Terribly Happy

I did a weird thing I haven’t done before which was to mix a long-awaited week of vacation with a self-imposed writing/reporting assignment. While traveling.

I do not advise it.

We went to New York City, which I love, my wife, our good friend Jessica (of last year’s super fun Vegas trip) and I.

The timing of the trip was for the big BlogHer conference, a convention for women bloggers, which I decided I should attend. And here’s where things get complicated.

I work for a newspaper and do freelance stuff for other outlets but the decision to go to BlogHer and write about it (without even knowing for sure whom I’d be writing for in the short term) was entirely my own. And here’s where we need to discuss something I’ve intentionally not talked about here or anywhere else publicly. I feel like I’ve told many of my friends, my family, some of my co-workers and pretty much every person I met at BlogHer, when they would inevitably ask, “Wait, why are you here?”

And that thing is this: I was at BlogHer because I was doing research for a writing project. If it were finished or much further along, I would call it a “book,” but it has been such a struggle and there are not nearly enough pages yet to call it a book, so it is a “project” until it gains some respectable paper weight. It’s about mom bloggers.

The other part of this thing is that it’s actually been something I’ve been working on for a while. A long while. So long that I don’t even want to say how long it’s been given how little progress I feel has actually occurred, writing-wise.

But, and this is the part that’s been keeping me sane, I’m not doing it alone. A while back, when this whole idea started, I approached a good friend of mine, Tracy O’Connor, a woman I’ve known and been penpals with since I was 15, about working with me on this. She’s a great writer, she’s very funny, she ran a message board with lots of proto-mom bloggers on it, and as a mom of five boys, she knows a lot about culture of these online groups. Together, we’ve had lots and lots of conversations, done research until our eyes were ready to fall out and have done quite a bit of actual writing. Unfortunately, we had to put aside a lot of it when we realized we were going to have to start over due to some plotting issues. This happened earlier in the summer. It was a bit of a confidence rattler.

This summer in particular, as I’ve watched several friends go through the process of completing and publishing books, has been tough. I keep screaming in my own head, “Why can’t you do this? What the Hell? What’s stopping you?” And the only answer I have is that it scares me. A lot. The bigger the writing assignment, the more I freak myself out about the scale and scope of it and the less I end up just enjoying the process and letting the good vibes and word counts flow. It’s started to affect my other writing, where I just want to avoid the keyboard altogether (like this delayed blog post, for instance) when the thought of writing in general begins to fill me with anxiety. Which it shouldn’t. I mean, come on. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve written millions of words. But I was unprepared, probably, for what a different beast something like The Project could be and how much you have to commit. I’m used to writing things, sending them out and moving on to the next thing. When the things I write are done, they are done. Living with one piece of work for so long has really messed with my head in unexpected ways.

But I’m also filled with determination to see this through and to do my best writing (and self-editing) with Tracy and see what we end up with. The earlier draft we did, the one that ended up pointing in the wrong direction plot-wise, I actually really liked. We were writing at a good clip and more than 100 pages were produced, pages that we were genuinely proud of. I know we can do it again and push it through the right way.

So that’s what’s been in the works: a “project” about mom bloggers. It’s fiction and we think we know where we’re going, but boy have there been setbacks and writer’s block (which I used to say I never got; ha ha, good one, brain) and frustration, but also in many ways it’s been very fun and challenging to get into someone else’s head and explore a world that is in very few ways my own.

Tracy has kept my spirits up at times when I would have just packed it in and moved on to something else and my wife at one point asked, “Isn’t rewriting and starting over normal for something like this?” I had to confess to her that I had no idea. I guess? Yeah. Probably. Damn.

I’m glad we’re sticking with it and I’m glad I went to BlogHer. It was a huge help seeing for myself a lot of what’s at the heart of what we’re trying to write.

But trying to balance a for-fun trip with a for-work conference that I was already really nervous about attending completely wiped me out. I was stressed and not sleeping well and came back from the trip more exhausted than when I left.

That’s even with eating lots of fantastic bagels, going to the Top of the Rock for the first time and doing some enjoyable Times Square people watching when I did have time to go out and enjoy myself.

Tell me this doesn’t look like fun:

OK, it wasn’t all nearly naked guys in Times Square. We did have time for a little sightseeing and delicious pies from Pie Face.

As for the conference itself, I laid out most of my official thoughts and observations in this week’s Digital Savant column, where I discuss the state of blogging through the prism of the conference.

I could have written a lot more (hey, maybe a book’s worth!) about the conference, really. There were lots of great insights in the panels I attended, a frenzy over products and swag I couldn’t quite get my brain around, and many good conversations I had with women who — when they learned what I was working on — offered not only great advice and stories, but who pointed me in the right direction to other bloggers, websites and events that I should look into.

The organizers of the conference allowed me to attend as press, which made the whole venture much more official for me and allowed me to go into work mode while I was there. I took lots of notes, shot photos and tried to remember as much as I could so I could share with Tracy later (she was unable to attend).

As much as I tried to blend in and observe, it was never far from the surface that I was one of the few men attending the conference. There were others, of course; BlogHer has more than 5,000 attendees, including expo exhibitors and they’re not all women. But I was so in the minority that my presence itself became a topic of conversations I had. I kept getting asked how it felt to be there with so many women, jokes were made (not by me!) about the estrogen levels in the rooms and, especially at the evening party events, I became very aware of how outside I was of these groups of bloggers who have made a pretty large, diverse community for themselves.

I can sit in a panel and absorb presented information like anybody else, but I can’t go to a party and pretend that I don’t know a single person there.

I had been warned by friends who’d attended before that the conference would be overwhelming and that the parties and swag are out of control. I’m not sure if that’s true since I wasn’t invited to some of the more private events, but I did witness an awful lot of grabby-grabby at the one swag event I was able to crash and in the expo halls, where everything from health supplements to iPhone cases to brightly colored dildos were being given out like Halloween candy.

It was fun to see some of the veteran bloggers react incredulously when bloggers who haven’t even been writing for more than six months asked why they don’t yet have a big audience or sponsors. The stories of successful bloggers who’ve quit their day jobs to do it full time have become so typical that everybody thinks they can do it. I’ve been getting paid to write for going on 20 years and I still don’t have the guts to do that. It’s hard out there and even the pro bloggers are killing themselves trying to keep the money coming. Yes, they get free trips and lots of product samples and ads on their sites, but my sense is that even for that top tier of bloggers, the money is not nearly as plentiful and the lifestyle as carefree for them as people might think.

Like I said in the column, it was a really well-run, well-structured, professional conference. I’m glad I was there and when I returned, I felt a rush of confidence for The Project. We have a lot more material to work with now.

A few other things: the column the week before the BlogHer thing was a collection of reviews, one of the Telltale “Walking Dead” video game (really good, surprising and well-written) and Sphero, a robotic toy ball.

There were also Digital Savant Micro features about what display mirroring means, one about RAW images and one this week answering a reader question about getting old photos scanned to digital.

Before we left, we had a small, early birthday party for Lilly. Weeks later, this last Monday, she turned 5.

It’s been easy to get distracted parenting her because she has a younger sister and the two of them have built their own little world of playtime and fights and giggly jokes. Unless we physically separate them, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like when it was just Lilly and how laser-focused we were on her, on every little milestone of growth and development.

With two kids, it now feels like those things just fly by as we’re barely able to keep up with each new thing.  It seems so recent that Lilly wouldn’t give up the green plastic pacifier or that we were still struggling with potty training, but when I look at the calendar I realize that was actually a lot longer ago than I remember and that her sister dealt with those things on a completely different timetable (longer on the potty training, much shorter time with the paci).

Time seems so short that we rarely even have time to look back on our family photos and videos and see what has changed.  I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t like to do that.  It just reminds me how quickly it’s happening, how many stages the girls area already past (Lilly was a newborn, then an infant, then a long stretch where she was a toddler; now she’s 5. She’s not a baby, a toddler, any of that anymore.  And I miss it.)

I see in comparing the pictures that even her face has changed. I have to just marvel at how cruel it is that these changes pass right in front our eyes in ways that we can’t even see as they happen.

Sophia Rayne Cavaliero. Photo provided by Cavaliero family.

It’s about the horrible phenomenon of children left in cars who die of heat stroke. It happens 33 times per year nationwide on average and shows no sign of abating despite calls for more awareness and efforts to incorporate technology into vehicles that could prevent these cases from happening. In 2010, the number peaked at 49 and as of this writing, 15 such deaths have already been reported for 2012.

My goal was not to write any kind of definite article about this because that has already been written. The heartbreaking, rigorously reported, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 Washington Post story, “Fatal Distraction” by Gene Weingarten is the starting point for any discussion on what happens. (And if you are one of those people who believes as a parent that it could never happen to you and that parents who lose a child this way accidentally should be prosecuted as criminals, please read the Weingarten article before commenting.)

I also found the transcript of a live chat that Weingarten held after the story was published to be incredibly helpful. And by helpful, I mean that my wife came upstairs asking if I was OK when she heard me upstairs in the office gasping and crying halfway through the original article. It’s a tough read, but also a must-read.

Instead of rehashing that excellent piece, my article was meant to look at the tech aspect of this — why there hasn’t been technology built into vehicles yet to prevent such accidents and if such technology does exist, why it’s not selling like gangbusters to parents who otherwise buy every safety apparatus out there. The whole article idea started when I was emailed by a local inventor hoping to sell just such a technology and that led to the other sources in the story.

As I say in the article, I’m haunted by the idea that something like this could have happened to me in the hazy, forgetful, incredibly stressful first year of parenting (and even after that) and I think writing this story helped me deal with that fear to some degree. (You can also read the Statesman.com version of the article here.)

I’m on vacation right now.

It’s the first official vacation on the books I’ve taken all year and by around June I was getting really, really antsy about needing a break. I was also sweating quite a bit, but I bet that had more to do with the start of summer than stress.

Later this week, I’m attending BlogHer to do some writing research, but also hoping to have some great food and enjoy New York. My wife and a good friend of ours are going and we’ve already got tickets to The Book of Mormon and plans to eat bagels until we can’t walk.

I worry that we’re trying to cram too much into a trip where I’m already booked up for two solid days at the conference, but I don’t care. I miss traveling so much that I’ll take it.

I have a bunch of stuff I wrote in advance running in the paper over the next week, but I’ll wait till I’m back in town to go over all that. For now: NYC! Excitement!

The last two Digital Savant columns that ran in the paper have been how-to columns where I’ve been trying to help myself as much as I’m trying to guide readers.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve managed to get a few of my little organizational projects off the grounds. I scanned in every business card I ever got and turned those into digital address book contacts. I started (and am still working on) digitizing some stray VHS tapes that have stuff on them I’d actually want to keep.

But with photos, I’m still a bit a of a mess. I back up everything to a very reliable Drobo drive enclosure (it holds multiple hard drives and if one dies, which has never happened, you can just swap the bad one out and your data’s still safe). I’ve put the most important photos of ours online in a few strategic places. But I still haven’t done a full backup to somewhere off-site or online of the photos, videos and documents we can’t afford to lose. And we still have photos scattered across two computers, two phones, optical discs and other places. So it’s a work in progress.

That doesn’t mean I can’t advise others to do better! In part one of the how-to, we talk about how to sort and organize photos and, with the help of a professional archivist, we talk in part two about ways to store and protect your photos and videos so they stand the test of time.

Would I pass that test? Not yet, but I’m working on it!

The other new Digital Savant things of note are Micro features defining what’s an SSD (“Hey, what’s SSD with YOU?”) and the definition of “IRL,” a good suggestion from my co-worker Addie Broyles.

The SSD in particular has been on my mind because I’ve been thinking about upgrading my laptop with one of those for the BLAZING SPEEDS. But they’re pricey. I almost pulled the trigger in a 480 GB drive for $360 (which sounds expensive until you see what these things normally cost at that size), but hesitated too long and lost the deal. Plus, I was thinking that I didn’t really feel like opening up my computer and fiddlin’ around with that right now, although truth be told, I want desperately to be upgrading. I recently bought a Neat scanner (which arrived DOA and is being replaced), upgraded our home router on a whim and am in general doing little upgrades here and there, perhaps as much out of restlessness than out of a genuine need to incrementally improve our little home office.

Summer is flying by, but this year I’m weirdly OK with it. No, I haven’t gone toobin’ yet and I’ve only been to Schlitterbahn a few times, but I’ve spent a lot more time with the girls recently than I had earlier in the year and we’ve gotten to see more movies and done more relaxing stuff than our schedule usually allows, so it’s all cool in my book.

We’re taking a trip to New York soon and then another trip to the beach, so I feel like there’s plenty to look forward to even if it’s not involving getting soaked here in town.

Oh, and Carolina ate a lot of sushi the other day and that made me really happy. My 2-year-old is the opposite of a picky eater. She’s absolutely indiscriminate about what she eats, something I hope lasts for at least another year or two. At this point, if she orders lobster off the menu with a side of caviar, I’m inclined to just give it to her and grin.

Me: “You’re a cutie.”

Carolina: “YOU’RE a cutie, Daddy.”

Me: “YOU’RE a cutie, Carolina.”

Carolina: “YOU’RE a cutie, OMAR!”

THE END

And the medal for beating three deadlines does NOT go to you. Suck it up.

You know what this blog post won’t have in it? Dead cats. You’re welcome.

So, how are you? I am good. I am fine. Things are finegood.

It’s been raining this week in our part of the world, breaking up what is usually an unbearable, dry, stultifying, soul-reapening summer season into something pretty manageable. The (relatively) cooler weather and season slowdown of life in general has made for a really mellow week.

But work does not stop, of course. It only seems a little slower for me right now because I’m caught up on most stuff, trying to work ahead when I can. I beat a set of three small freelance deadlines by several days, which never happens. I looked around my home office expecting to be presented with a polished medal or a crown of flowers of some sort, but none of that materialized. When I looked around the room, it was still empty, the deadline beaten its own virtuous reward.

What a fucking shitty reward.

Anyhoo! Time to catch up on the stuff I’ve been writing the last two weeks. The two big ones, the Digital Savant columns where thusly:

• I wrote about “FOMO” or “Fear Of Missing Out,” an Internet-borne affliction I suffered (I’m proud to say mostly in silence until now) when Radiohead played two shows in Austin, including a long-awaited Austin City Limits taping that I had to missed on account of I wasn’t invited. Yes, it still stings.
• This week’s column was about protecting your digital gadgets (phones, e-readers, tablets and the like) from the scorching sun, the gritty sand and the remarkably wet water.

We also introduced a new weekly feature in the paper that I neglected to mention before called Digital Savant Micro. It’s a bite (or “byte!” Ha! Sorry!)-sized little article where we define one term, answer a question from a reader or offer a quick tip or event information on the front of the Life & Arts section. The ones that have run so far include the definition of “Retina Display,” an alert about the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker, a definition for “bandwidth throttling,” and tips on what to do with a failing laptop battery.

Seperately, I reviewed Apple’s new Retina Display MacBook Pro. Do I recommend everyone go out and buy one right now? The answer… may surprise you. (It’s “No.”)

I have some pieces coming up about organizing and storing your digital photos, and something else that’s much darker and harder to discuss that I’ll hold off on sharing until a little later.

Let’s see, what else is going on… I finished Messy, which I really enjoyed; am currently reading Suffering Succotash, which is making me laugh and learn a lot.

Been watching, in no particular order, America’s Got Talent, The Eric Andre Show, Metapocalypse, Bunheads, Louie, among others, and gearing up for Breaking Bad, which is my favorite show currently on TV.

We caught up on some movies, including Brave (really, really good), Horrible Bosses (funnier than I was expecting), X-Men: First Class (great for an hour and then baffling and shitty toward the end).

See? Mellow. Spending lots of time with the girls, lining up all my writing stuff for the fall, trying to keep up with work until I go on vacation in August.

It’s a good summer so far. Face-melting heat index so far surprisingly low.

I was so sure that I’d documented her origins here at some point that I was genuinely shocked when I went back through the archives and couldn’t find it.

It makes sense. By 2000, when this site started, Cosa was fully integrated into my life as a guy living alone in Austin with a cat. She curled up on my bed often at night, she greeted visitors (even visitors who came over all the time) with a swipe of the claw and a long hiss. She earned a reputation among everyone who met her as a mean little fierce black cat, a creepy little “thing,” which is exactly what her name means in Spanish.

But before that, on a hot August day, she was a tiny little puff of fur I found abandoned in a cardboard box. She was on the curb in front of a friend’s house, the sun beating down on her little mewling body. The person who left her had left a tiny bowl of milk-gone-rancid and there were ants in the box.

We took her to a pet store and had her examined, fed her with a bottle, got her cleaned up and just like that, I was a first-time cat owner. When the vet was examining her, she clawed and resisted and was called “feisty,” which would stick. Even then, overheated and bitty and left for dead, she was a fighter who didn’t suffer fools.

Cosa in the late ’90s. Alternacat.

She mellowed a tiny bit when she got fixed, then she mellowed out a lot more when I got married, moved to New Braunfels and we adopted two sibling cats, Diego and Rico. We expected fights and turf wars and if I remember correctly, there was a little bit of that, but to our surprise, as she was entering cat middle age, Cosa accepted these little guys into her home. She wasn’t a snuggly mother, but she at least tolerated these new cats and over time, even followed them on their rounds on occasion. She got used to our kids, too, and in the last few years, enjoyed being petted by Lilly and Carolina.

She was never their favorite. Even at 13 and 14 years old, she was still a bit crusty and unfriendly to anyone but me. It never changed that she hated being touched anywhere on her belly or tail. Her purrs of contentment when she was being petted on the head or ears could easily turn into a bite. She and the boys often scared away dogs that wandered into our front yard by standing their ground and hissing like monsters.

It was a good little cat family of indoor/outdoor cats who pretty much came and went as they pleased. But they never left the short radius around our house, wandering further than one or two houses down only when we went for our own walks and Cosa or the other cats tagged along behind us.

She didn’t whine or demand to be let in or our all the time like Diego. She wasn’t active and adorable and tiger-like the way Rico was. But she was my cat, the only cat I ever owned on my own, and over the years I’d ignored all suggestions to get rid of her, give her away, find a nicer cat.

The morning it happened didn’t seem unusual. Except. The night before, I’d heard some dog yapping over Carolina’s baby monitor before I went to bed, way too late as usual. Around 1 a.m., there was barking I mistook for Carolina waking up crying at first. When I realized it was dogs, I ignored it and went to sleep. All our neighbors have dogs. Barking is a given.

The note

As I collected the girls for daycare the next morning, we opened the front door and I found an orange door sign lying on the entryway. As I loaded Lilly and Carolina into the car and tried to get them strapped in, I read the note. It was from Animal Control. It said, “Deceased cat” with a description of an “OSH” with black fur. “PLEASE CALL IMMEDIATELY,” it read. They had picked up a dead cat in our yard. I needed to call.

“It finally happened,” I thought. “She keeled over of old age and a neighbor spotted her lying dead in the yard.”

It didn’t occur to me that if this were true, a neighbor would have rung our doorbell to have us take care of the body ourselves. I just thought, “Oh no, Cosa died. She’s gone.”

Then I found a note with more detailed information under the wiper of my car’s windshield. It said:

The other side of the paper just said that animal control had knocked on my door and that nobody had answered. I had no idea what time that was; I felt a jolt in my stomach wondering if this had gone down the night before, when I’d heard the dogs barking and ignored it.

I looked at this paper and the orange animal control form, back and forth, trying to resolve them, wondering if there might be some kind of mistake. And the girls. They were waiting patiently in their car seats for me to take them to school as this horrible thing was unfolding.

I ran in quickly to check the garage and see if the other cats were inside.  I found Rico near the door and put him inside, but Diego wasn’t around.

That was all the time I had. I got in the car and headed to the daycare before we were late.  As soon as the girls were there, I called Animal Control on my way to work to try to get an idea of what had happened.

They were very sympathetic, but the news they get was not encouraging. They’d picked up a black cat that had been mauled by two dogs right in our yard. I asked several times if they were sure that was the only cat was killed and they thought it was just the one. They went into some detail about the dogs, saying they believed it was the same dogs that had been wandering around earlier in the week and which had been picked up, then claimed by their owner a day or two before Cosa was attacked. Cosa’s body had been picked up and taken before I’d even opened the front door.

The woman on the phone asked if wanted Cosa destroyed or if I wanted to pick her up. I knew I wasn’t going to be home early enough from work to pick up Cosa on the way home and I was already running late for work.  I asked if I could pick her up the next day and they said that was fine. I hung up the phone and went to work, my day turned suddenly weird and horrible.

 The burial

I was sad and shocked, but I didn’t cry, not all day. Even as I shared some brief details online about what had happened (and the weird, accusatory note that had truly disturbed me), I was too surprised to feel any grief yet.  I had filled in my wife on what had happened and even though she had never really been a fan of Cosa’s she was sorry for me and has had a lot more experience in her life dealing with pets that died.  (Cosa wasn’t my first pet, but she was my first cat and she lasted 14 years. Kind of amazing given she was a feral, fierce little thing when I found her.)

That night, I came home late from a social event (where people I knew from online offered truly nice sympathies after seeing my shellshocked Tweets) and were able to find Diego.  He and Rico were both safe, but we noticed over the next few days that Diego didn’t want to go outside and seemed spooked, which would make a lot more sense once we knew the whole story.

The next morning, I took the girls to school, ran some errands, then prepared myself for the task I was dreading.  I drove to the Animal Shelter to pick up Cosa. The Animal Shelter is in town and not far from where we live, but it’s on a dirt back road that makes it seem much further out and more isolated than anything near it.  It was already getting hot outside when I arrived.  As I waited in the cramped entrance area, I saw a tiny cat wandering around.  The cat came to me and meowed, looking up expectantly.  I scratched the kitten’s ears and it purred.  I suddenly felt much, much sadder as memories of Cosa that young overwhelmed me.

They didn’t have any more details on the dogs, but after a lengthy wait, they brought out Cosa.  She was in a plastic bag, frozen, they said.  The bag was in a large cardboard box.  I didn’t stop to look inside and see if it was the right cat.  I knew.

I asked if there was anything I needed to know about burying a cat.  Was it legal? Could I do it in my yard?  They told me it was fine and to bury her in the plastic bag. It would all decompose and it would be fine.

I got a hoe and a shovel from the garage, went to the outer edge of the backyard and started digging.  Our soil is hard and rocky; it’s hard to dig very far down or plant anything, but I tried.  I sweated and dug and dug and only managed two or three feet, if that.

That was when I forced myself to open the box, which I’d set down gently in the shade of one of our trees.  I pulled out the black plastic trash bag.  Inside it was a white kitchen trash bag and inside that was the body.

She was frozen still, stiff, curled into a U.  Her teeth were bared, but her eyes were milky and indistinct.  I was thankful that she was in one piece.  I had expected pieces of cat, a dismembered mess.  But she was intact.  I didn’t find wounds on her, just a reddish abrasion on her belly. No pools of blood, no mess.  Maybe they washed her before they froze her.  I had no idea.  Later, my wife would wonder if the dogs had flung her around, snapping her neck rather than gutting her.

I tried to avoid touching her with my hands, but in the end I wanted to know what her fur felt like.  I put a finger on her head and felt it was wet and cold.  Her once thick black coat seemed thin and sparse, her whole body appearing wet and the fur bunched together in places.

I put her back in the plastic bag and placed her gentle into the hole.  I covered it in dirty and patted the rapidly drying dirt down in the hot sun.  I said goodbye to her as I put a large stone from our yard on top of the small grave, something the Animal Shelter worker had also suggested to keep the area from being disturbed by dogs, other cats or raccoons.

I went inside, still not believing what was happening.

The neighbor

Later that day, after my wife got home, we went and spoke to the neighbor who’d left the note on our car.  The note had really rattled me and filled me with guilt and I had been dreading the encounter all day.  I was prepared to throw down and get angry and I waited for Rebecca to come with me because I knew she’d be much calmer than me should the conversation go south.

She invited us into her house and was not at all what I expected.  She was kind and was truly shaken up and upset about what happened to Cosa.  She has cats of her own that she keeps indoors and she had to witness the whole mauling with no one to help.  She’d called 911 and Animal Control and had waited helplessly with nobody responding.  She told us she kept asking herself why we couldn’t hear what was going on and was beside herself when Animal Control finally arrived, too late to save Cosa.  Of course, she didn’t venture outside to try to stop it and I didn’t blame her. There was no way she could know whether the dogs would attack her, too.

She told us a few other things we didn’t know.  The mauling happened at around 6 a.m., not late the night before like I thought.  That was a relief, in a way.  It meant it didn’t happen when I heard dogs outside and ignored them.  She also told us that Cosa put up a fight for at least 15 or 20 minute and that the dogs also went after Diego, who was outside and hiding under my car.  They apparently couldn’t reach Diego there and that was what saved him. For the next few days, Diego was completely spooked and didn’t want to leave the garage or go outside.

We exchanged numbers and, under bizarre circumstances, made a new friend.  She expressed complete commitment to helping us do something about the dogs and warned us to keep an eye on our surviving cats. She also said the thing that we’d been worried about ourselves; that next time it could be one of our daughters playing outside in the yard who could get attacked by these loose dogs.

She described the dogs to us in more detail so we’d know what to look for. We passed the descriptions on to Animal Control, but they told us that given our cats were also off a leash, it wasn’t exactly something we could to take to court. They just told us to watch out and to call the moment we saw the dogs return.

Which, of course, they did.

The dogs

 Friday night a week later.  I was in the living room with Carolina while Lilly was getting a bath.  My phone buzzed and I saw it was a local number. I almost didn’t pick up.  It was our neighbor.  She told me the dogs were back and that they were poking around my yard.

We did the parenting thing where there was total confusion for about 30 seconds while I tried to explain to my wife what was happening while we wrangled the kids (one of whom was just-out-of-the-tub-naked and headed straight for the front door).

I was able to squeeze past her and go outside and… there they were. Right at our front door, exactly as our neighbor had described them. A larger dog with a thick long coat and his smaller, sleek brown companion. As soon as they saw me, they backed out of our entryway and started poking around our front yard. As I followed them, I tried to fumble with my phone and call Animal Control, but I wasn’t sure which number was the right one in my cell phone history and as I Googled it, my phone died. I had to run back inside and grab my wife’s phone and while I was doing that, the dogs started heading back around our back yard (we don’t have a fence, a whole other issue that probably wouldn’t prevent our cats from getting out if we did).

I let Animal Control know the situation, but they said they had no staff to come pick up the dogs at the moment. I hung up and focused on trying to get some decent photos of the dogs in case they suddenly took off. Not easy given it was quickly getting dark.

Then it happened. They came around to the front yard, the two dogs, having made a complete circuit around our home. They saw Diego sitting near our neighbor’s side of the lawn and ran at him immediately. In two seconds, both dogs were on Diego and he was thrashing against them as they all but covered him with their much larger bodies.

I ran.

“NO! NOOOO! NOOOOOO!” I screamed like an insane person as I ran at them. Even as I got closer, the dogs showed no sign of letting Diego away. I ran for the collection of river rocks that line our house and grabbed the two biggest rocks I could find. “NOOOO!” I kept yelling as I threw a rock and missed completely. The dogs let Diego away and he darted off to the street.

The dogs, meanwhile, nonchalantly walked off as I breathed heavily, holding one large rock in my hand, scared, fully prepared to bash one of the dogs in the skull if it came at me.

My adrenaline was pumping and I had this horrible sensation knowing that at any moment, I could be killing a dog with a heavy rock I was holding. The feeling made me queasy. I tried to calm down as I followed the dogs out of our yard and down the street.

I wondered how long I should follow. I wanted to see if the dogs went back home to try to find their owners, but something even better happened. The dogs continued to poke around the neighborhood as I followed. I took photos of the dogs and tried to get closer and closer. As I calmed down, I saw that the dogs seemed well-fed and healthy, not ragged stray dogs. They even were friendly to me, coming up and seeking attention and affection. I was still holding the rock, still cautious, but they didn’t appear to want to hurt me and they didn’t even bark.

I was able to get close enough to the smaller dog to pet him and reach for his collar, taking a few blurry photos of his tags in the dark. There was a scrawled tag with a name and phone number. I called it.

The woman who answered was shocked that her dogs were out and even more surprised and shocked when I told her I thought these were the dogs who had just killed our cat. “NO!” she said. She sounded credible. I wondered if she was lying and had already been told by Animal Control that her dogs were suspects. She told me that because of some fence construction, her dogs kept getting out and that she was at work. She asked me if there was anything she could do (apart from just picking them). I told her I didn’t know. I told her we were watching out for our cats and our kids and that we were all very upset.

A while later, I had to stop following the dogs and just hope she was on the way as they traveled far away from our neighborhood. Animal Control called me back and I gave them an update. The woman called me back and said she was definitely on her way to get the dogs and that this wouldn’t happen again.

And a week later, it hasn’t. We haven’t seen the dogs and our cats have been staying indoors much more often.

It’s been such a weird few weeks of surprises and disruption. I haven’t been able to tell Lilly what happened yet, but I intend to. I don’t intend to tell her where Cosa now lies, but I do feel it’s important for her to know that he’s not coming back. I lost a pet around that age and for years wondered if the lost dog would come back home. I don’t want her pining for a cat that won’t ever be back.

The place where I buried Cosa still had the large rock on it, but when I went to check it a few days later, I found the ground where I buried her spongy and unsettled. The bag or the body or both were probably gassy and expanding. I tried to pat the dirt down with my foot, but the loose, rubbery sensation of the ground that held her made me sad and horrified me a little and I’ve tried not to think about it much, letting time and the weather do their thing.

But my eye goes back there now every time I see the backyard. I wonder if I made a mistake putting her there, if maybe I should have chosen a spot I wouldn’t see so often.

On the other hand, I didn’t want her far away from us. I feel like we pushed her away for the last few years as we raised kids and tried to keep them safe from a mean cat. Even when they got old enough to play with Cosa, they never really did and my fantasy that one day the cats would return indoors and re-integrate to their old life of leisure never materialized. Cosa never got to come back and be a cat that slept in our bed and cuddled up against me as I watched TV or just hung out underfoot at my desk as I wrote late at night.

And I think that’s what makes me the saddest of the whole situation. That I wasn’t there to protect her when she was literally fighting for her life. That I was the only person who really ever had any affection for her, and in the end, I didn’t even give her that often enough.

Cosa’s gone and I never got to say goodbye or give her one last pat that she could feel. She didn’t get to finish her life peacefully, on a vet table, being told she was loved and being comforted to a final sleep. Instead, she fought alone, violently, and lost.

She was abandoned when I found her and I can’t help feeling that in the end, too, she died abandoned.