poppy-friends

~ Remembering Poppy ~
April 1, 1990-June 3, 2002
� 2002 b j Altschul

In the beginning....

Poppy's first few days with me were telling.

In the spring of 1991, following a year when I finally had started to recover from major surgery, a boyfriend who had dumped me,
and unfriendly office politics, I decided that the first thing I'd do just for me was become a dog mom. I picked out a pooch from the shelter ads in the local paper, but by the time I arrived, the dog of choice already was spoken for. So I returned to the office and called a couple of the other local shelter organizations that also had interesting prospects (spayed female, housebroken, short hair, etc.). Sure enough, one of them -- FLAG (For the Love of Animals in Goochland) -- had a potential match and I made
arrangements with the foster mom to visit that evening.
"Shen Te" (Chinese for Divine, I think) and I had a friendly and otherwise uneventful first meeting, so the foster mom agreed
to bring her on over to my townhouse for the transfer. My new "family" spent her first night spoiled -- snoozing sweetly in
bed with her new mommy. Little did I know at that moment what mischief was to follow...
My house wasn't *quite* ready for a fur-kid, and I wasn't sure exactly what degree of housebroken she was. Nevertheless,
I went to work the next day, "barricading" little miss pooch in the kitchen. But that didn't last long.
Upon my return home at the end of the day, here's the scene that greeted me as I opened the front door: She was sitting in the middle of the living room floor into which she had dragged every stuffed animal I owned, from all three levels of my split-level home, with a ditzy look on her face as if to say, "Oh thank you for all my toys! Where are *yours*?"
On top of that, she had given a crew cut to my schefflera plant that was part of the barricade, AND she had dragged a 20-pound
bag of plant food from where it stood by the front door all across the living room floor. (She weighed in at a mere 13 pounds at
the time.) Lucky for both of us she didn't try to open the bag and eat any of it.

That was only the first day.

The second day she was "stationed" in the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom with a bowl of water, a soft towel, and the
bathroom door closed.
When I got home and went upstairs, I opened the bathroom door to find my blowdryer on the floor and turned on, hammering
the floor and making a lot of noise. Divine, my foot! Anxious to get out of a small room, she must have pawed at the cord hanging over the edge of the vanity near the door, thereby knocking the dryer onto the floor, which probably jolted it on.

The third day I made sure no cords were within her reach. Once again, she was stationed in the bathroom.

That evening when I got home I heard a sound much like running water, but not from the outside faucets where the yard service sometimes connected their hoses. Sure enough, when I opened the bathroom door, indeed was there ever running
water - the shower was turned on, hot as a sauna bath! Best I can figure is that this little mischief-maker pawed at the shower
caddy hanging over the faucet, thereby pulling the faucet into the "on" position. Must have happened not too long before I got home; otherwise the water would have been cold.
By then it was the weekend. I bought a large sheet of 1/4-inch plywood to create an escape-proof barricade for the kitchen.
Things were fine after that.
The next step was to find a more appropriate name for my crazy little fur-kid.

The Divine Miss Papagena

Quite spontaneously, shortly thereafter, my mom and I were driving around somewhere in Norfolk and noticed a billboard
advertising a local small business, Papadopoulous something-or-other. Ordinarily, we wouldn't have paid it any attention, except
that this particular time Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute (my favorite) happened to be on the Metropolitan Opera
broadcast. Papagena (one of the comic relief characters) was singing at that very minute. I made the ear connection between Papadopoulous and Papagena instantly, and voila, Poppy had both a nickname and a starring role
in an opera. Later on, she proved that she could, indeed, sing.

Part dog, part pig, part ...???
I think most of you will readily recall Poppy's lust for food, edible or otherwise. In addition to the first day's episode, her menu sampled - are you ready for this? - a rather sizable stuffed-animal walrus on whom she tried to perform a frontal lobotomy,
potpourri, a Christmas cactus, a camera lens case, a plastic container to hold tennis balls, newspapers, wood, plastic
flower pots, and a whole laundry list of other no-no's.
Even chocolate, which can be lethal to dogs, never seemed to faze her. The mother of all chocolate thieveries occurred following
a birthday party for me about a year after she came into my life. Among other refreshments, we had S'mores. And there were leftovers. I carefully placed the extra marshmallows in a metal cookie tin and stored them in the kitchen. The uneaten Hershey
bars and packages of graham crackers went into another metal cookie tin on the coffee table.
At this point I have to back up and tell you that Poppy's greatest vice at this stage of her life was to chew on anything plastic, so
metal containers most certainly would have no appeal. However, what I didn't reckon on was that she still liked to try to walk on
the coffee table. Costly oversight on my part, as it turned out.
The container was fine for an entire week after the party. But on Friday, when I got home from work at the end of the day, there
was no puppy-nose greeting me at the front door, no puppy-tail wildly wiggling hello.
What there was was a living room floor full of Hershey wrappers, and one rotund dog with the look of guilt of a thousand kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar. "Oh, Mommy," she seemed to be saying, "I don't know what I did, but whatever it
was, I sure did it!" She was on the sofa with her back to the door, turning her head from side to side as if to plead,
"Puh-leese, puh-leese! Don't punish me!"
The body count, after piecing all the wrappers together, was three whole Hershey bars, enough to inflict lesser dogs with unforgiving agony. The take on the graham crackers to this day remains unknown.
Ultimately, I deduced that she had walked on the coffee table, maybe even run on it, knocking the tightly capped metal container
on the floor and thereby causing the lid to pop off. My illusion of a well-behaved pooch vanished with her first whiff of chocolate.

Food theft redux
On another occasion she got into a box of kosher-for-Passover marshmallow cookies, unopened and tightly wrapped in plastic.
Out of her reach, I thought, on a pedestal near the front door.
(I never did figure out my own inability to psych her out as to places that would be truly out of her reach.)
Anyway, the box had been fine for a couple of days preceding the Seder to which I had planned to bring them as dessert...until I returned home from a brief round of errands to find the box ripped open, nine of the 12 cookies missing, and a very fat, uncomfortable dog eyeing me from her perch on the sofa.
Her guilt notwithstanding, I went upstairs to the bedroom to change clothes, and what do you suppose I found? Uh-huh, six of the cookies, whole, on the bedspread. The only way to put this delicately is, well, Poppy lost her cookies...
What else? Well, she seemed to get a special charge out of frozen green beans and broccoli. And then there were several
ham and turkey sandwiches stolen from Auntie Judy's *zipped up* Virginia Port Authority travel bag, and *under* the car seat.
(Poppy often was the Under-dog -- sticking her nose and half her bod under the steel utility shelving at PetSmart to scavenge
and snarf up any goodies she could find , hiding under the passenger seat in the car on a trip, taking refuge under the bed
during a thunderstorm.)
And let's not forget visiting Tamara and Annie the cat, right up the street from us at Stony Run. It wasn't Annie Poppy was
always so eager to visit, but her cat food!
My favorite of all her food escapades was the time she stole a chocolate eclair at Wanda's. We were chit-chatting in the living
room when Kelly, Wanda's then-11-year-old daughter, offered us humans some Weight-Watchers frozen eclairs for dessert. Unfortunately, she proceeded to drop one on the kitchen floor, and you-can-guess-who went lickety-split after it to prevent it
from soiling the vinyl. Nothing unusual about that, for Poppy, nor in her return to safety under the coffee table from whence
she would neither budge nor relinquish the eclair, except that her 'tude prompted me to write a whole song
about her life's escapades (see below).

This traveling life
Poppy was as familiar with the University of Maryland as with Deep Run Park, right down the street from us in Richmond. No particular "episodes" to recall, but our days of zigzagging together between our two homes meant she could be with me
throughout my master's degree, freelancing, the University of Maryland Biotech Institute, and teaching. She's left her mark
at several institutions of higher learning, tried nipping the feet of a few faculty members who weren't her type, and snarfed up crumbs in the lounge of the Department of Communication. Everywhere we went we looked for good parks, preferably with
trails and streams (which she usually refused to step in). I've always loved seeing her roll around in freshly mowed grass,
like the mall at UM, if only to see the white part of her fur get tinted chlorophyll-green.

Crossing over
In March 2002 Poppy was diagnosed with a moderately advanced heart murmur. She did well on medication, but the disease
is progressive and often worsens, often leading to pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure. Shortly after our most recent visit to Richmond Poppy's cardiologist here in Maryland increased her medications substantially because her heart murmur had become severe and she was experiencing pulmonary edema as well. On Sunday evening, June 2, I got home from a ceili to find Poppy breathing with extreme difficulty. She was to have had another blood test in the morning. Instead, we rushed to the emergency clinic around 2 a.m. and she was put on oxygen immediately. The vet on duty did not have a good prognosis for her, and after conferring about what would be best for Poppy, I made the painful decision to let her go. Despite the grief, I've found some wonderful pet loss support resources on the Web, and in my heart Poppy is now one of the "Bridgekids," one of the "fur babies" who has gone across the Rainbow Bridge to play and become healthy and whole and await their humans there at the appropriate time.

So I'm finding ways to cope.

But remembering her with all of you who are my closest friends
and who knew Poppy yourselves is the best therapy.
Poppy has left us all quite a legacy,
in both love and lunacy. Thanks for listening.
If you have other memoirs I'd love to add them to this "tail."

~ Poppy Stole an Eclair ~

Poppy stole an eclair-
A chocolate one of course.
She started out a little dog but
She grew as big as a horse.
Oh, Poppy stole an eclair-
It tasted, oh, so sweet!
My dog turned into a big fat pig
Because she loves to eat.
Chorus
(to the tune of the chorus
in Yankee Doodle):
Oh, Papagena is her name,
Papagena doggie,
Papagena rose to fame
Because I wrote this song-ie.

Poppy chased a squirrel.
It ran right up a tree.
She thought she could outrun it.
How silly could she be?!
Oh, Poppy chased a squirrel.
It flew through the air so fast!
My dog thought she would win the race.
Instead, she came in last!

Poppy turned the shower on
And got all soaking wet.
And when I tried to dry her off,
She was a soggy pet.
Oh, Poppy turned the shower on.
My dog now thinks she's a cat-
She won't go near the water unless
she's wearing a raincoat and hat!

Poppy romped with Muppet-
A bigger dog than she.
She hurt her left front paw
And then she wouldn't come to me.
Oh, Poppy romped with Muppet.
She faked a little limp.
She thought she was a tough little dog...
Instead she's just a wimp!

Poppy sang an opera,
A sweet and pretty song.
She sang her little heart out
For twenty minutes long.
Oh, Poppy sang an opera-
I think that it's a hoot.
Her real name's Papagena
Like in Mozart's Magic Flute.
� 1998, 2002 ~ b j Altschul

Papagena
Poppy �
Popster
Popmeister
Vildechaya
Circle dog
Circular
Popular
Popperoni
Popperonimus
Popski
Popsie
Popsie-girl
Popples
Poplet
Poppems
Poppette
Poppydog
Pussycat
Poosiecat
Pusslcat
Pusslcatamawitzki
Poppalooney
Poppaloonimus
Poppalouie
Poppamoo

Piddlepop
Pookie
Pookie-dog
Pookie-girl
Pooklet
Pookimus
Pooksie
Poopsie
Poopsequius
Poopsqueak
Popsqueak
Pillowpop
Bedbug
Rotundible
Sweepea
Sweeples
Snugglemutt
Cuddlemutt
Meatpotato
Ridiculosimus
Beautimus Girlibus
Baby girl
Goofy girl
Goofus
Goofaloonimus
Poofus
Pookus
Popsum
Popsimah
Popsicle
Poppy-do
Poppy-don't
Poppy-doodle
Barrel-bod

Sweet Patootie
Patootible
Pootimus Dogibus
Dogworthy
Loveworthy �
Pooh dog
Miss Pooh
Waminal
Sillikens
Wigglet
Piggsley
Wiggsley
Biggle
Biglet
Buglet
Booglet
Wooglet
Booglet-wooglet
Boogsley-woogsley
Boog-boog-boog-boog
Boogie-woogie girl
Boogamy-woogamy
Booglate (boogle-ate), v.
Wigglate (wiggle-ate), v.
Pigglate (piggle-ate) ), v.
Boogiate, v.
Wiggiate, v.
Piggiate, v.
Squeakerate, v.
Spinneroni
Spinneronimus
Spinnerate, v.

Tops of the Pops

~ Porta-Pop ~

immortalized in song, in my heart, in my smile
my beloved little poppy dog you came to me when i was blue
and now your time's come i'm blue again
brought humor and love to me when i needed them
gave them to me as a permanent memory of you

oh little dog whose presence
filled my heart and home
go for walks in your favorite parks,
beautiful peaceful streams along the path
chase squirrels all day long
stop to sniff the news
eat all kinds of things you shouldn't

my beloved precious little girl

imagine, a dog named after a character
in a mozart opera
whoever heard of such a silly thing?
well, whoever heard you sing, of course!
you sang your heart out and
i knew you did it for me

love you little poppy dog
12-year-old old little old lady poppy girl
the one with the six dozen or so nicknames
so mischievous and full of energy in your youth
my friends dubbed you circular and circle
dog and vildechaya
boing-boing-bouncing off the walls
we had such good times together
you and i we were one
all your funny little habits
riding backwards in the car
rolling around in freshly cut grass and
turning green yourself
chasing moths up the wall
flying down the stairs
i relish how you loved to eat all your life
putting your paw on an empty
ice cream carton to hold it in place
while you licked it clean, then
trotted it off into another room

i love that heart of yours
enlarged in your illness - the vet said
- to the size of a doberman's heart
but what i knew was that your heart was
the size of a woolly mammoth's
poster child for beagles your internist called you
an ENFP you'd have been, if you completed
the myers-briggs for dogs

all right, so what if you weren't crazy
about your uncle
that's an old lady's prerogative
but you did teach him how to eat play dance sing

in my book you'll always be my baby
no matter your age

miss you little girl
it just isn't the same without you kissing my face
sweet little puppy face licks first thing in the morning
on call 24/7 for any kibble you can get
scavenging and vacuuming at petsmart
snuggling in my arms all dressed up in
your pretty pink baby costume
funny little girl dog with four long legs
and a two-inch tail (if you could call it that)
permanent black fur coat and pretty face
the one with the white mask and
black-on-tan temple spots
i'd kiss you back and plant a big
pink lipstick smackeroo right there

you gave me the painful closeness of looking
after you as best i could
nothing was too good for my little pussycat
(stop calling me pussycat,
i'm a dog!)
i listened to your ticker the last week or so
heard it thump-thump-thumping hard and loud
worried it was going to burst the
drum of your barrel chest apart
and then your breathing became labored
and every breath you took
was an effort for me to listen to
and worry what to do next

you traveled with me nearly everywhere
longest stretch of unconditional love
purest happiness i've ever known
i was your mom always will be
you were my baby always will be
in the end your heart just had too much
couldn't take any more

funny, i didn't realize 'til two weeks
after your last day here
the double rainbows during the ceili
were a sign it was your time
that later that evening you would
cross the rainbow bridge

we'll be together again as one
when my time comes
and i will never ever have
too much of you little dog �

� b j Altschul 6/21/02

~ Poppy Love ~

little dog:

you're s'posed to be here
when i walk into the bedroom
at day's end

you're s'posed to be in my spot on the bed� or
in the pit group waiting
for me to plop down beside or on top of you and
make you move over to your spot so
we can snuggle up together and
hug our plans and dreams for tomorrow
no matter how tired or sleepy we are

so why aren't you here?
the answer jolts me every night

oh i remember

it wrenches my soul to do so
my heart aches every night and
again each morning when
you're s'posed to give me
sweet little puppy face licks of love at
six o'clock in the morning before
it's even time to get up and normal folks are still sleeping

so why aren't you here acting ornery
pesterating me to let you out already and
feed you so we can bo gack to sleep together
for another hour or so and then get up?

oh i remember

the night i saw two rainbows and
didn't know at the time it meant for you to go

not now! not tonight! not yet, little dog!
the dance has just begun!

i can't bear to relive those awful last few hours
it pains me so because i didn't know
could not prepare and hug you proper
it was so awful carrying you limp in my arms
into the emergency vet and
struggling to fill out the form while your lungs
filled up with fluid and the vet rushed you to the
back for oxygen then
pronounced with near finality,

"Your dog is dying!"

i could not bear the thought of you suffering� so now it's me
who's suffering like,

you're supposed to be here for me!

just as i was always here for you, little dog

my mind knows you still are here, in my heart
but my heart contorts itself in agony
missing the you i got used to knowing all these years

and now it has to get used to that big gaping hole
all over again
the one you filled so lovingly when you first came into my life

i miss you little dog
you're s'posed to be here �

� b j Altschul 7/2/02