The Pounds' Sterling

This is the last picture I took of my mom before the doctors started playing Mrs. Potato Head with her through brain surgeries and radiation that killed everything except, her. That’s why it's on my childless cat lady fridge as one of my favorite moments, even though we had many, many favorite moments since that picture.

I was just a too annoyed teenager to want to take a picture, let alone, be victim of yet another of the 500 she took of me at every moment all the time. It’s one of my great regrets.

I regret that today, as much as the 300 pictures we have of me secretly sticking my tongue out at her while I received honorable things like citizen of the year award or the nomination to lay our middle school's honorary wreath at Arlington Cemetary. I tried to look as ugly as possible, for her, while trying on the dress I'd wear to lay said wreath on our 8th grade trip from Chicago to DC - just hoping we could just stop with the pics, already!

Instead, I looked as ugly as possible on the fridges of 45 cousins I didn’t know she even kept in touch with, on their whole family refridgerators! I learned this again, every summer, when we’d go to the suburbs of Ocala to visit her family in July and everyone would show me all the handwritten letters my mom sent that year. About me.

Touche. Point, Mommy.

***

At home, my dad Poppy was always crying out loud, “We don’t own this house! This house owns us!” Every time something in the same Victorian house that raised him, that they were now raising me in, that my grandparents happily moved down the road to hand off… broke. Which was all the time.

When Poppy suggested the 3 of us get a puppy, my mom cried out loud, “That puppy will turn into a dog. And we won’t own that dog! That dog will own us! Forever!”

Poppy won the battle of adoption. My pick of the runt puppy won all our hearts. My mom’s pick in the name ‘Sterling’ as a play on our last name ‘Pounds,’ won us all over.

The Pounds drove 4 hours to the Sterling Farm and I spent the whole ride home with our poor kidnaped pup in the back of our minivan which was basically, the bus I convinced my parents my 12 year old friends and I needed them to get to take us to the 12 year olds' stuff we needed to get to; with Sterling pawing at the back window and helplessly squeaking because that’s how little he was.

My mom suggested we stop at the cornfields that comprised our 4 hour drive back to Chicago from Sterling’s little farm, because he was homesick for his little brothers and sisters... and how would we feel if someone just took Courtney right from them? So we did and Poppy pulled over and I captured this photo.

I slid the side door open and put the poor little guy who was the size of our palms, on the grass, then grabbed my mom’s camera and ran as far as I imagined him chasing me. His little belly, only as tall, as the grass.

When I turned around, the lens caught this.

***

For the first weeks to months to years we loved each other to completeness, Sterling did everything he was supposed to do. Delighted friends and neighbors and my 8th grade classroom, and spiced up freshman homecoming pictures in our lawn as a perfect distraction from awkward encounters with new families and arms around waists; and my mom’s friends and Poppy and I spent hours just watching him barrel into everything to our hearts' delight and his resilience.

He was like the little brother I always wanted, taking the weight of the family’s whole being, off my being.

We watched for hours as he was too little to jump over the one step from our living room to dining room, not for a lack of trying 42 times in a row and rolling over like a barrel. We looked for hours when he buried himself in the laundry basket upstairs and couldn’t bark yet; Poppy convinced it was a Jean Benet Ramsey situation, cryin' out loud about such.

Sterling tried to drag an easter bunny 10x bigger than his head, around our house, until he collapsed under it in defeat, sending Mommy for 500 more pictures.

And…he chewed up her vacuum cleaner. And chewed up the entire kitchen garbage can, after he chewed up all the garbage in it, in the middle of the living room. And he escaped and was caught by a local sheriff at the park, who wrangled him in the squad car with a cheeseburger. For which we were told Sterling spit out the pickles. Like always.

While Sterling enjoyed his joy ride with Sheriff the Dog Whisperer, my mom had no choice but to enjoy the rest of the day off work too, since I phoned in to let her know Poppy was about to kill us, if she didn’t come home right now to help me find the dog I let out when I was too excited to play with the friends next door to worry about our back door and a Jack Russel Terrier’s dream to run the neighborhood.

Sterling tore through the purse of my dad's mom Gma, every time she came over for a BBQ. Always to Gma's delight as she egged him on like a rodeo princess, Kleenex flying everywhere. The two of them together, were the highlight of Gma BBQs, for all of us.

When it came to my other grandma, my mom's mom Nana, The Amazing Sterling Show switched up the one-dog, one act production. With Nana, Sterling would sneak under the covers the one week she’d visit from the suburbs of Ocala, FL. And then he would fart. And then he would run away. And my dad was the most active participant by actively suggesting Nana had just passed gas in the living room. And I laughed, and my mom laughed because she wanted to stick up for Nana and she. Just. Was, laughing too hard, to be able to.

“Disgusting Family Dog!” Nana would yell, airing out the blanket that her own mom, my still alive Great Grandma Momo, knit right at our house on Nana's same chair, after her first trip on an airplane the prior summer. Momo did that all with the disgusting family cat purring on her lap, too.

When Sterling chased the mailman down in a blizzard and we had to walk to pick up our mail for 2 weeks at the actual post office, my mom told Poppy that we were no different than Momo’s airstream trailer in Nana's backyard, on a street the family made up themselves, that the postmen never have delivered to, anyway.

Poppy said as long as he wasn’t like her mom, Nana. Momo was excellent company to be in.

***

Sterling was 3 and Mommy was dying, and I was a junior in high school, and my dad was trying to hold on to everything we had in every which way and we were both trying to keep her alive in our house without knowing what to do next. In any way.

The inoperable brain tumor that was the size of the eraser on a mechanical pencil -which the doctor gave me the analogy of in the ER, while clicking his own doctor pencil, before they helicoptered to University of Chicago one of the times between my sophomore and senior year of high school…it really held us all hostage as every treatment we tried that she insisted we do, killed every part of her, except it.

***

It was Sterling the dog, who laid across her spine, in the middle of the night, and started howling until we called 911; that showed us where pain we didn’t know was happening, was coming from. That saved the comfort of the rest of her life. Which saved our lives. As much as it could.

I love smiling at this picture every day. It reminds me that even though we lost her, we sure did have her.