bladder removed.
For the second time in a week, I began a conversation with a doctor, this time the surgeon, with the same phrase.
“I think my cancer is back.”
The surgeon was a tall, thin man with an easy smile and friendly manner. I was thankful he did not have the legendary surgeon’s arrogance that I had witnessed among the equine surgeons at Ohio State. But then, I wasn’t a ten million dollar racehorse with a broken canon bone. I was just a frumpy veterinarian with cancer paranoia, and gall stones.
Like my radiation doctor, the surgeon also laughed at my paranoia. He tried to reassure me that this was a very simple procedure, and they would go in with an endoscope, get the gall bladder out of there, and I would be home that after noon. Easy peazy. No big deal.
“When you’re in there with the scope,” I said, “Could you take a look around? I really think the cancer is back.”
The next time I saw the surgeon was on surgery day at the outpatient center. He had on his blues and I was getting my IV put in by the anesthesiology team. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “We do these all the time. I will see you when you are waking up.”
The very next thing I remember was him once again standing over me, but with a completely different tone. I was in the recovery area now. I must have been awake prior to that because I was sitting in a chair, but I do not remember one second before him standing over me and saying:
“You were right. It’s cancer.”
Then, he left the room.
I turned to the nurse in a panic. “What does he mean? Cancer of the gall bladder? The pancreas?”
Even in my sedation fog, I knew that those types of cancer would be infinitely worse than the endometrial cancer I had.
The surgeon reappeared and finished his explanation. They had gone in with the scope, and just to the right of the entry point, right where my pain was, there was a five centimeter mass. He showed me the photograph they had taken of the yellow blob of tissue with multiple blood vessels running to it that was attached to my abdominal wall.
“While we were in there, “ he continued, “we pulled up your CT scans from just a month ago, and this wasn’t there. This is a hot one.”
My immediate reaction, enhanced by the “Twilight” drugs, was juvenile and feeble: “But I did everything they told me to do,” I whimpered.
The surgeon unnecessarily explained that cancer just didn’t work that way.
I knew that. In my fog, though, I thought it should. Just like getting an “A” in the many hundreds of classes I had taken in my life, I put the work in, so I should get the reward. I endured the surgery and the radiation. I kept every appointment. I did every scan they ordered. I drank enough disgusting “EZ-Cat” barium-infused lemonades to make Andrew Zimmern wince. I did the work; where was my “A”?
Finished with futile explanations, the surgeon said he was going out to the waiting area to tell my family.
“No,” I said. “I will.”
I wanted to tell them. I didn’t want them to go through what they had during my first surgery. When I had had my original robotic surgery, Steve, my dad and his wife Reva, and Sherry had waited for ten hours before anyone even came out to talk to them. The procedure had taken that long. Finally, the doctor emerged. The first thing he said to them was: “Could she have been bitten by a cat?”
After ten worrisome hours, that was the very last thing they expected to hear.
“She’s a vet,” Sherry reminded the man who knew my insides unlike any person in the world but didn’t remember my life’s work.
“Oh, that explains it then,” said the surgeon. Then he left, leaving my family even more bewildered then before.
Finally, he came back and explained that although my lymph nodes did not look cancerous, they looked like at one time I might have had “Cat Scratch Fever,” an occupational hazard. Then, he proceeded to tell them that the procedure had taken so long because the cancer appeared terribly aggressive, and they had to dissect out all the lymph nodes in the area. I was going to need radiation, he told them, and very likely chemo.
“This is going to be bad,” he told them.
Devastated, Steve went home alone that night thinking my condition was terminal. Dillie and Lady climbed in bed with him, but he was inconsolable. All through my illness I had tried to reassure him that I was going to be fine. I just had some unpleasant work to do, but in the end, I would be fine. We would be fine. Sobbing into his pillow with Lady and Dillie trying to lick away his tears, he realized for the first time that I could die.
In my hospital room the next day, Sherry came in to see me before the doctor made his rounds.
Sherry had had her own cancer learning experience when her mother. She was Pat’s daughter. Sherry had tended to her through the chemo and through the cancer’s inexorable spread to the brain. Sherry was with her when she had taken her last painful breath. She had learned through her mother’s ordeal that doctors were not always completely candid with the patients. She knew I would want to know what the surgeon had said. She had taken notes, and showed me her little steno notebook.
Yet, later that morning, the surgeon told me a completely different story. “We got it all,” he said. “There was no cancer in the nodes. The abdominal washings were clear.” I needed to take a few weeks off from work, but then I was good to go. I could resume my life of being bitten by angry cats and untwisting Great Dane stomachs.
Now, here I was not even six months later, and a different surgeon had just shown me a photograph of the innocent-enough-looking blob of tissue that was trying to kill me. I wasn’t about to let him tell me one thing and tell something even worse to my family.
I wiped away my tears as he showed them back to the recovery area. Brave face forward, I thought. Be a good soldier. I did not want them to see I was upset.
How silly I was to think that I could hide anything from them. My heart broke to see Steve come bouncing back with a big smile on his face.
“That was quick!” he said.
My dad and his wife Reva came in next. Dad was still recovering from a double knee replacement surgery that had nearly cost him his life. The post-op complications had sent him to ICU for a month. He came back in baby steps, using his cane.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asked in his booming former DJ’s voice.
I discovered that despite my professional training, I was not any better at relaying bad news than the doctors were. I started to cry. “The cancer’s back.,” I blurted out.
The surgeon stepped in to finish the explanation, and showed them the photograph of my cytological nemesis. “I will order CT scans,” he told them, “and then we’ll know how many there are.”
On the way home, Steve was in denial mode. “They’re not really sure it’s cancer, “ he said. “They didn’t biopsy it. Maybe it’s just scar tissue.”
I had no time for denial. There was a fight to fight. Throughout this entire journey, I wasted no time hanging out in the denial station. I just got back on the train and continued on. Yet, at the same time I tried to feed him as much positive, flowery outcomes as I could. Now, despite seeing a photograph of the killer itself, he was hanging on to those flowery outcomes like a San Francisco hippie in the “Summer of Love.” I couldn’t bear to beat down his false hope with what I knew to be medically true: that any time cancer gets outside it’s original site, the patient was in trouble. I was in trouble.
I called the radiation doctor from the car, leaving a voicemail message with today’s bad news. In less than two minutes, he called me back. I told him the surgeon had ordered CT scans next week.
“No, no.” he said, in his melodic Indian accent. “We need those scans yesterday.“ He instructed me to report to the radiation department at seven the next morning.
More barium lemonade, I thought. Yum.
A week later, he called me with the results. “There’s three masses,” he told me, without sugarcoating. “There’s the five centimeter mass, right at the original incision site. Then there’s two smaller masses where the robotic arms went in and out of the abdomen.
Then, he spelled out the plan. He had scheduled me for a CT-guided biopsy in a week, on Christmas Eve. On New Year’s Eve, they would put in the indwelling IV port for chemo. On January 2, I would meet the chemo doctor, Dr. M, who, he reassured me, was one of the best in Akron. On January 5, I would begin chemo.
“It’s all about the chemo now,” he said.
The train was on track, and it was a bullet train.
I was extremely grateful how he had taken over my case. Pat had not been so lucky to have Dr. R on her side. She had taken herself to an emergency room once the cough had gotten bad enough. With just a chest film to go by, the ER clinician had told her she only had six months to live. He referred her to a pulmonologist, who couldn’t see her for weeks. Discovering she also had a mass in her small intestine, the lung doctor then referred her to a gastroenterologist, who couldn’t see her for more weeks. That doctor then referred her to an oncologist, that wouldn’t even schedule an appointment for her until the gastroenterologist had sent the chart over to his office in 2B of the medical building, from all the way at the other end of the Andromeda galaxy, 2A. After three more weeks of waiting for the gastro doc to complete the referral, she learned that he had left for a four week European vacation, leaving her unsent chart on his desk.
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Five months of the six that she was told she had left had already passed and she hadn’t even seen an oncologist. Sherry and I fervently urged her to go elsewhere, but she didn’t want to rock the boat. She was caught in a sticky web of denial, and the dangerous assumption that these doctors that didn’t even know her name cared if she lived or died. She finally got mad enough at the situation that she demanded her chart and drove herself, as sick as she was, an hour away to Cleveland Clinic. for a walk-in exam. That very day, they admitted her on emergency and moved her to the oncology service.
By then, though, it was too late. The chemo they started only served to make her remaining time harder to bear.
I had, thank God, a totally different experience. I was never once in a disastrous holding pattern as Pat had been. My course to a cure was charted immediately and definitively. Dr. R’s take-charge attitude reassured me. I now understood why when my original surgeon had told me he was retiring and I had gone all Scarlett O’hara on him “Where do I go? What will I do?,” he had told me with reverence: “Don’t worry. I referred you to Dr. R.”
I was confident I would be well again. My faith in my medical team and the power of chemo was steadfast and strong.
At least for a couple more days.
Howie today, fat and happy. Thanks to Sean and jeananne for the photo and for giving Howie a great life.
This is the unedited version of a chapter in my book Dillie the Deer. The final, edited version in the book is the chapter titled "Howie's Hideaway."
A Visit from Howard Hughes
Living in the woods as we did, we were accustomed to wild visitors in our yard. Raccoons and opossums raided the bird feeder every night, causing poor Lady to spend hours with her nose pressed against the plate glass door, anxious to chase them away. WIld deer came through the yard every day. Bunnies, squirrels, skunks, foxes, beavers, wild turkeys, ducks, and even coyotes were all frequent visitors.
Only a few of these visitors could make it into the fence. Dillie lived her life behind an eight foot fence, as required by Ohio law. She was not allowed to mingle with wild deer, nor were they allowed to enter the fence. This barrier also prevented predators like coyotes and stray dogs from endangering her.
Peaceful wild animals often did come in the fence, and Dillie showed a natural curiosity about them. She followed the animals around the yard, lazily chasing them, but not showing any fear. A nesting pair of mallards which used the pool cover as their private pond each spring became such frequent visitors that they no longer even scooted away from Dillie. She started to nuzzle them like she did her familiar cats. In the early evening, the cottontail rabbits grazed right next to her, completely unafraid. She paid them no attention whatsoever. She was content to share her space with any unthreatening critter.
In late July, however, Dillie had a visitor that set her tail afluff and her hooves stomping. That visitor was none other than Howard Hughes.
Dillie was enjoying a splash in her baby pool while I was in the main pool swimming laps. I noticed as I swam by that Dillie was staring at something near the garage. Dillie’s tail fluffed. Her hair stood straight up. She stomped her hoof.
“What’s wrong with you, Dillie?” I called from the pool.
Dillie remained with all four hooves in her baby pool, but at full fluffed-up attention. Hoof stomp!
Steve appeared at the back door. He looked over the same direction where Dillie’s gaze was fixated. He was puzzled.
“What’s that goat doing here?” he asked.
“What?” I answered from the pool, thinking I heard him wrong. “What do you mean?”
“There’s a goat over there,” he said, pointing toward the garage. “A big white goat. With horns. In the fence.”
From my vantage point in the deep end, I could not see what he and Dillie were seeing, despite my best effort. “You’re crazy,” I said. “How would a goat get in the fence? It’s eight feet tall!”
“There’s a goat-- right there.” He pointed again. “It has horns that curl around its head and a long white beard. He’s big.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, splashing water at him. “You are just trying to make me get out of the pool to look, and then you’re going to tell me it was a joke.”
“No, really! There is a goat right there. Look at Dillie, “ he said. Dillie was still at full fluff. “She sees it.”
“Ok, ok, “ I said. “I will get out. But there had better be a real goat there or you are going to be a goat.”
I swam back from the deep end, to the steps at the other end and got out of the pool.
“He just left,” Steve said.
“What?? I knew you were pranking me.” I didn’t believe a word he said. He was not going to get my goat!
Steve was adamant. “There was a goat, I swear.”
“Then what happened to it? Where is it? Or did he sprinkle pixie dust and fly back over that huge fence?” I wasn’t falling for another one of his jokes.
“He didn’t climb over the fence. He crawled under it.”
“Oh, right.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head, and went back to the pool to finish my laps.
I had good reason to believe he was joking. He had a well-earned reputation as a prankster. One of his more memorable escapades was planting a tree in the middle of a friend’s concrete driveway– an elaborate event involving a concrete saw, construction cones, wheelbarrow, shovel, bag of Quickcrete®, and, of course, the six foot cherry tree. Another friend, Ray, made the mistake of telling Chevy man Steve that his Ford truck was better. When Steve said the only things Fords were good for was giving Chevy’s something to tow when the Ford broke down, Ray told him he was “full of BS,” using the actual term for stinky bull caca. Steve repaid him by running a classified in the local newspaper with Ray’s phone number advertising “Free bull manure, by the truckful.” Ray was subsequently inundated with callers asking if they could get their free truckful of bull dung.
Fully aware of Steve’s practical jokester ways and the lengths he would go to stage a prank, I was not about to fall for the goat story. I had no doubt that, if necessary, he would import a goat from New Zealand, rent a helicopter, and drop it into the yard, just so one day he could make me get out of the pool to see his imaginary goat. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of falling for his little farce. So when my nephew Kyle came over to swim that day and said: ”Why is there a goat in your driveway?” I was convinced that Steve had put him up to it.
Steve was not giving up. Each day, over the next six days, while sitting down for dinner, he said nonchalantly: “I saw that goat again.”
“Right,” I said. “He must have a lot of pixie dust.”
On the seventh day, I ate humble pie. I was sitting on the wide front porch, reading a book, enjoying the warm summer day. Lady, as always, was right by my feet. Dillie was on the porch as well, licking Lady and trying to steal ice out of my iced tea. Once again, Dillie suddenly came to white fluffed attention. Lady stood up and growled, wagging her black pompom tail with the same excitement she had when a squirrel came into view. I looked up. On the front sidewalk, six feet away, was a goat. The goat. A big white goat with horns that curled around its ears.
I picked up my phone and called Steve who was tinkering in the garage.
“Steve, that goat is here, on the front sidewalk.”
He couldn’t resist. “What goat?”
Now that I was finally able to see the goat, I could see it was extremely unhealthy. His coat was ratty and he had weeping sores on his side. His wrists, knees, and ankles were swollen, and he limped on his back left leg when he walked. The horns curled around his ears in such a tight spiral that they were cutting his ears. From his little tail to his wattles he was downright filthy. Every bit a he, his prominent male package was in full display.
I called out to him. “Hey, goatie goat! Are you hungry?”
He looked up at me horizontally-slotted big brown eyes, jumped in place, and fearfully ran toward the garage.
Steve called me back. “I just saw him go under the garage. That’s were he is living.” Underneath one side of the garage, there was three foot crawl space. This had become the luxury accommodation of one very homely goat.
I walked down to the garage with Lady leading the way. Steve showed pointed out the goat penthouse suite. Lady sniffed around, peeked underneath, and growled.
“He’s way under there,” Steve said. “Now will you apologize for calling me crazy?”
“No way, “ I answered. “You are crazy. You just happened to be right about this goat, but you still are crazy.”
I looked in the crawl space, too, and could see those brown eyes peering back.
“Only we could have a goat show up in our yard,” I said. “As if life wasn’t weird enough around here.”
“I wonder where he came from,” Steve said.
“Beats me. He looks like he has been living feral forever. He is in horrible shape,” I told him. “We have to keep him away from Dillie. He could be carrying parasites and diseases that she could get from him.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Steve was always Dillie’s Papa Protector. “If he gets within thirty feet of her, I will chase him away with a bottle of barbecue sauce.”
Steve and Lady ventured to the house to get provisions for our new subterranean guest. Soon, they returned with hay, sliced apples, and water. He placed the meal at the edge of the crawl space. Then they stood back and watched the hungry goat peek his nose out, take an apple slice, and retreat to his suite.
“I never saw a goat so afraid of people,” I said. Usually goats were gregarious, friendly creatures. “He’s a complete recluse. Like Howard Hughes.”
“Hey, Howie,” Steve called as he pushed the food tray further under the garage. “Come get your room service. Don’t forget to leave a big tip!”
Over the next few days, Howie became a little more adventuresome, and actually came out to eat his food, even if we were watching. If anyone tried to approach him, however, off he would go, back under the garage.
For our part, we began to accept Howie was part of our daily routine. Dillie had become more accustomed to seeing him, and didn’t hoof stomp or fluff when he joined her, at a respectable distance, in the fence. Lady stopped growling when he was near. Steve prepared food trays for him daily like he did for Dillie.
Still the unkempt recluse like his namesake, Howard Hughes would not allow us to get close enough to touch him. As a veterinarian, I desperately wanted to start antibiotics, wormers, and lice treatment . The complex goat digestive system greatly inactivates most oral medicines; therefore, the best way to treat him was with injectable and pour-on medications. Howie, though, was a long way from allowing us to touch him. Oral antibiotics seemed my only option. I hid a tablet within an apple in his food tray. He was too wily for that! He ate all the grain, berries, suckers, and greens. The only thing left on his entire food tray was a delicious-looking bright green Granny Smith apple, with a sulfa drug hidden in the center.
“Funny how he knows there’s something in there. He’s like a giant cat,” I remarked, knowing from my clinical experience that most dogs would take medicine easily if with a little peanut butter or Velveeta®, but fooling a cat was nearly impossible. A pet owner could put out an entire buffet of tuna, chicken, and Nine Lives® out, to hide one drop of pink Amoxidrops® within a morsel of the feline’s favorite food. Hungry Morris would run to the buffet, take one whiff, and turn away in a huff. Apparently, Howie had that same ability. No matter what I hid his tablet in, that was the one and only food item he left behind.
After two more solid weeks of spoiling Howie with delicious salads, fresh hay, and sweets, he finally allowed us close enough to him that I was at least able to apply a wormer to his back. Trying to give him an injection, however, was going to take a lot more restraint. I discussed the options with Steve.
Steve decided he was going to set a trap for him, so they could at least move h im into the barn. He wanted him caught, too, and not just to give him medication. An intact male goat has about as unpleasant of an odor as a skunk, and the noxious fumes were ruining his garage time. He and his garage buddies, The Garage Rats, as I affectionately called them, devised what they thought was a brilliant plan. They were going to set up fencing we had left over from trying to segregate the corral to keep the horses from bothering Dillie. The fencing was actually a six foot tall dog run with a gate in the front. The ragtag group of would-be engineers believed if they could lure Howie into the pen with some treats, they could then run up and close the door, catching him in the pen.
Not surprisingly, Howie was too crafty for the average gearhead.
Their first attempt at first seemed promising. The guys set up the pen next to the entrance to Howie’s suite under the garage and put the treats in the pen. However, Howie was no longer the starving waif he was when he had first appeared. His belly was always full now, and he had no need to venture into a pen to get more treats.
Steve instructed everyone to stop giving Howie any food, water, or treats except in the pen. During the day, Howie completely ignored the smorgasbord. At night, however, when no one was around to close the pen, he feasted greedily. In the morning, all the food was gone.
Steve was undaunted. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said, optimistically. “Sooner or later he is going to go in that pen while I am around and I will get him.”
Just a few days later, his decree came true. Howie did indeed venture in the pen and start nibbling his hay and grain. Steve ran out of the garage and tried to close the door. Howie saw him coming. Despite his arthritic joints and lameness, he scooted out of the pen and back under the garage before Steve could even reach the gate.
The Garage Rats regrouped.
The new plan was to tie a rope around the gate and pull it shut remotely, so Howie would not have time to run out. Once again, they set his meal in the pen. They tested the gate and rope remote control. It actually worked! Not only did the gate swing closed, but the latch caught.
They had him now!
Within just a few hours, they saw Howie go into the pen. Triumphantly, Steve pulled the rope and heard the gate clang shut. The guys all came running out of the garage to meet their quarry face to face. It was not Howie’s face, however, that greeted them. They arrived at the pen just in time to see Howie’s behind scurrying under the pen, back to his Plaza suite.
In the end, it was not human inventiveness that would catch the crafty old goat, but love.
The very next day, Howie was in the fence with Dillie, but being unusually friendly. Instead of keeping his usual respectable distance, he kept trying to approach her, as a mate.
Howard Hughes had found his Jane Russell.
Dillie was having none of it, and after scampering away from Howie’s advances several times, she ran into the house for the day. I closed the door behind her or the confused, lovesick goat may have just followed her right into the kitchen. Howie was only a few steps behind and peered longingly through the full length window of the back door.
“Now, we have to catch him,” I told Steve. “We are going to have to knock him out and neuter him as soon as possible. We can’t have him chasing Dillie around like that.”
Fortunately, that very night, Howie himself made other plans. At ten o’clock, I received a phone call from a friend, Sean, that lived about a half mile through the woods. Sean had three pet female goats penned behind his house.
“Hey, Mel,” Sean began, “did you and Steve put that goat in my pen?” I had run into Sean a few weeks ago and told him about Howard Hughes, the goat recluse.
“Put him in your pen? We can’t even get near that goat.”
“Well, he’s in there. Chasing my does around.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty horny, excuse the pun,” I said. I told him that Howie had been chasing Dillie around that day.
“If I can get him in a stall, do you think you can come over tomorrow and knock him out and neuter him?” Sean’s house was right behind my clinic, so the plan was to sedate him in the stall and put an end to his hormone-related problems. “If you can do that,” Sean continued, “I will keep him.”
“He’s pretty sickly,” I warned.
“We’ll get him back in shape,” he promised.
After successfully completing our plan the next morning, Sean said that he thought he knew who owned Howie. He gave me a name and phone number.
Later that day, I made the call. It was a conversation that left me shaking my head for the rest of time.
A pleasant enough lady answered the phone and I explained that Sean thought this goat is hers. “He is at Sean’s now, but he was living under my husband’s garage for weeks. He’s very wild and sick.”
A simple start, but then the conversation turned just plain baffling.
“He’s not really ours,” the lady said. “He was given to us by a friend, but he keeps running away, so he’s not ours.”
“Did you have him in a pen?” I asked.
“No, but if he were ours he wouldn’t leave the yard.”
I couldn’t believe what I had heard. What planet is this woman from? Can she really think any animal, especially hoofstock, especially a male, will just stay in a yard without a fence? No one could be that clueless!
Then it got worse.
Despite working with the animal-owning public for over two decades, and hearing every dumfounding statement that ever existed, or so I thought, I could not believe what she said next.
“The only reason we got him was because my doctor told me my baby was allergic to cow’s milk.”
Huh? I was speechless. This goat was a ram! A male! She got a male goat because her baby needed goat’s milk?
“But it didn’t work,” the lady continued. “My son’s still allergic.”
Two groups of people inhabit the blue planet. The first group is comprised of people that could be dropped by an airplane into a jungle with nothing but a pocket knife and a pack of chewing gum, and come out three days later, five pounds heavier, with a nice suntan. The second group, however, was made up instead of those lost souls that could be dropped into a Super Walmart with a twenty dollar bill and would never make it out alive. Their skeletalized remains would be found right in the potato chip aisle years later. These are the people that have such startling little common sense, such exquisitely diminutive ability to reason, such infinitesimally developed problem-solving skills, that their brains collapse in upon themselves. What remains is an intellectual black hole that will not allow a single thought to escape and will greedily suck in pieces of good brains around it.
I knew I had to end this conversation quickly or I was in danger of having my own brain sucked out of its calvarium crypt.
After hanging up, I told Steve that Howie was better off with Sean and his girl goats. There was no way he is going back to that home. I replayed for him the baffling conversation I had just had.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“No, I wish I were. I swear to God that is what she said.”
“You mean she was trying to milk that boy?”
“Either that or she thinks just by having a goat, any goat, her son would no longer be allergic.” Either way, the explanation defied logic.
“What was she trying to milk anyway?” Steve thought about it and squirmed. “Geez. No wonder he ran away.”
--------------------------
(A side note: later that year, Steve had a friend with at GTO car that needed some work. I came home and found the GTO parked in the yard. I said to Steve: "What's that goat doing there?"
If you are not a gearhead or a Garage Widow, this explains the joke: http://www.ehow.com/about_6659054_gto-called-goat_.html
It's amazing how much car stuff I have absorbed by being married to a Gearhead. MRB)
Dillie meets Ellen and her sister.
This was a chapter I wrote for Dillie's book that did not make the editor's cut. This happened in summer, 2013.
As spring turned to summer, the pain of losing our beloved dog Lady lessened and we could once again remember her with smiles instead of tears. I was still going through chemo, but the results so far had been encouraging. Follow-up scans had shown the tumors in the lungs, liver, bone, and kidneys had gone. All that was left were a few of the largest masses at the original surgery sites, and they, too, were on the run.
Dr. M gave me the good news before my latest treatment. He said he was thrilled, but surprised, at my response. I realized then that even he hadn’t given me the whole truth when he blasted me with those gut-kicking statistics at our first meeting.
My chemo nurses Cathy and Cindy both hugged me. Then, they plugged me into the iv pump and hit me once more.
Take that, sucker, I thought. Here’s another dose of hellfire for you. You had better get your chemical bonds in order, Tumornator. I am coming after you.
Once I was settled in, Cindy came over to my pink recliner and talked to me about Dillie. She had read about me in the local newspaper and wondered if I could bring her ten copies of Dillie’s book.
“I need one for each grandchild,” she said. She reached for her cell phone, and showed me a photo. “These are my kids,” she said proudly.
The picture showed all ten children, none over ten by the looks of them, a mixture of boys and girls, all button cute in little school uniforms, and all of very obvious Asian descent.
Cindy could see my surprise and smiled. “My sister and I adopted three refugee families and their kids. We are their adoptive grandmas.”
She explained that these three families were members of a tribe of people from Burma known as the Karen people. The Burmese army had been attacking these people for “ethnic cleansing.” After seeing their parents murdered in front of them, three siblings (the parents of these precious children) fled into the jungle. For three years, they endured the jungle and evaded their would-be murderers, the Burmese army. Finally, they arrived at a refugee camp on the Thai border.
They spent another seven years in the refugee camp. By the ages of the children, some of them were born in this camp. The camp had become so overcrowded that the Thai government asked the UN to step in and place some of the people in other countries. By the luck of a draw, these three families were placed together in Akron, Ohio. Various church groups stepped in to help them procure housing, education, and necessities.
Cindy’s sister Penny came across their story through one of the churches. She and Cindy had both done mission work throughout the world at various times. They still felt a need to do this, but could no longer travel to the Philippines or Africa like they had before. The two of them decided that they would make these three families their mission. They would become their adoptive grandmothers, and provide the three families with whatever support they needed.
With their assistance, all the parents got jobs, homes of their own, and medical insurance. The children all received education under the watchful eye of their loving adoptive grandmothers, who made sure the children did their homework and practiced their multiplication tables.
I sat in my chemo chair, amazed. Forget the Hokey Pokey, I thought. This is what it really is all about. This is what a life of service to God is: showing His love by sharing His love. It isn’t just sending in a check to a fund that will take care of the children in a refugee camp. No. That was not enough for this incredible nurse in front of me. She had given her life and love so completely to these kids she was now their grandmother.
I was embarrassed to realize I knew nothing of the plight of these people. I considered myself a well-educated person, constantly updated on current events. I was not one of those people shown on a late night talk show “Man on the Street” interviews that couldn’t name the vice president or didn’t know the Earth revolved around the Sun. Yet, I was not even aware that the government of Burma had tried to extinguish an entire race of their own people.
As Americans, we are woefully undereducated about the hardships around the globe. Unless it catches the eye of a celebrity who then stages a telethon, genocides like these are not even on our radar. Yet, even in these modern times, holocausts occur every day.
I had always vowed not to be like that, to not be so wrapped up in the luxury of American freedom that I was blind to the tired and poor, yearning to be free. However, there were times like this when my ignorance slapped me in the face.
When I first met my family doctor, for example, I was intrigued by her thick slavic accent and asked her if she was Russian. She pounded her fist on the exam table and said emphatically : “I am no Russian! I am Ukrainian!”
Oops, I thought sheepishly. I am American and I don’t know the difference.
Embarrassed, I later researched Ukrainian history and learned the source of her indignation. The Ukrainians had also known ethnic cleansing, by the iron Russian hand. Under Josef Stalin, Russia tried to obliterate the Ukrainian people and culture. Millions were killed by forced starvation. Women were raped and forced to bear the children of Russian soldiers, as a plan to “Russianize” the people. Whole families were executed and entire villages were burnt off the map.
Stalin wanted all evidence of the Ukrainian people erased for all time. He even tried to eradicate their history. Ukrainian history and lore had traditionally been told through song by blind minstrels, kobzars. In 1930, Stalin called them to a conference and executed every single one.
Shame on me for not having known this. Likewise, I knew nothing of the plight of the Karen. In fact, when Cindy had first mentioned them to me, I thought she had said they were Korean. I did know about the current plight of the North Koreans, and thought that was what she meant. As I sat in my chemo chair, I researched Burma on my I-pad.
Everything Cindy had told me was true. Prior to that day in chemo, I couldn’t have pointed out Burma on a map. Yet, life really is a learning experience and that day I learned about the history of Burma, including how the current government was butchering its own people.
That beautiful group of children in the photo and their parents had endured unimaginable horror. Lady Liberty had given them a new life, as she had my own grandparents escaping the Sicilian fascists in the twenties. My ancestors, too, had risked every thing to be free, coming to a foreign land with only lint in their pockets but a heart full of dreams. This was what America was all about.
I was grateful for the lesson Cindy had given me that day. “You must bring them over,” I told her. “They can stay the day and swim with Dillie.” I didn’t want this to be an empty promise like a “let’s do lunch” goodbye. Her story had touched me so deeply that I truly wanted to see all ten kids playing and laughing with their adoring grandmother.
On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks later, Cindy and her sister, the parents of the families, and the cutest group of grandchildren ever on Earth graced us with a visit. I was just pulling a cake out of the oven when my phone rang. They had the whole group together because they were going to celebrate a birthday for one of the little girls. Could they stop by with them?
I looked at the mango pineapple upside down cake in my hands. I bake a cake no more often than once a year. I had only made this one because we had some mango and pineapple for Dillie that was getting overripe. I could just throw some candles on it and– voilá– a birthday cake for a little girl!
They arrived an hour later in two separate vans. My nurse Cindy and her sister Penny, the children’s parents, and suddenly a swarm of laughing, giggling, running, playing, delightful children. They ran in ten different directions, trying the swing set, exploring the yard, marveling at the pool. The sound of their laughter filled our yard and our hearts.
The parents greeted me in very broken English but with generous hugs and thank yous. The children’s English was perfect as they peppered me with questions about Dillie. What does she eat? Does she like to swim? Where does she sleep? Why does she like bananas?
Dillie was in the yard when they arrived and at first she was a little overwhelmed. Grandma Cindy took charge, however.
“Ok, kids,” she said. “Everyone quiet down and line up over here.”
With the obedience and precision of a marine platoon, all ten children lined up next to her in complete silence. “Ok,” drill sergeant grandma told them gently, “we are going to go pet Dillie in groups of two.” Group by group she took them all up to the corner of the yard where Dillie grazed.
Dillie enjoyed the visit. She licked their little hands and faces. She shook her head as they tickled her ears. One of the boys was wearing a ball cap, and Dillie kept taking it off his head with her teeth. Everyone giggled as she did this over and over again.
Now that she was more accustomed to them, Dillie started playing with them in the yard. She put her head down like a little bull and mock-charged them. She kicked up her hooves and jumped in place. Everything she did caused a wave of child laughter to flow through the yard.
Steve and I looked at each other and smiled. We had had many treasured moments with Dillie and new found friends since she had become famous. This moment with these children was a special one. We would keep this one in its own little box in our hearts and pull it out when we needed a smile.
After the kids were done visiting with Dillie, Steve brought out the cake and lit the candles. The birthday girl was a precious little girl named Ellen. She had the jet black straight hair that all the family had, but hers was pulled back with pink ribbons. She wore a pristine white dress adorned with tiny pink flowers, lace trimmed Bobby socks and black Mary Janes. A more beautiful child could not exist in a Disney movie.
We all sang “Happy Birthday” as the children clapped. Ellen blew out the candles, with a little assistance from her grandmother Cindy. I handed the birthday girl the first piece of cake.
“Don’t forget the ice cream!” Steve said, placing a scoop of vanilla next to her cake.
“How old are you?” I asked her.
“Six,” she said, proudly.
“What do you want for your birthday?” I asked.
She looked up shyly at her Grandma. “It’s ok,” Cindy reassured her. “You can tell her.”
Her answer floored me.
She said sweetly: “A Bible.”
She had been born and raised in a refugee camp, this beautiful little girl whose smile outshone the summer sun. Up to just a few months ago, her young life had been full of uncertainty and fear. Yet, she didn’t want Barbie dolls or the latest video game. All she wanted for her birthday was a Bible. .
Dillie wandered over to Steve who was eating his own cake and ice cream. Her nose twitched and her ears wiggled. She was after the cake! The children all laughed as she pulled the plate repeatedly from his hands. Finally, Steve gave up and fed her what was left of his serving. As the softened ice cream splashed all over her nose, the children laughed more loudly than ever. The laughter was the most beautiful music I had ever heard.
I looked around the patio at the adults, the children’s parents and their two grandmothers. I could see the love in their eyes as they watched the children. How blessed we were to be able to give them all this moment.
Much too soon, the visit was over. In single file, their grandmothers marched them into the cars and off they went. Steve and I waved as they drove away and little voices shouted good bye. The yard that had just moments before filled with joyous laughter was now completely quiet save for an occasional sparrow chirp and the muffled sound of a neighbor’s lawnmower.
I contemplated all the stars that had to be aligned to have made this meeting possible. Through a chain of love and a miracle of grace this group of children had been brought to this point of time from a Thai refugee camp into our backyard. Had I not had cancer and had we not had Dillie, we would have never gotten to meet the angel in the pristine dress, the giggling gaggle of boys and girls, their parents, and their adoptive grandmothers with their boundless love. Right then, I knew my cancer journey was a blessed path, and Dillie, as always, was leading the way.
My own pets had lived a more comfortable life than these children had for nearly all their lives, yet they were filled with joy and love. I have met many people that had never endured one real hardship, certainly never saw their parents hacked to death in front of them, never slept in a jungle, never pulled bugs out of their day’s ration at a refugee camp, yet somehow still felt the world owed them an apology. Our country has an entire generation of milliennials that play baseball on X-boxes instead of getting real grass stains on their knees or think a harsh parent is one that will not allow them to upgrade to the latest I-phone. Sadly, we also have millions of Americans that turn to a life of cruelty, crime, or drugs because they say “there just isn’t anything to do.”
Tragically confused, so many people just can’t seem to find any meaning to their empty lives. They put their left foot in. They take their left foot out. They do the hokey pokey and turn themselves about. And they think the hokey pokey is what it’s all about.
Not even close.
Those children, this life of love, this is what’s it’s all about.
 "I am not a cash cow!" says Dillie This is a chapter I wrote for the original manuscript for my book Dillie the Deer that got the editor's judo chop, and does not appear in the final version.
I am the middle child in a group of exceptionally gifted, wildly successful, highly educated siblings. My eldest sister is an attorney for the US’s major military jet manufacturer. My brother, a year older than I am, graduated with me from vet school, and then went on to receive a Ph.D. in immunopathology. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on HIV. My younger sister received her Masters and Doctor of Optometry degrees at age 25, maintaining the perfect 4.0 average she had since grade school and going on to become the co-developer of revolutionary contact lenses. My youngest sister is no less than a board certified pediatric eye surgeon.
They had pristine houses worthy of Architectural Digest, expense accounts, and pension plans. They lived in major metropolitan areas, moving away from our podunk ‘burb as their accomplished lives demanded. They attended symphony events and cocktail parties with their equally accomplished spouses.
My spouse was not ever going to be bringing in a six figure salary. He did not have a closet full of Versace and Armani power ties. In fact, he didn’t have A tie. No “mani-pedis” for him, not unless someone provided a defibrillator for the soon to be comatose manicurist. While my brother could discuss at length the subtle differences between vintage single malt whiskies as easily as he could explain the biomechanics of retrovirus replication, my husband could only discuss the difference between Coors and Bud (Coors used prettier women in their ads), and thought “retro” meant dragsters with the engines in the front.
They loved Steve, despite his crudeness, because he helped the family in so many ways. In my grandmother’s final years, my mom had his cell phone on speed dial. Many times, he would go over to her home in the middle of the night to help if my grandmother had fallen or had to go to the hospital, physically carrying her to the car if necessary.
Despite knowing how much he did for us all, I know they could only shake their head in bewilderment at the crazy things he did. I did, too. He gave his grandson on his fourth birthday a gift he said every young boy should have: a hatchet. He painted hot rod flames on our toaster and toilets. He drove to a car show in Indianapolis towing his hand-built lavender roadster. Behind it’s wheel was a blowup rubber doll. Each December, he made me tear my hair out by insisting the other love of his life, after myself and Dillie, also spend the winters inside. Accordinly, he housed her in the dining room, right under the brass chandelier. Serving holiday meals was a challenge with an Indian motorcycle in the center of the room.
So what if my life was not the crystal and caviar life my parents had hoped for me and my siblings had achieved? We were happy. I did actually have a Waterford crystal vase for a short time. It was a beautiful wedding gift. When the sun came through it, it glittered and displayed a prism rainbow.
Steve blew it up. About a week after our marriage, my man-child hubby used it to shoot off bottle rockets.
We would never have the finances my siblings had, nor could travel to the far corners of the world as they did routinely. As small business owners, our financial security completely depended on my ability to keep working. More times than I care to remember we had to completely evacuate our savings to meet payroll. Until we sold the emergency clinic, we were always just one payroll away from potentially having to start all over again.
I hadn’t authored text books like my brother or saved a child’s sight like my sisters. I never attended board meetings in overpriced Ferragamos. I wouldn’t even think of buying a pair of shoes that cost over a hundred dollars, unless they came with a built-in car charger, coffee machine, glucose monitor, and stethoscope. Instead of board rooms, I worked ankle deep in various animal bodily fluids in the only pair of shoes I owned, my New Balance tennies.
I did not doubt my siblings and parents loved me, but it was in an anxious way, like a mother dog tends to the runt of the litter. I was acutely aware that I was– is, am, will be forever– the family Black Sheep. I didn’t believe that it is a coincidence that my first name is derived from the Greek word meaning “dark.” My Black Sheep role was predetermined by the stars. Having a biological cousin to that proverbial dark wooly ovine living in my rustic home only solidified my standing in the order Ruminantia.
Even if my family would never actually say out loud what I knew they thought of my life, as if that ever happens in Sicilian families, they certainly could never deny that I was the official family kook.
Every Corleone family had to have a Fredo. In my Sicilian family, that was me.
Had I been related to Ross Perot, I would be living in his basement.
So, when Dillie became famous, my family’s initial reaction was not so much excitement, but more like amused embarrassment. “What did crazy Steve and Melanie do now? Did she have to use her last name?” I told the CBS crew that showed up at our house the day after Dillie contest video went viral that I knew my family wouldn’t even be surprised to learn we had satellite trucks in our driveway, only that the news story did not begin with “a crazed woman in Ohio today chopped her husband up in little pieces and made crazy Sasquatch husband kabobs.”
They each reacted in predictable ways. My father, a retired advertising guru, complete with vanity license plates that read “Ad Man 1,” was in hog –make that deer– heaven. He thought this was fabulous publicity for my little clinic that was still struggling to stand on its own two feet. He dove into the public relations aspects like Greg Louganis into a pool. Daily, he posted notes to Dillie’s Facebook fans, and encouraged me to use her in any and all advertising for my clinic, even my yellow page ads. He wanted T-shirts, mugs, action figures, and the like. Marketing, marketing, marketing. He envisioned the day when Toys-R-Us stocked their shelves with the Dillie Joe with the kung-fu grip.
My younger sister Sally was the one that seemed truly delighted in the Dilliemania, especially after her teenaged son’s science teacher showed the video clip in class, not knowing Jordan was Dillie’s “cousin.” As any parent of a teenager can no doubt profess, anything that makes a parent connect with a teen for a moment is always welcome, even if that thing is a deer owned by a kooky sister.
My mother, however, was not at all happy about Dillie, and still is not. Just a few months ago, she and I attended the musical Chicago together at Cleveland Playhouse. Just as the lights dimmed and the crowd got quiet, my own mother turned to me and asked: “When are you going to let Dillie back into the wild? She doesn’t belong in a house.”
Somehow, despite two million Dilliecam viewers, countless news articles and You Tube videos, appearances on Animal Planet and Fox news, a center spread in the National Geographic magazine, she has never understood that : 1) Dillie is not a wild deer and cannot be “returned” to the wild, 2) she is in the house because that is where she wants to be, and 3) we love her like a child.
Thankfully, as the curtain on the musical rose, the overture began with a cymbal clash, drowning out my screams of frustration in Orchestra Row G.
My brother, predictably, was more embarrassed than amused; he could not find a hole deep enough to hide in. After our first network appearance, I knew they would find him cowering with a bag over his head in the super-secure subterranean levels of his HIV lab. Too bad for him I believed a woman’s identity did not spring from her husband and had kept my maiden name. I chided him that the next time he won an award for his work the presenter would cite the long list of his professional accomplishments, and then say: “...and his sister has a deer that lives in her house.”
Finally, my oldest sister Karen’s reaction to the Dilliemania was true to her intellectual-property-rights-attorney persona. She constantly bombarded me with messages about how we needed to be charging people to see Dillie on the web cam or in person. She wanted us to make Dillie our cash-cow.
“She does have four stomachs, Karen,” I told her, “but she is not a cow.”
“I’ll represent her!” Karen said.
Life was absurd enough already! I did not want to see the day my house pet had her own attorney, agent, personal assistant, and a contract demanding only green M and M’s in her dressing room. We had no intention of exploiting our child. We felt obligated to let any reporter or photographer do stories on her as they had their work to do and their living to make. However, when people asked us what our “fee” was for such stories, we just smiled and answered: “We love spreading the joy that is Dillie through the world, and that is payment enough.”
We were not naive to the negative aspects of fame, and did not want that particular monster damaging our little family. Accordingly, we turned down an offer for a reality series, much to Karen’s dismay. We didn’t believe that those shows ever really worked out for the people involved, only the producers. They made their money and went on to other projects. The subjects got divorced, estranged, or in some cases committed suicide.
“You’re crazy!” Karen told me. “That could provide income for you for the rest of your life. She could be ‘Honey Poo Poo’.”
Karen had represented me in the sale of my emergency clinic and had a prospective buyer’s attorney shaking like a frightened puppy when we had discovered they had violated a good faith agreement before the contract was even signed. I always recall with a smile how she slammed her briefcase on the walnut negotiation table shouting: “This is unacceptable! This deal is OFF!” The opposing attorney said he had to speak to his client and slunk out of the conference room, tail between his legs.
When they left the room, I turned to Karen and suggested we let it go. This was a lucrative deal that had been months in the making. I may not have a another prospective buyer for years.
Another briefcase slam. “Don’t you go soft on me!” she said. “Don’t you say one more word! I will put duct tape over your mouth if I have to. They’ll cave. And we’ll tack on a few grand more because we caught them in a lie.”
She was right. The attorney came into the room with the classic body language of a submissive delta dog. Head down, no eye contact. He would have rolled over on his back exposing his vulnerable abdomen if it wouldn’t have soiled his slippery polyester coat.
After that day, I called my sister “The Pit Bull.”
Now that legendary bully breed grip had grabbed on to the notion that Dillie should become a media star and would not let go. She had her sights on Disney. She told me she would not rest until the third sequel to “Dillie, the Movie” was released. “We’re going to Disneyland!” she said.
“Watch it, Karen!” I said. “If there is a Disney movie, you are going to be the villain. You’re going to be the Cruella Deville.”
I reminded her that just a few weeks before Dillie became famous, we had had Thanksgiving dinner at our house with the whole family, including my Grandmother Rose who had since passed away. During dinner, Dillie came ambling down the stairs and made her rounds around the table, greeting every one and trying to steal cranberry sauce or spill flutes of Asti Spumanti. Karen had remarked in less than amused terms:
“That animal belongs ON the table not AT the table!”
Oh how she had changed her tune now! She threatened to set up a toll booth in our driveway when people came to visit our little star. She paraphrased the speech from Field of Dreams. “People will come. They'll come to Ohio for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. And they’ll pay.”
“Karen!” I answered. “Can you put a price on a perfect summer day? On love? On beauty? On the smile of a child?”
“Yes,” the Pit Bull replied. “Five bucks.”
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