The full moon was September 13, which just happened to be a Friday. This was shortly after moonrise. It was cloudy.
The color in the clouds was there, but not really visible to the naked eye. I let my camera take whatever exposure it wanted to. That resulted in an exposure about a second or two long, which allowed the colors to be seen in the image.
The clouds were not moving quickly, but eventually the moon came out.
Zeke 2005(?)-2019
Zeus 2000(?)-2009
The first time Zeus, my last doberman, and I saw Zeke, he was lying in our across-the-street neighbor’s front yard. Our neighbor had brought him home for the kids, but the dog stayed outside and I never saw anyone interact with him. I guess they fed him, since he didn’t seem to be losing weight. On weekends when I took Zeus for a walk, Zeke always watched us hopefully. I was a little uncertain about this dog with what seemed like such a big head, so I usually ignored him, and Zeus and I went on our way. One day I gave in and said, “OK, come on.” It was all he needed.
After that, Zeke went with us on our walks. He eventually gravitated towards our house. The neighbors apparently thought we stole their dog, but Zeke made his own decision. But we already had a dog. I had adopted Zeus from a doberman rescue group in 2003 after my previous doberman died. We all got along well, and everyone was happy with the way things were.
So we did what we always do with the abandoned dogs up here, we took Zeke to the vet for vaccinations and then advertised for someone to adopt him.
Someone did adopt him. As they left, I warned them not to let Zeke out of their van off leash because he would run away. Even that long ago he always took off if given an opportunity. So they assured us they would keep him on leash, and they drove off.
Shortly after Zeke’s adoption Leah and I drove out to Yellowstone for a two-week vacation. When we got home, we had a message from our vet. Someone had found “our” dog, checked the rabies tag and called the vet. “Our” dog was being boarded on the other side of town. We decided it was fate telling us that Zeke really was our dog, so we brought him home. That was in the fall of 2006.
Zeus was familiar with Zeke by that time, and Zeus was a good-natured dog, so they got along well. Zeke naturally assumed the position of second dog. Zeus had a bed beside our living room sofa, and Zeke had one against a wall. When we went to bed, Zeus came into our room to a bed beside our bed. Then Zeke got up and went to Zeus’s bed beside the sofa.
Sometimes they shared the bed.
Zeke loved Zeus.
Back in those days I sometimes took both dogs on walks into the woods off leash. Zeus stayed pretty close, but Zeke immediately disappeared into the woods. Sometimes he came back out with us, and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes Zeus and I would get a couple of hundred yards up the road before Zeke followed us up. Zeus seemed worried about that, because he kept looking back over his shoulder for Zeke.
I sometimes took both dogs outside if I happened to have work to do in the yard. Zeus would stay near, but not Zeke. Unfortunately, Zeus followed Zeke if he decided to go exploring. Once he led Zeus about two miles down the mountain, where one of our neighbors recognized them and called us. They were covered in mud.
The two dogs were pretty much inseparable for the next three years, except for when I had to drive somewhere in my truck. I could put Zeus in the back seat of the truck and leave the windows down if the weather was warm, and he would never try to get out of the truck. But Zeke would always try to get out of the truck if the windows were low enough. That meant Zeke couldn’t go if the weather was warm and I had to get out of the truck without the dogs.
So it was that I drove over to my mother’s house one Sunday with Zeus but not Zeke. When we got out of the truck, Zeus began to stagger. He had never done that before, so I had no idea what was happening. I called our vet to have someone come in to the office, then I rushed over. The vet hooked up an ECG machine to check his heart. The trace looked like a bug had crawled through ink and then across the ECG printout. Zeus was suffering from cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that is not uncommon in doberman pinschers.
The vet prescribed some medication, but there is really no effective treatment for the condition. Zeus seemed OK for a while. Then one day in late December he was lying in his bed beside the sofa as we watched television. I would usually have one hand on him as we sat there, but not this time. I got up for something and looked at Zeus. He was twisted backwards as if he were trying to look over his back, and he was not moving. He had died right there beside us. That was December 29, 2009.
So Zeke became our only dog. Who knows whether dogs understand what death means. He seemed OK, but we knew he missed Zeus.
In any event, we continued to live our lives and so did Zeke. He was one of the good ones. Other than running away if a door was left open, he was an almost ideal dog. He knew what we wanted him to do, and he did it. If we took him to the vet, he almost automatically walked over to the scales and climbed up to be weighed. He remained calm while the vet poked him, and he stood stoically when he got his temperature taken or had vaccinations.
When my mother died in 2013 and we inherited her little dog Lucy, Zeke was perfectly OK with it. They didn’t have much to do with each other, not a surprise given the size difference. But Zeke never tried to eat her dinner or take her treats. He respected her.
Zeke got out of the house pretty often. At least it seemed that way. He would roam all over the top of the mountain and sometimes far down towards the bottom. One time someone who lived in Texas Valley found him running loose in the rain and brought him back to our house in her backseat. He was soaked, and so was her back seat. Another time a county police officer brought him back.
That was essentially Zeke’s only fault.
I knew that after 13 years Zeke’s days were numbered. He had been turning gray and slowing down. But when I took him in for his annual shots last week, I told them to give him a three-year rabies vaccination. On Monday, he started acting like he was in pain. We assumed it was his arthritic back, which occasionally causes him some pain. I gave him one of his pain pills and we waited. It has always taken a couple of days for him to get any relief, so we weren’t surprised that he was restless Monday night. Then on Tuesday, he threw up everything he ate. On Wednesday he didn’t. But Wednesday night he became restless again. I noticed that his breathing was shallow and quick. I considered taking him to the emergency vet clinic that recently opened in Rome, but I decided to wait till Thursday to take him back to our vet.
She palpated him abdomen, and he yelped. She decided he had some kind of stomach upset, so she prescribed an anti-nausea pill and some antibiotics.
Late Thursday night, Zeke was in distress. He was obviously in pain, and although he politely ate his dinner around 4 in the afternoon, he refused anything later, no matter how tempting it would normally be. I wanted to give him another pain pill, but I couldn’t get him to eat a marshmallow with a pill hidden inside. Or even a little bit of ice cream.
By 11 pm he was so bad I decided to take him to the emergency vet clinic. I had to carry him to the truck. Along the way his rear end fell off the back seat and got wedged between the back seat and the back of the front seat. That would never have happened to him before.
At the clinic they did blood work. His liver and kidneys were not functioning, and his white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets were all off. His abdomen was very painful to the touch. Then they did an ultrasound. That’s when they found the big mass on his spleen.
He was in such pain and discomfort that I decided to leave him at the vet’s so they could give him some strong pain medication. There was no way he could possibly have gone home and not been in unacceptable pain. I got in bed around 2 am, with the intention of getting up around 6:45 to pick him up and take him to our regular vet.
The clinic called around 6 am to tell me he was still having pain despite the strong medications they were giving him.
I picked him up around 7:30. The vet at the clinic had been talking about going to Atlanta or Chattanooga to a specialist for a more extensive ultrasound, or possibly a biopsy. Since it was Friday I figured there was no way I could get him to a specialist until after the weekend. Zeke needed some kind of immediate attention, so I took him to a different vet we had used before, one that I thought probably had an ultrasound at the clinic. The emergency clinic sent all Zeke’s test results so they could look at it before I got there.
I took him into the clinic and waited in an exam room for a while. Zeke was still in obvious pain. As we waited for the vet, he was shivering and every breath turned into a moan.
When the vet came in, she had looked at the test results and said there was so much going on with Zeke that trying to resolve anything at that point would be useless. His organs were just giving up. She said the only realistic course of action was euthanasia. It was not a surprise to me. I had already told Leah that I did not expect Zeke to come back home.
I took Zeke home and buried him in the yard next to Lucy’s grave. Back in 2009 I had Zeus cremated. I put his ashes in the grave with Zeke, along with Zeke’s collar and his peanut butter bong.
Zeke seemed to crash suddenly. One day he was feeling OK, and four days later he was in such bad condition that it was intolerable. As we look back, though, we think we see signs of problems going back weeks if not months. For one thing, he had been drinking abnormally large amounts of water for a long time. The trouble he had making the climb back to the house on our regular walk down the mountain, which I had attributed to age, might have been the result of his cancer. Dogs, like most animals, hide their pain and worsening health as long as they can. I hate to think he might have been having pain for weeks before we realized it. I also have to wonder whether something might have been done if we had know about the tumor earlier.
Zeke is the fifth dog I have had euthanized, and it doesn’t get any easier with practice. In every case I have known that the only alternative was pain, and a painful death in a short time. But I still feel guilty about doing it. I feel like it’s a betrayal of my dog’s trust. I’m supposed to help them, and they trust me to do that. In the end, I can’t help.
We let Sam see Zeke’s body before I buried him. We don’t know whether he realized what he was seeing, but we think Sam is going to miss Zeke terribly.
I wrote this Friday night, after picking Zeke up, taking him the vet, deciding to have him put down, digging a hole in the ground, putting Zeke in it and filling it back up.
We did our usual Friday night stuff. We went out for chicken, and I thought now we only need to bring home two french fries, not four as usual. We had just gotten used to not having to bring home a tiny extra piece for Lucy.
We watched Secret Life of Pets 2, and went to bed. I thought I would sleep soundly Friday since I had only about four hours of sleep Thursday night. But I didn’t.
This morning Zeke was still gone.
This was too sudden. We really didn’t have any warning that it was coming.
How can a dog fill a house? Even a dog of Zeke’s size? As I went about my morning routine this morning, every time I turned around there was a hole that Zeke used to fill. When Zeke slept by the bed, I had to pet him a little every time I passed by, getting into bed, getting out of bed to go to the bathroom, going back to bed, getting up in the morning. He needed a scratch on his back, or on his belly or on the top of his head.
I put on my socks this morning, and I didn’t have to give Zeke a little pat on the head between socks. He didn’t stick his head between my legs as I tried to put on my shorts. I took Sam out, and I didn’t have to wait while Zeke stared off down the driveway, thinking whatever doggy thoughts he did in the mornings.
I ran our battery vacuum around the house to pick up the dog hair, and I didn’t have to let Zeke skirt around me to get away from the sound. I wondered whether the vacuum would have half as much hair from now on, because there wouldn’t be that snow-shower of dog hair every time he shook. We won’t need that hand towel by the water bowl that we used to wipe his mouth after drinking — sometimes he forgot to swallow that last mouthful of water.
He won’t be watching hopefully when I pick up the keys to my truck. He always wanted to go for a ride.
He was only a dog, but he left a hole in our lives that was bigger than a dog.
As usual, the best sunsets we see are those we can never really get a good photo of. There was a nice sunset Sunday night as we drove home from a short outing. This is the best we could get.
The moon was a waxing crescent.
Maybe one of these days I’ll start taking an actual camera with me instead of relying on the iPhone, as good as it is for some shots.
My brother Henry would be 72 years old today, September 2, 2019. I have wanted to write about him ever since he died, back in April 2018, but have had trouble getting started. I decided to start his story today. I will add to it as I am able.
Henry’s story started on September 2, 1947, in Akron, Ohio, when he was born. But this story starts a few days after May 18, 1950, because that’s the earliest date Henry could remember, and it’s when the story teller’s story started. Henry was not sure that the ride to the hospital was a real memory. He thought he might have manufactured it after having been told about it many times. But the facts are right.
Henry and our father came to McCall Hospital a few days after I was born to pick up me and our mother and take us home.
Me, as a baby, and Henry, as a very young little boy
Home was 19B Redmond Road, the third house on the left, at the intersection with Leland Avenue. Our house was one of a long line of almost identical houses on both sides of the road. They were at the edge of Summerville Park, a little four-block-square neighborhood bounded by the Berry College campus on the north, Martha Berry Boulevard on the east, and Berry property on the west. There was a swampy low area around a creek on the south, and just beyond it a dirt road that passed a brick yard with several domed kilns.
Our back yard, me breaking with my father’s hat
Our row of houses was built as temporary housing for Battey Hospital, which was at the end of the long straight section of Redmond Road where we lived. Battey had a nice, college-like campus with multiple buildings and a little residential area. It was separated from Summerville Park by a forest of tall loblolly pines. Battery was built during World War II as a hospital for injured military. It became a tuberculosis sanitarium around 1946, and that’s what it was when we lived on Redmond Road.
When were ever that small?
The rest of the houses in Summerville Park were a mix of (probably) late 30’s homes, small but mostly neat. Our house was utilitarian. Each side of the duplex was a mirror image of the other. I guess each side was about 30 feet square. There was a small eat-in kitchen with a gardenia right outside the window, a living room, two bedrooms and a bathroom. In the center, with a door from each room, there was a hall with a floor furnace. All of our shoes showed a singed grid pattern on the soles from standing on the floor furnace in the winter.
Our father built an enclosed back porch where our washer and dryer and our freezer were. He built the room by himself.
Henry follows orders, I do not. I want a close-up.
Henry and I shared a bedroom, which was probably the interior room. We had twin beds. Our father, who liked model trains, built a folding train table. It folded up between sets of shelves against the wall, and could be lowered down between our beds. We could fold it down and have two ovals of track, one in S-scale for our American Flyer train, and one in HO scale, for our father’s train. Henry used parts of the shelving units when he built a Wilson cloud chamber when he was a teenager. A cloud chamber is a device used in early particle physics. It is typical that Henry would build something like that.
Henry explains things to a neighborhood boy.
Our parents had the corner bedroom. The little living room had a sofa and an overstuffed chair. Our father built a cabinet for a little black-and-white TV, a radio, and a turntable.
Christmas morning in the old duplex.
There was no air conditioning, of course. We eventually bought a window unit for the living room. When our father’s job changed at the Post Office, he had to work nights and sleep during the day. They bought a little window unit for their bedroom, mainly to provide white noise to drown out the noises the rest of us made.
No smile here.
At some point in the late 1950’s we took over the other side of the duplex. Our father reinforced the ceiling in the attic and tore down the wall separating the two living rooms. Henry’s bedroom moved to the far corner, and mine moved to what had been the interior bedroom of the other part of the duplex. What had been our bedroom became a den, where the TV was placed. We had an antenna on a pole right outside the window, so we could twist the pole to adjust the antenna for better reception. We could get the three networks on Atlanta stations and the same three networks from Chattanooga stations.
A little smile here.
In the summers we played flies-and-skinners, a baseball game with a hitter and a bunch of kids trying to catch the balls on the ground (skinners) or in the air. We played kickback in Leland Avenue, a football kicking game. We played kick the can. We believed that we had the right of free passage across all of our neighbors’ yards. We didn’t know how they felt about that, and we didn’t care. We crossed two other yards to reach “the woods”, a pine thicket between the last house between us and Martha Berry Boulevard.
“The woods” was divided into the familiar section closest to civilization (our house), and a less well explored section closer to the highway. The familiar area was where we built our forts. Several trails led into the wilderness, but we seldom went there.
Mother and children
The woods also bordered the property of an old, abandoned mansion. On the other side of the mansion were the Glenwood Apartments. Sometimes when we felt especially wicked we would sneak up to the corner apartment, where all the electrical switch boxes were mounted. We would throw the switches to turn off power in some, possibly all the apartments in that block, and then run back home.
Father and children. Caps are so cool.
There was, and still is, a city park on the diagonally-opposite corner of Summerville Park. The city provided games and athletic equipment, plus a teenaged supervisor, for the neighborhood kids. We rode our bikes to the park most days. The hills were much higher and steeper in those days than when I drive over them today.
In 1953 Henry started elementary school at Fourth Ward School, two houses down from our father’s old home and a mile from ours. That was when Henry started his new life away from home, while I was still there, just three years old, still a baby. Almost all the memories of our lives are from after that time. Most of the memories are episodic, and they usually center on me, since at that age, all kids are selfish little barbarians.
One of Henry’s school photos. He rarely smiled.
It was only in going back to those early days and trying to remember how we all lived that I realized how little interaction there was between two boys separated by almost three years in age. One of my earliest memories of those days is me chasing on foot after Henry, who was riding his new little bicycle down the street. For many years that was the kind of feeling I had about our relationship; Henry was forging on with a three-year head start, and I was struggling along behind him, handicapped by my own age.
I have no shovel, but I must try to hold it over my shoulders. Because Henry.
Ever since my Uncle Tommy died not long ago, Leah and I have been meeting Aunt Micki for lunch almost every Wednesday. A couple of cousins also come to our lunches. We have not had this much interaction with my relatives in a long time, and both of us enjoy it.
On Friday, we met Micki at a chicken place. She brought along one of her long-time tennis partners. It turns out her long-time tennis partner is my cousin. Her grandfather was my father’s grandfather, and her mother was my father’s aunt. She brought along family photos of her grandfather and his eight sons, and her grandfather and grandmother with their four daughters. One of the sons was Grady V. Paris Sr, my father’s father.
The bearded fellow in the front row is her grandfather, and all the rest are her uncles. Leah and I think my grandfather, Grady Sr, was the second from the right in the rear. Here is a photo that I think is my grandfather with his dog.
Here is the photo of my great-grandfather with his wife and their four daughters.
The poor, little lady sitting next to my great-grandfather was the mother of those eight boys and four girls. It’s no wonder she looks played out. The sister with her hand on her mother’s shoulder was my newly-found cousin’s mother.
I have met only one of the people in the picture of the men, and I do not know which one it was. He was called Ab. Apparently he was a riverboat gambler at one time. Today there is no way to verify that story, since anyone who could know of it is long dead.
The men are not named on the photograph. My cousin said hers is a just a copy that she got from her brother (now in his 90’s). She hopes her brother’s possibly original photo has names on the back. If so, we can identify my grandfather and Great Uncle Ab for sure.
It seems that the Paris family is pretty big. It also seems that I am descended from a dog lover. No surprise there.