It's Rotten Work
On Caring for a Small, Injured Dog
I feel like I should open this letter by telling all of my dog Chico’s many fans that he is doing ok, but also that this letter contains some details of a fairly gnarly injury my perfect son has recently sustained, so you may want to take care while reading.
Last Wednesday night, when my husband got home from work and was greeted effusively by our dog, he noticed a quarter-sized somewhat crusty and oozy lump on Chico’s back. We called the vet, got an appointment, and the next day, at his office discovered that this was not a small cyst that had burst (my initial assumption) but rather a palm-sized burn, hidden under the fur, that had become infected.
I left the vet an hour later having experienced my tiny dog screaming in pain, and with a good, heart-shaped chunk of his fur shaved from his normally glossy, thick coat with a horrible, oozing mess of skin in the middle of it.
This month marks 10 years of my knowing Chico (and also my husband, I guess) and earlier this year we celebrated Chico entering his teen years. He is a perfect dog—lazy, deeply affectionate, so charismatic it is sometimes difficult to focus on other things when he is in the room, breath bad enough to melt a truck, particular and individual and slightly crotchety, excellent at throwing his butt against you and leaning his whole 15 pounds into your side when he wants attention. I love him wholeheartedly. The last few years have been a process of understanding that he is, like the rest of us, experiencing the ravages of time. He’s almost entirely deaf now, and we think getting a little blind, stairs give him (more) trouble (than usual, he’s really never been a fan), he sleeps more of the day (seemingly impossible), and he will occasionally lose us when we are all on the same couch and run from room to room looking for us. This is both sad and also just the way the world works—I, too, am a little stiffer, a little more unwieldy than when I met Chico when he was 3 and I was 22.
The way the world works is not, however, huge, gnarly injury appearing out of nowhere. Except for when it does.
Neither my husband or I has any idea how or when he got this burn—could he have gotten splashed with boiling water or hot oil when nosing around in the kitchen, even though we try to keep him out? Could it have been an accident at the groomers’ last week? We both feel kind of insane—a week ago we had a perfectly healthy, beautiful dog with all his fur, and now we have a tiny, half-bald guy with a giant, oozing wound, with seemingly no precipitating event in between. Just one day he woke up and his skin fell off. It feels like a horrible dream, complete with horrible dream logic.
Chico, for his part, now that he’s being given painkiller-glazed meatballs every morning, is seemingly unbothered. He’s been spending his days like he usually does1 and other than when we’re putting salve on the burn, seemingly unbothered. But salve we must, twice a day, and I can’t figure out how to explain to him that we are doing this horrible thing to him for his own good. I feel like he knows, given the absolute stoic patience with which he has submitted to me carefully and gently patting goo into his [many texture adjectives here, all of them bad] skin. I am more upset than he seems when his skin flakes away onto my gloved hand.
I am not a person who has ever been good with….the body. I have thrown up a little bit from picking up totally normal dog poop, a thing I do literally every day. The worst part of being sick for me is very often not how I feel but having to deal with the various substances my own body produces. But when it’s Chico, and when it’s my husband, who is better about body stuff than I am but a thousand times more anxious about causing Chico pain, it’s me who is donning the latex gloves and peering carefully at the topography of a burn, gently wiping away grime and dabbing on antibiotic ointment. I am, in the midst of this, worried that it is hurting my relationship with my dog—he knows, already, what it means when I put on blue latex gloves, I watch him snuggle into my husband and avoid me, it hurts my heart.
Of course, we can’t go any farther without bringing in Euripides, trans. Anne Carson2:
Pylades and Orestes are that particular Ancient Greek combo hit of cousins/best friends/lovers. Orestes, still under the particular doom of the house of Atreus, is facing down the barrel of gods-induced illness/madness or a murderous mob. Pylades, although his cousin, is not narratively doomed in this same way, and could choose to walk away, could choose to distance himself from his matricidal cousin, and instead says that he’s not only going to stay, to face Orestes’ fate with him, he will shoulder some of the burdens of Orestes’ condition.
Tumblr user troubledtmesis did some literary analysis of a bunch of translations and of the Greek, and the word that Anne Carson translates here as “care” has some implications around not only tending and tenderness both physically and emotionally, but around ensuring someone has a good death and a proper burial—a duty, an embrace of care that goes beyond life.
I know the context and kind of received meaning of this quote has to do with queerness (remind me, please, to write an essay on my Theory of Queer Chivalry and Courtly Love please, this quote being fig. 1) but I also think this is just what you sign up for when you love someone, particularly a small creature with a shorter lifespan than your own. You sign up, knowing that it’s rotten work. Everything from like, very regularly handling his poop and denying him things he very badly wants because they will make him sick, to making difficult decisions around his health and wellbeing, to some day, in all likelihood, watching him die. But also, it’s not so rotten, after all—what else can you do but tend, but care, but perform the work and fret about it, but do whatever you can to ensure this small creature is happy and lives the longest, most luxurious life the two of you can manage, even if it is, occasionally, marred by discomfort.
My dog is not dying, but I’m also not going to lie or sugarcoat it—it is absolutely, truly, rotten work to care for him right now. It is bad in nearly every way it could be bad—I feel nearly frantic at seeing my dog in pain, I am repulsed by the stuff his body is doing to heal itself, I am constantly worried that I’m going to mess it/him/our relationship up somehow, I hate that I can’t explain to him why I am causing him additional pain and discomfort.
But also, its him, and its me.
Either a) asleep, or b) asking you for a bite of whatever you’re eating? please?
We are all going to pretend that I know this quote from my reading of the Oresteia in a compulsory lit class my freshman year of college, or from my abiding love of Anne Carson (both true), even though we all know that loving these lines, from this translation, means you did your time in the trenches of Tumblr in the early aughts (also true).
Where I’ll Be:
I’m teaching a translation course through Poets & Writers! Click through the link for more information, but in the meantime, here’s the description:
In this workshop, you will explore translation as a form of obsessive reading: a way of personally creating and recreating those texts that fascinate you, and learning how to incorporate these practices into your reading and writing life. Using the reflections of authors/translators such as Kate Briggs, Mireille Gansel, Jennifer Croft, and more, we will investigate how to create a translation practice that coexists with reading and writing. You will bring in one (short!) text that we will work with over the course of the three class sessions, first reading and annotating it, then translating it, and finally, mining it for ideas for you to take into your own writing. Through mini-lectures, writing prompts, and partner work, this class will guide you through the creation of a translated text. Class will be conducted in English, and my own language pair is English/Spanish—but you can be working in any language pair.
As always, if you’re looking for a good speaker for your organization, a teacher for a class or workshop, or a convo partner for your book event, get in touch!
What I’ve Written:
Nothing new since the last newsletter!
What I’m Reading:
Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal—a truly delightful semi-philosophical, mostly-culinary read about the kind of intuitive cooking that rolls one meal into the next. It feels like it was written by like, a wonderful glamorous woman in the 1930s or 40s who has caught you eating a microwave dinner or like, sweetgreen one too many times and is gently pushing you to experience culinary joy for yourself. It’s really lovely and approachable and vibes-based in a way that makes me want to cook very badly.
Oh, poor Chico! Poor you! (And yes, please do write that essay!)