19 years on a farm: sunflowers

This is the year of the sunflower, and the drought, and a few other things.

After last year’s bust of a sunflower crop, my husband, Radames, nurtured these beauties through woodchuck attacks and squirrel carnage.  Today, he picked the last of this particular batch…big huge blooms that the chipmunks were munching away at…we will keep them on the table a few days and then put them outside, up high, for the birds.

In celebration of 19 years here, I thought I’d try a theme for a while:  19 years on the farm. I’ll let you know if it works out.  My husband said to tell you this isn’t a farm, and it really isn’t.  But it was a farm and it is a lot closer to a farm than my homeland, the suburbs.  I like to say I live out in the middle of nowhere but then I am reminded that there is a Dunkin Donuts about 4 miles down the road.

It is September 18, 2016.

 

©claireaperez@gmail.com

Sunflowers picked by Radames and photo-shopped by me.

The Carnival of Dysfunction…inspired by politics

 

The Carnival of Dysfunction

Step right up
And hop on the Merry-Go-Round
Pick a horse, any horse
Round and round ~ the carousel’s bright lights
And magical ponies
Stationary, never changing, round and round it goes
From above the joker laughs at us all
The great engineer: knowing all, caring none

Step down; proceed to the house of mirrors
Look in and laugh
You are fat, you are thin, you are fat and thin
Reflections abound
Created to mock you
Take away your soul with illusion

Shoot the basket, five dollars for three tries, win a prize?
Rigged, contrived, set up
Beyond your control, in the dark of night
With trickery passed down
One generation to the next
Fooling you in silence
You can never win

Sideshow…the alligator man
The fattest woman ever
Mocking them
All the world’s a stage
Their role transparent
Yours hidden under subconscious guise
Puppet on a string

The next circus comes to town
The horses are all purple
You pay admission, buy your ticket: the same Merry-Go-Round.

©claireaperez@gmail.com

 

 

Let Go and Let God does not mean throw your soda can on the ground

I realize that is a long title but it sums up what I saw yesterday.  At the end of a long, hot week and a long hot month where the random fluctuations in my little universe have challenged me to rise up and cope, I was dismayed at the following scene.

Enroute to the pharmacy after my husband’s second arm casting of the week, we sat on the exit ramp.  In front of us I read the bumper sticker, “Let Go and Let God.”  I think ” what exactly does it mean for people?” For me, it means that God will intervene so I don’t have to do anything.  For that reason, I don’t particularly like this bumper sticker.

One thing I believe, if God is listening, he sure as hell, does not mean for me to abdicate my throne for hers.  Rather, I think, he wants me to get in there and do my part for the universe, as best  I can.  Yep, go ahead and forgive those mud slingers, Ann Coutler included.  But don’t wait for him to save me from her.

So back to this little scene on the ramp where I’m hot and bothered and at the end of my patience rope.  As I read the bumper sticker, I saw before me the driver open the car window, smash his soda can and drop it to the ground.  I started yelling at him, so tired, I didn’t want to beep, just yell out my window. By  the time my finger engaged the controller, the traffic was moving.

This man/woman drove off leaving the rest of us with his/her mess.  I imagine three scenarios for this piece of trash discarded into our universe:

a.  the can will be driven over, smushed probably, and it may affect someone’s tires.

b. a cautious driver may dodge it careening off to the right and into the guardrail.

c.the can will be picked up by the air or a person or a sweep of heavy rain and it will end up in recycling or the lake.

So, this is the bumper sticker I think God and I could agree on:

God Protect Me From Your Followers.

The followers who think that you created this beautiful planet and all of us for our own purposes, that we are not here to hold sacred each human, each piece of land, each day because somehow with your magical intervention, you are going to take care of it and make it all better, no matter what crap we put into the universe.

©claireaperez@gmail.com

Re-branding my dog ~ a lesson on spin applied to life

MU…our dear Boxer…rebranded and loved 2003 to 2008.

As a companion to my post on bullying, I dug through my archives to find this piece on branding that I wrote several years ago.

I have taught, and worked, individually with over 2000 people, children and adults. I have witnessed the same patterns over and over in human behavior. I am not a scholar of behavior, but I have found one pattern disturbing. People get branded by the society around them and then behave to fulfill the expectation. The society starts with childhood family and moves on through peoples’ lives.

When people are stuck and I have posed options to them, the responses have stunned me…their roots in voices miles, decades away.  I wrote this for the artist in the engineer and the engineer in the artist; the leader in the the group of followers and the follower in the leader; and of course, the hero in the scapegoat. Circa 2011

Imagine you are walking down the streets of New York City and you have not been branded yet. There is no story tagged to you, like a piece of tobacco rolled up in thin white paper without a name, you no longer have a label or a story. Gone is your award for class clown, bully, or friend, along with your tag lines: the family hero, writer, artist, black sheep, and on and on.

You, like the pieces of tobacco rolled in thin white paper have no brand. You are free to create your own brand. You can shake off what defined you and write your own story. Like the Virginia Slim, you can ‘go a long way baby.’ The projections of you can be wiped out like your fb account. This is what happened when I rebranded my dog Mu.

Mu was our first puppy. I fell in love with her from the beginning; failing to tell my husband she was not a pure bred until we were half way home. Five months into our relationship, things went bad. Mu grew powerful and started yanking at my shirt sleeve at the end of our walk. The louder I yelled, the more she tugged.

We went for walks or rather she did, with me almost achieving lift off as she dragged me down the path. What to do with this mutt, we should have bought a pure bred?

I told so many stories about my bad, bad dog, that people who knew me then, often ask now, “what ever happened with your crazy dog?”

Then one day, I picked Mu up from an overnight at the vet. I could hardly believe my eyes; there she stood, straight and still with the vet. I asked how she behaved: “Great, she is a sweetheart.”

On my way home I realized Mu was not crazy after all. I needed owner training. With the help of a kind friend, Cathy, I took control of the leash.

I then changed the story. Mu truly was a sweet dog and I started telling people that. In a few short conversations, my little Mu, became branded as the best little boxer this side of the Atlantic.

Now, back in New York City, as you walk through those streets smelling the car fumes and seeing the lights of possibility, you can take that energy and mold yourself into the creature you want to be ~ the one that lives on your own terms and sits like The Thinker, real or metaphorical, its own divine creation, living just once in a burst of beautiful light.

Like Don Draper of my once favorite show Mad Men, you can write your soul, for better or for worse. And as Don did, and I did for Mu you can take a story that condemns you, rewrite it, start spreading it, and change it.

©claireaperez@gmail.com

My Respect Paper ~ from my teaching memoirs

Into my third year as a high school teacher, I was having a heart-to-heart with my college bound senior class on the concept of respect.  They were only about ten years younger than myself but I was clearly the adult in the situation.  In the course of our conversation, one of the students said, “Why should I respect Emma?”

 Emma worked at our school as a teacher’s aide and lunch room monitor.  She was kind to me and we ate lunch every day together.  Emma went through the school of hard knocks and graduated.  I have heard she said some pretty crude things when her back was pushed up against a wall, but I honestly never heard her say anything inappropriate.

I was dismayed by my students response:  how arrogant, how condescending, how had we morphed into this world?  I felt I wanted to do something and so I did.  I assigned them a respect paper.  I asked them to write about the person they respected most and break it down into why, with three or four concrete examples. I hoped that through an anlysis of what constituted respect, they would grow to see the problem in their thinking about my friend Emma. Then they challenged me to do the same, I did.  What follows is the result, My Respect Paper.

I give everyone I come into contact with respect for two reasons.  The first reason is because we are all human beings, flawed and subject to the same vulnerabilities, the biggest being death which humbles and unites us all.  The second reason I give all human beings respect is because if I fail to do this, I may miss something important that they have to show me.  For example, if I did not respect my students despite their young age and inexperience, I would miss all the fresh ideas and hope they have to offer me.  The respect I give all human beings may heighten and intensify with time as I become more involved with them, but for this to occur I have to start with respect for mankind in general.

I have chosen to write my paper on Mr. Keating  (played by Robin Williams), a prep school teacher in the film Dead Poets Society  and a personification of what I respect in a human being and a teacher.

Mr. Keating has many admirable qualities and they are exhibited in his teaching style.  As a teacher, his goals were not content oriented but rather, student oriented.  Mr. Keating’s most impressive strength  was his ability to make his students look beyond poetry and into their souls.  This was evident on the first day of class when he led his students to the pictures of previous Welton graduates (Welton was the name of the school where he was teaching).  He instructed his students to look into the eyes of the alums and see the vigor, energy, and hope within those eyes.

“Lean in,” said Mr. Keating, and “peruse some of the faces from the past…invincible, just like you feel, the world is their oyster…their eyes are full of hope, just like you.  Did they wait to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable of?  Because you see Gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. Lean in and hear them whisper their legacy to you:  “Carpei, Carpei Diem.” “Seize the Day.”  “Make your lives extraordinary.'”

The best thing about this strategy was that it worked and his students began to seize the day as they ventured into their school year.

Secondly, I respected Mr. Keating’s dedication to nonconformity in his teaching.  Mr. Keating wanted students to think for themselves and this was clearly evidenced when he instructed them to tear out the first chapter on poetry analysis in their textbook.  “Excrement!” he stated as he told them to “Rip.”  He then went on to explain that poetry can not be measured by others who write about it, and that in his class, these young men would learn to think for themselves.  Although this method would not be possible for most teachers, a belief in independent thinking was illustrated well in this exercise.

Finally, Mr. Keating’s commitment to the individual student and helping him unearth what lies deep within his soul was tempered by his ability to guide, but not force.  He gave his students’ ideas in such a way that they wanted to explore life and poetry for themselves.  This was evidenced when he tempted them with knowledge about the Dead Poets Society, a secret organization where he and his peers found safety to “suck the marrow out of life” as they read and thought about poetry.  Mr. Keating was successful in stimulating his students to go beyond themselves as they too went to the caves around Welton and formed a Dead Poets Society.

In conclusion, Mr. Keating’s great ability as a teacher is admirable.  He took all of his life experiences and provided his students with the ability to experience life for themselves.  If you have not seen the movie, make some popcorn some night this summer and plug-in the VCR , it is well worth it.

I will truly miss you all next year, thanks for a great year, you have been an extraordinary class. “Carpei Diem.”

Words of Wisdom from Jean Ackerson Asher

One year ago Thursday, my friend Jean, passed away at the age of 87, days shy of her 88th birthday.   I hear her voice within me all the time and wanted to share some of her wisdom.

As a little back story, her daughter, Marianne Asher Cain, Ash, and I grew up together and we lived within two blocks of each other.  It was Jean and my friend who I cried to when I was dumped by my boyfriend and when office politics were just over the top for me.  It was Jean who supported our little escapades, whether funding our chocolate chip cookie bake off or giving Ash the car for us to go out at night, always Jean gently threw her head back and laughed, saying, “You Girls,” trusting that in the end Ash and I would be fine.

One summer in my early adult years, we were both off, I as a teacher, Jean as a retiree, and we had many conversations.  I am especially grateful for that time because I can see now that it refreshed the meaning of  all of the conversations we had earlier in my youth.  Jean has popped up in blogs before, but this is dedicated totally to her.

Here is a smattering of Jean Ackerson Asher’s wit and wisdom.

1. Life is coping with your problems.

No matter what we presented to Jean, this is what she told my friend and I. It was such a relief, I didn’t have to solve everything right then and there, all I had to do was cope. It was also a relief because, I grew up in the fairy tale land of the 1960s where people didn’t talk about problems. Jean normalized the concept of problems.

2. Girls, I’m gonna tell you, Monday morning always rolls around.

Jean would tell us this when we needed a pep talk, when we saw people who seemed to be dodging all of life’s bullets and having it “easier.” I can’t remember the specifics, but basically, it is the concept of Monday. Monday is reality, Monday is when you have to go to work because you have to pay your bills and because you have to be responsible. Jean  seemed to me to be saying, no one can escape Monday.

3. There is no accounting for people.

This response was uttered by Jean after many a story when Ash, or I, would discuss some blatant misdeeds of our peers or people we knew. Today, one might call it the WTF moment…you are standing there, a scene is set, people interact, and much to your dismay, you are completely dumbstruck by the absurdity of what you are witnessing. Either some ridiculous utterance has just passed a person’s lips or they have done something just unexpected, and outside the range of normal.

We could analyze all we want, pull out Freud and The Ennegram, but in the end, there “is just no accounting for people.”

4. What happened to helping people in your own sphere of influence?

Jean and I talked at length about the cruelties of the world.  We went one summer to a lecture series given by a Russian academic visiting our town, perhaps some of our conversations emanated from the stark reality this academic painted for us between Russia and the US.

Jean believed, I think, that you had to look around you and help your neighbor, literally.  It was the little things we do to help one another that made all the difference.  We weren’t going to Russia anytime soon, but we could help the people we came into contact with on a daily basis.

As evidence of this and to really show what I mean, this was left on Jean’s remembrance page.  I am sure there are many, many more examples of her true kindness, Jean’s sense of giving and reaching out:

David, John, Marianne, & Connie…so sorry for your loss. I have such fond memories of many times spent with your mother many years ago. But most of all, I am so grateful to her for giving me the first book that I actually read from cover to cover. If she hadn’t given that to me, I would not be the avid reader that I am today. My thoughts & prayers…
Joseph Zawko, Bear River, NS

5.  Oh Claire, come on in, but don’t look at this house

First of all Jean’s house was immaculate.  Second of all, it was beautiful. I remember bringing my husband over for a visit in circa 2003 and saying, “Wow everything is just as I remember it.”  There were touches of blue everywhere and it was set among large trees and a beautiful garden.  At Christmas, every window had a candle.  It truly enchanted me and nothing was ever out-of-place.

But the best part of those words were Come on in.  Jean was exuberant with her enthusiasm for seeing people and she always welcomed me, and many others, into her lovely home…it was wonderful.  Every time my husband and I left her company, my husband would say, something “She is really a joyful person, what a great spirit.”

6.  Oh, don’t worry about it, you have just had a cat fight.

One day, I burst into Jean’s house after a fight at work, and she just put it all in perspective.  Cats…lots of snarling, not much damage, usually.

7.  Come on in and let me get you some Tea or something…

When Jean died last year, I felt sucker punched when I got home from her funeral. The funeral was just beautiful and yet I felt so sad.  I put on my pjs and went to bed at 3 in the afternoon.  But, as I drifted off to sleep, I kept seeing her, standing over a bin of Country Living magazines, saying, “Oh, come on, its ok, have a cup of Tea.”  Unlike, other passages I have experienced, I felt so much peace.

8. Well, think about it, I’m 60 plus, my whole life, it was about what is next:  marriage, kids, grand-kids, and now, the next phase, the end.  Think about it!

Jean actually told me this the summer of our many talks, circa 1990.  She had a long time to prepare but when she was 80, she wrote me and said, I am not slowing down and I don’t intend to either.  Well into her 80s, I remember her saying in a phone conversation, “Well I’m so mad, I wanted to make a St. Patty’s Day dinner for Mike and Marianne and I can’t do it!”

9. What about you?

Yes, what about me…I was always worried about everyone…such a girl thing, and I must admit, a Claire thing.  Often, in the center of some long diatribe where I would be going on about one thing or another, and this person’s needs and that person’s feelings, Jean would interrupt and say, “Well, what about you?”

I know I was raised during the Me generation, but honestly, it was a good lesson.  And still is, for any woman who thinks the world just might fall apart without her.

10.  It is very sad and very bad, but, you can not, you must not, let this ruin your life.

This was in response to a break up of sorts, a parting of the ways shall we say.  But words I have chosen to live by and hear more frequently than I can say to anyone.

So here is to you Jean, to the wisdom you passed on to me, and to whatever we can all do to make someone’s life a little brighter.  It may make all the difference!

Jean loved Blue, so here is a photo Jean just for you!

 

Bullying in the eyes of the beholders

alone

I worked once, over 30 years ago, with a tragic character.  Her name, fictionalized, was Sephina.  I thought of her whenI watched Charley based on  Flowers for Algernon. A story about bullies ~ adult bullying exists and Sephina was my first introduction to this behavior.

Sephina was the daughter of first-generation Italians raised in an Italian working-class community during the 1930s.  She was odd and she was justifiably paranoid.   Her behavior did not fit the norm; she talked to herself, in between answering phones.  She was the receptionist at an office where I held a temporary job, and the butt of humor for the adults behind the glass door that separated the reception area from the offices.

It seemed Sephina’s fear that people were talking about her increased with their talking about her and that is where, as I recall, her paranoia became evident.  As she sat down at her station, her eyes would become big and bigger with each person that grazed past her desk.  Individuals spoke a casual, “Hello,” then turned to one another and giggled as they opened the glass door and went to their cubicles and desks. Many times I heard small groups whisper to each other, “Oh, there is Sephina, talking to herself, she is so crazy.”

My Aunt, the daughter of Italian immigrants herself, knew Sephina and told me that her husband was a brute.  He controlled her every waking moment, rarely let her out of his sight, and demanded much in the way of household chores. I imagined how after being outwardly shunned all day, never invited to Chicken and Biscuit lunches, and climbing into her husband’s car, Sephina went home to more abuse and labor:  fixing dinner, cleaning, and making her husband’s lunch for the next day, all the while hearing:  “You f____  c ___!”

Sephina dressed in tailored skirts, matching sweaters, and carried a plaid handbag.  I watched her leave the office one day, head bowed, staring at the ground as she opened her husband’s car door and slid into the passenger side.  He looked like one of those guys in life who never smiled, harsh, grumpy.

One day my Aunt invited Sephina over to her house because we both wanted to see how she made homemade noodles.  She taught us step-by-step this arduous process, which I have never done again.  She and my Aunt talked about the old days, the kindness of people back then, and some of their mutual acquaintances.  Sephina acted perfectly fine and made delicious homemade pasta.

Then she went back to work the next day and to the role she was cast in by that small little world she had grown to inhabit.  The role, which her husband  solidified (as my aunt told me) when she was told repeatedly, “you are no good.”   It is natural to assume the part and become the victim of the role cast in:  the unsuspecting person believes it and acts on it.  I learned Sephina was not crazy; she was encased in a socially cemented part that her husband and co-workers reinforced.

It is our social nature to want to belong.  Groupthink is when individuals follow the thinking of the group even when it causes cognitive dissonance.  People with power get away with bullying, not because they are right, but because the individuals around them who comprise the immediate group, do not have the courage to question the behavior of someone in authority.  Things will change, when individuals within groups stop supporting the erroneous myths and behaviors of those around them.  Children will learn from that example as they replicate the behavior of their adult caretakers.

I never saw Sephina again but in my mind, she still sits alone, isolated from the group behind the glass door.  A person with more courage than most.

 

For further reading, Ode to Bucky Goad will break your heart.

©claireaperez@gmail.com

Reflections on Teaching 1987, circa 1996

 

Looking through the windows of a one room school house:  June 9 2016…reflections on the window and through the window

I went back in 1987 to my old high school, no longer in existence, to teach social studies.  As I turn the magic number this week of 55, I can now collect my monthly pension. My ten year payout is paltry compared to what thirty years in gives retirees, but I have worked with people who lived on that amount. I am grateful and my life is simple.
Today I will reflect on the one room school house. There I was with 130 or so faces passing through my classroom daily and I was ill equipped to discipline in the late 20th century, when an older English teacher told me: ‘the best way to discipline: pretend you are in a one room school house.’

This picture above is a one room school house.  His advice sounded good and sometimes it worked.  Most of the time, it did not.

It worked when I taught a college level Macro-Economics course to 17 well-behaved, motivated, curious students.  I loved what I was teaching and the students and I gelled.  Throughout my lectures, discussions arose that made me think that I was connecting to humanity in a profound way.  Teaching at its best: those moments when everybody gets it and falls silent at the weight of the knowledge.

 

The students wanted to learn from me and I believe I did a good job.  It was the parent of one of these students who sent me the greatest thank you note in my teaching career. I have it somewhere among my things: she left a message with the school secretary who wrote it out and  to the effect, it read ‘Dan loves your class and cant wait to get there everyday.’

Most of the time, my one room school house was a wreck, or close to it.  To be fair, I weighed 40 pounds less than I do now, was ill prepared for coping with the illnesses and drugs that coursed through the veins of my students, and was evaluated at the time by my aunt’s hard core divorce friend as, ‘too nice for this world.’

My disclaimer however, should not substitute for the lack of support I received from parents, colleagues in the department, and administrators, to run my one room school house.  Nor should it negate, the expectations placed on me to bring out the best in all 130 souls that passed my way. For me, the weight of the conflict was extraordinary…I knew after my first year, I could give public school teaching 10 years but that a lifetime of it would drain my soul.

In the same one room, circa 1996, thirty-three hormonal fourteen year olds barreled into my Global Studies class for ninth period, the last class of the day.  Thirty-three students is a number at which you just pray to keep them all alive without melting down yourself.  The end of the day…always a bad class time, thats why it is assigned to new teachers. Students at fourteen have been trapped for about 7 hours, they want out, jumping beans come to mind.  I delivered the material but I was really in survivor mode.

At a parent teacher conference, a parent of a shy young man from that class took me to task. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a bright kid here, I would think that you would pull him aside, nurture him, encourage him, get him to his personal best. Not come home with Cs.’

I literally was speechless. He had a point, but what I wanted to yell back at him was, 168 students (we were in an over enroll year) pass through that door everyday.  You have one – you do the job!

Now I say: Sir, I would of if I could of!

@claireaperez@gmail.com

Claire Anne Perez

Beavers in the Gloaming

It had been a slow day, neither good or bad, just there, rainy.

Moby, our little happy dog, loves to walk, so I buckled him in and there we went. Watching him makes me want to break out in song, Zippity do dah, Zippity day. He is so oblivious to his own might at 80 pounds and so enthusiastic, as measured my the speed and rhythm  of his tail.

Rain in spring is marvelous…the greens and white apple tree blooms scream life through the grey monochrome and as we reached the bottom of the trail, my friend and I, and turned north to go home, we veered off to visit the beaver pond.

In the drenched grey, the wood ducks heard us and flew off. I looked around for other signs of life…could it be? I thought, as I saw a head across the way…a beaver?

It was not one beaver but 4….4 heads swimming…I braced, would Moby see?
No, he continued sniffing and I continued watching, hoping they wouldn’t cross over to our side.

As they came around the curve of the pond I whistled, either my whistle or their directive turned them around. I watched as they approached the embankment that leads to a second pond below.

The beavers emerged up onto the land, one by one they paired up.Their long swimming tails appearing like magic from the dark water:two  beavers in front, two in back. They proceeded, their backs to me, over their beaver-made dike, like some soldiers on a mission.

Their reality so concrete in the same burst  of time as mine…
so unaware of some forces far greater that
could simply bulldoze their world down.

Macadew…

Macadew is a big powerful dog.  He weights 80 plus pounds and his spirit is stronger than the body that contains him.  We picked him and his brother Moby out at the SPCA four years ago.  The night we brought them home, two rambunctious pups with two middle-aged “parents,” my husband looked at each other and said, “What have we done?  Maybe they were right, those people at the SPCA, when they saw us leave with two pit bull mix puppies and said, really, both of them?”

My husband said, “the brindle’s ok, but that little black & white (Moby) one might have to go…he seems a bit high strung.”  The next day began a routine that my husband has really been in charge of…I’m good with the love part and the walk part, he is great with the training.  The first thing he taught them was  Sleepy Time treat…from their first month with us, as soon as he said Sleepy Time, they stopped what they were doing and marched into their little cages.  Here is a glimpse.

As time wore on, we realized that the little Moby, was the more docile creature of the two. He is also, like a little Buddha.  He watches things, he follows us around, he watches more things, he sighs, and his walk is a little zig zaggy.  We thought he was going to have hip problems.  But, as time has demonstrated, he zips along happy as can be and gets plenty of rest.

Its Macadew who is a handful.  Not in a bad sense, but in a, oh my gosh, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of his teeth when your playing with him; and he needs to run and jump a lot!  One day, as a pup, he ran away, like a gazelle leaping over bushes and small trees on a bright sunlit winter morning…he moved faster than my eyes could track.  Suddenly, he was across the pond…his bronzed shape running like a beam of light under the green pines and against the white snow.

The Mobs and the Mac

Old photo…Macadew Moby, just because

dog investigation under way

We worry when we take him on long woods walks that he will pick up a scent and disappear forever.  It gives us pause when we look up and see no sign of the boy. Then with great relief, we hear him charging through the bramble and Radames says to me, “Look at him jump, here he comes.”

A strong dog, I did not expect at 4.5 months to look over at Macadew last Thursday night and see a creature shriveled up in pain.  His back was arching and he had a look of an old man on his face.  I panicked.  We thought maybe it was a bug and it would go away in an hour or two.  The next day, things weren’t getting better.  We took him to the vet and to the animal hospital.

Macadew has disc disease…apparently all the jumping caused it, or perhaps, it was one moment of play with Moby. At this point he is healing…completely in his crate with leash walks to eat and go outside and then back in the crate.  We see him making progress but the whole family is down.  Moby doesn’t understand when he is outside Mac’s cage, why Mac won’t engage in play.  My husband and I are worried that Macadew won’t get better and/or we will be faced with a 7000 surgery or wheel cart.  But mostly, we are in shock that our beautiful, robust creature is down.  We hope the next 7 weeks show healing and we hope that when he does get better, his little spirit can soar through the woods he loves.

@claireaperez@gmail.com