Duchess

I was probably about seven years old when a visitor asked my mother something that puzzled me. She watched our dog Duchess, and said to my mother, warily, "Don't you worry about her?" At first I thought the "her" was directed at me, and wondered what the woman didn't like about me, but then she said something about "allowing her in the house," and it became clear that she meant the dog.

"Oh, no, not at all," said my mother.

"Even around the children?" the woman asked.

"She's great with kids," Mom said.

After the woman left, I asked my mom, "Why would she be worried about Dutchy?" I'd been trying to make sense of it myself, but I couldn't figure it out. It made even less sense to me because we had two big dogs, but the woman had only seemed worried about one.

"Some people are that way. They worry about the coyote in her," Mom explained.

Duchess was a bit older than I was. I don't remember her as a puppy, but I knew the story. A friend of my parents had a German shepherd female who'd been impregnated by a coyote while out in their yard. When the litter was born, the owners worried that no one would want the little "halfbreeds," and they planned to drown them. Back then, that was considered the humane and responsible thing to do with unwanted puppies and kittens; put them in a bag or pillowcase, weight it down, and toss it into the river. My parents couldn't bear to see them all drown, and had requested a puppy for their family. They got "the pick of the litter" - the smartest, cutest, liveliest puppy - and named her Duchess. She went home to the horses and children on our acre plus.

We usually described her as a German shepherd; not because we were embarrassed, or afraid of an adverse reaction, but for the same reason we didn't usually use the words "step" or "half" in describing relationships in our family. Default to the simplest explanation. If people asked, though - and often, someone would say, "And what else?" or, "She doesn't look like a shepherd" - we'd tell them about the coyote half. I never expected anyone to worry, or even be too terribly surprised. It seemed very normal to me.

We later added another dog, my dad's black lab named Ebony. He was younger than Dutchy, and I remember him a puppy, an energetic ball of pitch black fur. He was my dad's hunting dog, a retriever; Dad said he was great at it. He was sweet and lovable, but not very bright. He also spent less time in the house than Duchess did, because he had a tendency to get overexcited and trash things. Even at 80 lbs., he also fancied himself a lap dog, and he'd sit in our laps even when he was clearly larger than we were.

Duchess was clearly the Alpha. Ebony adored her. She was our companion and watchdog.

We have few photos of her. My parents took very few photos - back in the days of film, it often took them years to fill up a roll of 12 exposures -  and neither of them was particularly gifted with a camera.

This photo was taken on Easter, the year I was 3. I remember that holiday. It was the first time that I understood that there was something special about the day. I loved my fancy new dress, even though it was kind of scratchy. I loved my Easter basket and cute candy.

We were getting ready to leave the house for church. Moments before this was taken, I'd been hugging Dutchy. My sister Lynne, the brunette beauty in pink, had scolded me for "getting dog hair all over your pretty dress," and encouraged me to pat with my hand. I wanted to please Lynne - I adored her. I could not figure out what she was thinking, though. I always hugged the dog. What was wrong with dog hair, anyway? And why was it OK to have it on my everyday clothes, but not on my new dress? Maybe my new dress wasn't as much fun to wear as I thought it would be. How much could you really enjoy a dress if you couldn't hug the dog while wearing it?

Look at the tolerant look on Duchess's face. She let me hug her and lay my head on her side. She listened to everything we said, accepting all the mushiness: "Who's a good girl? There's our good Dutchy-dog!"

She understood every word we uttered, I swear. If she'd had opposable thumbs, we could have said something like, "Could you drive down to the store and bring back some eggs and bread, please?" and she would have done it. For most dogs (and small children), you have to issue short, crisp commands - "Sit. Stay." We spoke to Duchess conversationally; we'd say something like, "You sit down here and wait for me, OK? I'll be right back." She'd sit down, wait, and trot off by your side as soon as you reappeared.

My dad trained the dogs to respond to certain whistle commands. The one that meant "Come here" was 4 short, one long, and then an undulating, "ooooo-weeee-oooooo-weeee-oooooo" sound. Sometimes Dutchy would take off from our yard to do something I think of as "going walkabout." There was a lot of open land around us, and she just wanted to go out and explore. She could sail over our backyard fence like it wasn't even there, much to Ebony's dismay. Sometimes, she'd just disappear. When we wanted her home, someone would go out on the back porch and whistle. She'd come trotting home a few minutes later. If she'd gone really far, we might have to wait a few minutes and whistle again, but I don't think it ever took more than 3 whistles.

Her obedience had only one loophole. If she was staring at a cat, you had to issue the command, "Dutchy, you leave that kitty cat alone!" before she started to run. She hated cats with a fervor my mother termed "a purple passion," and she'd perk up and go on alert if she saw one. Any of us could give her the command to "leave that kitty cat alone" and she would, without fail, provided she wasn't running yet. Once she took off, she wouldn't back off for God himself.

To my knowledge, she only caught one once, and held its face down in a puddle, with it clawing her leg to shreds, until it drowned. My dad tried to drag her away, to no avail. As my parents cleaned and wrapped her leg afterward, they scolded her. She looked at them as if to say, "I understand that you're upset, but it was the devil."

When our family adopted first one cat, and then more, she tolerated them only because they were ours. She never chased or harassed them, never so much as barked or growled, but she glared at them. "You be nice to that kitty cat," we'd say, and you could tell that she was thinking, "I am."

I only recall her chasing one other animal, and that ended badly. We were camping with my extended family, aunts, uncles and cousins, and Duchess decided to chase a porcupine. I had to be only 3 or 4, because I remember that the solid part of the cabin's screen door came up to my chest. I stood on my toes listening to an unfamiliar wailing and howling, and watched as my dad and cousins half dragged, half carried a howling Duchess to the ranger station. Her face bristled with quills. After the ranger and my dad pulled all the quills with pliers, and slathered disinfectant on her, she came back to the cabin. She was subdued and raw. I fussed over her, horrified by all the puncture wounds under the ointment. I don't think she ever forgot that lesson. (Who knows, though - she chased another porcupine years later.)

She barked only to alert us to perceived danger. (Thank heaven she didn't consider knocks on the door to be threats. I can't stand it when dogs bark at the door.) I heard her growl only once.

We had a wishing well in our front yard. We'd occasionally toss pennies, and sometimes, larger coins, in,  making wishes. We didn't take the coins out, because that would negate the wish, but I don't think there was ever more than $2 or $3 in the well.

Still, some neighborhood boys once decided that they'd help themselves to the coins. I was probably 9 or 10, and they struck me as about 13. There were four or five of them, ignoring me as I shouted at them to get out of our yard and leave our stuff alone. I was just inside the wire backyard fence, about 15 feet away. They ignored me as an impotent, whiny kid.

Duchess sat quietly by my side, simply observing. Finally, hoping to scare them, I issued a command that, to my knowledge, she had never heard: "Sic 'em, Dutchy."

She went over the fence so fast that she seemed to have levitated. In less than a second, she'd grabbed the most vocal and obnoxious of the boys by the seat of his pants, and shook him back and forth, growling a deep, menacing growl. The other boys scattered as this boy shouted, "Call off your dog! Call off your dog!" Duchess shook him hard, and I stared, open mouthed, until his pants started to rip. I called, "Dutchy! Come here," and she instantly let go, stopped growling, and trotted back. She jumped over the fence and resumed sitting placidly next to me.

As I watched the boy pedal away on his bike, I imagined (with some glee) him trying to explain the ripped pants to his parents, and I rubbed Duchess's ears. "Good girl! You are such a good girl!"

I later told my mother, and she chuckled. "I didn't even know that Dutchy knew what 'sic 'em' means!" I said.

"She probably doesn't. But, she knew they were bad news. She was just waiting for you to ask her to do something."

I was in junior high when Duchess started showing signs of aging. First, her fur started showing gray. Then, she got arthritis, which was painful to watch. We started taking her food to her, instead of calling her to it. Then, she started losing weight. By the time this was taken, when I was about 12 and she was about 14, she wasn't looking, or feeling, like herself.

She finally developed some sort of cancer. I can't remember if we had her put to sleep, or if she passed away on her own. I know that, by the time she was gone, I was happy for her to be out of pain.

I often imagine that she was one of the first loved ones to greet my parents, after they passed away. I'm pretty sure that she loves heaven.

I think she may have learned to like cats.

Not For Sale

I will concede that I could be cranky and overreacting. Let's establish that right away.

Still, I keep hearing in my head the growling, snarling noises that the cartoon Tasmanian Devil makes; that's what I hear in my head, too, every time I see, "&^$%#@!" or the equivalent.

My parents bought their house, on an acre and a third, back when the house was one of only three on the entire dirt road, outside of town. We kept horses in the back pasture the entire time I was growing up, even as the city grew up to and then past us. Today, the property is on an ordinary street in an ordinary neighborhood - a neighborhood that's considered "aging" and not very desirable, real estate-wise. The house across the street was the home of local casino owners for a while, the only one in our neighborhood with two bathrooms and a family/rec room. Now, even it's considered fairly ordinary. Its most unusual feature is an RV garage; plus, many of the surrounding homes added on those second bathrooms and rec rooms.

My parents had originally planned to sell off pieces of their property, but they never did, so it's still an acre and a third. The largest portion, by far, is behind the house, reachable only by going down a gravel driveway.

My brother owns the house now. He isn't sure if he wants to live there or sell it, so for now, he rents it to a family member. The agent who came out to appraise it kept saying, "If only it was 2005. You could have gotten so much for this in 2005." Now, of course, it's worth far less, and "You'd never get your money back if you tried to develop it ("develop," of course, meaning "subdivide and build houses on.")" We understand that. If my mother had wanted or needed money more than she needed an unused horse pasture, she would have sold it in 2005.

I bring this up because it's relevant backstory.

My dad died years ago. After my mother died, while we were still measuring her loss in days, we started getting notes in the mailbox. "Hi! I'd love to buy your property! Call me." We rolled our eyes and tossed the notes. Is there a "for sale" sign out front? No. Then please assume that it's not for sale. Most of the would be buyers gave up, but some kept sending new notes, getting progressively pushier. One of the last ones said, "I can't believe you haven't taken me up on this offer!"

Really? You're surprised by this? Note, pushy neighbors, the continued lack of a "for sale" sign! Nobody took you up on your offer because the property is not for sale! This cannot be a difficult concept to grasp.

I mean, good heavens, my mother has four children, ten grandchildren and four great grandchildren. If my brother decides that he doesn't want the house, there will be any number of heirs who do. Does anyone honestly imagine that we're just waiting for the neighbors to swoop in?

I thought they'd given up; I hoped they'd given up. It's been a year and a half. For crying out loud, we haven't even emptied the linen closets. The house is occupied by family. If the owner wanted to sell it to strangers, he'd put it on the market, not wait for little notes to be dropped in his mailbox.

The day before Easter, we were in the back yard hiding eggs. Friends and family, including at least two toddlers, were invited over for a BBQ. Normal, wholesome family holiday, right? The neighbor came out, stood on their side of the fence and yelled over, "Are you selling that property?"

Truly, neighbor? You left "pushy" behind in the dust long ago.

My husband was the nearest one to the disembodied voice. He said, "Probably not." (He has an almost pathological aversion to uttering definitive declarative statements.)

What I said to him was, "Don't say 'probably.' They're thinking that you've left the door open to the possibility."

It's probably a good thing that he answered them, instead of me. What I wanted to say to the neighbor was, "Do you SEE a 'for sale' sign? NO! You do NOT! The property is NOT for sale, and if it was, we wouldn't sell to YOU! Stay on your own side of the fence, you opportunistic jackals!"

Which, you know, all things considered, may be an overreaction.

But the property still isn't for sale.

Loving Tony

I recently lost a man I have loved since we were both children. He was 48 when he passed away - much too young for us to be prepared to lose him. Still, as they say, "It's not the years; it's the mileage," and he'd lived more than most people.

He wrote a published book in his 20s. In his 40s, he started working on an autobiography. It would tell details of his life, like how, at 25, he owned the second largest company of its kind in the world, printing backstage passes for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Billy Joel. He was making, we often said, more money than God.

Nothing in his life was of ordinary size and scope. Years later, he lost the company, and eventually, his family. He developed a drug problem that should have killed him. He consumed alcohol like it was water.

And, he lived to get clean and sober, religiously attending his meetings for AA, NA, and CA.

He asked me to write the foreward to his book. This is it.

*******************

Tony Perry is my brother. Most people gain siblings through some action taken by their parents, and are linked by biology, marriage, adoption, or in some other legal and definable way. This is not true for us; our parents might not immediately recognize each other if they passed on the street. There is no legal document defining our relationship. He is my brother because of decisions he and I have made, and because something in his soul speaks to something in mine. If you have people like this in your life – and I am fortunate to have many – you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, there are no words that will adequately explain it to you.

I remember the first time I saw Tony. I was a 14 year old high school freshman. He was a 14 year old sophomore, wearing a jacket that said, "Italian Stallion" on the back. He wore that jacket everywhere. He was loud, abrasive, charismatic and funny. I was quiet and unsure. At the first audition of the year, he made a hash out of the cold reading, and obviously delighted in doing so. The teacher sighed and said, "Never ask a techie to read lines." My attention sharpened – I was one of the few kids from my junior high theater department to actually have tech experience. It soon became apparent that not only was Tony a techie, he was THE techie in our school.

I also remember the first time Tony met my mother. So does Tony – she impressed him immediately. The school boundaries for our school were odd and elongated, so that a large number of my schoolmates came from the neighboring city, and rode the bus for half an hour to get to and from school. Tony was one of those kids. One day he missed the bus, and asked if my mom could drive him home. My mom always had a car full of kids, no matter where we went. "It's pretty far, clear out in Hidden Valley," I told her, but she was willing to take him. Tony climbed into the back of the car with an armload of books, far too many to be just his homework. "Hi," he said, "I'm Tony. I steal textbooks." Mom didn't bat an eye.

"Hello, Tony," she said.

Down the street from our school, there was a convenience store. Tony seemed to live on apple juice sold in little round, apple shaped, single serving bottles. He leaned over the back of the seat and said, "I feel like an apple juice. Can we stop and get one?" Mom slowed down and pulled into the parking lot.

Tony was beside himself. "She's stopping! You're stopping! You're actually gonna stop?"

"Sure," she said. "You have money, right?"

Tony talked about that for years. "I couldn't believe she actually stopped so I could get an apple juice!"

We had little in common, really, but it didn't matter.

Tony was the sun around which the theater revolved. He designed our drama guild T-shirts and our black satin jackets. He was our official technical director and our unofficial social director. Tony created our own holidays, The Thirteen Radical Days of Christmas, and as a group we designed a different activity every day for the thirteen days leading up to Christmas break. One day, we went to a Monty Python film festival; one day we bought our lunch from the generics aisle of Albertson's. (Remember generics? Remember when they took up an entire aisle?) He planned our group vacations to Disneyland.

On our first Disneyland trip, we had 9 or 10 of us, of both sexes, crammed into a single hotel room. My mother slept in the armchair; Tony slept in the bed next to me.

He'd started out across the room, on the floor, but two of the girls kept flicking Skittles candy at him after lights out. "Hey!" he yelled loudly, into the dark, "she hit my wiener with a Skittle!"

"Tony. Don't use that word," my mother chastised.

"Fine. She hit me in the penis with a Skittle." A few minutes later, he declared loudly, "She did it again!"

"Find somewhere else to sleep, then," Mom told him.

"There is nowhere else!"

"You can find someplace."

He walked around the room, stopping at the side of the double bed I was in. "I," he declared dramatically, pointing down at the bed, "am sleeping here." Then he looked down at me. "That OK with you?"

"Fine with me."

He checked with my mom. "OK?"

"OK. Now settle down."

I was notoriously chaste. For years, Tony took great delight in announcing to people, sometimes upon first meeting them, "I was the first man ever to sleep with Sharon Smith."

When Tony was arrested during my junior year, it absolutely undid me. I had not lived a life of unrelenting sunshine and rainbows, but this was, absolutely and undeniably, the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

One of the things we had in common back then was sobriety, a relatively uncommon trait in our group. When Tony arrived back at the school after being processed and released at the juvenile facility, I saw him climb out of the car and I went to meet him. I had never seen that look on his face, never seen him walk with that heaviness. He looked at me and said quietly, "They strip searched me for drugs, Sharon." My heart broke.

We were in the middle of rehearsing for our spring play, the largest show of the year. When Tony was suspended and then expelled and forced to complete the year at another school, I was a mess. Barred from even attending the show, Tony arranged for a bouquet of blue balloons to be delivered to the cast onstage during curtain call closing night. I wrote a sappy poem about it that was published in our school literary magazine, and saved one of the blue ribbons and wove it into my hair the next year when I went to the prom.

Tony was the only person I danced with at my prom. He was there with his fiancee, Jeanette. I was there hoping to see my best friend be crowned Prom Queen. Someone else won, and Tony barked to our table, "Nobody clap!" I clapped anyway – it was only courteous. I stepped on his feet twice during the dance; I am dance impaired.

Tony quite literally handed me back my life once. I'd been acting since I was 12, loved tech almost as much, and intended to continue doing both forever. But, I spent three of my four high school years with a teacher assigned to the theater classes simply because she had low seniority and no one else wanted the job; she'd never even seen a play before being assigned to us. I left high school having learned anything new, for three quarters of my time there, from the other students or on my own. I felt woefully inadequate to pursue anything theater related, even for fun. Oh, well, I thought, those are the breaks. Things happen. I'll get over it. Then Tony phoned one day shortly after my graduation.

The local university was having open auditions for "Chicago." Their auditions were always open to the public, so it didn't matter that neither of us were students - Tony wanted me to go try for a tech job with him. I dragged my feet.

"You don't sound excited about this!" he barked at me.

"I don't think I'm qualified to do anything."

"I'm not qualified either! Let's just go." Tony'd owned his own stage lighting company since he was 13; if he wasn't qualified, who was? I went with him. I spent the next ten years exclusively with the university theater department, then found I was also at home in other theater companies. As I write this, I'm preparing for the final dress rehearsal of a show, one I'm in with my husband and two of my kids. There are no words adequate to thank someone for handing you your identity back.

Most of the time, girls Tony was dating, and girls who wanted to date him, didn't worry about me at all, since I was obviously not a romantic rival. Sometimes, though, someone resented me. After Tony and Jeanette broke up, a girl working on a show with Tony and me took the opportunity to ask him out. He was taking the breakup pretty hard, and told her, "I just can hardly stand to even look at anyone female right now. I don't even want to be in the same room with any females." She was disappointed; in a few minutes, she became angry – at me.

Tony asked me, in the course of conversation, if I wanted to go to a movie the next night. Incensed, the girl said, "I thought you couldn't even look at anything female right now!" Tony looked at me, back at the girl, and expressed his puzzlement.

"That's not a female! That's Sharon."

The poor girl was fairly lukewarm to me after that, even years later.

When I got married, Tony stood beside my husband. When my first child was born, he brought a tiny T-shirt to the hospital that was a replica of our high school drama guild shirts. My children have called him "Uncle Tony" all of their lives. When he got married on New Year's Eve, I bought a black and gold formal to wear. When he broke his back, I drove him on errands and prayed for his recovery.

For years, he had the Midas touch. Nothing he tried failed, or turned out badly, or lost money. Since he never does anything in a small way, when it all went to hell it was really, truly hell.

Tony probably doesn't remember this, but when things got really ugly, with the cocaine, the booze and the craziness, I told him that he could only screw up badly in front of my kids once, and then he wouldn't see them again until they were 25. I meant it, too. He may not remember it, but somewhere he internalized it. He may have been absent from our lives for months at a time, but he never made me question whether he could be around my kids. He came close only once. The few horror stories they've heard, they've heard now that he's sober. They never had to watch him spiral out of control. That's a gift, too, to me and to them.

"Can you imagine me on cocaine?" he asked at one of our theater reunions. (Yes, we organize our own high school reunions, just for those of us from the theater department.) We all said the same things. "I don't have to – I saw it!" "It was ugly." "You're so lucky you never really saw it, Tony." "God help me, it was awful."

When Tony decided to get sober, he was a mess. His hands shook. His memory was dreadful. More than once, we'd be somewhere in public and someone would approach, saying, "Hey, man, it's been a long time. How are you?" Tony would have an entire conversation, then ask me after they'd gone, "Who was that, and how do I know them?"

His life sounds more like melodramatic fiction than a real life. It's not, I promise you. You will find yourself disbelieving what he has to say, but it all happened.

Tony is exasperating, clueless, infuriating, loving, amazing, talented beyond belief and his own worst enemy. I love him with all my heart.

Love him or hate him, you'll never forget him.

******************

I'm not sure what it will be like to be here on Earth without him.

I wish him peace in the next life.

I am so glad that those of us who knew him have each other to lean on right now.

I miss you, my brother. I always will.

Madeira

When I made mental lists of places that I wanted to visit, I never said to myself, "I really need to see Madeira!" I don't think it was on my radar at all. Then, we booked a cruise that would take my husband, myself, and two youngest children there.

This is our first glimpse of the city of Funchal, from the deck of our cruise ship.

Holy cow! So gorgeous.

By the time we tried to book a shore excursion, they were full, so we walked off the ship to see what we could find.

We found these sights before we even left the port.

I haven't edited any of these images, by the way - no filters, no color correcting. These are just as they came out of the camera. The colors really were that vivid.

We'd passed the first group of gathered cabbies hoping to entice us to hire them, but now we ran into a second group. We don't come from a large city, so we're not used to hiring cabs. My 18 year old and my 14 year old had only been in a cab once before.

One friendly but not overly aggressive driver handed us a homemade brochure. "I take you to the botanical gardens, the sea cliffs, a fishing village and back here. OK?" He named a price.

OK. Let's go see the island, we decided.

I'm so glad that we hired a driver. I would not have been able to make sense of, nor feel safe driving, the narrow, winding, hillside streets, even if I had access to a car.

It might have been worth the price just to see the Jardim Botanico da Madeira.

Looking down the mountain, you could just barely see the ship that had brought us across the Atlantic.

There she is - the Disney Magic.

Driving across the island, everything looked amazing and exotic to us - narrow streets, tiny cars, old buildings. We're from the American West, where something 50 years old is considered a teardown. Here, people lived, shopped and worshipped in buildings centuries old.

One of the local traditions turned tourist attraction involved sledding down the mountain streets. Straw hatted drivers steered the wheeled sleds down the mountain, and drivers like ours waited at the bottom to pick them up. We watched, delighted, but decided to pass on actually sledding.

A significant portion of the steep hills were terraced for growing. We're not wine people, but I hear that Madeira wines are highly rated.

The next stop was Cabo Girao, the tallest sea cliffs in Europe. The clear viewing deck was too unnerving for my youngest; she stayed well back. "I can see fine from here!"

Being a desert dweller, I find anything to do with water overly romantic (or overly terrifying, depending). I found myself in Camara de Lobos practically swooning. Drying fish! Battered boats! And the colors!

Our driver dropped us back in Funchal, where we had lunch and kept the camera clicking on our way back to the ship.

Maybe we'll be back there some day; maybe not. It will continue to be one of my favorite places that I never knew I wanted to see, until I was there.

All photos copyright: The Reflection Works Photography, 2013