Our dogs have the personalities of perpetual toddlers who are eternally experimenting with defying authority, asserting their independence, and putting everything not tied down into their mouths. As a result, our dogs have learned to lead lives inside protective bubbles that Tony creates. While most dogs frolic freely from time-to-time, our dogs are coddled and shielded, protected from the atrocities of life—the wet grass that brushes up against their underbellies on a rainy day, a draft that might blow through the house, or even worse, the emotional and mental trauma stemming from the confusion generated by the smells of other animals on our clothing when we come home. “It’s okay,” Tony will explain to them. “I know you’re confused.”
So it’s no surprise we’re getting a lot of the same question from friends all across the country: “How are the animals adjusting to the big cross-country move?”
We're finally getting settled in to one-half of a duplex generally reserved for faculty on the south side of Lake Forest College’s campus. It’s a row of housing that is about as close to the projects or the wrong-side of the tracks as we can get in a community where checking out produce in your full-length fur is dressed down as long as you have a coordinating jogging suit underneath the animal wrap. We’ll begin looking for a place to buy as the weather starts to get warmer, or at least above the sub-zero temperatures we’ve been experiencing periodically since Tony arrived with the dogs and cat on New Year’s Eve.
I’d like to think the search will start sooner, but I’m sure it would upset the dogs and cat. They’re still adjusting after the car ride. Despite sedatives, Sheleata Kanatuna let Tony know his thoughts about the car trip before he even made it to Atlanta’s freeway when Sheleata evacuated his bowels and bladder in Tony’s lap. Sixteen hours later, Tony pulled up in Lake Forest, Long John still walking sideways from the drugs, Buster with legs of jell-o unable to stand, and Sheleata passed out on the floorboard of the car, underneath the clutch, his vodka snores audible from outside standing behind the car.
Now, with snow blanketing the ground, it’s much easier to track the squirrels, rabbits, deer and 600 students who live only an empty PBR can’s toss from the front door. It creates a maze of unlimited paths for Buster to follow, distracting him from ever pooping. While he frolics on the snow and ice, tracking students by the scent of their laundry detergent or favorite sorority cologne, Long John tip-toes along, his delicate little German ham hocks shivering in the breeze. We got Long John a coat, but he hasn’t yet figured out how to relieve himself on a snowdrift while wearing an overcoat. We may have to get Long John a pair of pair of boots; when his toes get cold, he simply stops, standing in one spot alternately lifting his legs off the pavement.
Neither one having produced the yellow snow symbolizing the success one looks for in a sub-zero stroll, they frolic inside. Long John has mastered the stairs of our two-story unit, while Buster tripped, falling on his second day. Now he climbs the stairs one-paw at a time, waiting until all four are firmly grounded on the same stair before placing his quivering paw with great trepidation on the next step. A bold, brassy hound, reduced to a sissy by a flight of stairs. As crazy as this sounds, Sheleata Kanatuna pushed Buster down the stairs the other day, and if cats can’t smile, Sheleata definitely had the smug look of satisfaction that overcomes a toddler when he thinks he’s just accomplished something completely original. And, I swear, that cat chuckled.
While Long John sits at the front door, looking through the full-length window, watching the fashion parade by, Buster checks out a place still new to him. Newness can only mean one thing to a dog like Buster: all-new floors and carpets to crap and piss all over.
“It’s alright,” says Tony, his patience for inappropriate dog behavior miles long. “I know you’re confused.”
“Buster!” I yell. “On more dump like that and it’s to the glue factory for you!” Tony glares at me like I’m a crazed dictator with a hang-up over dogs with a propensity to crap indoors. Tony explains to me that Buster gets confused because the hardwood floors are the color of the earth, and to further add to the confusion, the cat gets to crap inside every day. I point out to Tony that dogs are color blind, and explain to Buster that Sheleata is more sophisticated, and that if he were a little classier, then maybe he could go in a box like the cat. But to him, a cat box is an all-you-can-eat buffet, so we’re a long way from that level of refinement.
Despite Buster’s fecal incontinence, both he and Long John have quickly become socialites on campus. Our little crapper clappers are rushing almost all the sororities on campus this spring, and administrative assistants in two different departments have started knitting them sweaters. Our neighbor had us over for chicken and sausage pot pie and a box of blush wine, while she explained she has decided that Long John should have a double-breasted jacket with brass buttons that will go on top so that it will be easier for us to put the jacket on. Right next door lives a little yapping dog, and she knitted little squirrels running in fear on his sweater.
It warms our hearts to know the children have been so quickly accepted and embraced. For in Lake Forest, a dog cannot be without his fashion. The expectations here are pretty high, and it’s a challenge to keep up, in this town where you can determine a person’s wealth by the number of garage doors on their house, particularly if there is a separate building for the garage. And by building, I’m not referring to a tool shed that accommodates a car, rather, one that can house your house staff above the garage housing your collection of cars.
In Lake Forest, the suburb in a bubble, the greatest crime against society besides outerwear for dogs that doesn’t match the leash, is divorce. Divorce wrecks more housewives then you could possibly imagine. My new title as Director of Special Projects provides me great latitude in the social circles I can invite myself to. With little to do one evening before Tony and the animals arrived, I attended a financial planning seminar, targeted specifically at women who have been wronged by the atrocities of divorce.
“Ladies, I used to think I didn’t know anything about finances, or that they were too complicated for me to understand,” said Judy, a real chip of the cleaver off the block of June Cleaver. She was leading the discussion. “One day I opened up my Betty Crocker Cook Book,” she held the book with plaid cover for all to see. “And I realized, ladies, we have ten different words for how to cut. And I said to myself, ‘Self, if you can understand all these words for cut, then you can certainly understand finances.’”
“So, my husband long gone with his secretary, and with no life savings of my own, I decided the only way to learn about banking was to go into banking. So I went to an executive club meeting. And this was back in the days when there were not women executives. I had to enter through the kitchen.”
Her words were inspiring, as she spoke with eloquence and poise about climbing over kitchen counters, over the potato peels simply to get into the boys club of banking. The lines between financial planning seminar and Tupperware party blurred when the presentation turned interactive, and Judy quizzed the audience hanging on to her every word, “Prizes, ladies! I’ve got prizes. Now, in what city is the Federal Reserve Bank that holds the most gold?”
“Switzerland!” said one overzealous overachiever eyeing the financial self-help book, Healing Your Way to a Brighter Tomorrow, Jenny was teasing the crowd with.
“Oh, Sally, Switzerland isn’t a city. The Federal Reserve is in Johannesburg.”
Jenny gave the book away a few minutes later when they ran out of countries in the Eastern hemisphere, and a woman who went on a fur-buying spree in New York remembered seeing a Federal Reserve Bank out the taxi window. “It’s just a lucky guess,” she explained to the crowd as she claimed her prize.
“Well, ladies, you may be guessing now, but when we’re done with this seminar, you’re going to know all about finances so you’ll never have to guess again,” Judy said. “So, who here knows that too much credit can actually ruin your credit?”
“Let me tell you,” said a woman in the front, turning around, standing up, hijacking the lecture, “this once happened to me. I had to buy a gift in the Banana Republic,” she said, as if it’s a foreign country. “I mean, I don’t even shop in the Banana Republic, but I wanted to save ten percent, you know, so I signed up for the card.”
She held her hand to the chest of her plaid Channel suit to express the sincerity of her confession.
“When we went to get the loan for the new master suite and family room, they told me, ‘I’m sorry, but you have too much credit.’ I mean. Too. Much. Credit!”
Collective gasp of astonishment.
“Too much credit! Who ever heard of such a thing? So I said to my bank, ‘Well, fix this!’ and they told me I had to close my Banana Republic card, my Talbots card, and my Gap card. I mean, I don’t even shop in those stores, but just got the cards to save ten percent.”
She thrust her shoulders back, standing up straight. “I’m telling you, this lady banker here is absolutely right. A Banana Republic card can hurt you more than you think.”
Had I been in a Southern Baptist church filled with large black women in bonnets and white gloves, they would have been proclaiming “Amen, sistah!” throwing their hands to the roof. But this is not a church where you use a fan printed with gospel hymns to keep you cool. This is an art history lecture hall at an expensive college on the lily-white North Shore of Chicago where dogs where name-brand fashions, and the women shop in furs. Here, these women gasp, clutch their pearls, and turn to each other in realization they are not alone in the shame of holding damaging credit cards for stores in which they don’t actually shop, but had to once pass through the doors to purchase a gift.
“So how are you supposed to get the 10% off?”
* * *
A few weeks later, I was having dinner at an uptown (there is no downtown in Lake Forest) restaurant when I overhead the conversation behind me.
“I had to fly to Phoenix last weekend. It’s such a pain owning your own Learjet.”
“Oh, why Phoenix?”
“That’s where our mechanic is. It had to be serviced.”
“Well, at least it’s Phoenix.”
“That’s for sure. I mean, we did get in a weekend of skiing.”
“Yeah. You could have been in Wichita, Kansas.”
“Oh, God, no. What could you do in Wichita?
“That’s what I’m sayin’.”
* * *
When someone asks “How are the dogs adjusting to the big cross-country move?”, or any of the other related questions, such as “How are the dogs doing with the snow?” and “Do the dogs like the cold?” the question one really is asking is, “How is Tony adjusting?”
It’s a Stepford world we’ve landed in here in Lake Forest. Snow only falls from the sky beautifully, the Federal Reserve is in Switzerland, and when we wake up in the morning, we have to dig out the Learjet from last night’s snowfall. This town lives in a protective bubble that keeps the ills of society out. Tony has lightened up a bit when it comes to the dogs. It seems the Stepford bubble is enough to free Tony from worrying about what the dogs might put in their mouths; he’s now focused on a real issue: what will they wear. Somehow, the dogs, who once lived in a bubble in Atlanta have been liberated by moving to a community that operates in a much larger bubble. Their limits have been extended by the greater limits and expectations of the community around them.
The truth is, the dogs are adjusting just fine. They’re dogs. They have their pack. Food is put in their stomach. And the flow of affection has not stopped one bit; if anything, it’s increased. From their perspective, life really hasn’t changed. True, they’re learning to pee on ice, there is a set of stairs between their food bowl and the bed, and we now live in a place that has rabbits, squirrels, deer and 600 students waltzing by in front of the house daily. These, however, are just minor inconveniences, like the child-proof cap on a bottle of Drain-o, just a fifteen-minute setback to pending disaster.
But even in this model community, far from the Federal Reserves of Switzerland, where credit from Banana can keep you from building a wing, and with its shortage of Learjet maintenance crews, there are down days. The children occasionally fall down stairs, their feet get cold because they don’t wear the right shoes, they occasionally get distracted by something exciting walking by, and, yes, they occasionally crap in the wrong spot. I’d say the dogs are adjusting perfectly.
How is Tony doing? It is him who I’m worried about; he only thought there were 8 words for cut.
While Dornacher was dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s in Atlanta, Director of Ambiance and Entertainment Timothy State was writing a check to begin the preliminary preliminary process of purchasing a pre-construction condo in Chicago’s West Loop Neighborhood. The neighborhood is just west of Chicago’s Loop, and is most famous for Greektown.
