Source: Wikipedia, Irish Setter from 1915, W. E. Mason, Dogs of all Nations
My friends, I’ve been very blue this weekend as I contemplate the deterioration of my mother’s already fragile health and listen to my dad cry out his heartbreak during our phone calls. I feel as if I’m on the edge of a precipice of loss. When it will happen, I cannot know, but that feeling lurks in every corner of my daily life.
So often lately, I choose to remember my parents as they were decades ago. In my head I see a photo of us together in San Diego (I’ll have to share it with you someday), that first summer I lived there, just weeks before I met Don for the first time. Big smiles, still vital – happy to be with me in my new city. Or I picture my mom and I laughing over something or other. We laughed a lot together; we’d laugh so hard that we’d clutch our stomachs, tears in our eyes. Laughter is the best medicine.
With that in mind, I thought I’d share a funny story with you. A true story. When I was a teenager, we had an Irish Setter named Shannon. Shannon was smart as a whip and constantly into something or other. Oh, he was a handful, but how he would make us laugh! He’d grab a dish cloth or a hand towel and run through the living room with it in his mouth, hoping to get our attention. If one of us purposely ignored him, he would reverse direction and run back through the room, dish cloth still in his mouth. This would go on and on until, exasperated, he would finally just drop the cloth in our lap as if to say, See? I took it. Doesn’t anyone care???
My dad wore dentures. He would sometimes leave them on the sink in the bathroom when he went to bed. One morning, my mom was in the living room (dad was still sleeping) and Shannon tore by her with something in his mouth. Then he tore by her again. She glanced up. Not a dish cloth. Something she couldn’t see was hidden in his mouth. She called out his name – Shannon! He did what he always did when he had something he didn’t want us to get from him. He went under the dining room table – just far enough to make it hard to reach him. By this time, Mom had asked for my help. We got down on our hands and knees and reached for him – he moved his head away from us. We reached again. He moved away. Finally, Mom got hold of his collar. Then we tried to pry his mouth open. When we pried his teeth apart, we saw anotherset of teeth – my dad’s.Oh no.
In a panic, all we could think was that my dad would completely lose it if Shannon chomped on his expensive dentures. And he would have. As I kept his mouth open, Mom, with the skill of a surgeon, began to remove the dentures from his mouth – praying the whole time that he wouldn’t bite down on them. Somehow we did it. Adrenalin-infused strength, I bet.
Afterwards, she took those dentures, scrubbed the life out of them, used some denture cleaner and put them back where they had been – on the side of the bathroom sink. She knew she couldn’t tell my father about it. I was sworn to secrecy and dad didn’t find out about it until many years later. For years, mom, my sisters and I would tell that story and laugh our heads off.Shannon was always up to something. We had a travel trailer parked in our driveway (right outside my parents’ bedroom window) and many was the time that mom and I would be out there on our hands and knees, one on either side of the trailer, trying to get Shannon to come out from under it. He would invariably lay there, right in the place where we couldn’t reach him, taunting us. We’d do this in whispers, trying not to disturb my dad (sleeping again) or our neighbors. After what seemed like hours of this rigamarole (confident that my dad was still sleeping) one loud bellow of Shannon! from the direction of the bedroom would bring him out from under the trailer and into the house, making Mom and me, on our hands and knees, look ridiculous.
All these years later, those stories still make me laugh. And that’s a good thing.
