Fran

(Front row seats to the hurricane)


By midnight, all the guests had arrived, and we all assembled in the back porch. This place was even more shielded by the storm than the patio. We were fortunate that the winds were blowing from the southeast. Had they come from the opposite direction, the trees from the neighbor’s yard would have most definitely had fallen into to our yard and probably on our house. The trees from the other side of the yard were at least 100 feet from the house, if not further. Believe it or not, the porch was probably the safest place to be other than the living room. The power was still out but our eyes adjusted to the darkness. There must have been some places closer to downtown with power because we could see the trees silhouette against the sky against a faint light.

Also by this time, the storm’s power intensified. The winds were always strong but would be intermittently fierce. It was sort of like nature taking a deep breath to blow out candles on a birthday cake. That was about how long the ‘fierce’ part of the cycle lasted, 30 seconds, followed by the sustained winds. It was during these gusts that the trees would bow, seemingly at a 45 degree angle. We could hear snapping, and at the time I thought they were simply limbs and small trees breaking. The air was mild and the rain itself was cold. For some reason, I thought precipitation from a tropical system would have been warmer. Most of us enjoyed the show, except for Bobby. He was still a little skittish. However he was not as vocal and agitated as he was when he first arrived.

What about the dogs, how did they respond to the inclement weather? Abby was having a wonderful time. Abby always loved guests, but she was infatuated with Nikki. Throughout Abby’s life, she looked to Nikki like an older sister or a mother. Even when Abby grew older and took on a more dignified and stately manner about her, she would revert into a silly, frolicky puppy whenever Nikki came around. Abby went from person to person and room to room inspecting everything. Things new, different or unusual always piqued her interest. She was quite busy that night.

Nikki always loved our house as well as me and my mine. Some may wonder if they were scared and how would we know. All I can say is that by judging Nikki’s and Abby’s behavior that night, they did not appear to be scared. As a matter of fact, both Abby and Nikki went for a swim after midnight. I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t let them stay in there long. Even though they were relatively safe, if something did happen to them when they were in a pool during a category one hurricane, I would have been derelict in my responsibilities to those dogs. I escorted them out of the pool and shooed them into the house.

Father’s response to the storm was drastically different from the other dogs. He was huddled in fear all by himself in my mom’s closet. He would have stayed there all night, but when my mom went to bed, he hopped on the bed for comfort and company. My mom went to bed around the peak of the storm around 2 am. She shared the bed with her grand-niece, Abby, Nikki and Father.

I’ve often wondered what Father would have done if he were still homeless. Where would he have hunkered down in such a storm? I’ll never know.
My cousin’s husband and I were the last ones to go to bed. The intensity of the storm was fading, and I wanted to get to bed before sunrise. I’ve found that trying to fall asleep after the sun has risen is difficult and at times almost impossible. We made it through the night unscathed. No trees fell on our house or cars. We wouldn’t know the full extent of the damage until the next day when we could have a better view of the situation.

That was the first hurricane I had ever been through.

Hurricane Fran: Prologue

(This is the part of Dabney Hall I entered and exited.)


As I stepped out of Dabney Hall sometime around 10pm, I saw and felt the heavy rains and winds and knew that the storm was going to hit closer to us than the meteorologists had predicted a few days earlier. Then, the weathermen were saying that Fran was going to glance off of the NC coast. The next update the next day predicted that Wilmington would be directly hit. The last forecast I heard was that Fran’s path would pass between Fayetteville and Wilmington, a good 80 miles from Raleigh. However these winds and rains were something I had never seen before. I had a hunch this was going to be different. I knew we were in for a rough night.
I decided to stop by the Harris Teeter at the Cameron Village on the way home. It wasn’t too far out of the way and I liked it better than the Kroger, Food Lion, or Winn Dixie nearer to where I lived. Even though the prices are higher, the selection is better and there are lots of cute coeds shopping there. However on this night, the place was almost empty, and I’m not just talking about the patrons either. Once I saw the beer and bread had been depleted, I knew something was wrong. It reminded me of days in winter when a snow storm warning had been forecasted. Although the city will be shut down for a day, people load up on bread, milk, eggs and beer. I bought a few frozen items such as some chicken nuggets along with some beer, soda and chips.

I took the back way home instead of taking Morgan to New Bern like I usually do. I was one neighborhood away from mine at the intersection of Glascock and Wake Forest Rd when I noticed that the power was out and would be out all the way home. As I pulled into the driveway, the house was dark but seemed to stand out ominously against the backdrop. I love our house and hope to one day retire here, but at times it can be intimidating the way it stands on the hill looming over all those passing by. When the power is out, the place seems to retain its own inner glow making the house take on a menacing façade.

My mom had some candles burning so I didn’t have any problems finding my way around a powerless house. However, I was hungry; it was late and the lack of power frustrated and irritated me at first. Fortunately I kept my wits about me, went to the patio and started the charcoals. I cooked the chicken nuggets, some hamburgers and a couple of other things and finally washed it down with a beer. Our patio is covered with an aluminium canopy and the way the house is shaped along with the direction the wind was blowing, I was fairly sheltered from the brunt of the storm. At this point, this was the prelude of things to come. My mom told me that things would get worse since the storm was going to directly hit Raleigh as a full Category 1 hurricane with the brunt of it around 2am. What I was seeing then was just a harbinger of things to come. My mom also told me that we were going to have some guests. Not by coincidence, the guests lived in trailers and didn’t want to ride out the storm in their homes, and I can’t say I blamed them. My cousin, her daughter, husband and Nikki were coming up.

Even though my cousin’s mom lives beside her in a brick house, my cousin didn’t have the stomach to suffer through a storm in the same place with my aunt’s boyfriend. Again, I can’t say I blame them. The guy was, we later found out, bipolar as diagnosed by his psychiatrist. It was nice the doctors had a name for his situation but as far as I knew, the man was coo-coo clock crazy. I’ll say more about him later.

The other guest was our hairstylist. Bobby cut hair for several family members, including mine until he moved back to Johnston County because he was sick with cancer. One day at my dad’s poolroom back in Greensboro, someone blurted out a question to me: I bet a homosexual cuts your hair? This was not the kind of place where people drank with their pinkies sticking up. These people drank straight from a bottle or a can, and the drinks were American brands such as Budweiser or PBR. Lite beer was looked upon as la-dee-da. This wasn’t a rough and tumble place, but if one was looking for trouble, it could be found there for someone not watching his step. I was speechless. What could I say? The guy could cut hair. Sometimes OCD has some benefits.

Bobby arrived at our home a little while after I started the grill. I remember him sitting under the patio with us fretting about the wind and rain. The other guests didn’t arrive until an hour later. We had a full house that night and we would have a show that none of us would ever forget.

We were going to have a hurricane party!

Abby is fixed

Abby was around 5 months old or so when she was spayed. By this time, it was apparent she would be a big girl. (Her dad was 115lb from what I heard.) Abby was also growing a little independent. No longer would she wait for me to go to bed until she went to bed. When she was a young puppy, she would patiently lie at my feet while I read something or watched TV. Another reason she waited for me to go to bed was that she was too small to climb in to bed by herself and had to wait for me to enter the room, pick her up and put her in bed. Now she could walk to my bedroom and climb in to the bed by herself and didn’t need my assistance anymore. She was still very much attached to me, but she was showing some signs of independence.
The operation took place in July or August. I don’t even remember the day she was taken down to the vet by my mom for the surgery. What I do remember was that she was not allowed to swim for a week or so in order for the incision to heal. This meant I couldn’t swim for a week or so because my being in the water would be too much for Abby to bear, and she most likely could not be stopped from getting in the pool.

For the next day or so, things went uneventfully. However by the third or fourth day after the surgery, the skin by the staples was red and inflamed—a sure sign that the area was infected. My mom took her to the vet who confirmed what we had suspected. Abby needed a follow-up surgery so the area could be cleaned and re-stapled. My mom called me at the lab to tell me about the unscheduled surgery and was quite upset as was I. Abby didn’t have to stay overnight and was released to my mom in the early afternoon.
When I returned home that night, I felt like Goldilocks after I took a look in my room: someone had been sleeping in my bed! I know I was in grad school which mitigated my living with my mom, but to have your mother sleep in your bed when you are gone during the day was odd. I asked my mom if she had slept in my bed and she said yes. Abby was so worn out that she went straight to my bed. My mom didn’t want her to be alone so she took a nap with my baby girl which made Abby elated. I still miss that old bed. It was probably 40 years old, so old that the mattress had a pronounced dent in the middle. (This was also the same room where my brother and cousin were born. I’m not sure if they were born in that bed, but I wouldn’t be surprised.) I called it a ‘hole’. The bed slept wonderfully which my mom agreed.

Later that night, things returned to normal. I slept in the bed with Abby. This was the last night that Abby huddled close to me while she slept. When she was scared or hurt, she would often press her body as close to mine as possible such as on that night. As a young puppy, Abby was inseparable from me in bed, but she found out I was a fitful sleeper thrashing around in bed all night during my dreams. She learned to sleep at the bottom right of the bed to stay out of my arms and legs flailing and kicking around. But on this night, Abby, scared and hurt, wanted the comfort of being close to me like when she was a young puppy.

The operation worked; Abby never had any puppies.

She was so cute, I could have squeezed the you-know-what out of her.

(I haven't found any photos of me hugging Abby, but I did find the one above with Nikki.)

She was so cute that I wanted to squeeze the shit out of her. For the most part, it is a figure of speech, but in my case with Abby, it wasn’t far from the truth. I often called Abby my ‘Huggy Baby’ because I used to hug her all the time. Sometimes if I was excited or overly enthusiastic, I would squeeze, once in a while too hard. Abby normally liked the attention even if she was sometimes smothered with it. A couple of times she whined at the discomfort I inflicted upon her. One time in an overzealous state, even by my standards with Abby, I squeezed her so hard that she vomited. She wasn’t mad at me, but I was embarrassed that I hurt my baby girl. I always checked the vigorousness in which I hugged her from that incident on. I didn’t stop hugging her and kept doing it even on the day she died.
A few years later, when that series on National Geographic aired, The Dog Whisperer, I learned several ways to deal with an unruly dog with behavioral problems. It turns out that I had stumbled upon several of these training techniques admittedly by luck. For example the hugging. To me, hugging Abby was an outward manifestation of my love for her. However from her perspective, not only was the hug a way for us to bond, but it was a show of my dominance over her. Abby had natural tendency to lead and take charge, regardless if she was dealing with people or other dogs. By me asserting myself over her in what I thought was a simple hug; I was able to find a way to check her sometimes aggressiveness and keep her in line. I needed whatever luck I could find because I had no idea how to raise a puppy when we bought Abby.

Better Than the Orkin Man

In the early to mid 90’s, my grandmother’s house, which is now my mom’s, had a rodent problem. There were mice and rats in the yard and in the house. The rodents never made their way into the rooms of the house, but they got uncomfortably close nonetheless. In the yard several feet from the pool was a birdfeeder which wasn’t exclusively used by birds. Naturally the squirrels had their fill. There was almost no way to fight that battle successfully. I never tried shooing off the furry tailed rascals. However when the mice ate the bird seed scattered on the ground by the squirrels, I was repulsed. The squirrels were discriminate about which seeds they would eat. Preferably, they ate the sunflower seeds and would pilfer through the bird feed picking those out and shoveling the rest below to the ground. It was there that the mice would be waiting, in broad daylight unbelievably.

I tried taking care of this by purchasing a pellet gun and shooting the uninvited guests. The pellet gun was a pump action model. I would keep the pellet gun handy at the patio, and when I saw a mouse under the feeder, I would pump the gun 5 or 6 times, take aim and fire. I always hit them, and they all died except for two. One of them rolled down the hill, but I was able to reload and finish off the job with it. The other time, the mouse rolled down the hill but was able to limp back up the hill and go to the edge of the woods where I caught up to him. He was a mean little bastard. When I approached him, he actually lunged at me a couple of inches. I let him live. It didn’t matter, no matter how many mice I shot, another was there soon after to replace him at the buffet. I felt like Sisyphus.
As annoying as the mice were, it was the house rats that scared the hell out of me. There were nights I could hear them scampering around up in the ceiling. That spooked me out, and there wasn’t much I could do about this problem. I learned to ignore it, but in the back of my mind, I knew what was lurking above.
One night, I was going to retrieve something from the storage room by the garage. Upon opening the door to the storage room, I heard some scratching around inside there. I reached up to grab the cord to turn on the light, and that is when I saw a huge fucking rat run up the side of the wall and into a hole in the ceiling. I know he was more scared of me than I of him, but had he ran towards me instead of away, not only would I have run, but I would have screamed like a little girl. When I say huge, I mean this thing from snout to the end of the tail was well over a foot. His girth was bigger than that of my forearms. I actually forgot why I went to that room in the first place, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t go in there anyway.
Fast-forward a few years when Father is on the scene. I never saw Father kill a mouse or a rat, but given his proclivity to kill little animals, I would be surprised if he did not like rats or mice. Father, when he was in his ‘killing mode’, was like a mechanism and he couldn’t be stopped once he was in that mode. For example, one time when he was going after a cat, he would not listen to me as I tried calling him off his chase, but he was intent to kill channeled his attention and senses to just one thing and he was oblivious to anything else not involved in the hunt. The cat got away.

About a year after Father moved in with us, I noticed a few things. There were no more mice in the back yard, rat encounters in the garage or rodents scurrying around in the ceiling. Was there a cause-and-effect between Father’s arrival and the rodents’ departure, or was it a mere coincidence? Who knows, but a good argument could be made that Father took care of these little beasts. But if he had eaten rodents, it makes me a little queasy thinking about it, and not for reasons that immediately come to mind. Something that will make one go ‘ewww’ is that I kissed Father in the mouth just like I did with my babies. Father wasn’t quite as vigorous about kissing as Andy or Abby, but he did it all the same. To think that the mouth that had touched a rat’s ass had touched my mouth is revolting. For obvious reasons, I try not to think about it.

Natural Born Killer

Related to Father’s proclivity to fight was his seemingly natural ability to kill. I’ve seen him kill two animals, live, and have seen blood dripping from his chin after he had dined on another wild creature that he had killed in the front yard while I wasn’t there. Once a dog such as Father has tasted blood, it is hard for it to eat exclusively Alpo. I imagine the taste of blood is a craving for him almost the way we humans will crave things such as ice cream or pizza. Whenever Father saw a little animal, I have no doubt hunger triggered in his mind that overwhelmed him.

One incident where I saw Father eat a little animal took place by the pool when Abby was still young. My mom, Abby, Father and I were under the patio so the incident took place on a spring or summer afternoon. We heard a commotion in the trees lining our neighbor’s yard. It was out of place and unusual, but it sounded like a heavy wind blowing by the way the leaves and branches were stirring around. We looked in the general direction of the noise and saw a mourning dove heading straight towards our back yard followed by a hawk. Once the hawk saw that people were nearby, the predator aborted its hunt and flew back into the woods. The mourning dove landed in the pool, a little shaken but still alive. The only thing wrong with it was that its head was scalped when the hawk’s talons dug into to the prey. My next thought was that the bird was going to drown to death since mourning doves are not aquatic birds. Fortunately for him, he was able to scramble to the pool’s edge and crawl out. Abby, my mom and I inspected the hapless but alive bird. He had beaten the odds. Abby was curious but she did not look upon the bird as prey or food. With a furrowed brow on her face, Abby sniffed the bird in a bit of confusion. It was about this time that Father walked over, took a look at the bird, chomped down on it, jumped over the fence and ate the thing, feathers, beak, talons and all.

Another time I saw Father kill for food was when he chased down a squirrel in the front yard. I was impressed with Father’s top-end speed. He could really accelerate. Even though the squirrel had about a 40-50 foot head start on Father, he still was able to close the gap and reach the squirrel. The squirrel was with in feet of safety. He made it to the tree by the mailbox. There was a pile of leaves around the tree that it had dived into before it made it to the tree, but Father was able to root around in the pile and pull out the now dead squirrel. Father walked back to his girlfriend at the time, a red chow, and gave the bounty to her.

Somewhere in the front yard on the border of your neighbor’s yard, there was a nest of moles. Father loved eating those little things as snacks. I never caught him in the act of digging for them, but I have seen him with a dead mole in his mouth. There were other times when I’ve seen him drink out of the pool after he was feasting on these animals. Father’s dark coat made it difficult to see blood on his hair, but when he was drinking out of the pool, the blood would seep into the pool from his chin. It was nasty and gruesome reminding me of that famous shower scene in Psycho.

Abby found out about Father’s smorgasbord and had to sample for herself. She developed a taste for the moles, and for the rest of her life, she would often be seen digging around the area where she first found moles that she had eaten.

A Cat Nap

(Here is a photo of me on the couch although at the time of the cat-nap, I was 15 years older as shown above when the incident described below happened.)


At the time this story took place, Abby was around seven or eight months old and had been housetrained by then. However, once in a while, she had to go late at night. She knew how to awake me so there were no problems that night getting me to let her out. I let her out back, a fenced in area, so I didn’t have to watch her while she did her deed. In previous nights I let her out, Abby would lollygag around exploring every corner of the yard, sniffing any different or unusual smells. I would call her name, and unless I yelled at her, she’d ignore me and continue doing her thing. I can understand why she was so curious about the night activities because of all the animals criss-crossing our yard. I’ve seen snakes, frogs, raccoons, foxes, deer, opossums, hawks, owls, rabbits, cats and dogs in our yard at night. It’s a different universe out there as far as Abby was concerned who only had a whiff of it from whatever smells and odors were left over from the nighttime activities.

So, on this night, I knew this was going to take a while. Instead of sitting there waiting for Abby to finish her back yard inspection on, I decided to go sit on the living room couch which turned in to lying on the living room couch. Without realizing it, I was down for the count and slept solidly for about an hour. Waking me up was Abby’s plaintively crying at the back door. It was so pitiful. She was all alone in the dark on the back porch all by her babygirl self, a singularity alone in the universe. I let her in and we went back to sleep. I think that whenever I let her out at night again, she got out and right back in with no farting around like before. When I moved to NJ and my mom was the sole caretaker of Abby, Abby started her funny business again. Abby could push my mom around, and she knew it. It became like clockwork for Abby who would wake my mom up around 2am so she could view the nighttime visitors outside. Right now, there are some readers who are thinking ‘She may have had to really go.’ Trust me, she could hold it. One time she held it for 36 hours, but I’ll discuss that in another entry. She had unbelievable bladder control. When Abby woke up my mom, she was asserting a dominance which she had over not only other dogs but people as well.

But on that late night in the dark back porch, she was my tiny little angel all alone in the world showing her vulnerability.