Important Safety Tip

When telling someone that your wife was gone for the weekend, to 'Horse-school' and your wife is standing there listening, make sure that you say 'Horse' and 'School' as separate words.

Of Men and Their Dogs

I had to have Grace, my first RRidgie put to sleep because she developed a spinal neuropathy that made it so that she could not keep her hind-end from falling over. She was otherwise perfectly healthy. Because it was worse some days, the day before we had her euthanasia scheduled she seemed pretty okay; Cheryl and I could tell that she wanted to be released from her struggle, so it was an obligation to her faithfulness of 9 years to set my own selfish desire aside.

Did I struggle and second-guess myself? I still do today but I am confident that holding on to her would have been cruel and childish. I have missed her every day. It was still the right thing to do, for her.

Letting Grace go was the hardest thing I have ever done and the most painful; I would cut off any of my own fingers for another year with her. We buried her in my friends' back acreage; She meant enough to him that he dug the grave himself. I cried for a couple of days. I could cry now.

What is this hold that our dogs have on us? The dog gives without reserving any of its' own self-interest; it is totally invested in you. Nothing on earth offers us that level of trust and so, deserves the very best loyalty that we can summon from our otherwise scoundrel pathology. The faithfulness of your dog never wanes; it never loses its' enthusiasm for your presence.

I guess the fact that we cannot ever achieve that level of focused commitment makes us admire our dog more than our hearts are capable of protecting us from abject misery when they are torn from our life. It is so much more so when the hand that does it is our own. Grace and Dixie, Terra, Dolly, Daisy... they are irreplaceable and so our suffering at their loss is implacable.

I feel your pain, Derrick.

'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Of Men and Their Caves

Long overdue, this post is.

If you are a member of the gentler gender you may quail at the site of the 'Man-Cave' where there is seemingly no order except for the uniformity of the dust depth. Take comfort in the knowledge that this is a facet of the masculine creature; where James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumpoe would say a man could live 'according to his natur'.

I look at my own cave and, despite the disorder there is a place for every dog; a sufficiency of electrical outlets; convenient sources of ignition; a fridge replete with beer and chilled pint-glasses; evidence of my habitation and of course, my world-wide-web eye.

This bear den is no more kid-safe than it is adult-safe; the electrical service panel is exposed; there are guns and ammo I can get to; knives, a bow and many arrows, easily improvised bludgeons, controversial writings and literature, a microscope, bones, feathers, rocks and shiny things, incomplete projects and sketched theorum; a mace from the middle-ages and of course, my own poison pen.
Life as a struggle is the allusory drawn in it's chaos of form; the dramatic anti-order. The dweller depicted in the string theory that is implied by the distant, elusive common theme: This is 'Me' as reflected in a shattered mirror of the things I ran back in my burning life to save.

Grant the man his cave and rejoice that it is there to serve him as refuge. Throw food in there once in a while and re-stock the fridge or cold window ledge when you venture in to pick up the dirty plates and cups half full of moldy coffee. The more sanctuary he is allowed the safer he feels to emerge and pick up his underwear and socks; make sandwiches for, and bathe the children.

His cave is not a place to watch TV or sleep but a hollow place that echoes his unspoken voice. In that sense, it is 'usable space'. It grounds me and allows me the tactile connection to the places, people and events that form my past and shape my present.