take my dog's ... fleas

Remember that really cool ending to the inaugural issue of "Preludes and Nocturnes?" Dream has just escaped from Burgess' circle, and had his long-awaited confrontation with Alex. As it wraps up, he turns to Burgess and says, "But come, I have a gift for you, to repay you for your years of hospitality. I give you eternal waking."

I feel right now like Sandy has given us her own parting gift as a way of saying thank you for all the years of hospitality we extended to her. Despite a good flea bath, despite the Frontline advanced flea and tick protection, despite our use of flea collars, Sandy has left us a veritable menagerie of a dog's favorite pets.

Our house has fleas. Their eggs are in the carpet, and they keep hatching and getting onto us. I have a couple flea bites, Natasha has a couple more, Evangeline has some, and Rachel's legs look like so much raw meat. (I suspect that we had this problem growing up in Saunders Station too, since we had a dog there, but I assumed at the time, in youthful ignorance, that the bug bites were from mosquitoes.)

What to do? I don't want to bomb the place, because the toxins in flea poison can be even worse than the fleas themselves, but the things are bloody near impossible to vacuum up. I can get beneficial nematodes to treat the lawn with, and I suspect I will, though the ladybugs we have naturally are already working on the problem out there, I'm sure.

Earlier today, I made up a boric acid mixture and walked through the house, sprinkling it on the carpet. Boric acid is less toxic to humans than table salt is, and not very irritating either, but it does have the effect of acting as a desiccant, which means it should kill the flea larvae before they can hatch.

Here's hoping. Fleas are bad enough when they're on the dog. It's even worse when the dog is dead and they're still alive.

A Christmas Thaw Brings Back the Fleas

The fleas returned this summer, the nematodes apparently having run their lives and died out.

We had a miserable time with them in the house again before I salted the rugs one night and let that desiccate their eggs. That killed the eggs, a bath washed them out of Sandy's fur, and then a flea collar ended up being what it took to keep them off her afterward. Can you believe that Frontline failed to kill the fleas on her, even when I waited a week after giving the dog a bath to apply the stuff?

It took until the onset of cold weather to kill the fleas in the yard, which meant we had to keep Sandy out of the yard and let her out only for walks on the street.

With the recent warm weather around Christmas, the fleas managed to re-enter the yard and we even found one inside the house today. Now that the ground is frozen solid again, I expect we'll have a break from them until springtime, when I'm adding more nematodes and planting a few bazillion marigolds to keep the groundhogs, insects and stray cats at bay.

With any luck, Sandy's flea collar will take care of the stragglers in the house, although I'm tempted to salt the carpet again.

I'm probably also going to check and see what I can do legally about cats wandering through my yard, since they bring fleas to the yard, dig in my flower beds and leave their disease-laden presents where my children can find them.

(I'm tempted to plant a bunch of catnip in the pesky neighbor's yard down the street, to draw all the cats there, but that would be low.)

losing man's best friend

"Of course you have to work hard to offend Christians. By nature Christians are the most forgiving, understanding and thoughtful group of people I've ever dealt with. They never assume the worst at the get-go, they appreciate the importance of having different perspectives, they're slow to anger, quick to forgive and almost never make rash judgments or act in anything less than a spirit of total love.

"No, wait -- I'm thinking of Labrador retrievers."

I wrote that in 1998, after a friend of mine was catching grief over the jokes he had been including in his "Fishers of Grin" humor mailing for About.com. Everyone gets the dig about Christians and our often-graceless manner, but what I've always enjoyed about it is its dead-on depictions of Labs. They really are a saintly breed.

I bought my second black Lab in late 1994, when I was living in Bethlehem, Pa. I recently had returned from living as a missionary in Haiti, where I had been forced to leave behind my previous dog, also a black Lab.

Once I bought Hamlet, we were inseparable. I took him with me all around the Lehigh Valley. He accompanied me when I went to visit my family in Pittsburgh, and he always came up to Lafayette College from 1995 to 1997, when we would visit my girlfriend during her undergraduate days there. Everybody knew him as the dog who spoke Haitian Kreyol, because that was the language I had used to train him.

Hamlet was the first dog of mine ever to have his own entry in the phone book -- Ma Bell gave me two entries for the same flat rate, and who was I to waste one of them? -- and also the first dog of mine ever to be listed as a friend of a church I was attending. (I don't think the elders were amused when they found out.)

He was a brilliant, stubborn, energetic and often destructive dog. He chewed holes in furniture, ripped up favorite books of mine, and broke out of his cage I don't know how many times, even when it was padlocked.

He also played a part in my romance with my girlfriend, whom I later married. One time the three of us were walking along a stream in Bethlehem, and Hamlet -- off his leash and galavanting along the streambed as he was wont to do -- wouldn't come back. So I threatened that if he didn't come back, I would push her into the water. She had enough time to voice a quick protest, and then I delivered on what I had promised.

Walking him was an experience -- I swear he made my arm a good six inches longer as he pulled at the leash with all the force of a man o'war -- but it was also invariably a pleasant one, since through Hamlet I discovered the other inhabitants of Easton, from the other dog owners out for a stroll in the morning, to the children who wanted to play with him, to the homeless man who stopped to scratch him behind the ears.

I don't think I've ever loved a dog more than I loved him.

About six years ago, when my wife and I got an apartment here in Nova Bastille, we realized we didn't have enough space for him. Labs are made to run, and our apartment had no yard and even less free space inside.

So Hamlet moved in with my parents, who have a huge yard and who discovered they enjoyed having a dog again. If he had a good life with me, he's had a great one with my parents, and they've enjoyed having him around as well.

Because Hamlet was born on Halloween, my father has developed a tradition of having trick-or-treaters sing "Happy birthday" to Hamlet before they can have any of the treats being passed out to celebrate. I'm told Hamlet's birthday is a hit with children all around the neighborhood.

Nothing good lasts forever. Now a little more than 10 years old, Hamlet has been in a lot of pain lately. He has no interest in eating, doesn't like to walk, and spends most of his time lying around and licking his leg. Friday night, the vet announced he had found a malignant and inoperable cancer behind one of Hamlet's hips.

I love him, and can't let him go on suffering each day. I'm probably going to call my parents on Saturday and tell them to go ahead and have him put down.

We're planning to visit my parents for Christmas, and my daughter loves seeing Hamlet, who admittedly is a lot more fun to play with than our dog Sandy, the dog we have here in our home.

I don't want to have to tell her that Hamlet has died, and that he won't be there for her on Christmas. I want to give her one last time to see him and play with him, and I want that for myself too. I want to be there with him, and hold him one last time as he goes to sleep, so he knows that he's loved, even as he drifts off.

It's not going to happen, and that really bites.



Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Psst! I totally stole this from Brucker.

cats and the devil

Theologians traditionally have believed that Lucifer was thrown out of heaven once it was discovered that he had a pet cat.

New study of the tradition, however, reveals that he wasn't thrown out of heaven for having a cat, as much as for being a cat. The emerging consensus is that he jumped up and made itself at home on God's Throne when God stood up.

barking to wake the dead

It is 4:09 p.m., and our dog barks at anything and everything. She's a great dog, and very patient with the kids, but her barking is enough to drive me batty.

Sandy barks at pretty much anything and anyone outside. Since we live inside the city limits, not far from a university, and with a sidewalk fewer than 15 feet from our front door, she gets provoked into barking quite a lot.

A Chien melange by pedigree, she looks like a cross between a Siberian husky and a German shepherd, and has a tremendously loud bark, with the result that she can be very intimidating to people who don't know what a friendly pooch she is. This is all very good since we bought her as a burglar deterrent, but it does get annoying when the kids are taking their naps.

I should add that another nice thing about Sandy is that she puts some teeth into our "Beware of Dog" sign.

The names we give our pets

The dogs I've named all have had literary value behind their names: Ajax and Hamlet.

I was going to name my next dog Strider for a sire or Circe for a dam, but the dog we have came fully equipped. We got her used the pound, and her previous owner had been calling her Sandy for over nine years.

I only named one fish that we had. It was called "Old Fart" because it wouldn't die even though we really wanted it to, since we had decided we'd rather use the aquarium for a turtle.

Naturally, when it did die, my younger brother Ward and I celebrated, and our mother was so incensed we weren't allowed to get anything for the tank for a year.