Every day was a scary day for Mac as he was introduced daily to something new.
He never objected to wearing a harness and even anxious, allowed me to lead/carry him to the lawn. Once loose on the lawn he would freeze and look up into the sky as if something was going to fall on him. The wind was his enigma (still not comfortable in it) and the bamboo rustling was definitely out to get him! Being Winter didn’t help and it was a sad sight to witness every time he went outside. We noticed that he would freeze at doorways. We would open doors wide and make sure there was no one in his eye line. He would then rush through the doorway to get back to the study. This went on for more than 2 years, but hey - he was finding his own way back to under my desk. Was he kicked walking past someone or walking through a doorway? Was his pen door slammed on him?
One thing was obviously clear: he had NEVER been inside a house and the slightest noise sent him into a nervous shiver. Pots and pans, telephones, voices, footsteps as well as thunder and lightning to name a few. After hours there were visitors to discuss plans to do building alterations on the house. I asked everyone that came into the house to just ignore him. Easy, he didn’t really make himself visible.
Just 2 weeks after Mac arrived - my Gran passed away. She was 94. My gran raised me, because my mother wouldn’t/couldn’t; (another story for another time; Charlie says if he’d read the book, he probably wouldn’t have married me!) I decided then to give Mac my Gran's birthday - it was a close enough guesstimate of his age. A week after that, Victoria left for USA to visit her American boyfriend and his family in Atlanta.
During the day it was just him and “miserable me” and he didn’t move from under my desk until I decided he should. (This was definitely meant to be, because my normal animated self, would have probably have been “too much” for him. Eating time was still forced and mornings were no different from the first one. Needless to say, he was not gaining any weight.
Once again, I knew I could rely on my AA partners for and support and decided it was time to take Mac out of the house and into the big world!
This was kind of the way of things for his first 2 months. There was zero eye contact. He had the most beautiful blue eyes and they were vacant; there was nobody home. The nicest treats were ignored. At an “agility workshop”, a well-meaning handler intimated that “he needed to show me that he actually wanted to live or I should consider putting him down”!
Mac and Me
C’est la vie
No comments:
Post a Comment