Quick Takes

Thanks, Jen, for hosting!

**1**

50 cent

= crude rapper

or the price of a fun book off the book sale rack at the library.

**2**

I have a new deskmate: my son’s pet Parakeet Percy (named because my son saw a Walker Percy book sitting on the shelf; the bird is not named after Percy Jackson the Lightening Thief, or Percy Weasley, Ron’s snivelly big brother.) Although I regret the space of my desk that the bird’s cage consumes, I don’t mind having the company. In fact, it was me probably more than anyone who wanted the bird, even though now we’ll have to find someone to watch him when we travel. We went to the pet shop to look at fish, and what do you know – parakeets on sale! Percy was the last blue one left.

Percy is the second budgie we have had. Lady lived only a few short months a year or so ago. Lady was yellow, which was not my oldest’s first choice, but she seemed the tamest bird in the cage at Animal Jungle, our favorite pet shop in Virginia Beach: where else can you get alligators, feed the stingrays, admire tortoises, monkeys, and ocelots (not for sale), as well as all the usual suspects, plus an extremely large fish section. Pets were big business in Va Bch. There were two doggie daycares near our house, a handful of groomers, and a dog stuff boutique.

We did get fish, too.

**3**

I promised new pets after we moved. But here it has been 7 months, and I hadn’t delivered. Easy to make a promise, harder to keep. But I enjoy the animals as much or more than the kids. I'll buy into the argument for pets as an aid to contemplation. They make you stop and stare.  I can see why owning a pet can lower your blood pressure, although when your dog wants to be fed at 5:30 on a snow day, your blood pressure may rise.

**4**

We did get a few flakes of snow today, justifying the day off of school. I think our administrators didn't want to be left out of the blizzard the rest of the country is experiencing.

**5**

 

Made granola the other day after a trip to the health food store to get things like flax seed, pepitoes, and wheat bran (and Dr. Bronner's soap, which I was introduced to by Dr. Bronner's grandson, who lived across the street from us years ago with his cheerful and pretty blond wife. I wonder what Dr. Bronner, with his aphorisms like "Smile, help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith, Lightning-like strong & we're All-One! All-One!" and reworkings of Chaucer, Longfellow, and Kipling all over the bottles of his soap, thought about his grandon being a fighter pilot in the Navy). I like to fancy myself a little bit crunchy. But just around the edges. For example, after Miss C and I made granola, we rolled out homemade sugar cookies for the kids’ Valentine’s parties.  But I frosted them with the stuff from a can because I can’t stand to waste all that butter on some cookies that will be crumbled on a classroom floor. (The parties were cancelled along with school today, so I have 4 dozen cookies to get rid of before Wednesday. I will be really, really disappointed if our parochial school pushes back the Valentines'/Mardi Gras party they were supposed to have today to Ash Wednesday. Surely they won't, but my son said his teacher said they might).

**6**

There is a thin line between crunchy and cheap. How many “green” things have I done – cloth diapers for the first 3, hanging laundry on the line, keeping the thermostat low – because I want to conserve energy and matter, and how much have I done because I want to conserve money? Has my frugality cheated my kids out of some pleasures (for instance, new bikes instead of thrift store junkers)? Does it matter if thriftiness and guilt motivate me to reuse plastic bags and send reusable water bottles instead of juice boxes in the lunch boxes, more than a sense of stewardship?

**7**

A list for Lent:

Giving up:

Sugar

I'd say alcoholic drinks, but since my husband is gone, I don't drink them anyway.

Looking at blogs after 10 pm (when I'm more liable to get lulled into excessive clicking and commenting...)

 

Adding in:

Mass at least 3x a week

Going to bed by 11

Reading Peter Kreeft's Prayer for Beginners, Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace, and I want to order something by Caryll Houselander.

More on dead pets

My sister just told me she disagreed with our death management practices.  Animals don't have souls, so go ahead and put them down, she said.

But my point wasn't that the animal needed a peaceful death experience, but that WE needed a nonviolent one.  If the animal doesn't have a soul, then why worry about its pain? Animals die in pain all the time in the claws of their predators.  But what about the effect of watching an animal die vs. killing it on our souls?

I agree that if your dog has rabies like Ol' Yeller, or is vomiting or excreting all over your house, then you have to put it down. Or if your horse has a broken leg and will never get up again, but will take months to die, then you have to put it down. But our rabbit wasn't a nuisance, so why should we have to commit an act of violence to put it out of its imagined misery?  It would've caused us more pain than watching it die.

It's not easy to kill a pest, let alone a pet.  What would St. Francis say? Swat that mouse, or move it out of the house, like St. Martin de Porres?  While you hesitate, that mouse is growing fatter in your larder, BD . . .

A death in the family

We have a somber household today. This morning a member of our menagerie expired. Rosie, the friendly miniature lop rabbit, is no more. A couple of weeks ago, she began drooling, and I suspected something was amiss. But we were busy getting ready to go to OKC and finishing reading fair projects, so I didn’t call the vet. And she was a hand-me-down rabbit – hard to justify spending $60 for a vet visit. About 2 months ago, I did actually take her to the vet to have her teeth trimmed because she wasn’t chewing on anything. My suspicion is that she developed an abscess or infection as a result of this trimming, and maybe the vet would have discounted an antibiotic. But we didn’t go.

When we returned from our trip, she looked worse: a bald patch appeared under her chin from drooling, and her cheek looked swollen. I finally called the vet to schedule an appointment on Friday. But Friday afternoon she had blood under her nose and was wheezing. She also had shrunk from not eating. I hemmed and hawed about taking her. I didn’t want to pay for treatment for a dying animal. I also didn’t want to look like a bad pet owner to the vet and my kids. After consulting my rabbit killing father, my husband agreed to put her “to sleep” himself. I cancelled the vet appointment.
By the time husband returned home, the rabbit was lying on her side. She looked like she was going to breathe her last any minute. Why knock her head with a blunt object or smother her if she was just going to fade out on her own? The kids all patted her and went to bed bawling about how nice she was and how sad to wake up with one less pet.

But she was still alive in the morning.

I started to feel a little guilty. Should we put her out of her misery? She didn’t seem to be suffering visibly. Neither I nor my husband wanted to be the one to “put her down” with a swift bludgeon to the head. Why is it that we feel compelled to kill animals near death? I try not to anthropomorphize our pets, but if they aren’t miserable, why go ahead and kill them? Is there a little unconscious sadism at work? How many dogs die naturally these days? Of course, dogs start to pee the carpet and get snippy when they are dying. This rabbit was just lying there. And eventually she died, like my 11yr old’s rat, who spent about 4 days shrinking until he finally breathed his last.
If we keep our small pets partly as teaching tools for our kids, they are useful for teaching about caring for the dying as well as the living, a reminder of that forgettable 7th corporal act of mercy. I was a bit squeamish about touching dead things, but my kids reached in and patted the rabbit and carried her out to her grave in the backyard, and wept as they shoveled dirt on her already stiffening body and said a few prayers of thanksgiving for her life.
The younger kids were similarly without fear this past summer when my grandmother lay in her coffin. They reached in and patted her hands and stared and said goodbye without self-consciousness, while I held back and felt awkward standing at her coffin. This grandmother was free with her commentary on the appearances of corpses, and I think she would have been pleased with her own appearance, although she looked thin. May she rest in peace and find happiness in Heaven.