Oh That Shirley...She's Just Something

There is an older man a who lives in my neighborhood with his little dog Shirley.  Lets call him Ed because truthfully, he has been walking that dog past my house for a decade and I just realized  that while I used to know his name, I've forgotten it.  Oh, stop it. The eighties were hard on my memory okay?  Shirley is a Shitsu, or a Lasa or something like that, only tiny. Her legs are three inches long, she's no more than eight inches tall and less than a foot long. She is such a feather that when Ed wants to pick her up he just lifts the leash attached to her harness and...Elevator Up!

Ed and Shirley walk past my house on the opposite side of the street every day. They used to walk on the same side of the street as my house, but more on that later. He is in his late eighties, very tall, and needs a knee replacement badly, which makes the walk a slow proposition. When I'm outside I call across and say hello and ask how they are doing. Sometimes I'll go over and chat with them. We talk about the weather, how his knee is doing, and most of all, about Shirley.

I'll squat down, waaaay down, on the sidewalk and coo to her in a voice I reserve for babies and dogs, which instantly melts the heart of the crankiest baby and turns nearly every dog on the planet into a wagging wriggling mass, except for Shirley.What you need to know about Shirley my friends, is that she is a card carrying, full on, paw waving in your face, oh no, you did not just do that- Badass with a capital B. She tolerates me while I pet her and tell her what a sweet girl she is, but just barely. She makes herself as huge as a four pound dog possibly can, stiffens like concrete and while I make an ass of myself over what is essentially a very nasty little dog, Shirley emits a dangerous, low pitched, constant growl that lets me know that she could obliterate me if she chose to. Then comes the part I am waiting for. Indeed, it is my sole motivation (yes, I'm manipulative, get over it quick..it's a recurring theme) and a veritable dog biscuit for my psyche. Every, and I do mean every-single-time, while Shirley readies herself to tear my throat out, Ed will smile a gorgeous beaming smile that I am quite certain broke some hearts back in the day when he played college football, and say, shaking his head, "That Shirley, she's just something." Ed's wife Gladys, who's name I do know and who talks in such copious amounts that it makes me shirk around corners when I see her coming, informs me that she is convinced that Ed's love for Shirley is what keeps him alive. Not a great testament to the power of your company Gladys, but damn, you talk a lot.

If Shirley restrains herself while I slather her with love she has not earned in the least, it is because while people are not her favorite thing, she reserves her most vitriolic hatred for other dogs. To say that Shirley is not good around other dogs is well, just not adequate usage of the English language. At the sight of another dog, and she has eyesight like Superman's, Shirley will launch her tiny body, legs churning, in a snarling ball of wrath that cannot, will not, be stopped until black death is visited up the intruder. It looks a lot like this;

and then, while the 200 pound Akita Shirley has just met ties his dinner napkin around his neck, Ed will pull the leash, Elevator Up! and Shirley, convinced that she has defeated her foe, totally unaware of her imminent demise, will continue to behave like Cujo from the safety of Ed's loving arms while he shakes his head, smiling, and says " That Shirley...she's just something."

I had the unfortunate  experience of meeting Ed and Shirley on a blind corner while walking my own dog. You need to know that my dog has virtually no interest in other dogs. Her sole neurotic obsession is me, but that's another post. When set upon by the snarling ball of hell's own fury that is our little Shirley, my dog, who is a pacifist by nature, found the path of least resistance to be a fast maneuver behind me and as Shirley attempted to remove her ass with razor sharp teeth, she dove back through my legs, neatly wrapping me in her leash and flew off the curb, taking me with her and leaving me with a sprained ankle which was swollen for weeks. Ed started that " Oh that Shirley she's something" crapola and I just limped off, pissed and muttering that yes, she certainly effing was.

The next day I was ready for Ed when he walked by. Ed flashed me his smile and I hit him with this. " You know Ed ( or whoever you are) I'm just not sure of the wisdom in allowing such a tiny dog, or any dog for that matter to believe that she can dominate everyone she meets. I'm concerned that some day Shirley will meet a dog who is more aggressive than she is and one or both of you will be hurt." I think I followed that with some more sanctimonious crap and Ed took Shirley and left. He never walked on my side of the street again. That was two years ago. He didn't look at nor speak to me for a year straight. My bad Ed. Someday I will learn to keep my mouth shut. It's not likely to be soon, but some day.

Today I watched Ed and Shirley hobble by and I couldn't help but draw some comparisons between Ed's Shirley and another Shirley I used to know. She was my sister.

There are five children in our family, three older that share the same father and then my brother and I from my Mother's second marriage. Shirley was the middle child of the older three. She was by far the most beautiful of all of us, and without a doubt, the most broken. I don't know what happened. I was born when she was twelve and have no memory of living with her, so the information I have is secondhand, and very old.  What I do know is.. no one appointed me score keeper, so I won't dwell on details, but suffice it to say that Shirley did not survive her childhood emotionally intact. She ran away at thirteen and while in a foster home became pregnant and had a back alley abortion. It left her unable to have children, a fact which tormented her always, but one that I secretly thought was a blessing in disguise.

Shirley was a mixed bag. If she was happy, everyone was happy. She lit up the room with her smile and was feminine and lovely in a way that felled men like trees. If she was mad, however, it paid to take cover. Her moods swung wildly, so it was impossible to predict who you were going to be dealing with minute to minute. At the risk of seeming redundant.... it  looked a lot like this..

In company with everyone in my family, Shirley was prone to addiction. She drank like a sailor, smoked Marlboro Reds and as an added bonus, was anorectic. I thought she was the coolest woman I knew. She was whip thin and always had studly boyfriends with great cars and would take us on adventures. Shirley had a thing for going to any river and I have many memories of time spent swimming and tanning with her magic formula, baby oil and red food dye.  I loved to shake the bottle in the sun and then watch it separate again.  Shirley loved all animals, but especially dogs and usually had one or two really great ones, the kind of dogs kept by people who are actually good with dogs.

My Shirley was the inverse of little canine Shirley though, because while she really was a dog whisperer,  people were her kryptonite and good judgment was not her strong suit. When she drank, which was often, it was even less so. In fits of rage I saw her throw our mother down a flight of stairs, call a very nice priest ( to whom I still wish I could call and apologize) a "goddam dirty rotten no good mother effing bastard." I can still picture his stunned face. I witnessed her giving a 9 year old three hits of speed and yes, I would have called CSD, but folks, it was me and I was nine, so my skills were limited.  Besides, I was talking so fast it would have been incoherent.

When I was 13 I went to stay with her in Montana where they let children hang out in bars as long as they don't drink. I think it's some sort of alcoholism training program. Anyway, she was a bartender and let me stay in the bar all night. After she closed, she took a 16 oz pop cup, added ice, filled it to the top with peppermint schnapps, popped in a straw and gave it to me with a handful of quarters for the juke box. Needless to say, I got hammered. When she was done cleaning up, we got into her boyfriend's sparkling metallic blue Datsun 280ZX  and she drove us to a frozen parking lot where we spun brodies at two in the morning while I hung my head backwards out the  passenger window and watched the stars go in circles. Like I said, I thought she was pretty damn cool, and despite all of her craziness, I loved her a lot.

Shirley had a series of failed marriages and relationships, and as she got older, I think she started figuring out that she was not that great with other humans and began isolating. It was almost impossible to get her to spend time with the family.  When she was 41 her last marriage ended and she came to live with my mother. A month later, a sore developed under her tongue. It turned out to be cancer, a variety so aggressive it is nicknamed " screaming carcinoma." It is caused mainly, her doctor said, by a lifetime of cigarettes and hard alcohol. After a surgery which split the lower half of her face vertically, removed her jaw bone, half her tongue and nearly all of her teeth, my sister, who had spent her life depending on her beauty to get her what she needed, was horribly disfigured and horribly lost. In the first surgery doctors took a portion of her forearm to rebuild her face. The graft died and began falling off because she was unable to quit smoking. It should be noted here that when Shirley was two weeks post op, our mother collapsed while playing a game of cards with her and though she tried to do CPR with her ruined mouth and arm, it was not successful and our Mom spent a week on life support before we made the choice to let her go. This left Shirley alone, and if possible, even more devastated. Doctors made another attempt to repair her face using a portion of her lower leg, but radiation therapy burned a hole in the graft necessitating that she hold a towel over it while she drank her Ensure so it wouldn't run out the side of her face and down her neck. Scar tissue eventually formed in her throat, preventing her from swallowing anything and a GI tube was put into her stomach.

There really are no words to describe how she suffered, but I can tell you this; In the days before assisted suicide was legal in Oregon,  I received a call from her ear nose and throat doctor who asked me if indeed I was her sister and emergency contact. I confirmed and he said, " I just want to let you know that today I gave your sister a prescription for enough liquid morphine that she can take her own life if she wants to. I really think she needs to have that choice."

Shirley didn't choose that route. Instead, she injected vodka into her stomach tube as a means of coping. Eventually, she went into an alcoholism treatment center and got sober for the first time in her life, but it was too late. Three weeks into treatment her organs failed and she died, sober and cancer free at 43 years old.
The night before she died, I sat with her in her hospital room and she said, " Well, I don't know what is going to happen, but if I die, at least I had fun, right?" The look in her eye told me she knew it wasn't true.

 So this morning as I watched Ed and Shirley slowly pass my house, I thought about how lucky that little dog is to have Ed to save her from her consequences and how desperately I wish my sister would have had such a fail safe system in place. Life isn't about that though. I think God, however you find him/her/it is captivated by our potential for creation and doesn't judge. You can create anything you want, but when your potential for creation is exausted, the universe will yank your leash and...Elevator Up!

 Oh, that Shirley...she was just something.