I always check

I always check on what people are reading on Under the Castor Oil Tree. I noticed today that several people had read a post from 2010. So I read it. And almost wept. Dogs make me weepy. And Luke, the dog, truly did.

Thought I'd share it with you again.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Luke

Luke Plunski--Luke the dog--died today.

He was Michael's dog first...saved Mike's life once and made Mike's life so much finer, brighter, happier. Then, after Michael died Luke became JoAnn's dog, saved her life in a different way, making it possible to move on after her son's death.

I'll never forget how someone with great good sense allowed Luke to be in Michael's hospital room during his last illness--even in Intensive Care. Mike had lost both his legs to his disease and Luke was his legs for him. Mike didn't take up the whole bed, so Luke would lay where Mike's legs should have been had the world been kinder. Sometimes a medical person would come in and be horrified to see a dog in a hospital bed. Luke would just look at them with those endlessly deep brown eyes and most of the time, the person would just melt.

Luke made you melt. He was a Golden Retriever and a beauty of one. How could you resist that look that said--"I'm laying here where I belong, next to my human...."

Luke became a therapy dog after Michael died and brought joy to hundreds and hundreds of people in hospitals and nursing homes. He was never assertive, always patient, always waiting for the human to make the first advance. And as gentle as a spring breeze, as sweet as the smell of honeysuckle, as healing as magic chicken soup.

He always came up to communion with Jo, mostly because he knew his job was to be near her always and he did his job to perfection. And one day, his great head leaning against the altar rail, I simply gave him communion--just a wafer like everyone else. After that, he was my great, good friend. If I'd forget and someone else gave out the bread on that side of the altar rail, I'd glace over and he'd be looking at me with those eyes that made me melt and I'd feel like I'd been rude to the Christ Child...which isn't far from true. Luke was about as Christ-like as any creature I've known.

I suppose some people might have objected to my giving him communion--but I never asked and, most likely, wouldn't have cared. It was only right and proper and in good order.

When Jo and Luke got into the library on Sunday mornings for the adult forum--they were there almost every week for years--he'd want to come greet me. Jo would give him his short little leash which he would carry in his mouth and he'd come to say hello. (He'd also take the chance to roll on the Library rug, but who can blame him for that?) It was one of the highlights of every Sunday, that little lick and rubbing against me.

My grandmother divided the world into two distinct groups "church people" and people who, well, were not 'church people'. I tend to divide the world into 'dog people' and everyone else. Loving a dog is like holding your heart in your hand and feeling it beat for a while. You all know the "DOG"/"GOD" stuff...well, I'm not sure it isn't true.

Lord I will miss him....

Jo held him as he died. I've held dogs as they've died and there is very little more profound and humbling than that. The pain of a dog's death is sharper and cleaner than even the deaths of people you love. I don't know anyone who, when someone they love dies, doesn't have some unfinished business or some guilt or some unanswered questions...mixed up stuff. With a dog, it's just pain. You know they never blamed you for anything, were never disappointed in you, never thought you should change your ways....they simply, purely loved you. Just like you are. Just like that. That's a Dog/God thing--there is no other creature besides a dog who can find that Agape Love, that redemptive Love, that Love that knows no bounds, that love that mimics God's love for each of us.

I weep for Luke tonight...but more for Jo. I know the pain she feels. I've been blessed and privileged and made a better person by the love of dogs....

Soon I will HAVE the picture I wish I had....

I heard from several people about my last post. (Thank you all for reading and responding with images of the Collie and the Lamb.) The first was Mike Miano, my old high-school and college friend. (Mike and I, along with Mike Lawless and Doc Lykins, lived one year at every college boy's wet dream address: 69 Richwood Avenue. I kid you not.)

Several folks sent me pictures of the picture but Charles Dimmick sent me a link to a place where I could buy it. And I did. Just a few days now. I even have a hook all ready beneath the three plaques that are on the right frame of the window directly behind my computer when I can glance up at any time into the trees and sky.

The plaques, from top to bottom, are 1) a rather drunken looking face projecting out of the plaque with  the words "In Vino Veritas" ('in wine, truth'); 2) a small plaque in graved with "SHALOM" ('Peace' in Hebrew, though the Hebrew means so much more than 'peace': it means wholeness, completeness, everything included and in harmony); 3) another plaque with raised letters saying, "VOCATVS atque non VOCATVS Deus aderit", which means, in translation, "Summoned or not Summoned, God is present (there)."

Just below that is a hook where something else important to me hung which I doubtless gave to someone, probably the last deacon to work with me, as a priestly ordination gift. I tended over the years, to give gifts to those being ordained of things precious to me rather than something new. I think they 'got it' when I did that.

So my picture of the collie and the lamb will hang there, just at eye level as I type, to remind me that, on whole, I had the kind of childhood everyone, simply everyone, should have--never struck in anger, never shamed or belittled, always kept safe, loved by two large extended families, in a town where everyone knew everyone else, able to roam the mountains until dark most summer days, nurtured and well-educated. It should be like that for all children and as I look at the collie and the lamb I will wish that for all children, truly.

The Left window frame is taken up by (if you are interested) a rather large Native American  Dream Catcher my daughter gave me.. On the top of the window that could go up is my high school yearbook photo and a photo of Bern when she was in her 20's. We grow old, we grow old--and I do need to wear my trousers rolled since the heel of my shoe catches on most of my long pants. I shrink. But there in the window, Bern and I are ageless but young....

The print of the collie and lamb is attributed to either Albrect Schenck or Walter Hunt and is either called "Collie and Lamb" or "Shepherd's Call". No one is quite sure. But if I wanted I could get it on greeting cards. I might just do that someday.

I'm waiting, not too patiently for it. When it comes, I'm off to find a frame....

The picture I wish I had....

I'm still looking at all those black and white photos my cousin sent me from Aunt Elsie's collection. I had a post about them back on June 26, I believe it was.

The one I've been pondering today is of me and my parents. It was taken in our apartment in Anawalt--the place I spent my first 18 years.

(I just realized I have no idea 'who' took the photo. It's just me and my mom and dad--our little tribe--in the photo. Who took it?)

There's a date on it--January 1959. I was 11. My mother was 48 and my father 51.

Dad is sitting on 'his' chair--it was red, if I remember correctly. Mom is on the arm to his right and I'm on the arm to his left. Mom is dressed in dark 'work' clothes but with a white, no collar top. Her hair is sort of frizzy--as mine is from time to time--but she is thinner than she is in my memory.

My father is thinner that my memory as well. And, so am I, for that matter. The heavy family I remember wasn't so heavy as I remembered! Actually, we all look kind of average weight. Huh! That's odd.

Dad has on a white dress shirt and dark slacks. His hair hasn't turned a bit gray though my mother has a streak or two. Dad is not smiling--no surprise there--when he did smile it looked fake anyway. Mom has the slight upturned lips I remember from her always. Neither of my parents were prone to laughter. They both had hard lives. But they were always, always gentle with me. That I know and know fair well.

I have a buzz cut--as I had in those days. Ray, down at the barber shop a block from our apartment took about 90 seconds to cut my hair! I have on a long sleeved striped shirt like many of the shirts I remember from my childhood. I was partial to stripes. Now I seldom wear them. Solids for me now that I am almost two decades older than Virgil and Cleo in that photo,

Dad's chair was by the door to the kitchen so, in the photo, you can see into the kitchen and see the coal stove we had there. Our apartment had no central heat so we heated with coal and cooked with coal, mostly. We did have an electric stove as well for important meals. My father NEVER cooked and my mother was only passing fair. I didn't know she couldn't cook when I was 11, obviously.

But here's the thing that haunts me: behind my head, on the wall in the photo is a picture I wish I had. It was always there in my childhood. Not always where it is in this photo but somewhere in our apartment and then in my parents' house in Princeton. (When I went to college they bought a real house in a much larger town 30 miles and two mountains away from Anawalt.)

In the picture there is a young sheep lying still in the snow and above the lamb is a collie, snout up in the air, calling for help.

I wish I had that picture. I would hang it in the office where I'm typing this. I would look at it every day and remember my childhood.

That picture haunts me. I long to have it. It was omni-present in my young life. I just wish I had it in my latter years. Really.

Already, two months early, I ponder...

I write Bern a poem for each of our anniversaries. I don't know when it started--a decade or more ago, I'm sure. Our anniversary--#47 this September 5--will cause me to ponder a great deal. I sometimes do stuff like have each line begin with the letters of the alphabet that spell out the number. This year would be F-O-R-T-Y-S-E-V-E-N--like that.

I have time to ponder and write.

Here's last's years 'almost' poem.

The Poem I Can’t Write

For days now I’ve been trying

to write a poem that just won’t come.

It’s for our anniversary and about my love,

so it should flow out without any effort,

since I love you so very much.

But the poem is hiding from me,

peeking at me from around the corner,

avoiding me at all cost, it seems.

Page after page I throw away

(or, more accurately, erase from my computer).

Forty-six years of marriage (and years before that)

of loving you—the words should pour out,

full of passion and wonder and amazement.

This time I realized something,

my love for you isn’t something ‘out there’,

that I can examine, reflect on, put into words.

That love is in those letters in the attic.

That love has altered, changed, become incarnate.

The love I feel for you is, quite simply, me.

I am my love for you. It is my very ‘being’

That cannot be captured and enclosed in words.

That is ‘who I am’. So, I am your poem.

This poem is ‘me’, my very being, the “I” I call myself.

I am yours. Your anniversary poem….

September 5, 2016

trumping Trump

OK, you already know about it but I'm going to say it again: the state of New Jersey hasn't passed a budget and shut down certain parts of the government, including the tourist centers, the state beaches and vital statistics. So, don't plan to find out what to do in New Jersey or go to a public beach or get a birth certificate over the 4th of July holiday.

But Gov. Chis Christie and his extended family took a state helicopter to a state owned house on a state public beach so he and his family could enjoy the sun and waves and breezes that no one else in New Jersey could because THE BEACH WAS CLOSED!!!

The shear arrogance and hypocrisy of a governor going somewhere that was closed to the rest of the citizens of his state 'on his watch' is breath-taking. And his explanation is only better--he had said he was going there with his family before the state shut-down.

"So the press found out a politician was where he said he would be with who he said he would be with," Christie said on (where else) Fox News, "I'm sure they'll get a Pulitzer for that....."

Take 3 deep breaths and think of the place you love most in the world (as long as it's not a state beach or park in New Jersey) and then lean into his answer to why he, the frigging Governor, was somewhere he, as Governor, said no other tax paying citizen of his state could be this weekend.

Probably more deep breaths and happy thoughts are necessary....

Even the Republican who is going to run to replace him as governor of New Jersey was appalled by the whole thing.

Pity Christie doesn't tweet (that I know of).

He might give Trump a run for his money.....

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that, even with my bum knees, I can run if I have to.

The bad news is that this afternoon, I had to run.

Bad Dog Bela, 12 and hating the heat with a passion, was supposedly on our afternoon walk around the neighborhood.  In actuality, what he was doing was turning around and trying to get me to turn around and go home and what I was doing was mostly dragging him. On this afternoon's walk/drag down Cornwall Avenue and down the driveway to the Congregational Church's parking lot, he turned around so much that he got his choke collar hopelessly tangled to the point it was choking him all the time and I had to take it off to untangle it.

When I took it off, he bolted back toward Cornwall Avenue and I had to run about 50 yards before I caught him, leaving behind the cane the physical therapist tells me not to be embarrassed to use if my knee is sore. I did two church services this morning--Higganum at 9 and Killingworth at 10 and before and after and in between drove for nearly an hour. That much standing and driving had my knee a little stiff so I had my cane for Bela's walk/drag.

I did catch him and got his collar back on and went back for the cane after I was sure I wasn't having a heart attack. The heart attack wouldn't have been from the 50 yard dash but from the fear he'd run out into the road if I didn't catch him and get killed in the light Sunday afternoon traffic.

Bad as he is, Bern loves this dog to death and if I'd let him be killed I might just have gone to Canada rather than face her--which would get me away from Trump at any rate.

He is old and even more stubborn that he's always been. I think, though, that he was as surprised as I was that he could run that far that fast. He panted for about an hour later and is sleeping behind me as I write this.

Lordy, Lordy, I wouldn't trade anything for the joy of having him with us for 12 years. But I didn't need that run today, though it is good to know I can do it if I'm terrified enough....

Please, dear God, help us....

I won't even try to describe the last few days of our President's and, unfortunately, our lives. You know all about it if you've been semi-conscious. All the stuff about tweets and Morning Joe and CNN. All that stuff. I don't have to tell you about it.

I want my President to be worrying about, well, 'presidential stuff'--foreign affairs, trade, Russia, health care (in a way that matters), the day to day operations of our massive government infrastructure, roads and bridges, inclusion of immigrants into society, safety, just stuff like that as uninteresting and opposite as it may be to what He-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named cares about.

When our children, Josh and Mimi, were 10 years old, there is no way I would have entrusted them with their day-to-day life without my guidance and the guidance of Bern.

The reason for that is, they would have done the kind of stuff the President does.

And what amazes me most is that, even though people (even Republicans) object to his 10 year old bully ('you called me that I'll call you that!!) behavior, no one is saying 'FRIGING ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!! IT STOPS HERE AND IT STOPS NOW!!!! GO AWAY AND DON'T COME BACK!!!!

Will no one but God save us?

Dear God, please save us......

(By the way, there is very little of true Presidential substance that can be said in 144 characters. Try to put the Gettysburg Address into a tweet.... )