The Meaning of Whiskey

[Da_Yog]

The Meaning of Whiskey

 

whis•key [hwis-kee] –noun

1 An alcoholic liquor distilled from a fermented mash of grain, as barley, rye, or corn, and usually containing from 43 to 50 percent alcohol.

2 A drink of whiskey.

 

This is not a story about drinking. Drinking has never been a part of my life. This story is about a brown-eyed beauty, and it goes something like this …

 

The first house I remember living in was on a two-lane road between Smyrna and Marietta. It was not the ideal place to raise a young child. Cars would come out of nowhere and dart by the house far faster than it seemed they ought to. Nor was it a neighborhood; it was more a clustering of six or eight houses, spaced more or less evenly along this one stretch of road. The house itself was a small, one-story, red-brick home with a carport big enough for just one car. A row of hedges lined the front porch from the driveway to the front door. I remember very little of the inside; that area was for eating and sleeping. What I do remember is the back yard. That’s where all the memories go to play.

 

The back yard was mostly an open expanse of green grass surrounded by a towering chain link fence. At least it seemed that way to me at the time. I was five and everything seemed bigger and more grandiose than it seems now. In the center of the yard, encompassed by a red-brick square, was a place where grass was not allowed to grow. Mom had planted a strawberry patch there, and the strawberries were sweeter and juicier than anything bought in any store, or so I remember. Off to the left was another place where the grass couldn’t grow, for the ground was constantly shaded by the most magnificent specimen of tree, the crabapple. The blooms of spring had long since passed, and the tree was full of small green fruit. Their mouth-puckering flavor, still on occasion, comes back to me.

 

My dog Whiskey was there, trotting close behind me on her white-socked feet. Her loving brown eyes watched my every move. As I ran to the water hose for a drink, small beads of sweat formed on my brow and flowed down my flushed face. Whiskey’s head tilted, first right, then left, as she watched me struggle with the strange, green, palm-sized, metal ring. By applying both small hands, I finally got the valve to open, and the welcome sound of flowing water greeted my ears. I followed the water down the length of hose, my eyes searching for the brass rim that signaled the end of my thirst. Whiskey softly padded around me to stand in front of the gate, then realizing that was not my objective, followed me to the end of the green rubber hose where water was pouring out onto the grass. For a moment, our brown eyes met, and we both began to drink—me from the metal rim of the hose, her from the water spilling over my mouth towards the ground. I drank until I could drink no more. She drank until I stopped.

 

Standing there with the hose in my hand, she there with her tongue panting in and out, our eyes met. She darted off a full half second before the spray of water hit her. The chase was on. Back and forth across the worn grass we ran. She was always close and watching but just beyond the edge of the spray. Finally I stopped, breathing heavily, my red and blue tank top clinging to my skin. As I stopped, so did Whiskey. Our eyes half closed, chest heaving, a cool breeze washed over us. Her head tilted first left, then right, watching me carefully. A couple of seconds later she trotted up beside me and sat down. Without even knowing why, I dropped the hose and began gently stroking the coarse brown fur above her eyes and behind her ears. She rewarded me with a tremendous slurp across the side of my face, an act that elicited giggles and a hug from me.

 

A voice came from behind me, from the kitchen window. It was a voice both stern and loving, “Turn the hose off!” A moment later, when both Whiskey and I turned to face her, our heads both tilted to the left at the same angle, Whiskey’s left ear raised and mine would have, had I been able to do so. Mom said, softer this time, “We shouldn’t waste water.” Whiskey tilted her wet, dimpled nose up and to the right so that she could see my face and watched me nod. I did not see this as I was far too busy gazing into my mom’s eyes, studying her face. It was pale and freckled and surrounded by a mass of softly curling red hair. She smiled at me. I smiled back. I looked from my mom to Whiskey. Our eyes met, and we raced to the faucet. She arrived just ahead of me then turned to face me. Her eyes watched while I rushed by her to the knob and began turning it clockwise. She circled me and sat down in front of the gate. After completing my duty, I sat down next to Whiskey on the brown patch of dirt in front of the gate, wrapped my arms around her neck, and rested my head against hers. She sat down beside me for a while, just the two of us on a patch of dirt in the back yard.

 

Slurp! Our eyes met. She chased me to the green and red of the strawberry patch, dancing from left to right, but always right behind me. Glancing around the small green plants, I searched for a tasty berry. It didn’t take long; there always seemed to be plenty. Reaching out I carefully plucked one, twisting gently so as to break the stem without bruising the fruit. The strawberry was exceptionally fat, with two round bulbous humps near the top. I pulled the star-shaped greenery from the top of the red, seed covered berry and bit off the bottom half. Smiling a childish smile as I devoured the sweet taste and delightful smell, I wiped the juice that was dribbling down my chin with the back of my forearm. The remainder of the berry I gave to Whiskey, who smacked her jaws several times to consume the fruit. She seemed to enjoy it as much as I—or so I remember.

 

That’s the way it was always done. Whiskey and I playing in the back yard, her making sure I never went through the gate and near the dangerous road. Sometimes I might catch her with the hose, and she would shake out her soaked fur, dousing me with a shower of water droplets in revenge. I never was able to shake the water from my body quite like she could. God knows I tried! Sometimes I’d play under the crabapple with my toy bulldozers and she’d be there near me in the shade—her eyes directed at me or, at the very least, an ear pointed in my direction. And sometimes we’d sit at the strawberry patch and share.

 

Those are the memories of that first house.

 

 

 

A couple of years went by. I was now seven years of age and felt physically no different than I was at the old house, but this place was taller, and so was I. I was just at that age when I was growing faster than my body could adjust. I was tall, skinny, and ungainly, but I was not yet fully aware of any of that. What I did know was I was in this new two-story house, with three much older stepbrothers, a stepfather, and a gigantic, mean, gray tabby cat named Bow-wow. That damn cat would saunter around the house like he owned it, and as far as I was concerned, he did. My mother, of course, was there. It was her second marriage the year before that thrust me into this situation. Whiskey was there too, still keeping watch on me whenever she could.

 

This house was a whitish brick and whitewashed cinderblock construction sitting atop a small hill. The sharply down sloping concrete driveway led away from a one car garage. Next to the driveway, near the garage, was a dirt trail cut by a car driving over the grass hundreds of times. The back yard had no surrounding fence, but Whiskey was never the type to chase cars, and I had learned to stay away from the street. It was also safer here, as the cars driving by on the street below were not nearly so reckless, barring an occasional teen or drunk. Two of my favorite things from the old home, the crabapple tree and strawberry patch, were missing, but there was a wooden sandbox for the toy dump trucks, and life went on.

 

Whiskey, for her part, seemed to have adjusted to her new home better than I. She even managed to work out some sort of arrangement with Bow-wow, a feat I would never quite manage. When I wasn’t around, she would sit under the stairs of the back porch— always in the shade—while Bow-wow would lounge like a king upon his throne at the top. If he spotted a strange dog entering the back yard, he would raise his head, let out a low pitched guttural wail, then slowly lay his head back down. From beneath the red stained wooden stair, a streak of barking brown fur would erupt and chase the intruder until it had run clear of the property. That was how many a day passed: Bow-wow sitting watch while Whiskey protected her new home.

 

Apparently one spring day Bow-wow was not on porch duty and my guardian had a moment’s indiscretion. Several months later, near the end of summer, Whiskey’s belly had swollen considerably. She had been eating quite a bit more than before and was spending a considerable amount of her time sleeping.

 

Mom had told me with a gentle smile on her face, “She’s pregnant.” Then when my response was to rotate my head to the left and raise my left eyebrow quizzically, she said, “That means she’s going to have puppies.”

 

“Maaaaam,” I said rolling my eyes, “I know that.”

 

Mom smiled gently then set about making Whiskey a bed of old blankets in the basement. It was quite a pile. A ragged quilt was on the bottom folded in quarters but long since having lost its neatness. Two old thermal blankets were piled on top of that, and an old comforter never used by the family lay atop it all. When Whiskey was trying to sleep or stay comfortable, she’d pad over to her bed, turn around three times, and gently lie on top of the pile with a loud sigh. She’d face the door I was most likely to walk through. When I did, she would look up, our eyes would meet, and I’d walk over to her and sit beside her for a while. I’d scratch behind her ears or just hug her neck and rest my head against hers. Every now and then she would raise an ear, tilt her head, then nose gently at her hairless belly. Sometimes she would roll over on her side holding one of her white-socked front paws in the air, so I could more easily scratch her chest. Sometimes she would go to the back door, and I would let her outside. That was how those last few pregnant days went for us.

 

The presence of the bed in the basement and Whiskey atop it seemed to transform the entire area. In a strange way, the wooden supports of the ceiling were now more visible. Their intricate grains lent an organic feel to an otherwise formless area. The varying shades of the wood blended with the browns and whites and blacks of my Whiskey dog. It seemed as if there could be nowhere else that was more fitting for her to have her puppies.

 

One morning soon thereafter the sun came up, and as always at that age, I was up with it. A gentle, prismatic spray of colors danced about the room: a trick of refracted light from a collection of hanging prisms in the window. I stretched and went down the hall in my own pair of white socks towards the living room to watch morning cartoons. As I walked past my mom’s room, I stopped. Something was amiss. She was not there. I began wandering about the house quietly calling her name. “Mom?” said the darkened bathroom echoing my call. “Linda?” mocked the empty kitchen at the end of the hall. “Mom?” replied the den in an ominously vacant tone. “Linda?” whispered the white porch on the back of our home. I called her so quietly that I heard no response. I heard nothing but crickets, song birds, and the yawning of the morning sun. I didn’t even hear my own footfalls; the carpet muffled the sounds of my tiny feet.

 

My search led me down the golden-brown carpet of the front stairwell to the basement where soft light spilled from underneath the dark brown door. My hand moved slowly to the doorknob, then paused for a few seconds with my forefinger lightly touching the brass knob. The clicking sound of nails rapping on concrete stopped me for a moment, then I smiled curiously and gently pushed the door open. Inside, the single naked light did its best to illuminate what was happening

 

The first thing I noticed was a smell I had never smelled before. It was a strange smell, a distinct smell, a salty smell. It was not unlike how my mom in later years would describe a new baby’s smell. It was, in fact, the smell of new-born puppies. On the concrete floor, wet with fluid stood Whiskey licking a tiny black and brown puppy. He was so small and frail that he couldn’t even open his eyes. His little legs were sprawled across the concrete floor and cute little grunting noises emanated from his wrinkled face. Each lick from his mother moved his tiny body and elicited another series of grunts. His tail, seemingly the only thing he had control of, was curled up into a tight spiral and raised high in the air.

 

Mom was hunched over a cardboard box lined with one of the thermal blankets. She was smiling a worn, haggard smile that was reflected in her bloodshot eyes and slumping shoulders. In the box, the puppies were mewling about in a little knot and grunting the way all puppies do. As Whiskey finished licking the last puppy, she raised her head and our eyes met. She’ll always be there for me, no matter what.

 

I went over and hugged my Whiskey dog as Mom picked up the puppy. It snuggled under her chin, and she held it for a minute before putting it in the box with the others. It wriggled and squirmed into the mass looking for a warm spot and didn’t seem to stop until its wet, matted fur began to dry.

 

Mom looked up at me and smiled gently, “Would you like to hold one?”

 

My eyes opened wide, all sleepiness forgotten, as I scooted the short distance to the box and sat on the cold concrete.

 

Whiskey trotted slowly over to me. Her head was down, and her eyes were half closed. She watched her children intently for a minute or two. Both of her floppy ears raised, and her head tilted to the left, then she leaned over and gave me a slurp on my left cheek. I smiled, giggled, then wrapped my arms around her neck. For a while, I scratched my Whiskey on the back of her head with one hand and a puppy with the other.

 

I looked up from the squirmy black and brown puppy with his corkscrew tail. “Mom, can we keep it?”

 

“We’ll see honey. We’ll see.”

 

“Well…What’ll we name it?”

 

“I don’t know.” After a pause, she looked from the puppy to Whiskey then back to me. “Do you know how we got Whiskey?”

 

I answered by shaking my head from side to side.

 

“Well…you were little, less than a year old. At that age you were hardly more than a mass of blonde hair, rosy cheeks, and chubby little legs.”

 

With that description, I scrunched up my nose. Mom just smiled at me and let her right hand that was gently stroking a squirmy puppy come to rest atop my hand. “Well you were,” she said, as she scrunched her nose up in mockery of my own.

 

“Anyway, your dad knew a man who worked with him in the Boy Scouts up at Camp Rainy Mountain.”

 

“Where’s that?”

 

“Do you remember where Lake Rabun is?”

 

My hand came to rest under my mom’s, and I nodded.

 

“It’s very close to Rabun. Well, this person your father worked with had found two abandoned puppies at Red Top Mountain…Lake Allatoona, but only wanted to keep one. When your dad told him we were looking for a puppy, he stopped by one Saturday morning to see which one we wanted.

 

“Well, we couldn’t decide. They were both female. Both had the same cinnamon brown coat. The same bushy tails. The same brown eyes. The same height. The same weight. The same everything. I mean they were just identical. We couldn’t tell them apart.

 

“Anyway, while we were trying to figure out which one to take, you went up to Whiskey, and she gave you a big slurp on those rosy little cheeks. You immediately wrapped your arms around her neck and let out the biggest giggle. Well, that decided who we were going to keep right then and there.”

 

“Mom…”

 

“Yes?”

 

“How did she get her name?”

 

“Well, your dad thought she was Whiskey colored, so he named her Whiskey.”

 

“What’s Whiskey?”

 

“It’s a kind of drink.”

 

“What’s it taste like?”

 

“Hmmm…It’s kind of hard to describe.”

 

“Can I try some?”

 

Mom smiled and quietly laughed to herself as I stared at her intently. A few contemplative seconds later she replied, “When you are older.”

 

“How much older?”

 

“About eleven years older.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because that’s the law.”

 

Why?”

 

“Because alcohol can inhibit judgment, and young people need all their judgment.”

 

“Why don’t old people?”

 

“Well…old people know when and where to drink so that it will be OK to have their judgment impaired for a while.”

 

“Does Dad?”

 

Mom paused for a minute. She was still petting the squirmy little puppy, and I was sitting next to Whiskey with my arm wrapped around her neck. Whiskey suddenly looked up from her puppies and gave her oldest child a lick on the nose.

 

At last mom found the answer she was looking for and said, “No hun, he never grew up.”

 

Mom just smiled and shook her head. It would be some time before we named the new puppy.

 

 

 

Six years have passed, and I no longer played in the sand box. We were still at the two-story house, and I was as ungainly ever. The puppy of Whiskey’s that we kept had been hit by a car one day while she was still young. Her death insured that we would get a chain link fence, although strangely this fence didn’t seem to be as tall as the one at our old place. The fence meant that stray dogs no longer wandered into the back yard. Even if one was to somehow get inside the fence, Bow-wow’s call would not be heard. Cancer had claimed his life a few years back. Nor was Whiskey in any shape to be chasing stray dogs. That duty had fallen to me. I seemed to perform it instinctively, albeit in the front yard.

 

It was summer again, which it always seemed to be in the memories of my youth, and Whiskey now spent most of her time in the basement. It was a gray place. The floor was plain gray concrete, and the walls were made of gray cinderblocks. On the far side of the basement from the stairs, tools and bicycles were stored. On the right, up against the wall, were a plain white washer and dryer. Near the basement center Mom had reconstructed Whiskey’s bed from years earlier. The blankets were perhaps even more worn and frayed than they had been. This was now her sanctuary.

 

Dirty clothes, formerly piled in a heap in front of the washer, now had to be placed in a clothes hamper. Failure to do so meant risking having your clothes become Whiskey’s new bed. The unpleasant odor so embedded in your clothes often took several washings to eliminate. The same pungent odor that she embedded in everything she laid on followed her around wherever she went. The area under her tail was always swollen and inflamed. She relentlessly chewed the base of her tail, and it was now scabby and missing a significant patch of hair. The teeth she used to chew with were yellowed and many were chipped, broken, or missing. Her formerly shiny brown coat was now dull and graying. The white patch of fur on her chin had spread to encompass more of her face. Her stomach was round and heavy. The exposed skin, no longer a smooth tone, was now brown and blotchy. Her eyes had milky disks, and she no longer heard with the clarity of her youth. She watched me when she could, which wasn’t often, but she was still my Whiskey. If I needed her, I know she’d be there with all she had, with nothing more from me than a glance, a meeting of the eyes.

 

Lately, she barely got up to eat and struggled to go outside to take care of bodily functions. The basement smelled. It smelled of stale urine, of feces, of Whiskey’s strange pungency, and of something else, something I had never experienced. Mom knew what it was, but she didn‘t want to. I just wanted my Whiskey to stop hurting. I wanted the vet to fix her, but this was not the kind of thing vets can fix.

 

I hated going down to the basement, but I did. I went for my Whiskey.

Finally, a day came when I was sitting at Whiskey‘s bed with her, scratching behind her ears, listening to her labored breathing. My mom came down the stairs and opened the basement door. In her hand she held a red nylon leash. Tears formed in her eyes and trickled slowly down her cheeks. “I’m taking Whiskey to the vet,” she said as she turned away from me, blew her nose, and tried to smile.

 

I had no such luck, and the tears were freely flowing. I managed to utter, “To get her fixed?”

 

There was a long pause before she answered. Her momentary success in smiling faded in an instant. “No, not this time,” she said while choking back tears.

 

“But the vet can fix her Mom. He always does. I know he can. Please!”

 

In a moment, my entire life seemed to pass. I stared at my mom through watery eyes, and she stared back at me with her eyes filled with tears. Finally, chocking back tears, she blurted out, “I…I can’t talk about this. Not right now. I gotta go.”

 

“Mom, no! Not my Whiskey dog,” I said, as I stood up on wobbly legs choking on my own tears.

 

Mom walked over slowly, planting each foot one in front of the other, as if to make sure of her balance, to take control of the one thing she could make sure of on a day like this. Her makeup was a mess as she struggled to hook the leash to Whiskey’s collar. She tried to speak, choked on her tears, then just pointed, her finger drawing a circle around my Whiskey dog.

 

Whiskey’s milky eyes turned to me one last time. Our eyes met. I leaned in and wrapped my arms about her neck. I scratched her behind the ears. She gave me one last slurp on the cheek as if to wash away the tears. Our eyes met…

 

She’ll always be there for me.

 

 

It’s now over twenty years later, and whiskey will forever mean something different to me than it does to most people. For my dad, whiskey was something to get him drunk and the color of that drink. For my mom, it was something that impaired your judgment and the name of our first family dog—a dog she loved dearly. For me, Whiskey has forever meant one thing:

 

whis•key [hwis-kee] –noun

1 A medium sized brown-eyed beauty, with a white patch of fur on her chin, who loved a boy more than anyone will ever know.

 

I love you, Whiskey dog.

Edited October 5, 2007 by Da_Yog

[Silver WInd]

This was a great story, very touching. But animal stories always have to end so sad, hehe, but well that is the way it goes. Nicely done.

[Da_Yog]

Thanks for the comments.

 

Yeah, there's always something about a "boy and his dog" story that is touching and must end sad. Of course, a lot of that is due to the fact that the child always outlives the animal and so the experience becomes the childs first real experience with death.

Edited October 13, 2007 by Da_Yog