The dog appears to be growing teeth.

Her black and mottled-colored gums, which once sported gnawed down upper and lower teeth and what appeared to be sawed-off incisors, tiny slivers of teeth have appeared.

The skin on her rump, once black and very like the skin on a knee of an elephant – and devoid of hair – now is turning a grayish pink, with spikes of hair like the upper lip of a 13-year-old boy.

Her scamper in the morning, knowing what treats lie ahead, is more like a puppy than this ancient dog who is the poster pooch for the saying:  “sad-faced old dog.”

Could she be the canine version of the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button?”

If so, let’s hope she also outgrows her allergies and yeast infection. Now that would be worth living life over again!

Not that I actually think anything alien is going to eat out of Chessie’s torso, although I have to admit, her black and white speckled belly skin punctuated with elongated moles and warts is creepy enough. It’s my thinking “who is this dog and what have you done with my sweet Chessie?”

She also reminds of me that Jim Larsen cartoon, “The Far Side” where cows are standing around on their hind legs chatting like Harvard academics until the lookout yells “CAR” and they drop down on all fours and start mooing.

Chessie, unfortunately, doesn’t have a lookout, so there she was, drooling in deep sleep,  probably thinking I was still snuggled in my electric blanket trying to unthaw my frozen feet while watching a taped episode of Nip/Tuck.

I look at this dog and am constantly stunned as to why I actually paid  money for her – $250, discounted down from $350 – the Blue Light special for the Golden Retriever rescue group.

First of all, this chameleon with fur only partially looks like a Golden retriever if you look at her directly from the front. She sports the typical whitened face of an aging Golden. A side look, though, revealed loose jowls that hang to her chest, more similar to a Basset hound, bloodhound or even the Shar Pei. Her ears are like a cocker spaniels, yet shorter. She has the bushy tail of a Golden, but no feathering or “skirts” as I like to call them, on her rear legs that would help hide her saggy lady parts.

I recalled when I was first introduced to her. I already knew her story, how she had been found on the streets of Hampton, her back-end hairless, raw and oozing an infection, a large tumor on her chest nearly dragging the ground. Eye and ear infections, 25 pounds underweight, and teeth that had been ground down to her gums, probably chewing her wild-hog looking skin. And the smell … oh my goodness, the dog’s smell would hit you long before you actually saw her.

And she was old. The shelter planned to put her down, realizing no one in their right mind would adopt her. But despite her terrible condition and the untold horrors she had gone through, probably at the hands of humans, Chessie still wagged her tail and was happy to be with people. They couldn’t give her the injection that would put her out of her misery. So they called the Southeastern Virginia Golden Retriever Rescue Group. They took her and also fell in love with her sweet and loving and even hopeful nature. The tumor turned out to be a mammary gland infection. She was treated for the worst of her conditions and once she became stable, was ready to find her “forever” home. I agreed to meet her.

Yet as I sat in that chair, Chessie tottered over to me, sat down, her whippet, hairless tail beating the carpet. She placed a paw on my knee, gripping  a little with long curved toenails and looked at me with with weepy brown eyes. She twitched her eyebrows slightly, leaned forward and kissed my hand with the most gentle of licks. Once, with a slight nose nudge, and then no more.

As her foster mom and I talked, I glanced over at the dejected-looking dog. She was sitting, hunched over, staring at nothing, making no movement, simply existing.

Then it struck me. She reminded me of my father.

It was February 2008 when Dad, after 20 years of using methadone for pain relief, decided to quit because the drug was possibly causing an even more terrible condition – chronic bowel obstruction. Multiple surgeries (quintuple bypass, triple abdominal aortic artery surgery, and perhaps the beginning of it all, gall bladder surgery). It was not a good year.

Dad’s attempts of kicking one of the most powerful drugs required the use of other drugs that had side effects that left him “ruminating” or making chewing and sucking noises for no reason or staring into space. And most didn’t relieve him of the pain or the leg twitches for which doctors prescribed methadone in the first place.

The sleepless nights, pain and drugs caused Dad to lose weight, his skin to turn ashen, his droopy bloodshot eyes sunken in dark circles. His white hair thinned, turning brittle and dry. “Dead man walking,” he quipped about himself.

Once I found him sitting on my couch, arms on his legs, head hanging down dejectedly, to his knees. I asked him what he was doing. He looked up with hopeless eyes and said: “Enduring,  love; simply enduring.”

So as I watched this wretch of a dog, a yeast infection eating her from the inside out, a dog whose teeth had been ground down by chewing her own infected skin, or chewing rocks because she had nothing else to eat, whose pus-encrusted eyes could barely see and with ears that reeked of death. With her head hanging down, her nose nearly to the carpet, I saw the posture of one who was “simply enduring.” She was the canine manifestation of my father. I knew then I would bring this dog home.

(Dad, I am happy to say, has recovered greatly from that terrible year of withdrawal only to find out that didn’t solve the bowel obstruction problem … <sigh>)

I called the next morning and officially adopted Chessie, to the delight of her foster mom and the vet who had been previously deeply discounting her services to treat Chessie. I figured, hey, the dog’s ancient. It’s the least I could do to give the old girl her last good year, right? I insisted on taking the little doggie hoodie she had to keep her hairless body warm and mostly hidden. I didn’t want the neighbors to think I had done this to her.

When I brought Chessie home that weekend, I purchased dog beds for the garage, my office and bedroom. I noticed Chessie was good about finding that extra bit of padding, no doubt from years of sleeping on dirt or cement. If we were in the family room, she would carry my sock and lay on it after she did her 10 minute happy dance. The preparation she would give a wash cloth before laying on it was entertaining.

When she went into REM sleep, little would wake her. I once opened the garage door, drove my car in, closed the garage door and walked past the sleeping Chessie to go into the house. Absolutely unbelievable. But if she was asleep in my bedroom, and heard me quietly pour a few bits of kibble into her metal dog food bowl, she’d appear in seconds, her hind-end often arriving first, a River Dance of toenail clattering as she did her happy dance on being fed.

At first I fed her two cups of food twice a day. She quickly gained weight and I had to knock that down to one cup, twice a day. She would gobble up her food in 10-15 seconds and look up expectantly. A couple of tablespoons of plain yogurt mixed with fish oil and other supplements help slow that down to 20 seconds. She needed special food to fight the yeast infection,  special supplements, baths twice a week with special medicated shampoo and special ear drops to clean the black gunk out of her ears and drops to clear her murky eyes.

Chessie had learned to survive by being a scavenger, so when the gravy train of four cups of food a day ended, she went out to search for more. I found her in my bathroom, having climbed into my garden tub and then up on the ledge where I keep the self-feeding cat container. She had drained the container of every bit of kibble. Not a big deal unless you just spent $300 on getting special dog food and supplements to fight the allergies in the five pounds of food she had just consumed. So I had to put a gate up in my bathroom to block her.

Chessie required trips to the vet every two weeks at the cost of a minimum of $200 each time. I have to say, she has responded to the treatment. She’s not cured, but the black skin on her back is now mostly pink and hair has come in. She sports a full, think blonde coat, which hides the speckled skin on her belly and a multitude of warts and benign tumors and whatever else you get as you age. Her tail is thick and full, the fur on her ears curly. The alligator skin under her jowls remain mostly black, although pink is coming through, as is a regrowth of hair. Even the worst spot on the base of her tail, where she did most of her chewing, has healed, although will probably never grow hair. Her eye infections are gone, and we are keeping the indefatigable ear infection at bay. The black skin on the inside of her ears are now almost all pink. She gets baths every other week now, mostly when she starts to smell a little stronger.

But with her improved health, along came spunkier behavior. She doesn’t tolerate Charlee’s passive/aggressive “stink eye” she gives Chessie when Charlee wants to “will” Chessie from a chew. Chessie will mount the much taller Charlee, bark and growl at her shoulders. It’s dog-speak for “You lookin’ at me? You wanna piece of me? Don’t you be eye-ballin’ me!” Charlee has tolerated these attacks because she always gets Chessie’s chew when she drops it to attack Charlee. The attacks are becoming more frequent and last longer. One day Charlee may not be so tolerant.

She still has her moments of sitting hunched over, staring at nothing, her “simply” existing look. At her age, I can relate a little. She chases flashlight balls and is as happy picking up a piece of paper as she is a squeaky toy that Charlee hasn’t disemboweled yet.

Chessie has elevated her position from sleeping on the dog mat by the side of my bed to take Charlee’s dog bed at the foot of my bed. That’s because Charlee usually sleeps at the foot ON my bed. The dog bed is more plush, and frankly, I’m OK with it, since I’m not in such close proximity of  Chessie’s snoring and farting during the night.

Once satisfied with just sleeping on the carpet, to then curling up on a throw rug, to moving from a dog mat to the dog bed, Chessie has now set her sights higher — the furniture. This was a dog who was supposed to live a year, at the most. She’s ancient. She’s been to hell and back and brought some of it with her.  And yet here she is,  more than a year after that fateful day when she sat enduring and wondering what life would hand to her next, sleeping and drooling on my couch.

You go, girl.

The Accord was hardly as sexy as the sleek Honda Prelude he used as a company car at The Gilroy Dispatch when we lived in California. I had requested him to ask for that car. His beloved Accord had done right by him for years, never giving him the slightest bit of trouble.

When finally it was time to trade her in for a more practical mini-van to accommodate our growing family, he glanced once more in the rear-view mirror – grieving - at the car that carried our just-married family - including three cats and six kittens - from Miami, Fla., to Gilroy, Calif.

In that car, we laughed our way across new country we would see together as a couple, my mispronunciation of Dubuque, Iowa; lying to hotel clerks about having just one cat, Bimini, with her adorable kittens, while sneaking in the very drugged Sidney and Frieda. How the kittens became weaned while driving across Kansas, the pained look he would get as one of them would claw up and down his perfectly preserved seats in their blue lambs-wool seat covers.

Oh, how he loved that boxy blue Honda Accord. It was a characteristic about Glenn that always endeared me to him. Perhaps it was because no matter how I looked in the morning, bleary-eyed after a 23-hour work day, he still looked at me with love and loyalty in his eyes. I may have changed from a sleek Prelude to a boxy Accord over the nearly 11 years we were married, but he always saw in me the girl I was when we married, even when I couldn’t see her anymore. When I close my eyes, it’s that look from him I try to summon, not those last terrible seconds when the plaintive tone of the flatline told me what I already knew – that Glenn was gone.

But this is three years earlier, in 1992, after the drive-train broke on the 1986 Dodge minivan that carried us from Gilroy to Belgrade, Montana. It was time to find another vehicle that was better suited for snow and ice than the rear-wheeled drive minivan that seemed to have a GPS system for finding ditches.

We had scoured the papers looking for a car, but neither of us had the time to go from lot-to-lot looking. Until I saw a car within our price range. But it was in Helena. We called, just to see, and perhaps it was the economy at the time, or maybe the sales rep was down in numbers or wanted a trip to Bozeman, but she agreed to drive the car there. But if we liked it, we had to buy it. We assured her if the car was as advertised, and drove well, that would be the case.

When Glenn walked out of the office and saw that baby-blue 1990 Toyota Corolla sitting in the parking lot, his eyes lit up. “She looks like my old Honda Accord,” he said with wonderment. The Corolla was a slight step-down from the Accord. It was like comparing the elegance of Grace Kelly to a quite pretty Kim Novak. The car was lacking some of the luxury of Glenn’s old Accord, but she had a lot of zip to her. She was nimble on the curves and readily responsive on the road. Just two years old, the Corolla had nearly 45,000 miles but little body damage. We paid the $6,376 for her on the spot, which included the stunning $1,699 we got for the undriveable minivan.

The first thing Glenn did was find blue lambs-wool seat covers.

At some point we acquired a Toyota Tercel stationwagon stick-shift that became Glenn’s car due to hauling of the newspapers each early Thursday morning to six post offices, a 60-mile-plus round trip. And so the Corolla became my vehicle.

While driving the Corolla, my nickname became Devon Ann-dretti. I drove to newspaper meetings in Great Falls, hugging the curves on mountain passes. I could make the 2-hour trip to Billings in 90 minutes. Cameron and I spent hours listening to 70s music, singing the words to America Pie and Piano Man, while driving to bowling tournaments all across the state.

It was the car I was pulled over most often in by the Montana Highway Patrol. Of course back then, it was a $5 “waste of a natural resource” ticket. I once quipped to an officer if I could buy a package of $25. The car could accelerate without me even realizing it, but stopped quickly when gophers would stop and stand in the middle of the road.

When car phones started to become popular, I found yet another way I could work during long drives to and from meetings. I bought a Motorola car phone and had it installed in the dashboard and an antenna off the back window. I replaced the old radio and put in a CD/radio player. Due to Montana’s straight roads, I could drive while talking on the phone, eating Wendy’s chili and driving with my knees.

It was in the back-seat of that car, just four months after Glenn died, that I drove my beloved Golden retriever Brandy to Ft. Collins, Colo., for cancer surgery, the longest trip I had ever taken by myself. It was in the back seat of that same car two weeks later that I took her to the vet, concerned about pain from her cancer treatment. He gave her medication, but wasn’t hopeful.

I went back to the office, under pressure to finish the paper. Brandy was too ill to get out of the car, but I checked on her about every 15 minutes. She greeted me each time, weakly thumping her tail. At the 10:45 p.m. check, she was sleeping heavily, snoring slightly, as I rubbed her head and ears. I ran inside and whipped off the last thing I needed to do, my editorial. When I went back outside, she was dead from an embolism, vomiting on the seat. Although I had the seat removed and detailed, it never went back in the same.

It wasn’t the last time I would get the car detailed. While taking Cameron to a horse-back riding lesson, he complained of not feeling well. He dropped the passenger seat all the way back into a reclining position (a nice feature, I might add) so he could lay back, starting at the ceiling. And then without warning, vomit spewed out of him like a volcano, hitting the ceiling. And he as quickly learned, what goes up must come down — his face was splattered by his own hurl.

Shocked, I pulled over immediately and started to yell at how inconsiderate he was to vomit IN MY CAR! At least roll the window down! But as soon as I looked at that miserable, chunk-covered face with vomit dripping from the ceiling onto my blue lambs-wool seat covers, I started to laugh. Loudly, uncontrollably. Not so much at him, but at the situation. And now that he felt better, Cameron laughed as well.

I pulled into the Trailside and bought paper towels to wipe him down and rescheduled his horseback riding lesson. And later had the car detailed — twice.

The Corolla had its quirks. At some point, she developed a loose connection with the battery cable. Every so often (more often than I liked), the car would simply stall out, usually while I was idling at an intersection. I had learned to carry a hammer under my seat. I would leap out, grab the hammer, yank open the hood, beat the battery cable to get a better connection, and then jump back in. Each time she would start. It took a number of months for my mechanic to finally figure out the problem. The hammer, however, remained under the seat.

In 1998 I bought a brand-new Subaru Forester after Glenn’s Aunt Ruth left us her 1997 Buick upon her death. I felt I was too young to drive a Buick, so I traded it so I could afford the Forester, which I still drive.

Two years later, when Cameron turned 14 1/2, the Corolla was the car I used to take him driving after he got his learner’s permit. It was the passenger seat where I vigorously pumped faux-brakes and clawed my fingers deep into those fading lambs-wool seat covers during our drives together. Upon his graduation from driver’s education and receiving his driver’s license at 15 years, 4 months, the blue Toyota became his the following spring after the snow melted on the roads.

It was tough giving up the Corolla to him, because she was still a speedier car. It took a while for the cops to figure out why the Corolla was so carefully traversing Jackrabbit Lane, only to see a very rigid-looking young boy gripping the steering wheel. The car phone had been upgraded to tiny cellular phones, although the case was embedded in the dashboard. The antenna was now useless, but it still clung tenaciously to the back window, flipped down out of sight.

Cameron started his memories in that car. It was the one he drove to school, where he boldly tried parking in the senior parking lot his junior year, only to find it had been keyed in punishment.

In 2003, it was the car he drove – following me – across the country as we made our move from Montana to Virginia. The Corolla – perhaps in one last effort to keep us from leaving my beloved Montana – had a flat tire only 60 miles into a 2,300-mile trip. It forced us to spend the night in Billings, where Cameron had a memorable evening chatting with a former classmate, Ashley,  then a college freshman, who happened to be staying at the same hotel that night with her parents while visiting family. I would have 10 flat tires to see that dreamy look on his face again.

It was Cameron who was pulled over for weaving after he got too sleepy during a particularly long drive, forcing me to drive backwards on the shoulder until ordered to stop by the police officer. Realizing Cameron wasn’t drunk, but just sleepy, he then escorted us to the nearest hotel or the night, making me forfeit my Orbitz hotel reservation less than 20 minutes away. It was probably the best $75 room I never stayed in.

It was the Corolla that sat parked for less than one semester outside my sister’s house before I decided I’d rather Cameron have the car in Blacksburg than me drive the 6-hour each-way trip myself to bring him home for vacations several times a school year. It was also that car where Cameron failed to call me often enough to let me know where he was and I called the Virginia State Police to ask if he had been reported dead. Thankfully, no. He had buried his car charger deep in the vehicle. (He still texts me when he gets home….)

His car became decorated with Virginia Tech stickers; the first touting his interest in computer science, which he later exchanged for one in electrical engineering. The sad memorial sticker for April 16, 2007 when a lone student gunned down 32 students and teachers, including a friend of Cameron’s.

And then the following year, the maroon and white tassel from his graduation joined the green and white tassle from his high school graduation on his rear-view mirror. Somewhere along the way, the new stereo sound system, with a woofer the size of a Smartcar, appeared in the trunk. A CD player with an iPod attachment.

Gone, however, were the faded and thread-bare lambs-wool seat covers that were pulled out in 2008. Inside, the car almost looked as good as it did the day Glenn laid eyes on her, although the back seat rocked a bit too much, there was a car phone gadget stuck to the cracking dashboard, and floor mats that never stayed in place.

Then Cameron got a job, and the new stickers on his vehicle reflected his status as a test engineer at Dahlgren Naval Station.

After spending $1,200 in repairs to get the Corolla to pass the state inspection in 2009,  Cameron had a tough decision when the 20-year-old car, which we had owned for 18 years, with nearly 270,000 miles on it, required $120 in parts and $500 in labor for the 2010 inspection sticker. Cameron had been saving for a new car, so he made the decision to buy a 2010 Nissan Altima with the technology package and Bose sound system. He put $21,000 down and will likely pay the $9,800 remaining by June.

As excited as he was to get a new car with a push-button start, heated seats, real seat-belts and airbags, and an in-dash GPS system, he had a pang of sorrow as he pulled all of his stuff out of his vehicle. He had driven it for 10 years, with no tickets or citations and only two minor fender-benders from other people rear-ending him.

As the Corolla sat among other trade-ins, I stroked her the hood, now pockmarked with “road rock” used to sand the highways in Montana after snowstorms. The blue had faded to gray in spots, and rust was etching a filagree pattern along the wheel-well. I touched the back seat where Brandy had snoozed while I covered school board and city council meetings and then later breathed her last. I peeled off the brittle Virginia Tech magnetic stickers and put them on my car. Cameron scraped off the base stickers.

This was the last car that held all of us together as a family, including a memorable trip to Hyalite Canyon with Brandy and Carmel squashing Cameron in the back seat, the same trip when Carmel hurled her dog food within minutes after that first winding curve to the lake where we would spend a beautiful afternoon.

They are all gone now, first Glenn, then Brandy and Carmel. The cats are all gone, too; Sidney, Studley, Gremlin, Frieda, Jasmine, Smokey, Snicker, Bimini, Harry and finally Spook. Only his treasured guns and Civil War collection share my life in a house in a state where he never lived. That little blue Toyota Corolla was the last vestiage of a life we shared together.  

As I drove away, I looked back once more and saw only the beauty of what that car was 18 years earlier – seeing her through the same filter in which Glenn had always seemed to look through at me – at a time when our future had no end. And then I wept.

 and in my eyes, as Glenn also looked at me – I saw only the beauty and the memories of that car that once held us all together as a family as we drove to Hyalite Canyon, when Carmel hurled her dog food after the first curve up.

And then just as quickly, she was back. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asked? I refrained from pointing out it should be “may I” because I had bigger problems.

For Hollis to choose to use MY bathroom rather than HER bathroom can mean only one thing: a stopped up toilet. Let me point out this is less Hollis’ fault than it is the whole NEIGHBORHOOD was built with too-small pipes, which forces the rather regular use of a plunger.

Already, Hollis has shown her tolerance for methane gas is higher than her ability to use a plunger.

“No,” I told Hollis, “you’re going to learn how to use a plunger.” She begged off. “Ewww! I don’t want to touch it,” she squealed as I flipped open the lid to reveal water as murky as a river in Thailand and less pleasant-smelling.

And so began Plunging the Toilet 101.

I placed the apparatus in the toilet and Hollis gingerly held the tip of the pole by one or two molecules of her fingertips while rotating her head nearly 180 degrees, her lips curled back in a grimace that made one believe she was about to give birth. It was like she was plunging nuclear waste, although given another day to fester in that bowl, it might have been.

I asked her to give it a plunge, and she pushed hard enough to create a tiny ripple. After three more pitiful plunges into that putrid puddle, I took Hollis’ hands, placed them on the plunger and then wrapped my hands around them. I showed her how to properly plunge, a skill that requires a careful touch – not enough force won’t get the job done, too much creates splash-back that can be catastrophic with a bowl in this condition.

It took  THREE flushes to properly get the bowl clear again, plus a few sprays of bleach. After replacing the plunger at its spot behind the toilet, we moved on to the kitchen for further house-training, in particular the hot chocolate powder that had been scattered – and then left – on my kitchen counter.

Hollis also finds touching a sponge “gross.” As those words came out of her mouth, my mind flashed back to a moment HAD I EVER uttered those blasphemous words to my grandmother, who took cleanliness to an almost unholy level. A sponge up a nostril wouldn’t be too far off.

The fact a 15-year-old girl had been allowed to even develop an aversion to touching a sponge would be unfathomable to my grandmother. To her, girls handling sponges to clean up after themselves would be as natural as breathing. And to be honest, some of my favorite memories of my grandmother was working with her in the kitchen, cleaning side-by-side. Sure beat ironing sheets, but I digress….

So Hollis grabbed a paper towel and attempted to disperse of the hot chocolate by simply spreading it around so it wasn’t as noticeable. I guess she figures if she’s bad enough at it, I’ll do it myself. She figures wrong.

So when she returns from her Christmas break, she will have a bright new sponge and some pretty yellow dishwashing gloves with her name on them under the tree. And perhaps one day even improved precision on pouring hot chocolate into her cup.

So a simple and quiet “thud” isn’t enough to make me even miss a keystroke. But then I heard the tail-tell (pun certainly intended) sounds of Charlee’s ”I’ve-got-something-in-my-mouth-I’m-bringing-to-you-even-though-I’m-not-supposed-to-have-it” dance. Once she actually brought me every item I had in my purse, including my photo card for the camera.

So far tonight she’s brought me two presents from under the tree and one ribbon. I glanced over and caught a glimpse of red. And then blonde hair. The Christmas angel! I looked backward and sure enough, she had fallen from the top of the tree. I managed to extricate her from Charlee’s gentle grip with only a little bit of spit on that synthetic “Britney” hair. I used it to smooth down the cow-lick Charlee had left her.

The angel’s fall from grace wasn’t completely a surprise. She had been perched - like a drunken schoolgirl who tries too desperately to walk normally past the principal during her prom – on top of my tree. At first she would list a bit to the right, then I noticed this morning she was tilting to the front. I’ve had nights like that.

She has not taken well to the fake tree. With a real tree, it was easier maneuver her hollow cone-shaped cardboard body over a few branches. A bit of balancing did the trick. But perhaps the plastic “leaves” are too slick. I couldn’t get a firm seat. She slowly inched upward like brownie dough baking in the oven.

So why not get a tree-topper that better fits this tree? I have to say, I’ve never been particularly fond of this Christmas angel. I was used to a five-pointed beige star on top of my grandmother’s tree. I wanted one like it. But my husband, he of Nordic heritage, preferred non-lighted Christmas toppers. He was drawn to this blonde angel wearing a headdress of candles, a red dress covered by a white apron held together with a garland of red flowers. She has puffy white wings and her hands are mysteriously placed so they appear to be pulling taffy, if she had taffy. She is, of course, the Swedish Saint Lucia. Glenn, with all of his Norwegian humor, called her Saint Lena (if you haven’t heard of Ole and Lena jokes, Google them). Since I had purchased all of the other ornaments (his job was putting up the tree and taking it down), I let him have his little Lena.

That was 25 years ago. Glenn’s been gone for 13 of those Christmases. I now think in terms of things I’ve had longer than I knew Glenn. Lena is one of them. As was my beloved Kirby and my current vehicle, a 1998 Subaru Forester I bought new.

Lena is looking a bit worse for the wear. Her crown of candles is missing all of the candles. She’s left with a headband similar to ones seen on the likes of Paris Hilton at the latest Sundance Festival.  The red dress with its smart little bow-tie still look crisp, although now punctuated with dog spittle. Her apron is permanently skewed to starboard and her once-smooth blonde coif now looks like she’s walked onto a steaming street after a late August afternoon Miami rain burst.

I climbed back up on the step-stool to force her back into her place of honor on top of the tree, but she popped off again. I briefly considered tying her to the top branch, but I feared what message that might bring to my nieces and nephew when they see Christmas Lena roped to a tree like Bondage Barbie.

So she  now sits atop my piano, where she will draw the dreaded attention of Andy, who will no doubt chew that frizzy hair and either vomit or poop it out later.

Perhaps this is the year she is retired to a lesser position at Christmas, sort of the Dowager Christmas Angel. Perhaps this is the year I’ll get a star like my grandmother’s tree topper, one that twinkles with the rest of the tree.

But more than likely, I’ll rig a method of putting Lena back on the tree. Because 25 years ago, Glenn and I decided for our first Christmas together, we would begin our own Christmas traditions, much like the beloved memories I had of sharing the holidays with my grandmother and other family members. Christmas traditions that would include the child I had just discovered we would have the following August.

Those Christmas traditions we started in 1984 ended when Glenn died May 2, 1995. But little by little, many of them have returned. The stockings are now more decorative rather than filled with goofy goodies, something Glenn insisted on doing himself. The pile of stockings with names  of beloved pets no longer with me grew a little last year with the death of Kirby at a still too-young age of 12. Glenn’s stocking, distinctive in that it was hand-sewn with his family’s pet name for him – Fraser – is still carefully hung by the fireplace each year.

As I look over a tree that is covered with ornaments purchased in the 14 years since Glenn’s death, I still see the “Our First Christmas 1984″ ornament, always hung at the top, and remember a time when we thought we had the rest of our lives to celebrate many Christmases together.

But Charlee has begun her “see-what-I’ve-got-in-my-mouth-” dance, tail banging dangerously close to carefully-placed ornaments. It’s time to rescue another de-ribboned gift and start engineering a way to put Christmas Lena back on the tree, at least for another year.

Getting Hollis out of bed remains one of the more difficult aspects of living with a teenager. And let me say this right now – not that I’m excusing it – but she and several other billion teenagers are pretty much the same way.

But now that she is on the junior varsity cheerleading squad, we are facing practice times that will require her to be at school – 30 minutes away – by 6:45 a.m. That’s a 5:45 a.m. wake-up call so we can hit the road by 6:15 a.m.

Right now I can’t get her up for her 7:30 a.m. class. I’ve turned  into this nagging apparition who appears in her doorway, bleary-eyed, every five minutes, sternly admonishing her to get out of bed. I start at 6:15 a.m. and this morning, it was 6:40 a.m. before she rolled out of bed, assuring me she had plenty of time to get ready.

Now I’ve heard that before. I try to get her to actually lay out her clothing for the next morning the night before. “I know what I’m wearing in my mind,” she tells me. Then the next morning, she changes her mind and is on the phone asking her cousin to bring some article of clothing in the midst of Shelby getting ready for school.

Hey, a girl’s got the right to change her mind, but with five minutes before pickup, that’s not the time.

So even though Hollis THINKS she can get ready pretty pronto, it’s a 75-25 chance something will keep that from happening.

She let me know her disapproval about my nagging this morning by slamming the toilet lid up and then down and then banging around in the dryer looking for something she had envisioned she would wear. Normally I put her clean clothes away (because I know if I give them to her to do it, they’ll never make it in the drawers, which, I might add, are pulled out of the dressers and sitting on the floor.)

But this hasn’t been a normal week. Monday night we all ate dinner at Baker’s Crust (Hollis doesn’t like the sound of the word “crust” or “casserole.” Just an interesting tidbit when you play the Hollis-version of Trivial Pursuit or want to torture her with words….). That had me working later in my home office to get the paper done, so I didn’t get the clothes put away by the time Hollis went to bed. Then Tuesday morning, I was out the door before she left to head into the main office in Norfoolk to finish up the Clipper with the designer and since I was asked to help out during election night. I didn’t get home until 11 p.m. thanks to a Berekley bridge lift.

I called Hollis again at 10 p.m. to find she had been home for two hours (after cheerleading practice and then attending a volleyball game) and never thought to put the dogs out, who hadn’t been put out since 7:30 a.m. I’ve simply got to improve her situational awareness when it comes to animal care. When I got home, I was pleased there were no accidents other than a suspicious vomit spot that could have been the cats. Charlee, however, was nowhere to be seen. I peeked in Hollis’ room to find Charlee sleeping on the bed. She thumped her tail, but made no effort to get up. Cool. Two bed hogs together — let’s see how that goes.

But during one of the many wake-up calls, I noticed a stain on the floor that looked perhaps like a pee stain but now I think it might have been stomach bile. Charlee never got her evening meal because I normally feed the dogs in the morning and again at night. And Hollis certainly wouldn’t think to feed them. If Charlee peed, that would have been the first time since I got her 11 months ago. And after holding it for 14 hours, I can’t imagine her going after just 7.  But then Hollis admitted the spot was thick like vomit, not wet like pee, since she (eewwww)  stepped in it.

And God help me and I’m not proud of it, but I smiled a little at that statement.

Here it is, Halloween, and with Shelby otherwise occupied, Michael down with swine flu and Hollis unable to find a friend who isn’t planning to go to another party (of which she’s been invited to some, but inexplicably won’t go), it’s down to me and her for tonight – and several hundred candy-starved children

So I offered to take her down to Elizabeth City myself, just the two of us, a Thelma and Louise evening. “No offense, Aunt Devon, but that’d be kinda boring…..” she responded.

ACKKKK! Did my niece actually call me boring? ME? BORING? I think what she meant to say was “lame, gay” or whatever teen-speak is for being-seen-with-your-adult-is-too-hideous-for-words, even though it’s in a city she’s never been in and 45 minutes south in North Carolina. AND she has nothing better to do.

Although with a gaggle of her friends, there would be the requisite talking about who is doing what to who, catty remarks about how well someone is wearing something or not, and if boys were along, going into dark corners of a haunted house, being frightened and screaming into each others arms, and the guys trying to covertly cop a feel in the darkness. Ah, those were the days….

Yep, I gotta say, going to a haunted house with Aunt Devon is pretty boring. <sigh>

After recovering from that whack to the knees, Hollis and I did manage to have a nice Friday evening. A child of vampire-lite lore with the slightly milquetoast Twilight books and now the most enjoyable Vampire Diaries, Hollis wanted to see a real vampire movie, like the old days. After flipping through my InDemand channels, she picked Interview with a Vampire and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I had to laugh an “old” vampire movie to her was made in 1992, not even 20 years ago. I was looking for the Bela Lugosi movies or even Nosferatu.  We decided on Dracula, because if I remember correctly, while way over the top with some of the scenes, it was pretty creepy. She remembers seeing bits and pieces of this movie when she was six.

So we watched Dracula and talked comparisons. I think she was pleased on how in this version of Dracula, the plot was similar to Diaries, where Dracula’s desire for Mina is driven by her Doppelganger from four centuries before: Elizabeta, who committed suicide, thinking her husband had been killed in battle, and therefore damned by the church to never go to heaven. The vampire curse began over Dracula’s anguished realization that despite fighting the Turks for his church, his God had failed him in protecting his wife. So he, too, would never die to avenge her death. Or something like that.

Except Dracula doesn’t age well, and there’s that whole offputting green lizard-bat thing he turns into at night we haven’t yet witnessed with the hunky studs from Vampire Diaries and Twilight. In my day, Frank Langella was the dreamy Dracula with his soulful eyes back in 1979. Hollis knows this same actor as the guy who played Nixon. Not the same sexual tension.

I found it amusing she felt the opening five minutes was “pretty intense.” This film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Trust me, there will be a lot more intense.

After warning her yet again she couldn’t creep into my bed if she got scared during the  night (I’d happily loan her a dog), we continued with the movie. After a few more discussions on whether this was how the Dracula myth began, I think she understands why I sorta shrug at how contemporary writers have turned vampires into almost people — have the ability to go into daylight because they wear a “ring” to protect them … or their skin shimmers in the light, but it doesn’t reduce them to the residue from under a charcoal grill after a barbecue.

Although I have to say, I love the Diaries plot where Damon’s strength comes from feeding on people, while Stefan, the “good” vampire, feeds only on animals. It makes him weaker than his evil brother and of course both are drawn to the same girl (Elena) who looks like the woman (Katherine) they both loved 145 years ago during the Civil War who actually turned them both into vampires.

So tonight, we’ll watch Interview with a Vampire while eating left-over Halloween candy and then I get to treat myself with a before unknown-to-me vampire movie with George Clooney! Even if the plot is bad, at least the scenery is worth sinking my teeth into….

Some of my fondest childhood memories were the times I spent with her. Not all of them entirely pleasant. She was a tough taskmaster. But when you got that rare praise for doing to her liking, such as ironing sheets, or we’d share a laugh and I’d hear her cackle, well, it was just a special time.

We’d try to make it to Fort Myers for the occasional family get-together, but somehow, there was always something -  our own family/job demands – that kept it from happening very often and never having the whole family get together like we did in West Virginia. We did for Christmas 1991, though, because we knew our time with her was getting shorter. She died 18 months later. I still miss her.

I mention this only because I have some innate need to cook a huge family dinner to celebrate the occasion of us getting together, whether it is Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter or a random moment of circumstance that brings all four of us together with our parents. I blame this on my time spent with Grandmother.

So when Mom and Dad were at the beach house, it occurred to me that Saturday evening we would have all of the grandchildren together. And whenever there are more than four of us gathered together, I develop a brain spasm that makes me say: I’LL COOK.  That statement spews forth out of my mouth like someone suffering from Tourettes Syndrome.

It’s not like I can’t cook. I cook just fine. I’m not terribly imaginative because frankly, I don’t have the time nor energy.

But with Cameron coming in to visit, and knowing my mashed potatoes will perhaps make him forgive the times he had to sit in my office while I was covering a city council meeting (hey, he had a TV, laptop and a dog, plus Red Baron and all the sprinkles he could eat from the mayor….), I offered to make dinner: chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, green beans with biscuits/bread. Not too terribly difficult. Well, not perhaps if it had been done at my house. But this was being done in a strange kitchen.

Everything is going OK until about an hour before I thought the chicken would be ready. Corn had been shucked, green beans plucked and potatoes peeled, boiled and now in the mixer. Gravy was a bit iffy, but waiting on drippings. I opened the oven to check on what appeared to be a beautifully browning bird, only to find out the oven had automatically cut itself off after two hours. Guess it was a safety feature.

So now everything I had timed down to the last minute so it would hit the table hot and at the same time was going awry. Potatoes were getting cold, green beans were taking longer than I expected to steam and was that chicken ever going to pop it’s “ALL DONE” cork?

The table was all ready to go and finally all of the kids were rounded up. Rather than waiting on the chicken, we decided to eat the first batch of mashed potatoes and gravy as an appetizer. Then came the green beans. Corn never got done, and by now, it was after 8 p.m., so I said forget it. Chicken finally popped the cork and it was delicious, but of course better with the mashed potatoes. Bread came out as dessert. Second batch of boiled potatoes were ruined sitting in the pot — too mushy to even use unless patching holes in the road outside.

It was hardly the well-timed out and well-prepared meal I had envisioned, i.e. those of my Grandmother’s. And my sister had called in sick. I had just spent five hours buying/cooking/cleaning a meal that required two dishwasher loads and it was consumed in about 15 minutes.

But as we sat there, all of us at the table, talking, laughing, joking, a little poking and teasing amongst the cousins,  I hope someday one of them will tell their children that sharing this meal with their grandparents was a cherished memory, not so much for what a perfect meal it was, but for its imperfectness, which probably made it even more perfect for our family.

Emotions run between hot and OMG! for teenage girls. Expect to be collateral damage just trying to understand what is causing their world to rock back on its axel. Fixing the problem isn’t always helpful. Sometimes just being the wall for the splatter of one’s hopes being dashed is enough.

Take, for example, the Blink 182 concert. Who is Blink 182? Don’t ask me. I know Taylor Swift now because she has four hits that run in-between every other song on the radio, and I know Kanye West only because he interrupted Taylor Swift during some video award ceremony that apparently had only 10 artists who submitted videos. I love Three Dog Night and Yes.  But I digress….

Anyway, Hollis was going to the Blink 182 concert and had offered to get tickets for several of her friends, which my sister graciously agreed to purchase for them (a mistake she’ll not likely make ever again). Of course the problem started when once Hollis’ friends heard she was getting tickets, others wanted tickets, like addicts looking for a cheap dime bag. Then the ticket prices went up, probably because of the run on tickets for everyone at Norfolk Collegiate School.

The plan was after the concert, Hollis’ buddies would go to the beach house for a sleep over, and then they’d go to the school’s Fall Fair. Sounded easy enough.

Apparently the night before the concert, two tickets were still outstanding. Hollis, concerned she couldn’t deliver, offered to stay home to free up one ticket. Of course that wasn’t going to happen. The extra ticket was purchased and I stupidly thought all was right with the world.

Except now they weren’t going to spend the night at the beach house, but instead at one of her friends. It would be easier for them to get to the Fall Fair and they wouldn’t have to wake up so early. And I guess sleeping at a beach house when it’s dark  and leaving is hardly as appealing as getting to stay there and enjoy the beach all day. OK, no problem. Saves me the drive to Sandbridge and then Norfolk. 

It’s now Friday. The girl’s mother picked up the bunch from school and I collected them from her house and drove them to the concert, listening in to the mysterious girl-talk about who looks cute, who’s dating who, who’s hot and who’s not and “I love brick homes.”  (???) I also learned a new hand signal that appears to be an insult to young men who look too long at girls who think they are too hot for those guys to be looking at them. It’s not obscene, but who comes up with this stuff? Someone not doing their homework, I bet.

I killed time during the 4-hour concert by meeting Cameron and my parents for a lovely dinner at Margie’s & Ray’s Seafood. If I had left after Cameron finished his meal, that would have left me with 3 hours and 45 minutes to kill, but thankfully, my parents chew their food. So with about 90 minutes left, I meandered the 25 miles back to the concert venue, stopping along the way to get cheap gas ($2.11).

So I’m at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater parking lot with nothing to do. I have my laptop. Should be able to hook up wirelessly, right? Maybe even post a blog? Booted up and searched for a connection. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. WTF? How could there not be one lousy hot spot at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater? Probably to keep people from YouTubing drunk kids dancing on the lawn during concerts.

After some equipment failure and rain, the band finally ended, mostly with me texting Hollis and begging them to leave BEFORE the final song so we can beat the traffic. Of course the final song is the one song they all know and have been waiting to hear it for four hours. Finally gathered the girls from the stream of humanity coming off the lawn, collected blankets they weren’t permitted to bring in (again, WTF?) and drove them back to the sleepover home (20 miles away) and then drove home (a mere 10-12).

But Hollis and the girls seemed to have a good time, and I had a great dinner, so while I spent five hours driving in a big circle, it was a good evening. And of course there was that cheap gas.