One thing that seems so strange in retrospect is how many animals came through our home and therefore how good Dad was at rearing domestic animals. Now and again, I grew jealous of them, but I cannot deny that, generally speaking, my father was really good at rearing animals. I had, much like a halfling or a kobold, a riding dog. 

My father bought a chow-chow for my mom. If you know nothing about these dogs, know that they’re basically small bears bred in China for fighting other dogs. They look like cute powder puff teddy bears and, as with real bears, that’s a grave mistake for any stranger wishing to pet them. Chows were bred to be fiercely loyal to a single owner. 

As a result, gobs of stories exist of a co-owner getting attacked for seeming to threaten the owner. If you want to motivate a dog to fight other dogs and owners, corrupting their loyalty seems the surest route. Imagine a lab gone rabid. Well, I suppose Old Yeller already did. And Cujo. 

That in mind, the dog’s name was Cody. And his “owner” of choice was my mother. Therefore he growled and barked and hated my dad. He gave me a bit of a pass most of the time because I was a child, I think, so on the better days when he didn’t hate my father so much — days dad felt ornery — dad would pick me up and place him on the back of the dog to ride.

This is the sort of thing many of the women in my family get onto many of the men. But as it turns out, the responsibility for me (or eventually my brother) on Cody’s back mellowed the dog. As a result, I hold an archive of photos of me riding that dog. Or of him laying down with me.

Some of the best involve the three of us: me on dad’s dark haired chest, the dog down near us. I watched dad groom a dog that hated him, discipline a dog that hated him (with love), walk a dog that hated him, feed a dog that hated him, and groom a dog that hated him. 

So he decided to get a cat. 

This, of course, seems a bit counter intuitive to most folks, the ancient rivalry of feline and canine in mind. The cat was a bright yellow tabby Dad named Otis from the movie Milo and Otis. I never owned a Milo, but I met one — a beautiful Abyssinian who lives out in a cabin in the Hamptons owned by a producer friend of ours. Thin, tiny, orange tiger.

Otis, on the other hand, shone like the son and had the brawn to match it. The cat befriended Cody. Seems the dog’s bias only extended towards other adult humans. Those two would hunt in the back yard together, play together in the house. We have multiple photos of Otis bedding into the feather down of Cody’s giant poof. They seemed to want nothing more than to accompany one another through life. 

Around this time I had a lot of days in the daycare at Rend Lake college. Mom was working on her nursing degree. This daycare was the place that had the giant pickup sticks in the glass tube with the marbles. It seems, in my memory, twenty feet high. And judging by my height now compared to my height then, I suppose it was three to for times my height, especially when seated. I mention Rend Lake because it was home from nursing school that mom brought the dead cat.

They had various assignments for biology, but one of them was a final involving a dissected cat — cutting parts, naming parts, so forth. There had to be half a dozen, a dozen nurses in training in that room. I still smell the formaldehyde. I didn’t know what it was. 

Mom or maybe Dad asked me if I wanted to see and of course, being infinitely curious, I said, “Yes.” 

One of the nurses lifted me up and I saw the end result of rearing domestic animals cut open in ribbons and pinned, as I said in the Dead Christ poem, with little metal pins. The formaldehyde is the strongest memory and remains the strongest smell of all my childhood. To this day, if you uncap one of those supersized sharpie markers, I immediately see dead, crucified, dissected, and mounted black cat. I tend to have to leave the room for a moment. 

I’ll spare you the more gruesome bits of the description. But they tend to come out in odd places like in my novella It Rides Upon Us, assuming that ever comes out.

From that, I learned quickly that rearing domestic animals leads — if, as they say in the country, The Good Lord tarries — to a brutal death. 

And no amount of rearing a dog that hated dad or his sidekick cat could save them.

It was the bright green stuff I saw in the driveway that I ran and told dad Otis was eating. He’s eating the green stuff. Licking it. Antifreeze. That killed him quick at the house on cottonwood.

Not long afterwards, the great bear of my childhood froze to death in an outdoor pin. 

I remember the flakes and brushes of snow in the tufts of Chinese brown bear hair.

I could have cried at the cats.

I cried more at the death of this halfling’s riding dog. I’d lost my Shadowfax, my Bjorn, and my Yeller all together. 

Parents often don’t buy their kids pets in order to spare them the reality of death.

But that reality taught me empathy and sympathy. I took no pleasure from the dissected cat. Nor from Otis drinking the kitty equivalent of hemlock. Nor from Cody freezing to death.

What I took from that is memento mori. 

And ever since I have remembered that I and everyone I knew would die. On the spectrum of possible deaths, says Augustine, we only get one. Why worry about them all?

Well that’s true. The circumstances which attend death in general are sufficient. No reason to worry, simply — mindful of my death — to do today what I would want to get caught dead doing. People always say, “I wouldn’t want to get caught dead doing that.” But they never stop to think what they would want to get caught dead doing.

Memento mori does that.

And what teaches us that kind of empathy and transitive life is the rearing of domestic animals. 

Including little tigers and a child’s riding dog. 

Dad was good at that. 

What was your experience with animals while growing up?

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Photo by Omid Armin on Unsplash