Soapbox

    Today was the senior breakfast and award ceremony for my daughter Katie, after which I dropped her off at school for graduation rehearsal. I have to admit, I"m feeling just a bit choked up.
   She came away weighed down by all the sashes and medals she has earned by her incredibly hard work for the last 4 years, but the child is nothing if not determined. She must get that persistence from her father, as she does so many good qualities (like her ability to do math!) because while intelligent enough I think I was pretty unfocused in high school. (OK, lets be honest: I’m still rather unfocused!)
    At the end of the ceremony they asked all the kids to come up to the front and un-spooled a big ribbon. In school colors (sliver on black) it said "2009" about every foot. The kids stood in a circle and each took hold of the ribbon until it went all the way around the circle, symbolizing their class and the sense of community they share. Then one by one the kids were cut apart to go their separate ways, but each retaining a section of the ribbon to keep with them as they go.

   As I watched my daughter standing there in the mob of laughing, jostling kids I thought of the times I let go of her small hand to let her stagger- and fall, stagger- and fall…  wiping her baby tears and setting her back on her feet because she was determined to try again. I thought of  letting go of the back of her bicycle and watching her go careening down the sidewalk toward disaster… and washing her scraped knees and helping her back on the bicycle.  I remembered walking her to the school bus for the first time and watching her disappear inside, knowing that adventure but also frustration, disappointment and bullies would be waiting for her. I thought of handing her the keys and watching her drive away by herself for the first time… and then sitting and waiting for the sound of the front door opening to pronounce her safe return. And of course the big one still looms: taking her to college and somehow leaving town without her.

   Sometimes it seems that parenthood is just a series of letting go- to fall down, to make mistakes, to break their heart… to find their own way. Despite her tender heart I am sure that my persistent, dynamic child will find her way pretty well. I hope it doesn’t take her too far from me. And I hope that she realizes how much of high school she will take with her.

    I wish I could go back to my last day of high school. Oh, I don’t want to be 17 again and God knows I don’t want to relive high school!  Aaugh!  But if I could just have that last day back- that last glimpse of all our young, hopeful faces, that last chance to make my mental as well as physical farewells…
    I would love the chance to spend a few minutes with the people I never bothered to get to know because I thought we had nothing in common- but oh, we did. I would like  to hug the people I didn’t hug because I thought they might think I was strange…  to speak a last friendly word to the people that I didn’t realize until much later that I would one day miss and to smile at the ones who I now know would die far too young.

   Tomorrow I"m having lunch with a friend from my high school days. We rode the bus together and chatted at the bus stop every morning, and she was on the crew for some plays we were in. We were never best friends but I liked her very much, yet when high school was over, I walked away without a thought. She was the past, and I was on to the future.
   She lives in Michigan now, but she’s one of the group of people from the class of ’77 with whom I have reconnected- mostly on the internet- in recent years. I love her sense of humor and her great attitude about life. She sent encouraging messages when Ted lost his job, and now that her husband is undergoing some nasty treatment for an aggressive cancer, I try to check in on her once a week. And when she realized that she had to drive through Columbus on a business trip south we arranged to meet for lunch. 
    30+ years after my own graduation I really treasure the chances to get together, even with people I didn’t know that well. Is it the age we were then, or the age we are now that makes those years we spent cooped up together 5 days a week seem like such an unshakable bond? Whatever the reason, I am glad for it.

    I looked at Katie’s smiling face today and I know my daughter isn’t really taking it all in, appreciating it all the way I would if I could do my goodbyes again. Well, who can at that age? She can no more imagine now  what it will be like to be my age than she could have, in kindergarten, imagined what it would be like to graduate from high school.
     It is a cliche, but youth truly is wasted on the young, I suppose. High school can be a really difficult experience, (for some of us really really difficult!) but the reward for the effort is all these amazing people that you get to have some amazing experiences with… and then take them all for granted.  But  if you’re lucky, you look back years later and realize what you had, and find an opportunity to say to at least some of those people, "Turns out, I’m glad we were there together."

My grandpa was about my best friend when I was little.
I was a strange kid, (“No!” you say, because you’re sweet. But yes, it’s true):  intense, moody, tending to be alone. I felt overshadowed by my pretty, creative older sisters and then by my very forceful younger one. But Grandpa made me feel like I was special.

He took me out canoeing at the cabin he had by the Big Darby, and when I got the hang of it more quickly than the other kids, he taught me how to steer from the back. I thought I was all that! He took all of his grandchildren fishing, but he called me his fishing partner and I believed he secretly loved me the best.
Probably all the grandchildren thought this- he was that kind of guy. But for me, there was nothing better than time spent with my Grandfather. I thought he was wonderful. He had a deep baritone voice, and used to sing little snatches of song when I would sit on his lap, usually something along the lines of “Oh, my little Tracy…oh, my little Tracy…” which made me feel safe and loved.

    When I was 13, he died suddenly following a surgery. The surgery itself had gone well, so my Aunt Patricia was going to Columbus to visit him in the hospital and it was decided she could take me with her. No visitors under the age of 16 were allowed on the floor in those days, so my sisters dressed me up in their clothes and even put a little makeup on me. I’m sure I fooled no one, but I felt really grown-up, and privileged to be chosen for the trip.
    Armed with an assortment of cards from my siblings we drove happily to Columbus, walked in the door of Mt. Carmel hospital, and knew right away that something was terribly wrong. My great Uncle Paul, all 6'5" of him, was standing like a sober sentinel in the lobby, waiting for us. He informed my aunt quietly that “something had happened” and Grandpa had gone “code blue” just a few minutes before.
    We went upstairs with Uncle Paul and the adults all huddled together, rallying around my grandmother. Since I was quiet and calm, I was pretty much left to my own devices as everyone waited for word and waited for other out of town family to make the drive to Columbus. I wandered up and down the hall, sat for a little and wandered some more, and suddenly a door opened and a bed was rolled out. There, surrounded by staff, IV's running and machines blinking, was my grandfather, being moved to the ICU. I recognized his face, but I remember thinking, "Oh, I see: my Grandpa is dead." Because it seemed clear to me that he wasn’t there any more.

    Eventually someone decided that in the hospital on a death watch wasn’t the best place for me, so my uncle David took me to his house to stay with my Aunt Sunny and cousin Karen. He brought me in and was just turning to go back to the hospital when the call came that Grandpa had died. Everyone started crying… except me. I already knew that he was dead, and had mulled it over in the car all the way to Uncle David’s house. I knew I wasn’t anyone’s fishing partner, any more.
   
  It was a big hole in my life, and summers were never the same without the cabin to visit. One day when I was 16 or 17 I realized that, while I could describe Grandpa to you, I no longer had, in my mind, an image of him. I could say “Probably about 5’9”, salt and pepper hair” but I couldn’t see him, inside me. I felt really sad, like he was truly gone at last. I felt like I had lost him all over again.

  Around this same time I started having fish dreams. They took one of two forms. In the first, I dreamed I was walking by a lake and saw, gliding far enough under the surface to be just barely visible, a huge fish, probably 8 or 10 feet long. Sometimes I was fishing when I saw it, and would pull my line in, fearful of hooking something so large that I could never reel in.
    Other times I was just walking by the lake and would stare in fascination at the murky image. The second, more frequent dream scenario involved aquariums full of tiny, bright fish who, when the lid was opened, would suddenly begin swimming out into the room, as if the air were water. They were so beautiful to see, floating happily about, but I somehow knew that the air was not good for them, and so I would try to gently herd them back into the aquarium quickly,. This was always a frustrating and only marginally successful venture.
    After a few years of these recurring dreams, I mentioned it to my sister Julie. She told me that probably it symbolized big things in my life I was afraid to face, and frustrations. Well I had big things in my life to face, I suppose- who doesn’t at 21? But the explanation didn’t make sense to me.

    And so the dreams went on.

    Then one night, in the middle of some other dream, suddenly my grandfather was there. I don’t actually remember this dream- I just woke up and knew this message he had given me:

You dream about fish because of me. Sometimes I come and visit you
when you’re asleep, which is the only time you can hear me now.
But when you wake up, because you were my fishing buddy,  when I
have touched you, you just remember it as fish. Fish means me.

    And I laid there in bed and thought, “Now that makes sense!” And so the next time I spoke to her, I told Julie what I had learned, and she nodded.  “That makes sense” she agreed. “Grandpa is a guardian angel, after all, so of course he would come to visit you. He’s watching over you.”
   I just looked at her, amazed and pleased that I hadn’t gotten any scientific theories about “random firing of neurons” and “working out anxieties of the day” this time. Those things were all perfectly logical, but this felt… true. It seemed to me that her ready acceptance of my spiritual explanation confirmed its truth. And who else would be a guardian angel for me but Grandpa?

    So then, the dreams were a welcome occurrence in my life. When I woke from one I would smile and think “Hello Grandpa! Do you like your new Great-grandson?” or whatever else had happened since the last  “visit”. They seemed to come less and less often once I was busy raising my family.

    Once or twice I had a dream where Grandpa was actually there, as himself. In the most memorable, my sisters, cousins and myself were all at the old house Grandmother and Grandpa had owned, visiting him. We were all our grown-up selves and had gone back into the past to see him. We brought stories and pictures of our present lives and our children to show him.
   He never spoke a word- he couldn’t, because he was a spirit, but he smiled and watched us all with obvious joy. We cousins had so much fun that we started just laughing and kidding around with each other and forgot to talk to him, sometimes. But that seemed to make him happy too- to see us good friends again. Then suddenly we realized that it was time to go “home”- and he couldn’t go to the future with us. We were so sad that we started to cry,  but he just looked at us, radiant. We knew he was saying that he would be there with us, we just wouldn’t see him.
   Each of us kissed him on the cheek and quietly left for our future lives.

    Then one night I had an entirely different dream. I was back at our old house on South Shannon Ave, in the front bedroom that contained the doorway up to the attic. I was about to get married there. My family watching happily from the hall doorway, I walked to the attic door to meet my anonymous husband for the ceremony.
    But the minister, supposed to be standing in the attic doorway, was standing IN the door- leaning out through the wood, grinning hideously and looking like some sort of demon. Frightened, I turned to my groom to see if he understood what was going on- and he had disappeared. Suddenly the demon had his huge hands around my throat and began to squeeze.  

    At this point I realized that I was dreaming. As the hands choked off my air supply, I thought, “Well crap- this is an awful dream! Now I just have to wake myself up and it will end.” I’ve done that before when a dream was frightening, but I just couldn’t do it this time. I heard a roaring in my ears and a terrible built pressure in my head as spots swam before my eyes. I knew that my actual body was lying in bed, right next to Ted. Perhaps he could wake me up.

   So I started shouting with my mind: Ted, help me! I don’t know what’s happening, but I think I’m dying! Touch me! Wake me up! But of course, I was asleep, and he was asleep, and he could not hear me. No one could hear me. My dream family was still standing smiling in the hall, as if they were witnessing a happy event. Everything began to go black and I believed with all my being that I was about to die in my sleep- perhaps I was having a freak heart attack, or maybe some weird sleep apnea that had stopped my breathing for too long. Or, maybe I really was wrestling with a demon! Who knew?

     And then I remembered that there is someone who can hear me in my sleep- someone who visits me in my dreams from time to time. I had no strength left to shout, even mentally. I whispered “Grandpa- help me wake up. Please… I have to wake up.”

    And I was sitting upright in bed, hands at my throat, gasping frantically for air as the room swam around me and Ted turned over groggily and asked if I was Ok. And I believe to this day that my grandfather saved my life. I mean, what else is a guardian angel for?

    I don’t dream about fish nearly as often as I used to- sometimes years will go by between nighttime “visits”. Is there an expiration date on guardian angels? Perhaps he doesn’t feel I need looking after as much as I used to. (Boy, is he wrong!) But I did have a different type of visit from him one day.

    A few years ago I was sorting through the box of old photos my sister had collected from aunts, uncles and second cousins, who had sent them to her so she could copy them to make a family album. I had enjoyed finding pictures of my father as a small, tow-headed boy with a mischievous smile on his face and my great-grandmother, lovely in her high-necked white blouse and Gibson-girl hair.  These photographs offered a wonderful glimpse into people and a time that I had never experienced.

     Suddenly my casually sorting hands were stilled and I drew in a slow breath. Among the sepia-tinted photos of my parents’ youth was an old color snapshot that I hadn’t seen in years. The colors in the somewhat blurry photo had faded and yellowed with the passing of time, but I saw the image as clearly as if I were looking though an open window. Gently, in a daze of memory, I put my hand out and slowly touched its surface. I was surprised to feel only paper: I had half-expected my fingers to reach right into the image itself and touch trees and grass…and his face.      
    The picture showed my grandfather standing in front of the cabin by the Big Darby where we spent so many glorious summers. He was wearing a white terry-cloth shirt with blue piping that I didn’t realize I remembered until the photo brought it back with such clarity that when I closed my eyes, I could smell his after shave on it. Grandpa’s hands were in his pockets and he was smiling unassumingly at the camera; a short man with grey-streaked hair who had lived a hard life but never seemed to worry too much about it. Behind him the sun dappled through the big walnut trees that stood guard over the cabin and the yard sloped away toward the river bank where he docked his canoe.

For just an instant, I could actually hear the wind sighing through the high branches and mixing with the rush of water, breathe the slightly fishy smell of the river, and of mud and rocks baking in the sun along the bank. It all flooded over me in a dizzying wash of memory. Somewhere there’s the burr of a lawn mower: Uncle Roy is cutting the grass I thought, and the sound of laughing children drifted upstream from the sandbar where I knew my cousins were swimming.

Now I hear Grandpa’s deep chuckle as he asks me if I’m ready to go fishing, and of course I am, yes, yes! Let’s go right now, Grandpa, and stay out all day. I want to hear the pride in your voice as you tell me how well I steer the canoe and call me your best fishing partner.

I reach to take his hand…  but I touched only an old piece of paper, a photograph from a box, and I was sitting on a chair in my sister’s kitchen again while my own children played in the next room.

Time’s window was closed again, and I was left shaken by what I saw and felt. That amazingly clear sensory memory of that brief moment in time was locked away in my brain somewhere, and seeing the photo had opened the door, or completed the neural circuit to allow me to access it for just an instant.
        And I know he is still with me.
 

    Well it’s been a week now since we lost our dog Boomer, and of course, life goes on.

    Don’t you just hate that some times?

    Don’t you just feel sometimes that the world should change somehow? Some sort of cosmic acknowledgment of the passing of a soul, whomever it was? But other than that weird sense of emptiness in the room and in your heart, nothing much really does. The house gets dirty and needs to be cleaned, laundry still piles up. People on TV get excited about the same inane crap they always did, you have to deal with the same junk at work. There is still a thousand little details of life that you need to attend to and the world doesn’t care about your grief. That sense of normalcy can be a great relief, and at the same time, as annoying as hell.

    This seems to be how it goes. First you feel devastated and wander around like the walking wounded, missing that person (or that dog) all the time. Everything makes you cry.
    Then after a while, you stop thinking about them all the time, and you don’t feel so bad. Then you realize this is happening, and you feel guilty for not feeling so bad. It seems disloyal to be going on with your life when they are not!
    Then you feel stupid for feeling guilty for not feeling so bad…. all of which makes you feel bad. Ah, the perversity of the human mind! These stages go by faster when the loved one was just a dog, but I think they are essentially the same for anyone.

    That awful day after we had him put to sleep, when I was staggering around exhausted but unable to rest, I decided to keep busy and got out the vacuum. As  I vacuumed the hair off the rug in my bedroom, I realized that I as sucking up all traces of Boomer in our life. I paused for a moment, then shook my head in exasperation. What was I supposed to do- keep the furry rug as a shrine? Ditto for the dog nose prints I washed off the back window the next day. Reality rears its ugly head and life goes on.

 I don’t cry any more when I pull in the driveway and look to the garden gate and Boomer isn’t standing there, wiggling with delight at my return. Seeing Rocket wander by with Boomers old kong in his mouth only gives me a small lump in my throat. Katie and I spent  time this weekend searching through photos for pictures of Boomer, and finding them made us happy instead of sad. 
    We have a tasteful little wooden box of ashes on the shelf by the front door, where Boomer used to lay on guard. I set his old collar on top of the box with the tags hanging down in front. When I go out the door, I kiss my finger and touch the tags as I go by, and usually I smile.

    Life goes back pretty much to normal, whether you want it to or not. Which I guess is a good thing.

    So I had this dog….  and his name was Boomer. And he was not just any dog, you know. He was the best dog there ever was. I’m sure everyone who loses a pet says that about them, but in this case, it was true.

    Katie used to say that you could tell true "dog people" by which of our dogs they were most fond of. Rocket is small and cute and has soft ears and carries around stuffed animals in an endearing way. He is non-threatening and basically sweet, and people who don’t really know dogs often prefer Rocket.

    But Boomer was the real dog-lover’s dog. Boomer had a depth of character that you don’t always find in dogs. It was almost impossible not to anthropomorphize Boomer: he was such a unique individual in both personality and appearance. Boomer was a blue merle Australian shepherd, and the first thing people noticed about him was his unusual eyes. "Is he blind?" they would ask, because one eye was half blue.

    We adopted Boomer from a rescue group when he was about 9 months old, and he learned basic obedience quickly. He was a herding dog in the truest sense: he was smart and loyal had a strong instinct for his home territory. Shortly after we got him I was taking him for a walk in the big field behind the school where my kids’ bus picked them up, and let him off the leash, as I had begun to do. He would run in great, happy loops out in front of me, chasing birds and the joy he took in his freedom as he flew over the grass was a beautiful thing to see.  He always looped back to me before running off again: the herding instinct, I guess. On this day, however, Boomer spotted a cat darting in between two of the houses that backed up onto the field, and a different instinct kicked in. He took off like a streak, and no amount of shouting and whistling would call him off his hunt.
   I ran after him between the houses but Boomer was out of sight. I called a few more times, then gave up and headed home to get the car and scour the neighborhood. How far would he wander? I remembered times when Mischa, our Siberian huskey had run off, and was finally found miles away. How am I going to tell the kids that I lost their brand new dog? I worried as I loped up the street, praying he wouldn’t get hit by a car…. and there he was, sitting on the front step, waiting for me. He already knew where he belonged, and when he lost sight of me, he simply went home. Ted says this is the difference between a dog bred to run in a straight line, and one bred to run in circles.

   Boomer always had a taste for cats, and squirrels (caught one once,  to his chagrin!) but he also always held true to that sense of home. Several times I put him in the back yard without realizing that the gate was open…. because he never strayed. With Rocket I would realize my error when I caught sight of him wandering in the neighbor’s yard, but not Boomer. I came home from work once and he was sitting at the open gate- on the inside… wagging his hind end (no tail on an Aussie) and waiting patiently. I regarded him in surprise for a moment as I got out of the car and he looked at me, wiggling with excitement but not venturing out. Impressed, I finally  said " OK, big dog" and he ran out like a shot. He knew the command "stay in your yard" and I could let him out to sniff and wander when I was working out front without fear of his running off.
   Except when it was snowing. Oh my, how that dog loved snow! When I would bundle up and head to the garage for the shovel, Boomer would stand anxiously inside the door, quivering with anticipation until I said "OK". Then out he would go into the snow- running, sniffing, rolling.  I have always loved snow- the way it sounds, and the way the world feels- and it almost seemed like Boomer felt the same way. But I suspect that what he really loved was that for him, it erased his boundaries. If I didn’t keep an eye on them, I would look up and this dog, who would sit all day by an open gate without venturing out, would be sniffing happily 5 or 6 houses down the street with Rocket, his partner in crime.
    "Get back here, you morons!" I would shout and he would bound back happily with no sense of guilt for having broken the rules. I guess snow covered up the boundary lines.
   He loved to run, and he loved the wind. No matter the weather, Boomer wanted to be outside. Wild weather brought wild smells, perhaps. Aussies have very long hair on their legs and haunches. Boomer’s long hair was straw-colored, and we called it his grass skirt.  I loved to see him standing outside, muzzle into the wind, with his "skirt" blowing wildly. The only time he didn’t want to be out was when it thundered. Then he would run upstairs and lay down beside my bed, in his safety spot, and pant until the thunder passed.

   Boomer would jump over poles or chase a frisbee, but he most loved to play with his black rubber kong toy. We would throw it and he would tear after it and bring it back to us… eventually. First he would blow past at top speed just a foot or so away, daring- begging you to leap on him and try to wrestle it away from him. He would give it to you at once if you gave him the command "drop it!" but he seemed to have so much more fun taunting you with it that often I would lunge forward as if I was going to try to grab it, just so he could gleefully evade my reach.
    Our other dog, Rocket, would get incredibly excited by all this. He wouldn’t chase the kong, but would chase Boomer, and run alongside, barking at him all the way down and back. Apparently Boomer found this annoying: from time to time he would veer off course and head-butt Rocket along the way, bowling him over. Then Boomer would resume his run back to me with the toy, unencumbered by his critic.
   He posessed great loyalty, energy and dignity, but he could also be very funny. Just his sheer zest for life would make you smile. Sometimes we called Boomer our "cow dog" because he had a habit of making a low rumbling sound of contentment that was more like a moo than anything else. He often made this sound while he rolled over and rutched himself back and forth on his shoulder blades, feet flopping in the air. Then he would flip to his belly and, hind legs dragging out behind, would pull himself in a dog’s version of an army crawl across the grass, or through the snow, to the great amusement of any watching.

   Life with Boomer wasn’t always easy, of course. When he was young, Boomer liked to chew things: logs from the firewood pile, the legs on the kitchen chairs, the uprights on the deck railing, the legs off Katie’s Barbie dolls. Once I spied him coming up from the basement and he just had a guilty look- you know how dogs get. They duck their head a little and there’s something about the eyebrows- you just know they know they were up to no good. I ran down to to the family room and found that Boomer had eaten a chair.
    My dad had an older, kind of tweedy recliner that he didn’t want any more, and my sister Becky had called dibs on it. But Becky didn’t have room in her house, so we were "babysitting" it until such time and she had the space. Well now it had no seat. Fortunately (for himself  and the chair) Boomer hadn’t actually ingested the chair- just dismantled it in great chunks. I glued in as much as I could of the foam chunks, covered it with quilt batting and spent over an hour sitting on the floor with needle and carpet thread, reweaving the cushion cover. From time to time Boomer would poke his head around the top of the stairs, I would glower at him and he would disappear again.

   Boomer was the nemesis of squirrels, stray cats, possums and woe betide the bunny that ventured under the fence! More than once I had to dispose of the remains of his keen hunting instinct. Squirrels would sometimes taunt him, I swear, chattering from the rooftop while he ran in lathered circles, barking at the house. When I would open the door and order him to be quiet he would look at me in confusion.
       Don’t you understand? You’re in danger!
He even got so zealous about protecting the yard that he chased birds from the feeder. In vain I tried to explain to him that they were supposed to be there: to him they were interlopers. And yet, I have seen him lay there and take all manner of abuse from puppies without a whimper. He just knew the difference. Or maybe, it was because he recognized that they were babies.
    When Boomer was still pretty young, I babysat my nephew Anthony every day. When Anthony could not yet crawl  I would settle him in on a big cushion with some toys and leave the room for a minute. This bothered Boomer quite a bit. He would pace back and forth from me to the baby, me to the baby:
   Why are you away from the little one?
When I returned I almost always found him curled up beside Anthony: on guard, no doubt, in case a squirrel somehow made its way indoors and attacked.
    Boomer was a pretty laid-back dog (when no kong or squirrel was in sight) but we knew he was always on guard. Katie was nervous at night when she was younger, but said that she would remind herself that Boomer was asleep either against the front door or in the hall right outside her room, and it made her feel safe. I confess that when Ted was gone, his presence across the front door was very reassuring to me as well.

   I awoke with a groan this morning from an unsettling dream- I was dreaming that Boomer was dieing, and the nurses asked me if I wanted to them to save a part of the sternum and ribs that people sometimes used from dogs to make clocks, and I said yes, I had decided to make a grandfather clock out of Boomer. (?)  I opened my eyes and looked at the clock- 6:15 AM. Just 4 hours since we had had Boomer put to sleep.

   Last spring, just as the lilacs were in full bloom, Boomer developed a cough. No other symptoms, just an occasional cough when he laid down, but as a former nurse, I immediately suspected CHF. He was 12 1/2 years old, after all, and while he seemed in robust good health, it was a possibility. I took him to the vet. He took an x-ray, and came back and said to me "Your dog has a very big heart"
    I sighed. "Yes, he truly does. But I don’t think you mean that in a good way, do you?"
    The diagnosis was an enlarged heart with severe valve disease. He was started on lasix to clear out the fluid, and a heart medication. The cough almost disappeared, and Boomer was still the grand old man of the neighborhood, dashing around the yard like a puppy… when we would let him. I was afraid to throw the kong more than once or twice for him for fear he would run himself to death before my eyes. Not that he would have minded going that way, I guess.

    It was just hard to believe that he was as sick as they said he was! We have friends who had dogs they had to carry in and out of the house by Boomers age, but if he spotted a squirrel making a break for the feeder, Boomer was still out the door and in the yard without bothering with any of the 4 steps between the deck and the grass. He could still catch a fly off the living room window. Sure he seemed to pant longer than he used to after exertion, but who doesn’t? But sometimes, when I was brushing his beautiful white ruff on his chest, I could feel his heart beating very hard, and I knew it was trying to compensate for those bad valves.
   He was enrolled in a heart drug study at the local veterinary hospital where all the doctors and techs just loved his sweet nature. (Boomer used to kiss them while they were drawing blood). I would drive him over once a month for an hour or two of ultrasounds and blood work, and at the end of the 6 month study they pronounced him ill but remarkably stable, and sent him on his way with some nice expensive medicine.
       He began eating less, so mealtimes were a bit of a chore, what with all the pills and then mixing wet food in with the dry to make the pills taste good, and keeping Rocket from pilfering the food- and possibly pills- from Boomer’s bowl. Because he was on lasix he now had to sleep in our room with the door closed, so that we would hear him when he wakened and could let him outside to do his business. It was like having a baby again, as he would often get me up 2 or 3 times a night. At least there were no diapers to change.

   One terrible night in January  when I got up with him, I found his breathing was very  labored and he seemed to be in pain . I sat up with him for over 2 hours and finally woke Katie and Ted because I thought we were going to have to have him put to sleep to spare him further pain. But at dawn he finally fell asleep and when he woke he was much more comfortable, and within a day or two was back to his old rambunctious self. And so we waited and we watched, expecting that it could happen again any day, trying to prepare ourselves but knowing all the while that it wouldn’t help when the moment came.

   And when it did come, it wasn’t quite what we thought it would be. We realized that he had  internal bleeding, so we took him in to the emergency clinic around 10:45 last night. Katie left her friend’s house and drove there to meet us. They took films and said there was definitely something going on in the abdomen, but also his heart was now in atrial fibrillation. As soon as the doctor said that, I knew that the end had come. There was no way they could really try to address whatever was causing the bleeding when his heart was in danger of stopping just from the fluids they needed to give him. And so we made the decision that every pet owner knows they may have to make some day.
     They took us to a quiet room with sofas and chairs and brought Boomer in. He had an IV shunt taped to his leg so they could administer the final drugs. He wagged his stump in relief at seeing us, sniffed us all and then spent the next 5 minutes of our time together anxiously trying to convince us to take him home- going back and forth from us to the door, sniffing around the door frame and then looking back at us.
     Come on, you guys know how to make this thing open! Let’s get out of here!
    We tearfully called him back to us, petted him and gave him a few final words. We told him what a wonderful friend he had been and how we would never forget him.

    "I- I wish he looked sick" Ted confessed. "I know this is the right thing to do… I just wish he looked like he needed us to do it." The doctor gathered her syringes.  I put one arm around Boomer’s neck and the other around his chest. I could feel his great heart, so big in so many ways, just thundering now inside his body, trying desperately to cope with the demands of his heart disease, hypovolemia, and anxiety.
    "You’re almost done now, big dog" I whispered, and nodded to her. First she gave him a sedative, and in just a few seconds I felt him relax, and then his feet start to slip. Ted and I lowered him gently to the blanket they had placed on the floor and we all stroked his fur. "It’s Ok, you can just go to sleep" we told him, and after only a few  seconds more, he did. That frantic hammering of his heart stilled at last, and the doctor collected her empty syringes.
   "I’ll give you a few minutes."

    We sat and stroked his fur gently while we wept. I remembered aloud the first day we brought him home, and Katie wondered how little Rocket would deal with the loss of his life’s companion. Ted said that he wants to get another dog soon, if everyone was in agreement. I shrugged, too numb to think about it.
    After a minute or two we got to our feet.  It was 2:15 AM: we’d been at the hospital for hours and we were all exhausted. We walked to the door and I opened it… and we looked  back, realizing that Boomer was never going to trot out after us again. Somehow, leaving him there, walking through that door and out into the night without him was much, much harder than giving the go-ahead to administer the drugs had been. I had a last glimpse of him lying there- my rambunctious dog, so still and alone, and I felt my heart break inside me.
   Katie, holding a fistfull of tissues to her face, scurried ahead of us to her car. "Go with her" Ted said. "I don’t want her driving by herself right now." And so the two of us rolled through the early morning, talking about things we remembered about him and crying.
     "Didn’t Julie and Craig have to put their dog Babes to sleep on the day after Easter?" I asked.
     "Yeah, why?" She considered for a moment. "Oh. It’s the day after Easter by now."
    We rode in silence a bit longer. "You know," she said, " I never quite believed in heaven or anything before, but now… I really hope there is a heaven, and that dogs get to go there. At least Boomer should."
   "If there is such a thing as a spirit, Boomer had one, as surely as you or I" I agreed. "Dogs may not be just like people, but there is some connection between people and dogs… I don’t think it’s just in our minds. I think it’s more than that, like we were made to be together."
    "He just seems too… real, too connected  for us never in any way to be with him again!"  she wept.
   That is the cry of everyone who has lost someone beloved: This just can’t be the end! If this is really is forever- what was the point? That’s a truth I guess we all have to resolve for ourselves in the quiet of our own hearts. If there is a life in spirit after life on earth, do dogs share it? I don’t know. There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

   All I know is this: we had this dog, and his name was Boomer. He was one of us- he completed us in a way we didn’t know we needed completing. He was our guardian and companion, our court jester and disciple. And he was the best dog there ever was.

Crisis averted!  Supermom saves the world yet again!
Film at 11:00.

     This is the on-going story of Katie and the 3,000 word essay. I think, before it’s all done, telling it may take considerably more than 3,000 words.

    Ted and I were in bed asleep last night when Katie came home from her cast party, and I was awakened by the sound of her obviously upset, crying. (I still waken quickly at the sound of a crying child.)  I found her in her room in tears, turning out her pockets, and she sobbed out her story.
   Quick background:  Katie has to write a 3,000 word essay  about her senior theater project for her International Baccalaureat diploma. It is worth 1/4 of her theater grade for IB, so it’s a big deal, and messing it up could harm her chances of getting that diploma she has worked so hard for. The seniors were told by their theater teacher that the paper was due in early May. And then Friday, as they were gearing up for that night’s performance of the school musical, the teacher told them "Oh wait- it turns out that paper is due Monday. Sorry."
     Sorry? You’re sorry?

    As you can imagine, students were hyperventilating right and left. Since the paper is for the IB portfolio, the teacher doesn’t have any real latitude on the due date. They have to be mailed off to Venezuela or wherever to be graded by the mysterious and all- powerful grand high Poobahs of International Baccalaureate. The teachers, confronted no doubt with a row of tear-streaked faces, decided they could put the due date off until Wednesday morning if they express shipped them, but that was the very best they could do. And of course the kids all have the play Friday and Saturday nights.
    Once her initial panic was over, Katie, being an eager beaver, sat down with my little laptop and wrote over half of her essay Saturday afternoon.  She saved it onto a flash drive rather than onto my laptop, so she could also work on it on the other computer. She had a really early call for the play and figured she’d end up sitting around a lot, so she tucked the flashdrive and my computer into her messenger bag, grabbed her other stuff and off she went. As it happened, she never had an opportunity to use the computer. When she got home after the cast party she went to unpack her gear and discovered that the flashdrive was not in the messenger bag. This is where I found her.

    "My paper is gone!!" she sobbed. "It was like half-written! It must have fallen out of my bag at the theatre!! But the building is locked now, and I can’t wait until Monday for them to unlock the building to do more work on my paper! All that work is wasted!!"  She was literally pulling at her hair, distressed, distraught, disconsolate.

   Well, it was bad news for sure but, being parents, we were not nearly as impressed with the apocalyptic nature of the situation as she wanted us to be. However, being parents, we got out of bed, turned on the lights and rolled up our sleeves anyway. I told her (uselessly) to calm down and started to looking around the house  in case it never made it to the theater while Ted turned on my laptop to see if he could find any traces of the paper on it.
    "I didn’t save it on there!" she protested.
    "Nevertheless" he said, and proceeded to do… that thing he does with computers, which looks so much like what I do and yet is utterly different. Sure enough, he unearthed a partial copy which the computer had made when she accidentally closed it down w/o saving at some point. Apparently the computer does an emergency back-up in such instances, but you have to know where to find it, and super-dad knew.  It was only about half of what she had written, but it was a good beginning.

   So, doom at least half-mitigated, Katie was able to take a deep breath and realized that perhaps her entire last 2 years of school work were not a crash and burn after all.  She called her theater teacher right away and asked her if she could meet her at the school this morning and let her in to look for the thing. ("Which she damn well can!" I thought, as she was the one who messed up the dates to begin with) Visions of me on my hands and knees with a flashlight, crawling row by row through the auditorium were dancing in my head. What fun!
     Meanwhile I kept looking. Katie was resogned that all that could be done had been and went upstairs to brush her teeth for bed while I stood in the living room and did a "Monk". I surveyed the room slowly and envisioned Katie putting the computer in the bag, and probably setting it down while she gathered other things… where would she have put it?… I walked over to the big chair near the front door and lifted the small pile of folded laundry that was on the seat, shook them carefully…. and a small blue flashdrive slid out onto the cushion.
     I caught my breath. How many blue flashdrives do we have in this house? I wondered. How would I know? I’ve never even used one.  I slid it under the bathroom door, knocked, and told Katie to look down.
     "Oh my God where did you find it??!" she shrieked (and dropped a blob of toothpaste out of her mouth)

   Crisis averted, flashdrive found, supermom saves world once again! Ted popped it in my laptop and verified that it was the right one and had the paper on it, then promptly transfered the file to 3 different computers so that if we woke up this morning and poltergeists had crashed one of them during the night, she could still retrieve it from another machine.
     "Well, who has the greatest parents in the world?" I asked my smiling daughter as I finally went upstairs to go to back to bed at 12:30.
     "Pretty much me" she said.
     "Pretty much you?" Huh.

      All I can say it- thank goodness I use my powers only for good!