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foggidawn
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Name: foggidawn
Gender: Female
Interests: Eastern Orthodoxy, theatre, writing, reading, hiking, singing, gardening, dogs, and lots of other stuff that doesn't come immediately to mind.
Expertise: Yikes. At 28, I would not consider myself an expert at anything, except perhaps making a fool of myself. I'm really good at that.
Occupation: Librarian
Industry: Library & Information Science
Message: message me
AIM:  foggidawn
Member Since:
4/29/2006
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| I was talking about my dog today. We had "Bring Your Dog to Work" day at my place of employment, and I was playing tug-of-war with 10-month-old Berkeley. "Oh, I'm so glad you like dogs," my coworker remarked.
As I pulled on one end of Berkeley's rope toy, I was irresistibly reminded of another rambunctious puppy who would hold on to the end of her rope like it was her only lifeline. "It's been years since my dog would play tug," I told the person standing next to me. And then I told her a little bit about my Joy.
I don't have puppy pictures of Joy. when Joy came to live with us, I was 13, and didn't have a reliable camera. Indeed, at 13, my strong and continuing aversion to cameras (and to being photographed) was just beginning. And none of the family had a digital camera -- back in 1993, we were on the technological cutting edge because we had e-mail! At any rate, all of Joy's puppy pictures live in my memory.
Puppies are adorable, overly-saccharine-sweet all, and Springer puppies perhaps most of all. Courtney, our family dog when I was a young child, had been a Springer, and we knew that was the breed we wanted. When Mom get news of a litter of Springer puppies for sale in a town a few hours away, we piled into the car with a cardboard box lined with old towels, to fetch "our" puppy. When we got to the breeder's house, all of the puppies were adorable, tumbling about, playing with each other, cuddling with their mother . . . except for one, an independent soul who was halfway across the yard, exploring the marigolds in the flowerbed. That was our Joy -- the name seemed immediately obvious. We arranged to take her home, and she cried the whole way. No amount of petting and comforting would console her. My father remarked that the dog didn't know it, but she had just landed in Dog Nirvana. In the months to come, my brother and I carried her more than she walked. She became our "furry sister" in so many ways. (Including ways that involved drinking out of my cup if I wasn't paying attention.)
As she grew, her personality developed. She loved to be the center of attention. When given a bone, she would bring it in to the living room where the family was gathered to read or watch TV. She would plop down in the center of the room and begin a demonstration of bone-chewing techniques for our edification and entertainment, sure that we were there strictly for the purpose of watching her. She was extremely intelligent, creating a morning routine that involved waking Mom, bringing her slippers, then taking hold of the belt of her robe and pulling her out to the kitchen to make breakfast. When breakfast was nearly done, Mom would give the command to "Go get Daddy!" and Joy would be off to the bedroom, leaping on the bed and nosing at the covers until Dad would get up. Joy would herd him to the table, jumping and barking and fussing if he made any detours (which he occasionally did, just to irritate her) until he got to the table. For her efforts, she would get a scrap of toast, or maybe a bite of bacon or sausage . . . but she was convinced that the routine would fall to pieces without her involvement.
Joy was Dad's dog -- she loved us all, but Dad was the one she listened to. When Dad would come home, she would jump on the couch or attempt to climb into his lap wherever he was sitting, demanding attention. She always retained that independent spirit that first attracted her to us -- she knew what "Come!" meant, but she would only obey if she really felt like it . . . unless Dad was calling. She was not much of a snuggler, but would cuddle with Dad. If she was, as I've said, my furry sister, she was the spoiled baby sister that we all loved and were exasperated with by turns -- and she loved and was exasperated with all of us. She loved to ride in the car, unless that car ride involved a trip to the vet (and she had that canine ESP that told her when those visits were coming). She hated baths, and would run around afterwards furiously rubbing her nose and ears on the carpet to get the water out, then sulking out of reach until she was dry, giving us the Evil Eye.
It's been good to remember Joy as a puppy, as a young dog. Sometimes it feels like all of my memories of Joy are old-lady-dog memories from the last months of her life -- though, until she was 12 or so, she generally acted like a puppy, at least at times. I never expected to be the one who was with her until the very end, but life is nothing if not unpredictable. Last summer, my parents moved to Russia (as those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know). Joy, at that point a dignified senior citizen, came to live with me in my one-bedroom apartment. I worried about her being confined to a smaller space than usual, but it quickly became evident that the apartment was really all the space she needed -- especially since, a couple of months after moving in with me, it became apparent that Joy was going blind. The vet confirmed that the cataracts she had been developing for some time had been helped along by canine diabetes, and at that point Joy had almost completely lost her vision. To cope with the diabetes, I learned to give her insulin shots twice a day. Visits to the vet became more frequent as we attempted to regulate her blood sugar. She grew more feeble, but still retained the character of the dog I had grown up with. Most of the pictures I have of Joy are from this time in her life -- and, in most of them, she is sleeping.
During this period in her life, Joy became more tolerant of petting and affection, probably partially because I was the only human she had left, and partially because she didn't have as much energy for posing objections to being picked up and cuddled. I think her last months were happy, and though I knew the end was near, I was glad to have her with me in my lonely apartment.
In March, after several months of fairly good health, she became very ill very quickly. The vet suspects that a tumor was pressing against her brain, or that she had a stroke. It was time to say goodbye. My brother came to be with me during those sad, sad minutes at the vet's office. When they brought her in to see us, she was drugged, but able to recognize us. She licked our hands and we petted her, but it was obvious that only the medication was keeping her from pain. The decision I made that day was hard, but right.
In grieving for Joy, I have put off writing about her. The sad times that I just wrote about consumed my memories for a while, and it was hard to even remember Joy as she was for most of her life -- vigorous, energetic, and a little bit sassy. Now, a few months later, I'll see a dog pulling its owners along on a walk, playing fetch or tug-of-war with a favorite toy, and I'll think of the happy times. Joy loved going for walks, and can be credited with helping Mom and me get into the best shape we've been in, before or since, by her insistence on them. She loved begging for treats from the table -- "I don't know why this dog begs in this disgraceful manner," Dad would joke, slipping her a bite of meat from his plate. She loved chasing the chipmunks that lived under the woodpile at my grandparents farm, though I don't think she would have had a clue what to do if she had caught one.
Most of all, she loved us, and we loved her. It seems cruel, at times, that dogs' lives are so much shorter than ours, but the time that our family had with Joy was a blessing, worth all of the pain at the end. Our lives are richer for having known her.
She lived up to her name.
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| I know I haven't updated this week. A lot of things haven't happened this week.
As some of you already know, I had to make the difficult decision to have my sweet dog put to sleep last Tuesday morning. This is a very difficult time for me, so I would appreciate your thoughts and prayers. I want to write about her, but the emotions are still too raw. Perhaps soon.
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| Of the New Testament writers, John is my favorite.
I've been thinking about John's writing style lately. I subscribe to a podcast that gives me the daily Scripture readings of my church, and lately the epistle readings have been from I John. Today, the Gospel reading was also from John, so a double dose.
Of the four gospels in the canon, John's is different from any of the others. They each have their own flavor, of course. Mark's came first, and is shortest and roughest -- to me, Mark is like a journalist, or the biographer who latches onto his subject and publishes with breathless haste while the topic is still hot. Mark wanted to get the word out, and he did it fastest. Matthew, on the other hand, wrote for a target audience. He wrote for those like him, who had grown up in Judaism and perhaps didn't understand the hoopla about this Nazarene who had gotten everyone so worked up. Matthew pays careful attention to Old Testament ties and genealogy. And then there was Luke, who was meticulous in his attention to detail -- his is the longest, and since he was probably the only native Greek speaker of the three, his is the most polished writing. When I studied ancient Greek in college, Luke was our textbook.
Those three -- Matthew, Mark, and Luke -- are called the synoptic gospels. This basically means that they were written close to the same time, and their accounts tally closely with one another.
And then, along came John. His gospel differs from the other three -- it doesn't contradict them, it expands upon them. John came later, and he filled in the gaps. "You want to know more?" John asks. "I was there," he says. "Here's what I saw. Here's what I heard." Modestly, he never refers to himself by name, but from the other accounts, we know that the "certain young man" mentioned occasionally is John, himself.
John's writing is simpler than Luke's. I remember one Greek class, when we shifted from Luke to John's first epistle. It was glorious! Suddenly, I could translate whole sentences without the lexicon! John uses deceptively simple vocabulary -- "light," "bread," "love," "truth." Words any child can understand, the simplest of metaphors, the clearest of language. And then, when you stop and think about it, the deepest of meanings.
I have great fondness for the character of John. Some people relate to the fiery Peter, to Paul's dramatic conversion, to Mary Magdalene's deep and emotional faith. All of them are inspiring, but I am most encouraged by John. We see him in the Gospels as one of the younger disciples, sometimes rash, sometimes cowardly, sometimes a little bit arrogant. He was one of the sons of Zebedee, and he and his brother James were called "Sons of Thunder" -- I think the rest of the disciples probably saw those two brothers scrapping with one another, as well as standing together against antagonists. John is one of the ones who had his mother ask Jesus if her boys could sit on his right and his left when he came into his kingdom. John is also the kid who ran away in the garden, so scared that when a guard grabbed his clothes, he left them behind and fled naked.
And then there's the mature John, who wrote the fourth gospel, three epistles, and the book of Revelation. He lived longest of any of the disciples, and though he underwent torture and imprisonment, he was the only one to die a natural death. John's message to us can be summed up in one word: love. "Little children," he says, "love one another."
Maturity is a long road. I remember wanting to be "grown up" -- who doesn't? What I didn't realize is that it doesn't all come at once. There's no magic age where you suddenly start acting like an adult, where you put away the childish outbursts of temper, where you no longer cry when you're tired and giggle when you're excited -- or if there is, I haven't hit it yet. But I look at John's long life, at the young disciple he was, at the mature man of faith who penned those letters, at the aged saint who had that vision on the rock, and though my faith is like a grain of salt beside his, it gives me hope. "Love one another," he says.
I'm willing to try.
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| (Sounds like the title of a Mercer Mayer Little Critter book!)
Today was just pleasant -- I got a few things accomplished, relaxed a good bit, and didn't go to work because of the ice storm. I watched Into the Woods, and found it amusing but mildly disturbing (it is Sondheim, after all). Of course, such days don't leave a lot to write about! I'm still feeling unmotivated about a lot of things, but I suspect that the answer to that problem is to get up, away from the computer, and do stuff. *sigh* In the meantime, I think I'll go check my email again. . . .
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| So, if you mail a package to Russia in late November, said package might just arrive by mid-February.
I had mentally written off the Christmas package I sent to my parents. No, I did not insure it. Why? Because I am "stupid, stupid, stupid," to quote a failure card from Kill Dr. Lucky. I will do so in the future. But it arrived undamaged, if slightly later than I had expected!
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