Marcie Carey died on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 in Munich, Germany. She would have been 11 years old in a few more weeks. I never knew her exact date of birth but we always celebrated her birthday on 15 July since that is the anniversary of the day she came to Miami to join Queequeg, Astra, and me.
Marcie began her life in a puppy mill in Georgia, where she had three litters of puppies before she was 15 months old. When the puppy mill was raided and closed, Marcie was for several months in the care of Italian Greyhound Rescue to whom I am grateful for choosing me as Marcie’s permanent parent. Of the 16 IGs seized with Marcie, 11 could not recover from whatever physical and psychological horrors they had been subjected to, and they died. I always knew, intellectually, that because of her past health history (her teeth were so terrible she had to have all of them removed, she had a pronounced heart murmur, and intermittent idiopathic seizures) that Marcie would not have as long a life as her very long-lived sisters, but, really, I didn’t accept this…
Marcie must have used all her resolve to survive the puppy mill. During her life with me, she was always very quiet and introverted, a dog after my own heart. Marcie bonded with her sisters, made friends with a tiny few humans, and having been taught to do so by Astra, was extremely fond of cats. Marcie once adopted and cared for a fragile, days-old kitten until a home could be found for the kitten and I saw during these days what a brave and loving mother dog she must have been under terrible circumstances.
Toward the end of her life Marcie had a spell of difficult fortune and became deaf. She seemed to be recovering and adjusting to this new challenge though, and surprised me by warming quickly and easily to life as a European dog. The intelligence and adaptability of dogs is really incredible; just by watching our neighbor dogs out the window and in the park, Marcie quickly deduced that she no longer needed or was required by society to wear a leash, and without even one trial run about how to do so, figured out how to walk with me on the pedestrian part of the sidewalk and even to pause patiently outside the pretzel store while waiting for her own treat.
As ever she communicated by tapping me with her paw when she wanted something. In her last moments I held her tiny paw while cradling her in my arms and felt her last breath and heartbeat. For such a quiet dog she filled the home with her gentle personality and my heart with love. I know my girls are all together now and wait now myself to be with them again.
There are many other photos and stories about Marcie, Queequeg, and Astra contained in this Website. Marcie was the last connection to the family of dogs I have been in for more than 20 years.
Here is a video of Marcie persistently admiring a cat,
It’s been a little while and in fact there is a backlog of photos in waiting. This amazing creature cannot wait though, so here he is. Black whippets are rare, and a self-colored black whippet rarer still. I know there are more self-colored sighthounds in the EU than the US, but I haven’t seen any, probably because it is too cold for them to come out. This dark-haired hound was almost glowing in the rare patch of sunlight…I was already on the tram and the dog was waiting for the tram on the other side of the street, and when I got off at the next stop and walked back was already gone. I hope I see him again!
During the session “Reframing Painting: A Call for a New Critical Dialogue,” in the midst of a wonderful paper called The “Irrelevance” of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings by Christina Chang of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, I noticed this handsome assistance-dog-in-training was sitting almost right in front of me. What amazing good fortune, and what a great place for an assistance dog to train (and if he or she is training to help people with certain types of disorders, a lot of likely assist-ees).
Even while being mesmerized by the talk my body began to pay more attention to the dog. He or she was a Labrador-type dog but with lustrous long hair, with cowlicks and widow’s peaks leaping to and fro. My fingers itched to twirl and smooth those curls and I could not help but wondering what is really important.
The dog was a bit anxious and needed to go outside so his person, and nice woman who I exchanged smiles and eye contact with, took him before the session closed. I couldn’t find them again. I would like to know more about them both…
Marcie Carey has chosen “the quiet mind.” I loved from first sight and have come to greatly respect the steadfast “resistance to extroversion” of this retiring Italian Greyhound who mostly devotes herself to patient admiration of her cat and kitten friends. Marcie’s indulgences are that she enjoys eating all kinds of unusual foods, unusual for a dog, I mean, like cranberry relish, and to being stroked and snuggled by people she has known for more than six years, which at present includes only myself.
Marcie (who arrived with this normal non-avant garde non-literary name, the one word she knew, and thus kept) has always been a very beautiful little dog, tiny even by Italian Greyhound standards with expressive black shoe-button eyes and her white scarf, feet, and tail-tip. Since Marcie has gotten older her blaze and mask has extended up her nose and face and now covers her eyes. Her fur is also salted and peppered with many different flecks shading from white to black and all the saturations of grey in between; you can see some of these variations, even in the whiskers, in the high resolution photo above. Marcie has several whorls of fur, called when they occur in horses wheat ears or corn ears, on her chest and neck. These are oval, almost heart-shaped patches or hair that grow in opposite or circular directions as compared to the rest of the fur – crop circles of hair. I tried to get some photos of her (below) where you can see these patterns, but Marcie was skeptical about being photo documented.
I was thinking today about how talkative MC, as most people call her, has become over the years. When she first came to live with Queequeg, Astra, and me in Miami she hid for most of the first days. The person from Italian Greyhound Rescue who placed Marcie with us did so, actually, knowing that we would not try to make any extraordinary socializing efforts with this very timid dog who was seized from a puppy mill and very nearly feral. Quee and Astra were so gregarious. They were very loving with the new little sister at once and showed by example that there was only sharing of attention, sleeping surfaces, and food. Sometime I will tell more about Marcie’s first months, but they were spent in silence. I tried not to think about what had happened at the puppy mill but I began to worry that something had happened to MC’s larynx or throat and that she was unable to bark.
Gradually, though, Marcie did begin to express herself, through more frequent instances of allowing to be touched, stroked, and finally, held, and through some adorable “breath sounds,” small chuffing and sighing noises she still to this day makes. One day I was making some food she was particularly interested in – some kind of noodle soup I think because I remember the hot cauldron – and suddenly Marcie emitted a little “woof!”. MC was surprised and I was surprised. I tried not to react one way or the other so she wouldn’t attach any traumatic significance to using her voice, but I was very thrilled. After that, Marcie began vocalizing more and more and today she has the same screeching trill as many other IGs. Italian Greyhounds are close to Basenjis, the “yodeling” dogs, and like their cousins they are capable of quite a large range of sounds, almost like mynas. While she is far less interested in conveying communication to humans via sound (or understanding human speech) than her sisters were, Marcie has a fairly large repertoire of noises.
Happy 1 November: To those who worship in a cathedral of rain dripping from the trees, woodpeckers etching a gospel into the bark, mockingbirds calling the sun out of the shadows, bats folding their wings tipped with sunset, owls threading the night air and stitching a cape that whirls them away through the starry sky, to the constellations who have watched over every creature ever born.
Yesterday was Astra Carey’s birthday and today is the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. I was thinking about both of these things as I spent Halloween for the first time ever as an “adult” at a nice dinner party — a popular activity this week. At the first I heard the latch snick shut too late, but tonight was surrounded by my fierce Teutonic guardians. Of course when I got home I watched Lars von Trier (earlier this week Melancholia and then tonight AntiChrist to keep in perspective how things actually are “broadcast from the outside in” [I am pretty sure that’s what that Maps lyric really says or at any rate I like it better].)
In the exactly three months since I “resigned in protest” from the church I have not missed it at all. I had already spent all the years I can remember from a child just meditating and thinking about being this or that animal the entire duration of every service anyway, though I believed in the teachings about forgiveness, patience, love, charity and so on and appreciate communal rituals and think they are important. Of course I am completely skeptical of yuppies who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” as this is just a cop-out not to have to be bothered to go to a service. Of course now I am one of those people while I am figuring out how to implement “organized pantheism.”
Toward the end of her life a relative was so upset and disgusted by the priest/child abuse situation – the horror itself of course but also the cover-ups – she was seriously investigating other religions, everything from the Anglican church to the Baha’i faith. She was a rational and methodical person but I understand now that this is a rational behavior – if – not in the historical abstract like the Borgias – actual people alive now who you know who are Catholic are deceitful, sadistic, unforgiving, abusive of the trust of those they hold power over and you are Catholic this generates a ?. So they have to go, or you do. Finally having such a personal revelation I was suddenly quick to voluntarily excuse myself.
But I am a little nostalgic today. I used to love not just Halloween but All Souls Day and All Saints Day. These days of obligation were taken very seriously in Belgium, almost as seriously as May Day: the trains, metros, stores, banks, postal service, schools – everything – would shut down and people spent the day walking from churches to the small graveyards beside the churches to the larger cemeteries. This was a solemn public ritual but I could tell other people felt similarly hopeful that perhaps the interceding saints, on this one day, would let the departed know how much we loved them still in life. I’m pretty sure my animal and human family members and my (sadly, many) friends who have died the past few years knew because, well, they did. But you never get to say everything, and you never know what is going to happen. Maybe the comforting thing about participatory rituals is that they make a reality.
