Nice poem, Marsha. Reminds me of a story... On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 12:44 AM, MarshaV <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Can't escape the heat > Disguised as a memory > Howling at the sky > Always chasing almost love that way > Loaded heart in the need to run > Almost always chasing love that way > There's a way you're expected to obey > Don't bite the hand that feeds you > Don't you know what freedom means > Bad dog Bad dog > > --John Trudell, "Bad Dog" > > Lessee... this was back in 1991, I believe. Lu was pregnant with Sarah, our second child and it was a couple of weeks before Christmas. We were living in a caretakers quarters of an incredible mansion - built with gold rush millions and recently refurbished by a real estate developer, guy called Harmon. Martin A. Harmon. A pretty interesting character. Fairly political and some interesting links come up<http://joyfulmolly.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/heritage-wrecker-award-martin-harmon/>if you google him. ( I don't know if that counts as biting the hand that feeds you, but hey, any dog will bite the hand that feeds if the same hand beats you later.) Anyway, I had a dog there I named *Fahrvergnügen *who was a Queensland Heeler cross - a mutt, but a really cool dog. He had this beautiful black and white spotted coat and a handsome face and was the most intelligent dog I'd ever owned. I loved him an awful lot. Anyway, Lu and I were headed to Mexico over Christmas, chaperoning a bunch of college kids from San Luis Obispo on a mission trip and we needed a place to leave Farhf. I asked my ma, who has some acreage and horses if she could take care of him while I was gone, but she pretty adamantly refused so I decided I'd have to leave him home with a big bag of dog food in the garage. Upon deciding this, we went over to my mom's place - her mobile, actually, where Lu is staying now and had our Christmas celebration since we'd be gone through the holiday in Mexico, helping out at an orphanage and building some shacks. I usually took Farhf with me everywhere I went, but since he was going to have to get used to staying on his own, and my ma had made me mad with her rejection of my dog, I left him this time and took his head in my hands and tried to explain that he'd have to be on his own for a bit. When we got back later that night, Fahrf was missing. This was pretty unusual and I was admittedly worried. Especially when he was still gone the next morning. We called the animal shelter, we went searching, but he never showed up. I drove around the neighborhood, and finally figured out a dark patch on the highway (49) at the turn-off might have something to do with my missing dog. I stopped at the patch on the road and inspected it a little closer and sure enough, there were some black-tipped hairs that I matched with the carpet in my VW van where he was wont to curl up and sleep, and it was a perfect match. Mystery solved. He'd never chased after me before, and certainly not out onto busy HWY 49, but I guess something in my demeanor or some instinct told him that I was planning on leaving him behind and he just didn't want to be left. Bad dog indeed. Not long after, we got kicked out of our caretaker position by Mr. Harmon, even though I pleaded to be allowed to stay there just a bit longer since my wife was about to have a baby and we had no place to go, he was pretty adamant and didn't really care about my problems; was more concerned over the proliferation of my puppies in his domain, I'm sure, and we resolved to move into a school bus I'd bought in Santa Cruz, and were just about to do so when the opportunity to move into our own house with no money down in North San Juan, where we stayed for the next 18 years. So it all worked out in the end. But what I remember the most keenly, was the grief I felt over that dog. How I cried, nay, sobbed my guts out that night after I discovered his death by forensically scrapping his hair from 49, how it came over me and astounded Lu, since I'm usually pretty stoic. In fact, I can recall sobbing like that only three times in my life and what seemed to me to trigger it was not my dog's death so much, as thinking about my dad, and how we'd drifted so far apart. The death of my dog had one other effect - On the Mexico trip I got close to the guy who organized it. I noticed something wrong with him, a distance from everyone else and we went out one night and talked and talked. I told him about Farhf and he told me about his beloved older brother who'd killed himself the year before and he talked about being a shephard and the grief that comes with the job, and I talked about the loss of freedom when a coyote decides to be a sheepdog instead. I learned a lot about myself that Christmas. I'll always miss Farhfegnugen. He was a *good* dog while alive. ------------ Yet it is small matter. For if a dog be well remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where the dog sleeps. On a hill where the wind is unrebuked and the trees roaring, or beside a stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pastureland where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog, and all one to you, and nothing is gained and nothing is lost -- if memory lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog. If you bury him in this spot, he will come to you when you call -- come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path, and to your side again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they shall not growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his footfall, who hear no whimper, people who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them, for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is well worth knowing. The one best place to bury a dog is in the heart of his master. (written by Ben Hur Lampman & published in the Sept. 11, 1925 issue of the Portland Oregonian) Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
