Or how he is going to obtain them.
He is just as happy going for a drive in an old Chevy truck as a brand new Mercedes.
He doesn't worry about how many Facebook friends he has, who is on First, or how many calories there are in a bacon cheeseburger.
He doesn't care about your age, your weight, your tax bracket, your biological clock or what is on TV. He only knows that soon, the people he loves will be home.
On those days that I come home drained from a difficult day, tears in my eyes and the worry of ghosts in my soul, he simply lays his head on my knee and looks up, as if that moment is what he lived for. His tail will wag with a healing that humans can't always give.
If there is a ball to be thrown, he will abandon all restraint and give every fiber of himself, to reach that for which was before, only a dream; unmitigated glory.
His life is not deadlines, or deals or caring about the things that in all reality, will not matter at the end of a life.
All he cares about is how to bequeath that for which sustains him, in his too short life, his faith and his love, as he patiently waits.
There are days when I wish we were all, more like a dog.
True words, they are such stoic beings.
ReplyDeleteI love your Book of Barkley, I am still savoring it and limiting my evening reading so I don't fly through it too fast. I know that I will return to the book again and again in the future as the stories speak to me.
These amazing creatures that share our lives... One at my feet right now, 14 years old and he will break my heart someday soon... I try my darndest to just 'live in the moment' and not think of a time when he will no longer be there snoring away, gently, waking from time to time to look up at me and smile and tell me it is all going to be OK.
Fair Winds and Following Seas,
Cap'n Jan
Love everything about this post! Thanks for stopping by my blog. :)
ReplyDeleteMarie
Bravo
ReplyDeleteI've been trying to write a comment for this. But you have about said it all. What wonderful creatures that share our lives. We don't learn to 'live with dogs', they learn to 'live with us'.
ReplyDeleteAdaptable, empathic, guardians, partners for life.
Fair Winds and Following Seas...
Cap'n Jan
Here's a story you might like - I didn't write it, of course (I was not here in 1925, although Mom and Dad were, but not yet an 'item'.) Hope it shows up OK. I was, at one time, very active in the rec.dog.hunting and rec.pets.dogs list serv - oh way back in the late 80's early 90's. I kept some of the stories that I particularly liked that were posted by folks. Someday I'll make a blog of my own. Well, maybe.
By Ben Hur Lampman
We are thinking now of a setter, whose coat was flame in the sunshine and who, so far as we are aware, never entertained a mean or an unworthy thought. This setter is buried beneath a cherry tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry strews petals on the green lawn of his grave. Beneath a cherry tree or an apple
or any flowering shrub of the garden is an excellent place to
bury a good dog.
Beneath such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer or gnawed at a flavorous bone or lifted head to challenge some strange intruder. These are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter. For if the dog be well-remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where the dog sleeps. On a hill where the wind is unrebuked and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pastureland, where most exhilerating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog and all one to you, and nothing is gained and nothing is lost--if memory lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog.
If you bury him in this spot, he will come to you when you call--come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path, and to your side again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they shall not growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his footfall, who hear no whimper, people who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them, for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is well worth the knowing. The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of his master. ---
You and me both...lots of folks could learn from the dog, if they'd only listen
ReplyDeleteYep, that 'magic' that dogs have works!!!
ReplyDeleteCap'n Jan - I am so glad you like it, towards the end there's a passage you will recognize, that meant the world to me, on his death.
ReplyDeleteI would do it again, even knowing the loss.
Sweet Marie - you are welcome!
Suerte - thanks for stopping, just keep sharing his story, so we all remember.