The Chihuahuas

Winter 2008, I called home to tell my mom that I was going to drive up from San Diego to visit. "Oh good," she had said. "You can meet the dogs."

The dogs?!?!

Let me take a step back and explain. My parents don't understand having pets, mostly because they find that they have little utility and are expensive. To them, buying food for a pet to eat is akin to throwing money down the toilet. Although my sister and I did manage to beg our way into owning a few pets as children, pets were never viewed as part of the family. For instance, when our pet bunny got weird stuff in her ears, the solution was not to take her to the vet, but to "let her go." Since we lived up in the foothills, this really meant "let the coyotes or mountain lions eat her." As kids we didn't really understand this. Eventually, we did beg our way into owning two cats: one of which we still own. She lives at my parent's house, and my parents only begrudgingly care for her because we remind them to and cry if we come home and see her doing poorly.

So. Dogs. Completely out of character, and without months of begging from their children. I was perplexed.

"Dogs, Mom?!" I exclaimed. "Um... what type? How many?"

"Two of them. Small dogs."

"Two dogs?? Like, what breed? Are they mutts?"

"Oh, I don't know. But they are small."

"Why in the world did you guys decide to get dogs???"

"You know we have the groundhogs in the backyard. Bad. They ruin the lawn." This was true. Last time I was home, I had noticed the burrows and piles of dirt in the backyard. My mom had even had somebody drive a car back there so they could try to pipe exhaust into their tunnels to drive them out, but this hadn't worked. "A patient tell me a good way to get rid of groundhogs is to have dogs. They run across the ground and the sound scare the groundhogs away."

That's right, my mom had gotten dogs because she wanted to get rid of groundhogs.

I came home to visit, and discovered that my mom had gotten two yappy, mean, and obnoxious Chihuahuas.

Unfortunately, not the actual Chihuahuas. The ones they had looked meaner.

Where had she gotten them from? Apparently, somebody was giving them away at the park. And where were they staying? In the pool house. (This was before the pool house was being rented to the Tent Person.) When I was home, I went by the pool house to meet the dogs. It was the middle of the winter in California, which isn't cold by any sort of standards, but definitely is cold for two short-haired Chihuahuas living in a poorly insulated structure without heat. Or blankets, for that matter. The two pitiful dogs were shivering in a kennel placed on the cold cement floor. And my poor cat was terrified of them and was nowhere to be found.

My sister and I told my parents that this was a terrible idea and that if they were going to have dogs, they ought to take care of them. We then left after the weekend, and the next time I visited home, the dogs were gone. I didn't ask any questions.

Finally, a few years later, I found out that my mom was getting her hair done and her hairdresser mentioned that her children wanted dogs, so she had given them away.

"Better than your dad's idea," she told me, "to drive somewhere and drop them off far enough away so they can't find their way back."