"If there are not dogs in Heaven,
then when I die I want to go where they went."
-- Will Rogers
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| Mama 7-14-14 |
"Here I wait, for my friend who's late.
I will stay, just to walk beside you for one more day."
-- Jess C. Scott, Skins, Animal Stories
I'm not a real "dog person."
But I dearly love a couple of people who dearly love their dogs.
Fortunately, those couple of people happen to have remarkable dogs that are easy for me to love as well.
This is my mom's really good dog, Mama.
My God, this dog.
She's about as close as any dog has ever come to making me into a dog person.
Call it dumb luck, a happy coincidence, kismet or karma -- Mama was a stray who ran into my mother's backyard several years ago and never left.
The two of them look after each other in the most remarkably beautiful way.
I got to visit them both yesterday at my mom's house in Michigan.
As Mama was lolling on the patio, panting and exhausted from chasing her Chuckit! ball around in the afternoon heat, Mom said, rather tenderly and wistfully, "She's been a good, good friend."
And then there was just this quiet moment.
We kind of let those few words hang there in the atmosphere for a while as we appreciated the pure, simple truth of them -- as we appreciated the pure, simple goodness of a really good dog.
There was nothing more to say.
