MindsBase

I don’t normally have a very exciting life. In fact, I think most authors live fairly quiet lives, especially compared to politicians and professional sportsmen. If you want to hear about lots of great writerly action, visit Neil Gaiman’s blog, as he dips his fingers into many pies.

But since this is Amber’s blog, I want to share my thoughts on something that happened this week:

I should have known something really bad was coming down the pike, just around the corner, because lots of little things went wrong this week — involving pests, pulleys and policemen. Separate incidents.

I had finally gotten me and mine home safely, and just about put my house back in order, when I had a Feeling.

I went outside and stood on my porch and looked carefully at my dog, Pesto (the one I blogged about recently). She was sitting in the bed of her doghouse, awake and chillin’, the way she often does. So, I retrieved something from my car and went back inside again.

I had another Feeling.

I went back out to the porch and took a closer look at Pesto. She often sits a little funny in the back because of her advanced arthritis, but her front legs were positioned a little funny, too. I pet her black fur and rubbed her long, floppy ears. I noticed she was breathing a little heavy and had been drooling on her bed. So I stood back and called for her to come to me. She didn’t move. It was at this point I noticed her eyes. They’d lost their brightness, that cute thing the eyebrow moles do. She looked at me with sadness, with pleading.

I didn’t want to overreact. She’d gotten stuck places before, mostly in small holes around the pasture. She can’t use her back legs much so sometimes we drive the back end for her and she steers in the front. But because of the Feeling, I knew that this was different.

So, I grabbed my most logical child, my eight-year-old son, and told him I was concerned. I had him come out with me and we tried to help her up. Pesto tried briefly but collapsed again. My son suggested we give her some pain meds. It was a good idea, and the first pill (wedged in some cheese) she was able to get down — barely. The second pill took her a while to eat, and if you have ever given a dog cheese, you’ll know this is strange. Cheese comes only slightly behind fresh meat, in doggy cookbooks.

My son went to tell his brother and sister — what, exactly, I don’t know — while I grabbed a towel from the bathroom to use as a sling around her middle, so we could support her legs and get her up and walking. I removed the heavy lid of the doghouse, thankful for once that my husband builds even doghouses with extremely time-intensive features that you never thought you’d need.

With the kids watching and calling to Pesto, I lifted the ends of the towel around her middle, but it was no use. She wasn’t using her front legs at all now. The best I could do was move her into a more comfortable laying position, for which she gave me a look of gratitude before laying her head down.

That was the last time she moved, really.

I went right in and called the vet. It was 5:03pm on a Friday and I feared they were closed already. We have no doggie hospitals in backwoods, USA — as far as I know. I prayed someone would answer. A woman’s voice came on. After some time on hold, the woman told me I could bring Pesto in right now for emergency care. I knew what that meant. My kids knew what that meant. I told them anyway, that this was the end for Pesto. This brought our first wave of tears, but I couldn’t give in to it — I had to try and call my husband (who, in another unlucky turn, had lost his cell phone a few days before) and I had to get Pesto loaded into our car.

Fortunately, just as we were leaving, my husband’s car pulled in, so the family drove together. Pesto was awake on the ride, but didn’t raise her head to look around at all. My kids had their hands on her, speaking words of love and comfort. My husband said, “Well, Pesto, I guess this is what you have to do to get a car ride these days.” because the vet told us a year ago that her traveling days were over.

Once we carried her into the vet, batman blanket and all, we gathered around her on the concrete floor. The vet, a young woman with a frizzy brown bob, whose name I don’t even remember, took one look and said it was time. The words brought more tears, though we all knew the truth already. We could see the old girl was in pain. She was ready to be free from a body that had been holding her back.

It was simple, really. Peaceful. We each put a hand on her once more as the needles went in and the medicine stopped her breathing and then her heart. We knew she’d had a good run. Fourteen years! A breeder told me a month ago that after age twelve, a big hound lives on borrowed time. We’ve been ever so grateful that she borrowed that time for us.

We brought her body home, wrapped in the batman blanket, in a too-flimsy white cardboard box, and dug her grave in the drizzling rain. Now, instead of looking into the doghouse when we leave, we look into the field and say “see you later, Pesto.”

We know that it’s only an envelope under the dirt and rocks, though. We’ll see her later, running free on those horsey legs, ears flapping in a heavenly wind.

We love you, Pesto. We sure miss you. God be with you till we meet again.

pup — 1996

young lady — 2000

old lady — 2010

Ms. Agnes dePesto, Jan 1996 – April 2010

I had a dream last night that one of my friends’ family was coming to visit me (on a tropical island where I lived) when I got a phone call saying that they had all been killed in a plane crash.

In the dream, I sunk to my knees and began to sob. Then I shook myself awake, out of the dream, but I still felt racked with emotion and guilt for inviting her to visit me on my island.

Couldn’t shake the feeling all morning. Don’t you hate that?

But its interesting, isn’t it, what things come out of our subconscious minds and how they affect our lives. I wonder what worries, or expectations, or preconditions we carry around with us that impair our ability to be happy and successful? If my worries are leaking into a dream, they must be somewhere buried inside me. And they probably have nothing to do with worries about plane crashes or this particular friend. Dreams — mine, at least — are abstract at least, and metaphorical at most…

Or maybe I’m just playing out story ideas while off-the-clock.

Here’s an LA Times post about the significance of dreams >>

Reading an old favorite, Thoreau’s Life Without Principle, I came across this passage. Does this remind you of today??

Swap out the words “post office” and “letters” with “net” and “status updates” and there you go:

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correstpondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

(paragraphs and emphasis added.)

Can it be that we haven’t come anywhere, socially speaking, since 1854? Hmm.

(Yes, I note the irony that I’m posting this as a blog post on the net.)

I love reading myths and legends. Wanna know why?

1. I enjoy the similarities between the stories of ancient peoples — in spite of their living in differing societies.

2. Myths are so rich in symbolism!

While the Greek and Roman myths get a lot of airtime, I particularly enjoy other ancient myths such as Asian or American Indian folklore.

This Nisqually Legend is a great one:

Long ago, people ate all the fish and game and so started eating each other. This was wickedness, so the Changer sent a flood to the earth.

Only one woman and one dog survived and repeopled the earth, but those people were primative, walking on four legs and living in holes in the earth. The had no tools or clothes.

Then, a giant bear with hypnotic powers came and started eating everyone.

So the Changer sent a Spirit Man with a face like the sun who also had powers. The Spirit Man modernized the people with techniques for fire and tools and clothing, after he taught them to walk on two legs.

He also told them that there were two powerful spirits, one good, one evil, and the Good Spirit had sent him.

He then went about the task of killing the bear (using seven arrows, symbolic of completeness) and doling out the valuable skin.

Then, Spirit Man made a house with one door and put all the disease and evil deeds inside it, then tasked the head man of a certain family to protect and never open the door. Generations later, only one old man, his wife and his daughter were the guardians. One day while he was away, the man’s daughter peeked inside the door and so let out all the sorrows of the world.

Stories help unite a people. Help them speak a common tongue. It makes you wonder — what are the stories that unite us as a people, as well as tying us together with the rest of humanity, past and present?

And, are we losing these common stories?

There aren’t too many things I enjoy as much as a good story, but this week I met some creatures that compete nicely with even the best fiction. Don’t believe me?

C’mon. Could you have come up with this guy in your wildest imagination? I mean, if you hadn’t seen anything like it before.

Even though we see lots of amazing stuff on TV and in movies, there’s really no substitute for real live experiences. This week, our local library brought the Reptile Man over to show us his pets.

Well, not exactly pets – he runs what he calls a Serpentarium, which houses, as you might guess, snakes, lizards, turtles, an alligator or two, and the like. Something I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see. But the way he talks so expertly, so lovingly, of these creatures, well, you can’t help but fall in love with them too.

Especially when, after the show, you get to pet the 4 foot alligator, the 10 foot banana-yellow snake (that takes 7 kids to hold) or the knobby tortoise that wanders boldy through throngs of children, searching for dandelions to munch.

I did notice that he didn’t let us pet the rattlesnake or the king cobra, but that was fine by me.

One lizard (a skink, I think) can go without eating for A YEAR. He stores fat in his tail. Tell me you aren’t impressed!