cornered

now that max is temporarily done practicing for his own death, he's doddering around like a sharp-toothed old man, harrumphing and creaking and unpredictably bleeding from his various volcanic booboos on all sheets, blankets, pillows and other fabric surfaces of the house. we're learning how to enjoy life with an animal who snores louder than anyone else in the house and who sometimes (only sometimes) poops while walking across the floor because the parts of his body aren't all talking to his brain about what they're doing or thinking of doing the way they used to. he just doesn't know he's pooping, sometimes.

to narrow down the chances of the dogs repoisoning themselves (it's somewhere back a bit in the blog if you want to hear about it) and to minimize the places we might find unremembered poop, we keep a dog gate up at the kitchen. because max is getting blinder by the day, it has become increasingly treacherous to step over the gate from the kitchen. max knows the kitchen is where the dog food lives. it is also where the cheese lives, so when he sees someone (today it was me) go into the kitchen, he puts his sweet little nearly blind self right on the nonkitchen side of the gate and when the first foot comes over the gate into the hallway (as my right foot foolishly did today) he snaps his bedraggled mouth closed, resting a few sparse teeth wherever (mostly between my toes, fortunately). max does not bite hard most of the time. still, he looks like a shark leaping out of the water, jaws gaping. it's unsettling.

the snapping continues throughout the day. max and his back feet don't always get along so well these days and as a result, he has to ask for external help to get himself up onto the couch or bed or "his" chair. because he is still as blind as he was a paragraph ago he does not recognize the hands coming toward him as the ones he asked a few seconds ago for help. so he snaps his little jaws down on whichever hands happen to be helping. this has necessitated development of a new form of max transport known as the gator hold and carry. a wise external helper grabs the dangerous striking head of the max animal just below the jaws and then, after immobilizing the striking head, uses the other hand to lift the increasingly lightweight beast. much the way you would carry an alligator, crocodile or snake. by the time you put him down he has forgotten all about the fact that he has any legs at all and he sort of falls into whatever he's put down on until a few minutes later when he notices a pile of feet underneath him.

but the most adorable new development in max's particular form of aging is his absolute inability to recognize which side of a door is the side that will open. what i mean is this- max will consistently walk up to doors he's previously had no trouble with and will nose himself into the hinged side, which is often in a corner anyway. at our front door this mostly just means he stands or sits facing the side of a door for a while until he gets bored and walks away. but doors inside the apartment, doors that separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house, for example, tend to be open most of the time. and old snaggledy max will wander into a room, manage to get himself somehow turned around so that he's lost, then he'll see the door. and he'll walk right up to it all happy to know he's getting out and he'll point his nose under the hinge of the door and peer out from the crack between the door and the wall, entirely at a loss as to how to get himself from where he is to where he sees. he'll stand there stoic as anything until someone comes and gets him. this has been incredibly helpful to me in terms of finding the dustiest, unsweptest, most in need of painting places in the house. now i know you're getting all sad that he's lost and upset in his own home. don't you worry. i would be concerned for his ongoing mental anguish a little more if i hadn't dragged him out from behind the same door three times in under ten minutes. and i don't mean i just scooted him back. i put him out in the middle of the room or at the doorway or, once, out in the hall. i don't think he remembers new stuff very well, like the time five seconds ago when he did exactly the same thing he's doing right now. all that's in there is the old stuff. desire to chase a ball. passion for cheese. so that when i pick him up from whatever door he's found himself trapped behind, using the gator hold and carry to keep all my hands and fingers, i can put my head right down on that skull of his and although he can't see me well enough to know if i'm worth biting, he knows the smell of his people. he buries his cold nose against my neck and suffers the kisses because he remembers them all from before.