The No-Blogging Report

I’m not sure I believe in "slow-blogging". It’s either full-force for me or not at all in a summer of delights and despairs.

The weather has pretty much sucked. I don’t think we have had more than 5 days over 80 degrees F and I can count the sunny days on the fingers of (maybe) one hand. The rain, the constant, unending rain, has, however, made the grass green (if gone to seed) and has added an extra degree of lushness to the verdancy of our mountains and gardens. After almost eight years of struggle against the elements, this is the best our gardens have ever looked.

My massage practice thrives, if on a small scale, and the weekend yoga classes are picking up steam, with lots of great ideas coming forth for the fall and winter. Occasionally, Preachy-boy attends. I have also been tapped to teach a class this fall at the local community college. I am pleased as punch about this. I really think it’s cool that a college, however small and remote, thinks I have something to offer. Neat, neat, neat...

I turned 50 last week. Although I could have used a week in Rome to celebrate, I preferred the rather quiet party Preachy threw for me and the nice new flat-screen monitor I am now using to emote over my prose and other online activities. See picture below of the better of the best in the way of presents. I wish I had ever looked like that. Preachy says it’s not too far off. Whatta guy...!

We have been living for most of this year with various surgeries on our dog Dooley, who has an inoperable and expanding tumor in his sinuses. After 4 days of evaluation at a veterinary hospital in Virginia, Preachy brought Dooley home this past Monday. The only thing the veterinary hospital could offer was radiation, which, due to the location of the tumor, would likely blind him. We opted out on that and opted in for prolonged quality of life, since there has actually been no change in Dooley’s personality or happy-go-lucky attitude through most of this. Still, it is hard to know that one day, maybe soon, he will begin to have seizures as the tumor begins to invade his brain. This will likely be our point of crisis, as it will definitely herald the end of any meaningful quality of life - for Dooley - and for us.

Dooley was picked out for Preachy by his middle daughter, KC, who was about eight at the time and who was watching her father move far, far away from Washington state to the East. Dooley slept on the seat as Preachy drove East and helped him move into his life here on the mountaintop, soon accompanied by the ever-oblivious Schultz. So Dooley has been with Preachy through pretty much everything. Dooley’s mom, Megan, stills lives (at 16!) with KC, her sisters and their mother - although I hear she sleeps more than anything else. At that age, she’s entitled. As I believe Dooley is entitled to love and be loved and have his little doggie life for as long as he is still around in body and especially in soul.

Putting animals "to sleep" (a perfectly horrible metaphor) has always presented me with the strongest feelings of being in a no-win situation. Killing is murder - I don’t care how you slice it or try to justify it. It’s still murder. It may be in self-defence, it’s still murder. And even though you might believe you are doing your pet or parent a favor - it’s still murder. Murder with the best of intentions, but murder nonetheless. And the fact is that I believe that once this tumor invades Dooley’s brain, he will be gone. His spirit will have been freed to make it’s way in the universe and to bring joy to other dogs and other beings and other lives.

I understand that grief is an essentially selfish emotion - and I am being REALLY selfish about this. Because I want him to stay.

Maybe this makes me too much of a bleeding heart as far as some people are concerned. However difficult, though, Chip and I will do the rightest thing we can by Dooley, despite our own wants and needs. Dooley deserves no less from us, since he has given us and everyone around him his best for over twelve years.

But we will not put him down for convenience sake, as we have watched others do with their pets when they have become too old or too sick to continue to be "fun" or easy to deal with. I had the great joy the other night to hear my cousin mutter to a friend of hers as I was telling my Dooley story, that she wouldn’t have wasted that kind of money on a dog when he was better off dead. I gathered up my things and left as soon as I could politely do so. This woman has more money than God. This is also the person who thinks Junior is "presidential".

I wonder if the two go hand in hand. My cousin works from a metaphor of authority, where she sits at the top of the heap and dictates to all and sundry what should be done and how to do it. She seems to subscribe to the belief that humans are at the top of this pile, a very biblical perspective - dominion over the animals and all that. I see that position as crap and I am very angry at her for her lack of compassion. I wonder how she would feel, since she is "older" and past her serviceable biological lifespan, if her husband just sort of had her "put to sleep" because her knees are bad and she can’t make babies anymore?

At best, we are all the same in the soul of the evanescent and have a right to our lives. My special joy and pain is that sometimes I have to say goodbye to the joy that a being like Dooley has brought into my life - and that’s very painful. But I have no right to throw away his life as though he were a piece of furniture. It’s not something I am prepared to do. It’s morally repugnant to me and I see it as a sin. This puts me in the place of judging someone whom I see as being all too judgmental anyway - but that’s part of the conundrum.

So this is part of the drama of our days right now. As a result, I am not paying much attention to the political convention and am not even sure if it’s only the Democrats or also the Republicans who are meeting this week to "select" their candidates. As though there’s any, doubt...<sigh>. I’m not much for speechifying anyway. It’s only words and it’s been a long... long... long time since any politician’s words matched up with their actions once they are in office. I don’t know what, if anything, it will take to put us back on a more "holistic" political course, but even though I will vote for them, I doubt it will be Kerry and Edwards.

The summer will continue - with all its’ rain and sun, wind and wonder. Dooley will do and be as will happen to him and to us and we will all get through it one way or another. Blogging is not a thing of the past for me, as some of you may have thought. I’ve sure been gone long enough. But right now it seems an intermittent pleasure, at least in participation. See you all later... but probably not too soon.