Posts tagged ‘dogs’
MY LIFE WITH MILLIE AND SAM
10/16/2021
Millie was losing even more weight, and her arthritis was causing her great pain. She hadn’t eaten for two days. So, I made one of the most difficult calls I have ever made in my life. I called the vet’s office and said it was time. I drove her to the vet. Went inside to tell them we were in the parking lot. As I walked back to my car there was Millie lying on the back seat looking at me with her beautiful eyes full of love.
A vet who has known Millie all her life came into the exam room and immediately said by the smell she could tell the problem was her kidneys.
The process went very fast. First Millie got something to make her sleep. Millie was standing and just keeled over. The vet said it was not usually so dramatic. Next came the injection which would relieve Millie of all her pain and sleep forever.
Millie is gone now but will never be forgotten.
Update 6/27/2025
Since this story was first written my cat, Sammy, has died at the age of 17. I have never been much of a cat person, but after 17 years I must say Sammy grew on me. However, Sammy being Sammy, I’m not sure of Sammy enjoying having me around.
August 18, 2025 at 1:58 pm
She came home with us, and we crated her in the living room, then went upstairs in our split-level home to go to sleep. Millie began crying. We thought she missed her siblings, but she was missing company. Once moved to our bedroom, the crying stopped.
In September my wife went on vacation, and I was left with un-house-broken Millie. I brought Millie into the sunroom and closed the door to the rest of the house. Armed with paper towels and a host of cleaners I was prepared to clean up after Millie until she learned where to do what had to be done. Eventually she learned to go to the back yard and do her business. Before she left on vacation Joni said Millie should not go on the couch in the sunroom. I figured, okay, I would lie on the couch and Millie would lie on my chest. The rules were met somewhat. To make a long story short that couch was one of her favorite places. She loved to lie down with her head on pillows. She loved pillows. The couch is now heavily stained with ripped cushions. But Millie was happy on her couch and that is what mattered.
Joni enrolled Millie in a dog training school. I went along with them but had to stop. While all the dogs were walking in a circle on leashes Millie would come over to me to say hello.
As with most dogs Millie became more than a pet. She was a member of our family.
I remember when our cat did something unacceptable. Joni sprayed water on the cat, and the criminal ceased the activity. When Millie did something Joni did not approve of she sprayed Millie. Millie loved it. During the winter Millie would break through ice to get to water.
Millie has such a mild personality. Sometimes our cat, Sammy, would sleep on Millie’s bed or Millie’s favorite chair. Now Millie was at least seven- or eight-times Sammy’s size, but she would not bother the cat. Millie would come to me looking up as if to say, “Dad do something.” When we would pass a barking dog on walks, Millie looked as if she was thinking ‘What’s your problem’?
When Millie grew old and somewhat confused, if she wanted me to do something she would stamp her left front paw. How she learned that I have no idea. As I tried to figure out what she wanted she would go to her bed and lie down forgetting that she wanted something.
There are two incidents in Millie’s I will never forget.
One day Millie went to the backyard when nature called. She began barking. Millie never barks. I went out to investigate and there she was challenging a groundhog which had reared up on its back legs. Not a good sign. After I saw what was going on I went into the house and got a broom to chase the groundhog away. But for some reason I chose a different tactic. I hit Millie on the head to get her attention, allowing the trespasser time to escape.
The second event could have been disastrous.
Millie has only left the backyard twice, crawling under the fence. She barks when she wants to be let back in. One day, no barking. She was outside for a long time, so I went out looking for her. No Millie. We live on a very busy street. In was close to Christmas so the street was busier than normal. I heard horns blaring and went out front to see what was going on. Traffic was stopped in both directions and there sat Millie on the double yellow lines. How she got there without getting killed I’ll never know. I called her to come, and she did with what I thought was a guilty look on her face.
With advancing age Millie became more and more confused and developed arthritis. And not long ago she stopped eating dog food. She was losing weight. The vet told me I should cook for her. I made her scrambled eggs or pancakes for breakfast and pork chops, fish sticks or chicken for dinner. But eventually she ceased to eat human food. I could see the end was approaching, fast.
August 15, 2025 at 1:35 pm
Recently, my cat, Sammy (Samantha), died. She will probably be the last pet I have. And this will be the first time this house has been without a pet in about 35 years.
We’ve gone through a host of various types of animals as pets over the years. There have been lizards and snakes. I had a ball python for 25 years. We’ve had gerbils and a hamster. The hamster was found by a friend around Christmas time. The girls named it Noel. There was a hermit crab named Shelly. We have also had three dogs and four cats as pets one time or another. I’ll save most of their stories for the future.
This story will concern the last two pets who lived in this house. Millie, a fantastic dog and Sammy who would demonstrate an attitude when she wasn’t sleeping, which was most of the time. But no matter what their personality, they were part of the family.
MY LIFE WITH MILLIE AND SAM
This is a story about my dog, Millie, and my cat, Sam. Both remarkable pets.
My wife, Joni, and I adopted an SPCA dog. He was a terrier of an unknown mixture named Whitey for obvious reasons We loved him and had him for years. I would be sitting in a chair in the living room, and he would sit in front of me. I would say, “He’s coming up” and he would jump into my lap. Of course, he was white, but when he got a haircut portions of grey skin would show.
When Whitey died Joni said, “No more dogs.” Whitey’s death was grieved by the entire family.
My brother’s wife had quads, and they already had two kids at the time. We went to my brother’s house to celebrate the high school graduation of Lauren, Katie, Christopher and Andrew. All went on to get degrees, and some of the kids, advanced degrees.
When we arrived at Mike’s house the first thing he said was that we should go into the garage. He had a female Chocolate Lab named Haley. She was gaining weight, so Mike cut down on her food. His daughter, Jessica, came home from nursing school and said, “Dad, she’s pregnant.” When we walked into the garage there was Hailey nursing nine pups of various types. There were Chocolate Labs, Yellow Labs and pups colored brown and white. Mike did not know who the father was but my money is on a German Shepard. The pups were born at the beginning of June. Joni could not resist having one of these pups. Who could? At the beginning of August found Joni, my daughter, Lynn, and myself driving to my brother’s house to select one.
At that time there were seven or eight left. They were outside when we got there running around in a pack. Falling, jumping but always staying together. The pups were let into the house and we all sat down to have lunch. Joni had her eye on a Chocolate Lab named Chubs because he was the largest of the liter. As Joni was eating her lunch, and the pups were playing, a brown and white pup came and sat next to Joni. We did not pick out a pup. The pup picked us. I wanted to name her Molly, but Lynn wanted Millie. From the title of this piece, you could see who won.
August 12, 2025 at 3:06 pm
MY STORY, PETS, PUBLISHED IN THE CORNER BAR
As I mentioned in my post on April 7th, The Corner Bar had accepted my short story, Pets, for publication. It has now appeared and here is a link to the sto
“PETS” by WALT TRIZNA
Copyright 2025 Walt Trizna
Ronald Corey was a mean son of a bitch. His foul nature increased over years of personal disappointment. His life was now going nowhere. His anger was relentless since his wife had walked out the door. Just about everything that breathed hated him and he returned the favor. Turns out, there would also be some beings which didn’t breathe would share that hate. Tall, overweight, a monster of a man in size and personality, he had a rim of graying brown hair bordering his bald head. At 49, Corey was ten years older than his departed wife. He was educated, with an associate degree in engineering but held firmly to his blue-collar upbringing. Unfortunately, he did not hold firmly to employment. His favorite response to management ‘Go fuck yourself,’ resulted in rapid and direct membership to the ranks of the unemployed. His wife, June, was a complete opposite of Corey. Highly educated, holding multiple degrees, she was petite with dark hair and eyes so blue they merited a double take by the observer. Their temperament was also at opposite poles. How they became attracted to each other, never mind married, was a mystery to all who knew them, and eventually became a mystery to June too. June was aware that Corey drank and came to consider it to be just part of his makeup. When not drinking he was different, loving and kind. But once they married his drinking increased, being loving and kind flew out the window. Then came the start of physical abuse. June finally saw the handwriting on the wall, and what she could not see was knocked into her. Corey desperately wanted her to produce a son, but after one year of marriage, June came to realize that bringing a child into the world with Corey as the father would be a disaster. How would he treat a child when he treated her so terribly? Her imagination reeled and her mind produced images that left her disgusted. While he tried to become a father, June adhered to birth control. Corey would yell, “I don’t understand it. The rest of my family is popping kids left and right. What is wrong with you?” June replied, “Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you. Go get checked.” She knew Corey had a deep-seated fear of doctors, his entire family did. “Why don’t you get checked?” he shouted back. “Fine,” June said. “We’ll go together,” and that was the end of that. Finally, after five years of enduring the hell of their marriage, June had had enough. Sporting a black eye, she began packing. Corey threw his glass of cheap scotch at their closed bedroom door and felt nothing, no loss – no regrets. Experiencing emotions, other than anger, had long ago departed his being. As she turned to leave tears moistened her eyes. Seeing this, Corey was sure she did not have the guts to go. He waited for her determination to wither, was surprised when she 10 Corner Bar Magazine said, “I can’t take the pets. You’ll have to take care of them until I find a place for them.” The pets were now his responsibility, and he despised them – always had. The dog, Molly, a medium size brown and white mixed breed, was an SPCA rescue. Sally and Sam, the result of friends of friends whose cats produced litters, were two grey tabbies who looked identical, although three years of age separated them. After June was gone his drinking increased and the more he drank the more his rage grew needing an outlet, and that outlet became the animals. If one should chance his way, it would receive a kick or powerful slap sending the poor animal sprawling and running for safety. After Corey had enough of their neediness, he looked at the animals and said, “Now to get rid of you little bastards.” But a short-lived moment of sanity filtered into his brain. The entire neighborhood knew about the pets and would become suspicious if they all suddenly disappeared. “Christ, people are going to jail for shit like that,” he said to himself. You see, he did not even consider putting them up for adoption. He only considered death or abandonment. But then he realized the plan to just drive them to some field and leave them was also out. Damn, he couldn’t remember if Molly had one of those new fucking chips im planted. “Damn animals are turning into computers now,” he mumbled. From then on the animals lived in fear of Corey. In time after constant abuse, fear gradually turned into anger, an anger they communicated to one another as only animals can. Poor Molly spent most of her day huddling in her open crate, seeking the false sense of security it provided. If she left the cage, in Corey’s presence, she would suffer a kick sending the dog running back for shelter. The abuse was relentless and soon resulted in a permanent limp, and also something else, a hate which crossed a subtle boundary. There was another bone of contention, the cats’ litter box. The cats, constantly hiding, ventured out only to eat and use the litter box. The abuse they received when hunger or nature called was relentless, journeying to the levels of Molly’s rage. The source of the cats’ abuse was that Corey felt degraded every time he had to scoop up the cat’s waste, as if he was some kind of servant. One day he thought, I’ll show the little bastards and stopped cleaning it. Soon the box was nothing but a huge mass of lumps of congealed urine-soaked litter and cat turds. When the cats began relieving themselves in the vicinity of the box, Corey cursed them to hell and was forced once again to keep it clean. “Fucking cats,” he would mumble every time he had to clean up after them. With his wife gone, Corey stayed drunk most of the time. During this ‘relaxed state,’ in the far reaches of his muddled brain was the realization that he needed to find a job soon. Alone with the pets, that’s how Corey lived, but then his twisted reasoning would replace logic, and he would mumble, “Find a job for what? To feed the damned animals.” Due to the stress of their lives, the behavior of the animals changed from the normal response to a lone master, following that person from room to room to occupy the same space. This was not how life for the pets in the Corey household went. Here they avoided their master and stayed hidden, and Corey liked it that way. And when Corey finally passed out from a day of drinking, they would form a tight group glaring in his di rection and attend to their needs. One day, after one particularly violent attack on the animals, from the corner of his eye he detected movement. In his drunken stupor, he could not tell if he was seeing things or not, the movement was accompanied by a soft rustling sound, as if the softest of materials was being dragged across the floor. Was he now hearing things? Sure, he would find an animal lurking, but all that he saw were piles of pet hair constantly increasing in size and quantity, another by-product of the animals Corey loathed. That was a major problem, the hair. Shortly after June left, Corey noticed small balls of hair accumulating at the edges of the rooms and eventually they appeared over most of the floor. The rest of the house fared just as bad with the sink filled with dishes, a heavy coating of dust on every surface and the refrigerator full of rotting food, but the hair was the filth that maddened Corey the most. June had kept the floors swept and, of course, Corey never appreciated the effort. Now the hair accumulated, it seemed, with a vengeance. If he only knew. Corey swept up the hair every few weeks, filling plastic bags full of the fluff. He would be in an especially bad ‘pet mood’ after completing this chore. One day, after a particularly long time between sweeping up the hair, he had two bags full of waste. He was about to take them out to the trash when his usual anger turned to shock. Piercing the depths of both bags, he saw two glowing points of red resembling glowing cigarettes seen in the night or the last embers of a dying fire. He shook his head, looked away, and when he looked back the glowing points of light were gone. “What the fuck?” he muttered and soon forgot the incident. Corey stretched the hair cleaning, and at the same time, the hair seemed to accumulate at a faster rate, appearing as small tumbleweeds, ready to move with the slightest breeze. After the next cleaning, he had three bags of hair. Corey stooped to pick them up when he stopped. He shook his head to clear his brain because he could not believe his eyes. In each bag, in addition to the two small glowing spheres, there appeared a crimson crescent shaped like a smiling mouth. Corey stepped back and then stumbled forward for another look. The specter in the bags was gone. Weeks later, cleaning yielded four bags of hair. Once the job was completed, Corey cautiously approached the bags and vaguely remembered the previous specter. It was then he beheld a sight filling him with terror. Along with the now glowing eyes, the smiling crescent reappeared slightly parted and filled with a vicious set of pointed teeth. The balls of hair began to move within the bags, which was impossible. Soon the bags tipped, spilling their contents on the floor. Ever so slowly, to Corey’s horror, the spheres of hair began to move toward him. Within the fluffy balls there appeared to be a solid presence, a substance where none should exist, as if something unworldly had taken on a physical aspect. Corey backed into the corner of the living room, stumbling over accumulated trash. While their master faced this unknown terror, the pets appeared, Molly, limping from her protective crate, Sally and Sam from beneath beds. Corey’s eyes flicked from the animals, sit ting in a group gazing at him to the slowly creeping maleficent spheres. The closer these hateful entities moved toward Corey, the more at ease the animals seemed to become, as if a great weight were being lifted from their lives. It was then that neighbors heard ungodly screams coming from Corey’s home and called 911. The responding police had to break down the door to gain entrance and were met by a grisly sight that they would never forget, haunting them for the rest of their days. Corey lay – they assumed it was Corey – in the middle of the living room. Where his face had once been was nothing more than a blood-soaked mound of flesh. The rest of his body was horribly mutilated. Once they overcame their initial shock, the cops noticed Molly and the two cats sitting close to the body intently observing it. One officer said to the other, “I wonder if they tried to stop what ever happened.” His partner responded, “Do you think the animals could possibly have do this?” “No way. Look how they are keeping watch over their dead master. They must have loved the guy,” said the other officer.
v 13 Copyright 2025 Walt Trizna Corner Bar Magazine
Here is a link to The Corner Bar
http://cornerbarmagazine.com/
May 9, 2025 at 12:06 pm
I’m working on a short story, Cliff’s Note, recently rejected but with a good comment and helpful suggestions. I have a rewrite and decided to try the story on my roommates.
First I tried the story on Sammy (Samantha). Here is her response, not good, but she wanted to get close to my work.
Jpeg
Next I looked to Millie for an opinion, hoping for a more positive response. After pondering their reaction, I decided I had more work to do.
August 1, 2016 at 10:21 pm
From the moment we take our first breath we are terminal, that’s reality. It is what we do between that first breath and the last that is important. Life is a crapshoot. I was reading the obituaries one morning, you do that as you age, when on the same page I found one for a four year old boy and one for a 103 year old woman. If that doesn’t make one stop to ponder this gift we call life, nothing will.
Back to the subject of this article. As I sit here writing I can hear the coughing and wheezing of our asthmatic cat, Sally. I’ve never been a cat person. I’m a dog person and love the companionship and love a canine returns. I find cats to be aloof and wanting only your service. You fulfill their needs and then you get that look, ‘You can leave now’. But as with all generalities, there are the exceptions that prove you wrong.
My family has a history of owning cats, primarily due to my daughter, Lynn. That history began with a pure white kitten name Stimpy. He was found standing next to his dead mother, a recent victim of a run in with a car. So young, he needed to be fed with a bottle. The woman who found him, my wife’s coworker, discovered she was allergic to cats so we adopted him.
Perhaps due to his early association with humans, he was extremely sociable, wanting to be where the action was. Our neighbor swore that Stimpy was unaware he was a feline and chose to be human. As with most of our cats, Stimpy developed health issues, three years of injections for diabetes and finally succumbed to a mouth tumor.
Then there was Zosia, Polish for Sophie, the name of my beloved aunt, Auntie Zosia. This mature cat walked up to my wife and Lynn while they stood in a schoolyard. After many attempts to locate the owner with no results, she stayed but not for long. Zosia developed a lung tumor and went downhill fast. A prolonged stay with the veterinarian was little help. I took Lynn with me to bring Zosia home and was presented with a bill for $450. With a shaky hand I made out the check. Lynn could tell I was more than surprised. Sensing my shock, she looked up at me, she was about eight or nine at the time, and said, “Would you rather she died?” Lynn could always, and still does, tell it like it is. Zosia died, then our dog, Whitey, died and we were left pet less.
After a while, Lynn decided that condition needed to be remedied and one Sunday afternoon she and my wife visited the local SPCA. There Lynn found ‘The Kitten’ and named her Lucy. Due to a bureaucratic detail, Lucy could not come home until Monday. Monday afternoon I took Lynn to pick up Lucy, but Lucy had been adopted. There was supposed to be a hold on the kitten, but she was gone. Lynn lost it there at the SPCA. I suggested a look at the remaining kittens and, with a tearful Lynn, went to have a look. That’s when Sally came into our life.
Lynn chose the names based on Charlie Brown characters and Lucy was gone and could not be replaced, hence Sally. That was 14 years ago. Sally is a grey tabby with a white-tipped tail. Late last year she began losing weight; asthma has plagued her for years. A trip to the vet diagnosed renal failure with the prognosis of not making it to the New Year, but Sally proved the vet wrong and continues to hang in there. Due to her kidney problems she now resembles a holocaust survivor, skin covering bones, but is active and constantly hungry.
Whenever I sit in my recliner she will jump into my lap and look up with her big green eyes thanking me for the care and love.
I still don’t consider myself a ‘cat person’ but I’ve become a ‘Sally person’. I’ll miss her when she’s gone, but I don’t think she’ll be going anywhere soon.
Then there’s Sammy. . .
Here’s Sally
May 29, 2014 at 8:55 pm
Walttriznastories's Blog 