Now Tia was a different story. She not only held on for a while but she also put up with a lot of crap. She never got hit by a car, and we moved to a safer area, at least for dogs, but she does have the distinction of being the first of our dogs to discover porcupines.
We had a summer home about two hours north of Toronto. It was on a lake and surrounded by forests and other cottages. In these forests lived all sorts of creatures like foxes, skunks and porcupines. Now Tia did have a few run ins with skunks, but that’s nothing a tomato juice bath won’t take care of…yes they actually work. But facing off with a porcupine is a different deal all together…
I remember running up to greet her and suddenly noticing what looked like hundreds of spikes sticking out of her nose and mouth. They looked really cool because they were this really neat combination of white and black, and extremely sharp. Tia seemed pretty okay with the whole thing except that her eyes were extremely glassy. I ran next door to grab Aunt Wendy who was an ex nurse, the closest thing to a vet I was going to find up there. She got my mom(no Dads were to be found at our cottage during the week, they were at work) and then she grabbed a pair of pliers and asked me to hold Tia. She said this wasn’t going to hurt much and I thought she meant herself because there is no way she was going to convince me prying out these quills from my dogs nose was going to be a painless procedure.
She then proceeded to pull them out one by one as Tia shook, but remained calm. I guess at this point, Tia knew anything would be better than living the rest of her life with several spikes protruding from her face. When it was all over there was no blood and Tia ran off as if nothing had happened. She never tangled with a porcupine again. I wish I could say that for the rest of our pets.
To thank Aunt Wendy for saving Tia and her face I decided to give her my goldfish that I had at the time. I can’t remember its name but I do remember arguing with the pet shop owner over the fact that this particular goldfish was black and white, therefore making its name a complete denial of its true self. To get this gift ready I put the fish in a cereal bowl and scrubbed out it’s container and all the pebbles inside it, I then rinsed it off, filled it back up, put the fish in and headed for Aunt Wendy’s. By the time I got to the back door my black and white goldfish was floating on the top of the water. Apparently I hadn’t rinsed the bowl well enough and my fish choked on the remaining soap suds. I decided not to give it to her. This is the one pet death I take full responsibility for even though there was no intention…so I guess this would be fish-slaughter of the first degree.
A year or two later Tia developed some kind of kidney disease, at least that’s as specific as my parents got. I went to camp that summer(a standard vacation for my parents) and constantly wrote home asking how Tia was. My parents always assured me that she was fine…she wasn’t. When I got back from camp Tia was dead and I was pissed. This was the first time I realized I couldn’t completely trust them. Them being those figure heads we sometimes call parents. I wanted to hold a funeral and bury the body, totally unaware that a garbage and furnace had done the job for me. It was at this point that my parents decided to take a break from pets…well at least dogs…
