Spreading the Murphy Love

Elemental to our daily happiness - like the air we breathe - Murphy was our water for the past five months. He provided us with a constant fountain of adventures, and he lived for the water itself. He drank it by the gallon, jumped from high cliffs to swim in it despite our efforts and every single day he refreshed our daily routines by completely throwing them off.

Silky thick locks of golden fur coating his soft physique, Murphy first entered my world while I was in Italy during the late summer of 2010. I'd heard mention of his arrival in an email from my mom where she wrote of their recent visit to the Tri-County Humane Society. I couldn't get home soon enough.

Since our perfect childhood dog, Sophie, had passed a couple of years before, we all secretly wished my parents would get another dog. Finally, he had come. A whole lot of him. Much bigger than a puppy (but with the same maturity level) Murphy's long, smiling head was the size of a small horse. He had deep set, dark brown eyes and an ever-expressive brow.

Soon after arriving home, we were relaxed downstairs for a movie with Murphy at our feet. My parents said he experienced a seizure prior to my return home that may have been caused by overexercising, but no one knew for sure. That night, he had another one. We calmly surrounded his jolting limbs and protected his head from the hard surface of the media center. It was hard to watch. After a couple of minutes it was over. The twinkle in his eyes was gone briefly, and for the next fifteen minutes he paid no attention to people as he panted and shifted from one room to the next.

Murphy liked jewelry. He chomped up six or more pairs of my earrings, a necklace, and a ring, spitting them into pieces. Once he was trying to get the earrings I hid on a table and he knocked over a commemorative shot glass that shattered as it fell. My mom and ran over to him just as he started trying to ingest a huge piece of glass that she carefully yanked out.

Another time, he found a couple packs of Sport Beans and a strawberry powder drink mix from the Interbike show. After breaking in, he smeared the crystallized chunks all over our carpet. Minutes later, he found the chunks that had sunk between the carpet threads, and proceeded to eat the carpet itself.

As much as he was difficult at times, little Murph made up for by never whining, growling, and rarely a bark. He could care less about other dogs. While at the dog park, he'd spring to the far end and try to get down to the water to play alone. He never even jumped up onto anything. In fact, he was only beginning to learn how to go around glass doors to get inside, and how to jump into cars.

Typically, I'd wake up in the morning after my parents had gone to work. I would plug away at blogging for Designer Pages and anxiously await my late afternoons spent with Murphy. Running shoes laced, we galloped the two miles down Beaver Island Trail to St Cloud State. Smurphy would stop and grab random sticks - some far too big for his body - and carry them for miles. Sometimes he ate leaves that had fallen. He'd dart in front of me in pursuit of them and purposely make me trip over him as people passed. I'd let out a playful shriek, blush, and reach down to apologize for my knee to his ribs, but it always seemed like he relished those moments, examining my face to make sure I wasn't angry with him for demanding love. Of course I wasn't. Sometimes I'd just sit there with him for awhile. Even lay down on random grassy lawns and roll around on our backs together.

One night at dusk Murphy and I made our way back home from a walk. There was something happening in my mom's vegetable garden behind the house. Three deer eating all of her beans and herbs? NOT okay. This was his chance to shine! I knelt down next to Murphy and gave him a pep talk before asking our bundle of love to do the unthinkable: chase them away. From 100 meters back, we began to sprint. "Get them, Murphy! Run like the wind!!" I yelled.

Just as the twinge of what it might be like to realize you're the owner of a hopeless "hunting dog" set in, our dog spotted the deer and magically began after them. I cheered. Shouting from behind, I realized something: His soft golden body wasn't chasing them at all. He was imitating them, trying for that same spring in his step, and would look back at me every couple seconds to make I was saw him doing it. After zig-zagging, he got to the water after they'd ascended into the island brush. I called to him. No response. Once I got to the river bank, I noticed he had waded in and was literally squatting in the shallow water's mud about 10 feet away. Fifteen minutes and a shattered sense of companionship for not getting him out myself, my mom and I stood there together. Waving sticks and throwing tennis balls, he watched us act like idiots. Eventually, we waded in knee-deep to pull him out.

This was a dog who more than loved the water. He lived for it. But in the weeks to follow, Murphy's seizures continued, and got worse.

Epilepsy, we thought.

Since acupuncture didn't seem to work, we opted for the heavy duty, two-a-day phenobarbitol meds. They made him tired. Constantly hungry too, eating more carpeting, gnawing on countertops, t-shirts, more earrings, and even added a USB key that contained my Fulbright documents.

After being in Minneapolis for a week, I returned on Sunday night to St. Cloud. Yesterday, on Monday afternoon, Murphy had 3 seizures in 5 hours. Each seemed worse than the one before. It's a horrible thing to witness. During the final seizure yesterday, his entire body spun in circles around the room. I jumped between him and the bed frame, dresser, and closet with a pillow in my hands to cushion his fall, but at this point I knew it was more than epilepsy.

A brain tumor, we reasoned. All of his symptoms matched.

Twenty minutes after the third seizure, he jumped into the car without help, and took his final trip to the vet.

Murphy is gone now.
And there's something about the unconditional love he had offered me in such a short time that felt like a solid, unwavering force. As if I could no wrong. It cannot be compared to human friends, as wonderful as they may be. In my life, Murphy has been much more than a sweet dog... he was my gale wind showing us all how to live a new, beautiful day each morning.

I'll never forget Murphy. He's probably watching us from a little river somewhere, wading in water with jewelry and rawhide aplenty.

Cease Fire, September!

...I've got to catch my breath!

Eurobike in Friedrichshafen was only one week ago, yet it feels like eons ago already. This is what the month of September does to a person, and we forget about it til it lands between the eyes after the comparatively blah 11 months of the year.

Last Tuesday we arrived at 7 am to our tiny hotel in a small town called Stokach outside of Friedrichshafen, Germany (I just like typing that city name for some reason). We were exhausted after our 9 hour road trip turned into a 16 hour or so (we lost track) trip when the Swiss border patrol stopped us for not having correct commercial documentation from the Italian government for transporting 6 bikes up to the land of wiener schnitzel and hefeweizen. I guess they thought we'd be selling the bikes in Switzerland. Just to spite them, we should have cut a deal with the Italian border patrol - who were of course drooling over the Parlees and trying to help us as much as possible - and handed them each a bike to make the Swiss piddle their pants with envy. But the one positive about arriving was that we were greeted by Michelle, Phil's best college friend, since she'd hiked by way of train system from Geneva, Switzerland to see us. Needless to say, none of us had slept - so we cat napped til noonish and then got on with our day as if nothing had happened.

In any case, we got to Germany after pulling an all-nighter of driving through the Austrian mountain passes during a massive rainstorm and stopping three times to sleep for 20-45 minutes along the way. Keep in mind that all of this came after we spent the entire weekend building the bikes until 3 am or so each night, while waking up at 9 to start up again. I guess this is the life of trade shows from the opposite side of where I'm used to being: in the press tours, where they put you up, pay for everything, and make sure you're writing diligently each day while seated in the lap of marketing dollar luxury.

Well the actual show went very smoothly. We had a corner spot at the snazzy Shocker Distribution booth and our Z1, Z5 SL LTD, and CX bikes shone in their "ghost" matte black glory. It was rad to watch people walk past glancing about and to see more double-takes in front of me than in romantic comedies. Men and their bikes, I swear. Some would whip out the knock system - where you gently use your knuckles to listen to the sound the frame makes when you knock on it. Others would grab their little cameras and take pictures of tiny, carbon clamps and outer cable systems, zooming in and snapping 10 shots from different angles. You could tell they were just biting at their bits to not steal the bike away for a test drive. Every time Phil or Tom would remove the bike from the stand and explain something to the daring few who could handle its tempting presence on the ground, an entire mob of people would gravitate towards them, oohing and ahhing even when the language spoken may not be one they understood. The ultimate realization I made at this European show with throngs of people from around the globe is that all of them speak, you guessed it, cycling.

The last day there I realized my flight back to the US was going to be on Saturday instead of Friday. So I went along to the show for another fun day of carbon talk. Upon arriving, the key to the truck just disappeared. I searched everywhere for it to refill our stock of catalogs, but to no avail. The little key was MIA. The rest of the day was full of stress and scanning the ground. In the end, it was officially not in our hands, though it seemed it could just reappear any given second. It's sort of like a worst case scenario situation too, since I was to catch a 6 am train the very next morning leaving from Friedrichshafen up to Frankfurt in order to get back in time for the remainder of Chelsea and Noah's rehearsal dinner in Portland, Maine on Saturday night. (If you think that was a mouthful to read in one breath, try digesting that thought while French people are asking you questions that you answer in a mixture of Spanish and Italian!)

After a bit of help from the Scandinavian Parlee Rep, Alex, and his friends from Norway, Phil was able to drive me to the train station while Tom slept in the driver's seat before the last big day of the show. And with what seemed like a ton of bricks in my suitcase, a traversed the planes, trains, and automobiles into a rental car by 8 pm in Portland's airport and made it safely to the DeLorme farm of Freeport, Maine just in time for the little slideshow and a massive culture shock of english-speaking happiness :)

The very next day I awoke to a library of philosophical books at Noah's parents' house, and snuck out and over to Chelsea and Noah's new pad to join them for breakfast and a quick chat with Phil, who would be stuck in Germany for the coming week. Later, Suzanne and I went to work gathering wildflowers for the wedding and getting on the St. Croix boat headed over to the island at 1:30pm. The wedding took place and was out of a perfect fairy tale. Every friend was interesting, the DJ hilarious, the setting picturesque, and the happy couple basking in the glow of an east coast sunset with fresh lobster and hula hooping.

On Tuesday, about a day and a half after the wedding, I arrived home in Minnesota and was greeted by my two sisters and a beautiful dinner of fresh vegetables cooked with potatoes and seasoning. After so many airport pretzel and peanut packages atop wine from the wedding, my body came back to life out of its post-travel abuse coma. Mia and I went on a long walk around the lakes the next day and chatted about life and love and law. It was perfect, just as Calhoun always is. Later that night, my mom came to town and we all visitied Mia at work before she brought me back to St. Cloud where a brand new man would enter my life. Murphy. Or Smurphy, as I like to call him.

And that's where I am now. I walk with him, he kisses my hands and politely pulls me along the path. I talk to him - he listens intently before he plays, rolling around for belly rubs. We visited Saint Cloud State University's bustling beginning to a fall semester where he's surrounded by people who coddle and pet him as they recognize the change their lives are going through from the relaxation of summer to solid homework and little animal time. With Murphy around - even after the Vikings lost to the Saints 9-14 last night - life has become simple, lovely, and renewed with a dog in the house to start with our darling Sophie left off a couple years ago.