Good Dog. Stay.
I received a precious gift from my parents recently. A first edition book by Anna Quindlen called Good Dog. Stay.
Last night I read the whole book. Yep, a whole book. Granted, it’s not a long book, but considering how much of my “reading” is digital these days it felt like quite the accomplishment.
Falling asleep after a good cry must be better than Tylenol P.M. as I overslept my alarm by at least an hour. And those of you who have lost a “fur child” know just how deeply they touch you. I still feel like our dear Jackson is with us, it’s been over a year, right around the time I started this blog…and we have a new dog (below)–but I still think of him every day.
The last page of the book brought me to bittersweet tears. The author writes about what she learned in the course of her old dog’s (Beau) life of 15 years (which is pretty long for a lab)
“Starting out I thought that life was terribly complex, and in some ways it is, But contentment can be pretty simple.
And that’s what I learned from watching Beau over his lifetime: to roll with the punches, to take things as they come, to measure myself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise my nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically holler, “I smell bacon!” I’m not what I once was, and neither by the end was he.
Sometimes an old dog teaches you new tricks.”