Companions

Episode 59 - Companions

Official transcript: https://www.cheynemusic.com/transcripts

Jan & Rob, Dee & Jim talk about companion animals they have known, some of whom do well in the home, others not so much.

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Transcript

JIM (voice-over): Today we remember and celebrate the animals whose company we have enjoyed as we have been Making Our Way. Currently there are three. Jan and Rob live with Skye, a seven-year-old female black Labrador Retriever who is lively, mischievous, likes to play keep away with anything you might need right now, and though she loves going to the park and on walks, she mopes when it’s time to put on her harness. Dee and I live with Brigus and Pip. Brigus is a nine-year-old male Golden Retriever who’s recovering from surgery for a growth on his side. The pathology found the growth to have been benign. So now Brigus awaits the removal of the sutures which will have happened by the time you hear this. He does not tolerate the Cone of Shame at all, so he’s been sporting instead the Surgical Suit of Sorrows for the past two weeks He’s lively, runs alongside me on my bike rides, and though he loves going on walks, he mopes when it’s time to put on his harness. Pip is nearly two years old, a male Teacup Yorkie who suffered a brain inflammation - meningoencephalitis they called it - but he is recovering sell, and so we are weaning him off of his steroid regimen. Pip thinks everything is wonderful, alerts us whenever anything comes within 100 feet of the front door, and thrills when it’s time to put on his harness because he can work off those extra ounces he’s gained from the steroids. I mean, he almost hit four pounds, and summer is nearly here.

Since it’s three dogs, I was tempted to call this episode “Menagerie à Trois,” but, no. Instead, thinking of these three and of the many other animals with whom we have shared our homes, this episode is called “Companions.”

[Music]

JIM: And we’re here to talk about our companion animals, and animals in general, and pets and all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small. What’s the very first pet, Dee, that you remember in your family?

DEE: Billy the Budgie… a little budgie bird.

JIM: Billy’s…

DEE: …a little budgie bird.

JIM: …is a bird. And what color was Billy?

DEE: Billy was green. The first Billy was green.

JAN: Wait, there’s multiple Billys?

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JAN: Okay.

DEE: Billy the first…

ROB: He flew.

DEE: …passed away when dad varnished our entryway rock, and the fumes got to him.

JAN: Gosh.

JIM: Oh, that’s sad.

ROB: Oops.

DEE: I was very young when we had Billy the First, and my grandmother got him to talk.

JIM: Oh, they talk. What did he say?

DEE: “Hello.”

JIM: That was it?

DEE: “How are you?”

JIM: “Hello?” “How are you?”

DEE: Yeah, and he would say his name Billy.

JIM: Oh good. [to Jan] Do you remember grandpa’s bird Jacko?

JAN: Yes.

JIM: Do you remember what he used to say?

JAN: Well, first, he spoke with a Scottish brogue, and he’d say, “God bless the general you old coot.”

JIM: Oh, is it “the old coot?”

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: I had “old rascal.” “Old coot.” I like that even better. Was it [for General] Coutts?

JAN: I don’t know, Jim.

JIM: Okay. It was just a thought so you’re Billy number One, green, and talked.

DEE: Mm-hmm.

JIM: And then you got another budgie and also called him Billy?

DEE: Yeah. The way I got the second one is funny. It was a Christmas gift from my brother and sister, and my parents knew nothing about it.

[Laughter]

DEE: So, it’s Christmas morning. Dad goes down to turn on the heat, and then he comes up and walks into the bedroom and he goes “Oh my goodness. There’s a bird downstairs. There must really be a Santa Claus,” which completely confused me, and I’m like, “What do you mean there must really be a Santa Claus?”

[Laughter]

JIM: Oops. Jan what was your first pet?

JAN: Duchess.

JIM: Was it Duchess?

JAN: Yes.

JIM: Our Golden Retriever.

JAN: Yes.

JIM: I remember going to pick her up.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: Yeah.

JAN: A little puppy and she peed in the back window.

JIM: In the back. That’s in our Chry-

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: Was it a Chrysler?

JAN: Yes.

JIM: What was that car? A green - two-tone green Chrysler. ‘54 Chrysler.

JAN: I look at how we’ve progressed as dog owners in our lives, but that was like, “Let’s get a dog. Let’s get a puppy. Let’s spend too much money. Let’s do this,” and I don’t think we had any idea. At least it wasn’t how we would care for a dog today.

JIM: Dogs are out in the backyard, right? And they’re there in a doghouse or in a pen or something like that.

JAN: First of all, our relationship with pets in general in our society has changed, but also I think we were clueless. We wanted a dog. That was as far as the thought went. Now she had a great doghouse, and it was always filled with cedar shavings…

JIM: Right.

JAN: …and she loved that whenever you’d put the new cedar shavings in she’d go in…

JIM: Just go berserk.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: It’s come flying out of the doghouse.

JAN: But she’s also the first time I had to deal with a dog running away, and that time between when they go and when you find them was horrible.

JIM: And do you remember how she ran away? I had it as kind of like during a storm or something

JAN: Oh, I don’t remember.

JIM: Yeah.

JAN: I just remember that she got out and I - it seems like when we found her, she had gone back toward the house in Garden City.

JIM: I was old enough when we got her that I was aware that I had not had a dog and now I was like those kids on TV that had dogs.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: You know, like, “Oh, we’ve got our own dog,” and that was Duchess and she was - she lived to, like, 1975 or something?

JAN: She was 15…

DEE: Oh, wow.

JAN: …I think, when she died. She lived a long life.

JIM: Yeah, yeah, and Rob, What was your first pet?

ROB: My first pet was a dog named Ginger. We also had a cat. I have a memory of a cat named Mitzi. It was an outdoor cat and I don’t remember us doing much other than feeding it. But ginger was a medium-sized mix…

JAN: Collie mix, right?

ROB: She had a little - No.

JAN: Oh that was a later dog.

ROB: Yeah, that was later. I think she had a little lab in her, and maybe some Cocker Spaniel. I don’t know. She was medium-sized kind of an orange dog.

JAN: Ginger.

ROB: Ginger, yeah. We lost her while we were on our first camping trip with my grandparents to Yellowstone. My aunt and uncle - my Uncle Sherman, Aunt Ruth Ann - kept her for us and she ran away.

DEE: Oh.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: Oh.

ROB: And, um, never found her.

JIM: Oh, my goodness.

JAN: This is why I’m - I’m very, you know, why I give you with the air tag so that you can find Skye.

JIM: Yeah.

JAN: It’s one of my worst - I can’t imagine anything much worse than your dog running away and you don’t know what happened.

JIM: Yeah.

JAN: It’s a horrible…

JIM: Well, it’s - in my mind, it’s the dog not knowing what it’s done. “I don’t know what to do. I’m lost.”

ROB: It’s another sad thing is the cat ended up dying. It ate some poison or something outside. We found it dead out in the - near the neighbor’s yard. Looked like it’d been poisoned.

JIM: I guess we’re talking about pets that we have killed.

JAN: Oh my gosh, this is depressing.

ROB: Sorry.

JIM: Yeah, well, growing up, I remember only Duchess. [to Jan] Did you did you have a rabbit?

ROB: I did.

JAN: Not when we were children.

DEE: I did.

JAN:  No, I had a…

JIM: You had a guinea pig.

JAN: …guinea pig and I had a pair of hamsters that were named Isabella and Ferdinand…

JIM: Oh very good.

JAN: …as one does after historical figures.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: That’s right? So that they so we have our furry friends. They fill our hearts with love and then they break our hearts...

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …at some point. I came in, Dee, to our marriage with a cat.

DEE: Mm-hmm.

JIM: Blue. Blue was named by Lydia Smith who gave Blue to me just after mom died, and she came and presented Blue, and I was not yet ready for a cat, but it seemed like, okay,someone gives you a gift, so you accept it. And so I had Blue, and then you brought BJ who was a male cat.

DEE: Yeah, he’s a tabbie.

JIM: But we always talked about getting a dog, but our townhouse wasn’t allowing dogs.

DEE: Mm-Hmm. 

JIM: So we waited till we got the house that we’re in now, and then we picked up…

DEE: Cassie.

JIM: Cassie, our beautiful Golden Retriever Cassie.

JAN: You know, it’s funny. That’s the first thing about getting a house that we did was to get a dog.It’s like, now we can get a dog, and that’s how we ended up with Shasta, and it was at that point we made the decision to get a Lab, a Labrador Retriever, and that - actually it seems obvious now, but at the time we thought of other dogs. Rob wanted to get a Shih Tzu so so he could say, “Shih Tzu,” but we [laughing] we ended up with a Lab…

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: …which became just - you know, retrievers are the best.

JIM: So, three dogs, 2 cats, several fish. You guys have had…

ROB: Three cats, five dogs, a snake…

DEE: Ew-Woo.

ROB: …an iguana…

DEE: Wasn’t there a tarantula, too?

ROB: …a tarantula. We did - Rocky our raccoon - my raccoon, it’s before we got married, but it was the year - just the year before we got married. We were working together out of camp and I - somebody brought three little orphaned raccoons.

JAN: Well, what had happened is, somebody shot the mother of the raccoons.

ROB: I don’t - I don’t remember that part.

JAN: Well, it was at camp, and somebody - yes, so Rob adopted Rocky.

ROB: Rocky was great, because I was the outdoor craft director that year at Camp…

JAN: Shagbark.

ROB: Shagbark. Jan’s dad was the program director. And so I had this little guy, followed me around everywhere I went. He - I had to teach him to climb. He slept with me at night. He went to the bathroom in a litter box. He ate cat food. I had him - took him to a vet and, and he got hi,s his shots. The mistake I made was bringing him home at the end of the summer to my parents’ condominium, or townhouse He just needed space to roam. Yeah, I had to watch him constantly. He was into everything. And so finally one night my parents wanted to go out to dinner, and I said, “Let’s do this.” We had a half bath on the ground floor. “We’ll put him in the half bathroom. We’ll put his litter box in there. We’ll give him a little bit” - he liked raw egg and stuff like that. So we put a raw egg in a, in a pan for him, and a little bit of cat food, “and we’ll just leave him in there. What da-” we took everything out, “What damage can he do?” When I got back, you know the mirror over the sink? He was hanging by his front claws on the mirror, and when I opened the door he looked at me, and he just made a couple of squeaks, “ee ee,” like “uh-oh,”  and I looked and the bathroom was a mess. He had dumped his litter. He had dumped the egg, the cat food, and then he had just - it’s like he’d taken his paws and just tapped on the walls everywhere he could; his dirty paws leaving all these paw prints everywhere. The floor was total grimy mess. And that’s when we decided it was time to let Rocky be free, so we took him to, uh, Lower Huron Metro Park and let him loose. And he walked out and never looked back.

JAN: You know, it’s an example of not every animal is meant to be a companion in your home.

ROB: Right.

JAN: And that’s the perfect example of that.

ROB: Yeah. That’s true.

JAN: You know, he needed to be out and be free…

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: …and it would have been cruel, really…

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: …to keep him…

ROB: Oh, yeah.

JAN: …when really he was old enough to be on his own. 

ROB: Right. So that was my experience with Rocky. And then Snakey Lakey Lakey was while we were at school in Colorado. We got him, brought him back. Tell ‘em the story the night of the - when we were all tired…

JAN: Oh, my goodness, Rob.

ROB: …of studying for finals.

JAN: When you’re at college you do strange things, and so it was finals time and we had Snakey Lakey, who was male, and another friend had a female Bull snake. And we thought it would be entertaining to put them in the same dorm room on a bed together, with candles lit, and music playing to see if they would mate. And I’m just gonna say that our snake was a failure. He could not complete…

ROB: He tried.

JAN: He didn’t - he made attempts. He was never successful and you know, we had to go back to studying I guess, but, um, lessons you learn from animals.

ROB: We had half the dorm, I think, outside the doors watching.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: I was on Facebook once and George Whittingham, bass player for the ISB - he was the guest at CMI one year - and he pops on he says, “Are you the guy with the snake?” And I said, “No, that’s my brother-in-law,” but he remembered coming to the cabin where Snakey Lakey Lakey was…

ROB: Right.

JIM: …and there was some sort of a devotional that night that included watching the snake eat a mouse.

DEE: Oh my gosh! How is that a devotional?

ROB: I don’t know, but he did a great job. I can’t even remember what it was.

JAN: He was the guest at CMI.

ROB: Yes, but that was - he wanted to see the snake eat a mouse and so, yeah. That was Lance Duguay and I were the counselors that year.

DEE: Oh, no!

JAN: It’s the circle of life.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: You also forgot the Jackson’s chameleon.

ROB: Oh, I had a Jackson’s chameleon when we lived in Garden City.

JAN: Yes. He was cool. His eyes moved independently.

ROB: Yeah. It was a female so he didn’t have the horn - she didn’t have the horn, but I would hold her on my hand like this and I would point her at a fly, and that tongue would come out and grab the fly.

JIM: That’s pretty good.

ROB: It was awesome.

JAN: The tongue was longer than the body…

ROB: Yes.

JAN: …and it would unroll out of it’s an out of her mouth and then come back in.

ROB: That was amazing.

JIM: Now, these more exotic pets, are those because you were a science teacher?

ROB: Well, partly. I was just interested. The iguana was a gift from Pam and Bill Bridges, and I honestly - I think I had him - I named him Einstein, okay? That’s, that’s a…

DEE: Yeah.

ROB:  …not just a Billy or a Rocky…

DEE: No.

JAN: No, but it’s an oxymoron.

ROB: Well, yeah, but. He lived at least 25 years with me, and then I gave him to, um, Ben and Annie Bridges, and they - they had a somebody worked for them who had, who had others and raised them, and had a big outdoor cage and stuff. So they gave him to him and that’s where he spent his last days. But, yeah, I took the iguana into school. There came a point when they wouldn’t let you bring - they wouldn’t let you keep stuff - live animals in the classroom.

DEE: I can bring my dogs to school.

ROB: Yeah, well see that’s nice.

JIM: My mug today is a picture of Brigus and me…

ROB: Yup.

DEE: I love it.

JIM: …on the coast at Acadia National Park

ROB: Yup.

JIM: …and it’s him looking at me smiling. I believe I told a joke and he’s the only one that got it. “All you need is love and a dog named Brigus,” is what it says on the mug.

ROB: Brigus. What kind of name is that, Jim?

JIM: That’s a great name. One day I pulled out a Newfoundland map, and I came across this name Brigus, which I had never heard of before, and I just thought, “That actually is a very distinctive name.” And it seems to suit him because he’s quite, um, he’s a large, block head, bold shoulder, big limbed dog, and it’s from a Scottish term that means “brick house” and then it’s just changed into Brigus. And so that’s how we named him.

DEE: And the golden retriever is a Scottish breed.

JIM: Scottish breed, and Cassie was - that was something that just popped in my head once. I remember I was driving down Fletcher when that name popped into my head, then I we talked about I said that was okay. Duchess, I don’t know who named Duchess…

JAN: Probably Dad.

JIM: …probably Dad because Dad had had a dog named King…

ROB: Oh, okay.

JIM: …when he was a boy in Springfield. And there’s a wonderful story about King. Dad was the youngest of the four kids. Grandpa and Jack, Dad’s brother, older brother, were going off to a store and they took little Jimmy with them and King. They were in the backseat. They get to a store. Jack and Grandpa went into the store leaving Jimmy and the dog in the car. Springfield, Missouri. When they came back to the car, they hadn’t noticed that there wasn’t anyone else in the backseat anymore. And they just go home. But in the meantime, Dad had gotten out of the car with King not knowing where he was. He was too young, but he followed the dog. The dog led him right back home, which - Grandma was really surprised when Jimmy and the dog showed up, and so when Jack and Grandpa came back she had a little bit of a moment of, “Where’s Jimmy?” And they kind of panicked until she could finally reveal. When Dad and I were visiting Springfield for his sister’s 50th wedding anniversary in 1986, saw the house that this had occurred in, then he showed me the route they had taken, and it was not simply down the block. This was past traffic lights. This was quite a walk. And congratulations to King for getting Dad safely home and finding their way home.

JAN: We started naming our dogs after places that were important to us, but also because we pretty much always wanted to travel with our dogs. So that was all kind of part of the tradition. So Shasta is Mount Shasta. Sundance and Dakota were just like Western names. They went with a yellow and black Lab, because they were two puppies from the same litter. That was a delight. Juneau is obviously Alaska, and Skye was the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

JIM: Well that worked for Freeport, your cat…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …because of LL Bean and Freeport, Maine. What about Matisse? How did that happen?

JAN: We just went with an artist we at that time I don’t remember why exactly but we had a fascination with we’ve always Always had a fascination with Matisse. We have a couple of prints in our house, and I don’t know…

JIM: Are they his cut-out times?

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: Remember when we saw that?

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: I’m, I - that’s where I first connected with Matisse…

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: …were these paper cutouts…

ROB: The DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts].

JIM: …he did later in life.

JAN: DIA.

JIM: And it was a Maine Coon cat?

JAN: Maine Coon cat.

JIM: Yeah. 

JAN: Both Freeport which and Matisse were Maine Coons.

ROB: Yeah, and then Tigger was a, just a…

JAN: She was a stray…

ROB: …stray.

JAN: …that I brought home when we were first in Garden City.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: So she was - yeah. One of the things I was thinking about with our five dogs: We had five Labs, so on some level they have traits in common, which was what we were going for. We were going for that retriever personality in our home. But you get to know them as individual beings.

DEE: Yeah.

JAN: And they have differences of personality. Skye’s not like - I mean, she’s a Lab like the other Labs, but she’s a unique individual animal, and I think that it’s - one of the cool things about having had five different Labs over the course of our lives is getting to know them as individuals, which is why when we lose one, as we lost Juneau, when somebody says, “Are you gonna get another dog?” Well, it wasn’t like a peg in a hole…

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JAN: …you know, this was a being that was part of our family, and it’s not interchangeable…

DEE: Right.

JAN: …you know, so for - this is for Rob and me, and I know for you guys, the companion animals we have in our homes are individuals as part of our family, and known as individuals. So that’s been something we’ve learned in the course of our lives…

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: …of having pets. I think we learned also our ethics, Jim, like what you said from the people around us. When we had dogs earlier in our lives and we would want - you know, Labs are exuberant when you walk them, and so the way to control that was to put a spiked collar on or a choke chain or whatever. That was fairly standard at the time. I would never do that now, and I learned that really from other people in our lives, other people who had dogs…

ROB: Mm-Hmm.

JAN: …who said, “Wait, that’s that’s not good.” And we even had dog trainers who said, “You need to put a collar on that dog.”

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: No, I don’t. I need to learn how to manage this behavior. Not to hurt the dog.

ROB: Right.

JAN: So, those things I’ve learned from other people.

ROB: The cat that I talked about when we were kids was, really, almost feral. I mean he was outside all the time.

JIM: This neighborhood has a lot of feral children. [laughter] And I tell people, “Stop feeding them and they won’t keep - and they won’t come around anymore. They’ll find another place to go.”

ROB: But I would never think, if I had a cat, I would never think about letting it roam outside.

DEE: No.

ROB: It would be an indoor cat for its own safety. We had a dog named Princess that we had to give up to somebody else because she needed too much room. We didn’t have a fence yard, and she was a runner And if she got out it would be you know a long time before I could get her back. Part Collie, and she just had a lot of energy. Then we got Spoofy, who my dad wanted to call Spoofbutton. We went downtown. It was downtown Detroit to a - it was on a Sunday as I recall and we we would go to Eventide on Sunday afternoons to wait until the evening service at Detroit Citadel. So he takes me, it was just the two of us, and we went down to the Humane Society downtown somewhere and we’re looking in this little Toy Manchester Terrier or whatever they were called. Yeah, we liked it. And so he said, “Let’s name it Spoofbutton.” I said, “Where did that come from? Spoofbutton?”

JAN: Your dad was a crazy man.

ROB: And so, but we ended up naming her Spoofy. Then we had Munchkin.

JIM: But Spoofy is a great name. It’s a non-mug name.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: You know, it’s not a Rover or something, and Spoofy is the one I remember. I didn’t remember anything before that, and I don’t know if when you came to Detroit in 62, do you remember when…

ROB: That…

JIM: …if you had anything with you when you came?

ROB: We might have had Princess. We didn’t have her for very long because…

JAN: I remember Princess.

ROB: …she was too much dog.

JAN: She was, now wasn’t she part Collie?

ROB: Yeah. Yeah.

JAN: Okay.

DEE: Yeah, that’s a working dog.

ROB: Yeah.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: And she was a runner, boy.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: When she got out and we had no fence. and and we had a big field behind her backyard, and she would just go.

JIM (voice-over): Dee wanted to share a story about two dogs she knew growing up: Bozo and Geronimo. So she called her brother Darryl in Newfoundland to get the details. He joined us by phone.

DARRYL (via phone): Many, many years ago, Dad had our mutt Bozo over at Uncle Jeff’s and Aunt Carol’s. He made a mistake where Geronimo, which was a black and white Newfoundland dog, and a very big black and white Newfoundland dog, was out in their backyard, and Dad brought Bozo into their house and Geronimo’s house. And then after a while someone let Geronimo in and he knew there was an intruder in the house. And usually Bozo was a tough, medium-sized dog who didn’t back down from anybody, but Geronimo saw him and started barking and running towards him. Bozo went and hid between the wall and the television, and Dad got in front of Bozo to protect him. And Geronimo came over to Dad, got on his hind legs, put his front paws on Dad’s shoulders, and started growling at him. And Uncle Jeff and your cousin Stephen went over to Geronimo, who was probably around five foot ten when he was fully stretched on his hind legs, and they took him by the collar and pulled on him and flipped him over on his back. And there was a window right next to where Dad and Bozo was, and the window was open, and Dad picked up Bozo and threw him out the window. And Bozo’s legs were already going in mid-air for when he hit the ground and started running away. That was the story of Bozo and Geronimo. We have survived that dad didn’t jump out the window and start running away as well.

[Laughter]

JIM (voice-over): So, there are a few memories about our animal companions. I should add my thanks to the many of you who reached out with concerns for Pip and Brigus. They’re doing well, and they’re lying on the floor beneath my feet while I’m recording this. Later, there will be walks, dinner, some medications, maybe a treat, and then on to tomorrow.

 Thank you for your company.

Until next time.

[Music ends]