The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [49]
Then there's the folding, which we enjoy most, folding clean, fresh-smelling sheets and towels, shirts, pants. The trunk I once packed full of clothes for Stephen has long since been ransacked for Trevor. As luck would have it, Trevor and Stephen are about the same size. The trunk serves as Trev's dresser.
One night Stephen and I find ourselves folding a run of twenty or so identical boxer shorts complete with sports insignia.
“Where did these come from?” I ask.
“I think they're a gift from Trevor,” he answers. “I guess you won't have to buy us underwear for a long time. I saw another couple of boxes of these in the garage …”
Besides maintenance and upkeep of the house, work, and schoolwork, our animals teach us rituals. Rufus loves to howl. He possesses a hound's deep baritone and will “sing” on command, sing passionately, starting in the lower octaves and reaching crescendos that so amaze and move us, we reward him with almost a whole pack of Pupperoni, the other dogs rewarded in the wake of Rufus's performance simply for being Rufus's friends.
And Buster, indeed, loves balls. At the sight of one he cannot be distracted. He is compulsive about balls, perhaps owing to his epilepsy. Buster must be kept indoors if the boys decide to shoot baskets in front of the garage or he will steal the ball and boot it all the way down the hill to the retirement home.
Now and then we let him have the ball inside our fenced yard, but he's allowed to play with it for fifteen, at the most twenty minutes at a time or he will pop it, and/or bloody his nose, and/or work himself into such a frenzy he begins to seize.
As for G.Q., the behaviorist at the vet school in Grafton diagnosed him as dominant aggressive, a condition, he told us, that often surfaces about the time a dog reaches two years old.
“If he were in the wild, he would be alpha male, top dog,” he explained.
“In the wild,” I considered. “He's not far from it…”
To suppress his aggression, the behaviorist instructed us, we must engage G. in rigorous training, including disciplined walks on the leash followed by the exercise of the command of fifty to one hundred downs each day. The behaviorist also put him on Prozac.
All of us participate in G's training lest he get the notion he can bully any of us. During the early dark, sleet or snowfall, while I cook dinner or while the tutor instructs one or the other, the boys work with the bulldog in the dining room. Rufus and Buster drop in and try a few downs themselves. Over the drone of the tutor's explanations of algebraic equations can be heard: “G, heal! Good boy! G.Q., down! Good boy! Buster, down. Good boy! Rufus, down. Rufus, down. Rufus, down … .”
My friend Frank has sent us a video showing the beneficial effects of Prozac on animals. One weekend my sister Eve comes to visit, and while she and I shuck a huge barrel of corn, I show her the video. We listen to the narrator explain how a bird, once confined in a cage much too small for him, plucked out all of his feathers. Though the bird was rescued and moved to a larger cage, he continued to torment himself and was nearly bald, full of scabs and scrapes.
Given careful doses of Prozac, however, the bird is shown in various stages as he grows new feathers, until at last he is fully arrayed, content, and animated. You can see for the first time that the bird is a beautiful parrot.
“I've known people like that,” says Eve, a practicing psychologist now in divinity school.
Another segment of the video shows a dog who refuses to come out from behind the drapes of his person's living room, and yet another dog who has fixated on a particular stick and cannot be persuaded to put it down. As a result that dog hardly eats or sleeps.
“That's me,” I comment.
“I'm the one behind the curtain,” Eve answers.
Once on Prozac,