My One Year Anniversary at The Rainbow Bridge

Can you believe it, it's been a year since I left earth to come to the Rainbow Bridge. We don't mark our existence up here by the calendar but today I happened to check up on my mom, dad, and baby brother and I found Mom working on my grave site. That's what reminded me of how long it's been. She was cementing the marker down on top of a couple of patio stones and adding polished river stones and broken china to decorate around it. It looks pretty and it made me feel good to know I'm still in her heart.

I'm finally a full-fledged angel-dog. Little did I know when I first got here that you start out with a little pair of training wings and if you want a "full-feathered" set you have to earn it feather by feather. I do look majestic, now, if I do say so myself. Not that most angel-dogs are vain about their looks. They're not. I was always a "preener" by nature and most earthly characteristics stick with you up here, especially the quirky character tics that make you you.

Little Levi who Mom and Dad adopted the day after I passed over to the Rainbow Bridge is doing well except he still squats like a little girl which amuses me to no end. Dad always said I probably lifted my leg a minute after I came out of my mother's womb.

Being a poodle, I used to think poodles were the best groomed in the world but watching my schnauzer brother grow up has given me a new appreciation for and definition of dogging beauty. He takes my breath away, he's so cute and Mom loves to run her hands over the soft texture of his hair. She calls him her stress reduction machine. That long beard of his comes in handy, too. He hides bark in his mouth when he's outside and brings it inside. Mom always has a pile of confiscated bark sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to go back out.

Speaking of stress, there's been a lot of it the family house for Levi to help Mom overcome. All the bankruptcy talk in the news about the company my Dad gets his pension and health insurance from is causing it. She even started selling stuff on e-Bay to help build up a nest egg should that happen. It takes up a of time and she doesn't like doing but she's the kind of person who has to do something when trouble is on the horizon.

Anyway, Levi is the perfect puppy for Mom and Dad and he came into their lives at the perfect time. I see that all now. In my sixteen years on earth I caused a lot of stress with my stubbornness and need for early intervention with an animal behaviorist. Mom and Dad were up for the job back in those days but now that they are older they deserve and need an 'easy' dog like Levi. He's a sweetheart with a sweet heart.

Cooper from The Bridge

P.S. Wasn't I a cute baby. That's me in the first photo above, when I was 4 months old. The second photo is one of Levi taken a few days ago.

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Poor Pooping Levi!

Oh, my God, my mom is ruining Levi! Three nights in a row she got her head lost in her keyboard and completely missed his very weak-but-still-there attempts to use mental telepathy on her. So he did the next best thing a puppy in poop distress could do. He did his job in front of the door. Mom bawled herself out up one side and down the other but if she doesn't learn to pay attention soon poor Levi is going to need a doggie shrink to undo our mother's failings.

To make matters worse, two times in the past few days he's pooped on the deck instead of in the dog yard. That's Mom's fault too. She gave my baby brother too much access to the deck. That deck is huge, wrapping two sides of the house so Dad can take his wheelchair out there from three different rooms of the house. Until last week Mom was limiting Levi to one end of the deck using a lattice work barrier to contain him. But she used that lattice to line the picket fence to keep Levi from doing another Houdini escape.

Too much deck freedom or not, it's not as if my brother wasn't being supervised outside. Sort of. Mom's been faithfully sitting out there with him but when Levi pooped on the deck she was lost in the Marley and Me book. Yup, while reading about the antics and misdeeds of Marley the Labrador retriever our own puppy was having a major melt down because he couldn't find the steps down off the deck to the dog yard. Levi needs to learn to turn his mental telepathy up a notch when he's asking for help and Mom needs to quit being an airhead.

Jason, my angel brother up here with me, says Mom raised three other puppies who turned out just fine and I have to have more faith that she'll shape up before she ends up creating a permanent problem. But I'm wondering if Jason remembers how one-tracked and lost in another world Mom gets when she reading and writing. It's been a long time since he lived on earth with her plus she's seventeen older now.

I also confided in Jason that I'm a little worried Levi might be a tad slow at catching on to how life and bodily functions work. He laughed at that one and reminded me that I was nearly three years old before I figured out farting. Whenever I'd do it I'd take off running as if the devil himself was giving me a rectal exam with his pitch fork. All our canine pals up here the bridge who heard Jason tell that story had a good laugh over that one. ©
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People Beds

I've got this thing about beds. I like to be underneath them. Oh, and did I get in trouble the first time I discovered how much fun that could be. I was just three months old and it was in a motel. I was on my very first vacation, going west to see the mountains. I didn't even have to belly crawl to scoot around down there. It was a jolly good time playing hide and seek until Mom and Dad got so exasperated trying to catch me that Dad huffed and puffed to lift the mattresses up and Mom snatched me off the floor. I spent a lot of time in the motel bathroom after that. That's when I first became acquainted with baby gates. I hate those things.

For many years my mom had an Early American bed that sat high off the floor and my cushy dog bed sat underneath it. Being close at night in a warm place where I could spread out and keep all my toys near by was my utopia for years. Then we moved to this placed called a wheelchair accessible house and my folks spend a lot of time getting the height of the bed just right for my dad to make transfers in and out of bed by himself. I miss that old high bed, though, and my bunker underneath. The new one is so low to the ground I have to belly crawl under it and half the time I get stuck down there.

Not so long ago, I crawled under the bed in the middle of the night looking Kleenex and ear plugs and you guessed it, I got stuck. Again. I cried a little---or a lot depending on whose telling the story---and it woke Mom up. I admit it was kind of scary. She had put plastic boxes under the bed, trying to make it hard for me find room enough to access that space. I fooled her, I got in under there that night, but I couldn't turn around to crawl back out. Mom ended up having to wake my dad up, get him in the wheelchair so she could lift the mattresses up to free me. After that happened, I got banned to staying in the kitchen and laundry room at night, behind the wicked baby gate. Have I mentioned that I hate baby gates? They could at least have the decency to call mine a dog gate in my presence. ©
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