As promised, I am continuing 'The Story.' This week nine years ago marks the date my life was crippled. But this week EIGHT years ago marks Tinkerbell's flight into my life. On July 17th, 1998 she left Neverland for Austin, Texas where she began her Flight Lessons and Wing Repair workshop.
Eight years later she is still my guide and continues to help navigate the winds of my life. She is sleeping at my feet while I type this. When I hit the 'enter' button to submit this post, I am going into the kitchen where I'll prepare a grilled cheese sandwich for us to share. That's her favorite and today is all about her.
This is her story. This is my story. We share it with you with a sprinkling of pixie dust. Have a nice flight...
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There is the thing, and then there is the memory of the thing. When the doorbell rang on Tuesday, July 14th, 1998, the one-year anniversary of my paralysis accident, announcing the arrival of a dozen yellow roses it was the memory of a smile I offered to the delivery boy. But he didn’t know that. Just as he didn’t know that the color yellow was a fading thing and the roses, although directly in front of me, offered only the memory of scent.
When trauma occurs our human tendency is to employ the fight or flight response. Mine was flight, quite literally, on a gilded ship into the land of fairytale. While my body, soul and mind remained trapped in a torturous experience, some small part of me sailed to a port of safety. I think it was the feeling part of me because since the trauma of paralysis, abuse and recovery, my body began to regain sensation but my feelings remained numb. It was as if the land of the living were the mainland, while I in my numbness stood on an island. From my isolated vantage point, I could see the mainland, but I had no way across.
I considered the flowers. Purple vase, green stems, yellow petals. Ah, I remember yellow. It’s a primary color, kin to brother red and sister blue. It lends its hue to joyful objects like lemon cake, Easter eggs and summer dresses. But the damage from surgery had left a few side affects. Just as I could not feel the tips of my fingers burning when they touch an oven door, I could no longer feel yellow. My nose could differentiate between a natural rose and a store bought rose. But the scent, like the emotion, just didn’t reach beyond the surface. "To Tinkerbell. It’s time to fly,” the card read. Hmmmm. I remember flying. I dipped my nose into the folds of petaled sunshine. But the rays weren’t enough to penetrate my foggy interior. I sighed, grabbed the packages for the post office and closed the door on thoughts of Neverland and memories of yellow.
Bright bright bright outside, as only a day in Austin, Texas can be. As I scanned the parking lot for Robin, I could not resist the urge to look up. So much sky up there. They say everything’s bigger in Texas. Certainly holds true for political egos and summer sunsets over the Austin canyons. Cotton ball clouds, expansive breeze, a good day for flying. But I hadn’t recuperated from paralysis enough to drive myself tot he post office, so flying was certainly still out of the question.
“Hey girl, get your happy ass in here before you melt,"Robin shouted as she pulled her 1988 VW van into view. My four-year-old niece Hannah was in the backseat with sister Danielle, who had just started kindergarten. They were arguing about the Spice Girls. Should there be a sixth girl in the group and what spice should she be? When I ducked out of the asphalt-heat and into the soothing temperature of the van, the current choices were Flower Spice, Weenie Spice and Stupid Spice.
The day was as a day like any other. That’s when these things happen.
As we passed the Highland Mall, Robin says under her breath, "does that sign say puppies?’ and the next thing I know we are cutting across four lanes of oncoming traffic to pull up next to a 1981 red Chevrolet Nova. A crude wooden board has been spray painted with the words Chiwa-wa puppies 4 Sale. Yo Quiero Taco Bell. It sits at an awkward angle against the front bumper of the Nova. I roll my eyes. She’s gotta be joking. She is not actually going to look at these puppies. Then she turns off the engine and I know she’s serious. "Robin, what are you doing? I don’t want to see these dogs. Get me outta here." She smiles at me, mischief in her eyes. I look out the window and see the man put out his cigarette in the ashtray of the car. "I mean it Robin. He’s probably suffocating those little dogs. Any man that smokes in this weather with the windows rolled up and puppies inside probably also has his mother locked in a basement somewhere and bites the heads off of live chickens. Let’s go." But there she sits, grinning.
The man approaches the van on my side. I do not look at him nor offer any encouragement, bur Robin rolls down the passenger window from the controls on the driver’s side to allow a strange hand to deposit a foreign package in my lap—a little brown dollop of fur stares up at me. Then the man—who I am more and more convinced, is some kind of Charles Manson psychopathic Santa Claus--proceeds all the way around the van until all laps and hands are filled with puppies. The little package of breath and paws fits in my palm. Her heavy sigh is the final crack. I turn to Robin and glare. If venom could be projected through the eye sockets she’d have been howling in pain and begging for mercy. Lacking such a device, I reached for my box of superlatives.
"You suck. You horrid, sadistic wench. I cannot believe you’re doing this to me. I cannot have a dog. I can’t do it. You know I can’t do it. I hate you. Damn. Damn. Damn! I cannot have a dog!! Just get me outta here. You’re gonna burn for this. I’ll never forgive you. Let’s GO! I hate you!"
Of course I didn’t hate her, but I hated the way the little brown fur began to wiggle. I hated the way it’s liquid brown eyes sought out mine and asked me for help. I had none to give. And that helplessness confused, overwhelmed and consumed me.
You see, since surgery, more than my body experienced paralysis. And while I regained physical movement over the slow progression of seasons, the emotional and spiritual recovery was taking much longer. I had been a vibrant woman living in a colorful world. She was a memory. I could remember her and her passion for life the way I remembered the smell of roses or the color yellow. But now my life was divided into the Befores and Afters of trauma. Before: passion. After: apathy. Before: color. After: grey.
My two cats Gracie and China had suffered through my transformation and daily I felt their disappointment. They seemed to recall better than I who I had been and how much love we had shared. They keenly felt my withdrawal and knew how much of a chore loving had become. I had my literal and figurative hands full with the daily chore of feeding and cleaning after the three of us. Affection was a luxury I could no longer afford. Emotion—the kind of emotion that allows you to engage with another being—well, that seemed a lovely place to visit, somewhere on the mainland. But me with no boat, no bridge, no wings.
The guilt from two cats was more than enough. A dog—geezus! especially a puppy! -- would want all kinds of things from me I no longer had access to. There’s no way to set a puppy on the windowsill and know it can stay content for hours in the sunshine, settling for the ever-so-often stroke of the tail or rub behind the ears. Just feeling the little tuft of fuzz in my hand elicited in me a maternal growl of protest. I was angry and resentful at my lack of connection to the person I was, the life I lead, the dog I had always wanted.
After what seemed eons, Norman Bates packed up his pups and returned to his car to light another cigarette. We drove to the post office. I felt better. And then I didn’t. I would, if I could just move far enough away from the feeling in my hands, from the tugging at my heart. I can’t do it. I know I can’t do it. Why can’t I do it? It’s ridiculous. There’s no way. Just forget it ever happened.
All the way to the post office, the longest short drive I’ve ever taken, Hannah and Danielle pleaded with us to turn the van around. We were making a terrible mistake. We needed to rescue the puppies. Certainly we could get the brown one, the girl dog, and name her Puppy Spice!
Stepping out of the car I resolved to put it all behind me. I focused on getting inside, loading up the desk with my packages, paying for the postage. The bill was 9.90 and I handed the clerk a ten-dollar bill. He gave me two nickels in change. I turned to my nieces and said, “Here you go! Go buy yourself a treat! Now, don’t spend it all in one place!” I joked. Hannah turned her earnest face to me, eyes lit like Christmas, and said, “I know what I’ll do with my nickel!”
“What?” I asked.
“I am going back to that red car and get a puppy!”
That was it. I threw my internal hands to the sky. I surrender.
One hour later I was riding home in Robin’s van with the brown thing in my shirt pocket. By the time we reached my apartment complex she was snuggled between my neck and the headrest, sound asleep.
I extracted her little puppy self from my neck and gathered her into my palms, while negotiating my way out of the van. I closed the door, waiting for the sound of the engine to turn off. But instead it continued to idle. I dipped my face into the car window: “You’re not leaving?! What am I gonna do?’ You can’t just leave me alone.”
“You’re not alone. And you’ll figure it out. Together.”
As the van pulled away, I stood in the parking lot too stunned to move. The little brown thing must have felt the same way, having been traded into foreign laps and hands all day, removed from her home, her siblings and all that was familiar. We just stood there--me on the pavement, she in my hands--both of us too timid to move.
The cars on the asphalt, the stairs and lamps and apartments all looked exactly as I had left them this morning. Nothing had changed. (Except everything.) The day was just like any other. Of course, that’s when these things happen.
I tucked the little bag of fur under my arm and fished for the keys in my pocket. We turned toward the door and stepped inside a new life. Together.
The first day and a half there wasn’t much room in that apartment for anything other than panic. Neither of us could believe what I’d done, but the implications stared up at me through twin brown pools. If I wasn’t careful, I’d drown in them. In times of stress, I find myself moving in slow motion. The world shrinks to this step, that breath, breakfast lunch and dinner. Oh yes, and potty time, which was new for me. Dogs don’t come with litter boxes.
On the second day I took her to Pet Smart and we bought a doggie bed, puppy food, a purple collar no longer than my index finger and chew toys for her little needle teeth. On the third day we played fetch, hide and seek and the new game: harass the kitties. On the fourth day I named her Tinkerbell. She seemed to possess wings and mine were only a memory. Perhaps she would teach me again to fly.
On the fifth day she didn’t eat breakfast and wouldn’t drink water. When we walked outside for our morning potty break, she had diarrhea. When she wouldn’t play fetch or eat lunch I called the doctor. Knowing that sickness in puppies is highly contagious and often fatal, I drove her immediately to the vet's office. Within minutes he confirmed Tinkerbell had Parvo and explained that chances of survival were about fifty/fifty, but for small dogs like chihuahuas, the percentage of survival dropped to around forty/sixty. To save her would require an aggressive medical treatment that would average between one hundred to two hundred dollars a day and could go on for weeks, to no avail. She could die at any time, regardless of how long they treated her. She could show signs of improvement and then suddenly reverse. The realities of Parvo and the reactions to treatment were as varied as puppies themselves. The vet cautioned me that Tinkerbell's test had come back very quickly, which indicated the virus was advancing quickly through her system.
I had quit my job just weeks before and was living close to the end of my savings. Sitting in that treatment room with the sounds of barks and meows all around me, a tiny shaking brown lump in my hands, I felt the headsman had come for me. Each word the vet uttered about Parvo glinted with the sharp edge of a silver ax. This was nothing short of a death sentence. For Tinkerbell. For me.
I thrust her into the hands of the vet and said, "Do what you’ve got to do. Start treatment" and ran from his office. I climbed into my Acura and screamed at God. "You can forget it!" I wailed. "You take this dog from me and this contract is over! I will not stay in this world if this is how it goes!" I called my mother on the cell phone. Through snot and tears and hiccups I screamed into the phone: "Tinkerbell has Parvo. She’s at the vet's and they're keeping her! The doctor said he had not seen a test come back so quickly with a positive result, so he thinks it’s advanced! I am not staying on this fucking planet any longer if she dies! Do you understand? This is enough! ENOUGH! What kind of a sick game is this? Rape, paralysis, abuse, and then bring some small shape of hope to my life just to yank it away? Just to play with me? Fuck that. If she doesn't make it, I am out of here! I am OUT OF HERE!!!"
What could Mernie say? She knew I was dangling from the thread of a very thin rope. She used what she could. "Angi, listen to me. I want you to go into your apartment. Do not think about this for one more minute. Just get out of your car and into your apartment. Light a candle and fill the tub with hot water. Get in and let go. Tinkerbell has not gone anywhere yet, so just give yourself a few minutes without the thought of what might happen. Don’t think. Just go get in the water."
I did. When I got out, I lit four candles, one in each of the four directions. I took my favorite Tinkerbell figurines from the Disney Store and placed one in front of each candle. I found my pixie dust, stashed away in the sock drawer. It came with a Tinkerbell doll someone had given me for Christmas. I sprinkled pixie dust into each of the four candles and then I sat in the middle of my living room. I didn’t speak to God again. I wouldn’t even look in His general direction. We were on such shaky ground. We kept a respectful distance, knowing that a muttered wrong word or an askew glance could have disastrous results.
I sat. And I sat. Then I sat some more.
At some point before sunset I dressed myself and went back to the vet's office. When I walked into the back room where they kept the critical care dogs, I heard Tinkberbell at the same moment I saw her. She’d spotted me and began to howl-- a little Chihuahua two-and-a-half-pound howl, but a howl from the gut. A howl for me. For us. I wasn’t sure if it was a howl of hello or goodbye, but of one thing I was sure. Only five days together and I wasn’t the only one to feel my world changed. The howl, whether hello or goodbye, spoke of recognition. Familiarity. Association. We were a pack.
They let me take Tinkerbell to the yard behind the building. All sick dogs are allowed out back, but the Parvo pups have to be contained within one tiny area so they do not infect other animals. I sat down with her on the grass while she sniffed around, peed, then finally settled into the cuff of my jeans and fell asleep. I said nothing. I was careful to think nothing. Each moment was precarious and I simply could not afford fear. At this point, it was a fight for both our lives. Too much hung in the balance to give way to words, to tears, to thought.
It was just Tinkerbell and me as the sun sank low in the Texas sky. So much sky. A big blazing Texas sunset and then time to go home.
Tinkerbell was returned to her cage, but as soon as I turned away from her container, she started howling. Bark. Bark. Hooowwwwl! Bark. Bark. Hoowwwwl! I walked faster, the sound threatening to break my heart. I heard one of the attendants say as I passed through the doors into the waiting room, "Hard to believe such a big sound can come from such a tiny being."
I wondered if it was big enough to save her. To save us both.
The next day presented an emotional land mine, threatening to detonate a bomb of grief with every step. I visited Tinkerbell three times that day and again at midnight in the after-hours facility. There was no improvement, but there were no signs of worsening. A dispensation of grace, that. The fourth day I visited Tinkerbell twice and then again at the after-hours facility at midnight. They would not allow her out of her cage that night so I slunk down on the cold linoleum floor and curled around her cage, stroking her with one finger through the metal bars. It was there, curled into the fetal position with Tinkerbell as my center, that I felt the first flutter of wings in my heart.
“Tink, I have been thinking. Maybe. Maybe I can do this. Maybe we can do this. I really don’t know how to come back. I don’t remember how to love or how to feel, really. I can't promise you anything. I am damaged goods, Tink. I don’t know what kind of home or what kind of love I can give you. You are taking your risks if you stay with me. But if—if—you’ll stick around I’ll…I’ll..." I gulped. I felt a huge abyss stretched in front of me. A gulf as dark and wide as the ocean between mainland and island. I had been looking at the mainland a long time, wondering if a ship might someday come. But on this night there was no ship, only the sound of wings. "What I am trying to say is I don't know why you chose me. But thank you. I want to choose you back, Tink. I want you to stay... with me...and...if you’ll come back to living, I will too.”
I left that night in silence. For once, Tinkerbell did not howl. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not, but I knew I had made the first step of a significant journey and the energy it took left me exhausted. I drove the five miles home and slipped into a dreamless sleep almost immediately. I awoke to the sound of wings.
When I arrived at the vet's office the next morning for my first visit of the day, I stepped out of the Acura and again heard the sound of wings. I actually ducked this time, thinking someone's pet cockatoo or parrot might have escaped the facility. I scanned the parking lot. Nothing. I walked in the door and greeted the receptionist by asking if anyone had lost a bird. "Not that I know," she said, "but I need you to come with me." She took me to a private room, which was unusual, and told me the doctor would need to see me privately. My heart dropped. What had happened? Was Tinkerbell taking a turn for the worse? Had she died in the night? Tears immediately filled my eyes as I imagined the tiny place she’d made in my heart never filling, never healing, leaving one more rip in the fabric of my soul. The doctor came in before I could ponder on what island that devastation would leave me.
“Well, Ms. Sullins, I don't know how to explain this. But something's changed with Tinkerbell." I looked at him and his face seemed confused, conflicted. I held my breath. "Tinkerbell is eating normally and shows no signs of diarrhea. We've taken her off the IV, as she's drinking on her own. I really cannot tell you how this occurred, but to be certain I ordered another Parvo test this morning and it is negative. She literally shows no signs of the disease."
The sound of wings. It was closer now. I could hear the flutter so loud it was hard to make out what he was saying.
”What?” I asked, feeling disoriented as the wind swept across my face and through my hair though the air in the room was still.
"I cannot be too optimistic, here, Ms. Sullins and I encourage you not to be. These things can happen only to reverse immediately. I want Tinkerbell under close observation for the next seventy-two hours. She needs her food and water intake as well as her bowel movements monitored for any sign of change. I want to see her again tomorrow afternoon, but if you feel up to taking charge, she can be discharged from our care. Would you like to take her home?"
Home. Yes. I want to go home.
Tinkerbell's wings were wide enough to carry us both.
Have you seen our latest project? On a recent trip through the world of imagination, I stumbled across an old, forgotten graveyard. The sculptures, stones, moss, trees and leaves were alive, whispering the wisdom of ages. I hope the haunting beauty of their message shines through this film. We're working on a coffee table book of the guardians who allowed me to photograph them and the magic places they call home. 
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