A Month of Thanksgiving - November 2, 2012

TODAY I AM THANKFUL FOR: We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance. Sometimes change comes on four legs.

 

Five years ago Chloe’ - my Border collie - came into my life at a time when I wanted – needed – my life to change. She landed in the middle of my struggle for normalcy like a heat-seeking missile. Chloe' is not my whole life but she makes my life whole and for that I am thankful. 

Change . . .

*Written 4 years ago when Chloe' first stormed into my life . . .

Nothing is certain except change itself.

Sometimes change comes on four legs . . .

John Steinbeck once wrote that it is the nature of humans to complain about change. Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better. We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.

Chloe’ wasn’t what I was looking for that day last August. I wasn’t even sure I was doing the right thing – looking for a puppy so soon after Katie’s passing. But there she was – bounding down the dry, dusty gravel hill on a farm outside of Kalamazoo. Her bright blue eyes full of piss and vinegar. Her round body barely keeping up with her chubby legs as clouds of dust rose up around her. She sprang onto my leg and into my heart in one full swoop – I never knew what hit me!

I had just gotten out of the hospital and was looking at a long, up-hill climb to regain my health and my life. The last thing I needed – everyone close to me advised – was a puppy. But I wanted – needed – my life to change. And it certainly did. Chloe’ landed in the middle of my struggle for normalcy like a heat-seeking missile.

Chloe’ is instinctive and dominant, in the way of all well-bred border collies – and explosive. You don’t simply coexist with her – as you can with most dogs – you have to react to her. Like all border collies, she needs work – and like it or not she will invent her own work if not given something productive to do. She somehow knows what annoys me the most and commences to have at it if left alone too long. Eating my zucchini plants is a current favorite “job”.

I have been around dogs enough to know that the problem with dogs is almost always the people who own them. Chloe’ and I are both impulsive, impatient, distractible, and restless. We are also both redheads of Scottish descent. Need I say more?

Recognizing early on that I needed help with Chloe’ – a far greater challenge than I had ever imagined – I started reading books. Books on training, books on border collie history, books on trick learning, books on recognizing “calming signals”. Our coffee table is piled high with dog books.

And then there are the classes. Puppy Head-Start was my very first introduction to the world of the American Kennel Association and its members. Dog People – but a totally different bred of dog people. These are not “pet dog” people. These are serious dog people. I have been told by more than one trainer that I don’t always take my “work” as a handler serious enough (Just when did I transition from being a dog lover to being a dog handler????).

At 11 months Chloe’ is well on her way to becoming a champion Agility Dog. At 52 years I am wise enough to know that I may be the only thing that stands in her way. But I am also confident because the challenge exists to make things better for both of us. I have had other big changes in my life that were more or less second chances – this time change just happened to arrive on four legs.

*Epilogue: We have survived each other! And I have learned so much more than I have taught.

Dogs may not be our whole lives. But they make our lives whole.

- Roger Caras

Spring Cleaning . . .

I am trying to break up. With my past lives.

I am feeling the pressure to trade them in for a more mature, less cluttered one. I am, after all chronically ill, for Pete’s sake – I am expected to be a walking advertisement for one preparing to move into the final phase of a life well-lived. Especially in the material things department.

Except, that over the years I have grown crazily attached to the concept of being prepared. I have tried paring down my stuff in the past – once living the frugal life prescribed by Mother Earth News and the various publications of the Rodale Press. I did, I did – but I just ended up gathering even more paraphernalia, partly because I needed it in order to live “the simple life”, and partly because on the extremely rare occasion I threw anything away, I would find that it would suddenly take on critical importance. It would morph into a life saving tool – a scrap of information clipped from a magazine/a stub of a candle that could be remolded/buttons clipped from shirts turned cleaning rags/a paper written for some college course.

As a result, I once vowed to never, ever get rid of anything again – which means every spare space of our home is filled with things stored for some future imagined use.

Now that spring is approaching, I’m bracing myself for separation anxiety as I take on the formidable task of dunging out. And to be frank, I am also feeling quite breathless at the prospect of having clean, clutter free spaces in our home. For some reason these imagined orderly spaces are beginning to symbolize some soul cleansing quest I envision myself embarking on.

Not that my soul necessarily needs refining – but you get to a certain point in life and you wake up one morning with the realization that all the stuff you have amassed is just that – stuff.

Like a collection of golf balls each discovered while diving in locations throughout the Great Lakes and Caribbean. Do you think The Container Store has a suitable stylish box designed for life experience artifacts such as these? One that will let me sort them by type, color and location found?

I love The Container Store. What’s not to love about a store that advertises they offer “an exceptional and eclectic mix of products devoted to helping people simplify their lives”. A slogan that definitely has appeal for a reformed Earth Motherer like myself – who admittedly can’t shake a desire to simplify life despite being born with defective “clean genes”.

Peg Bracken, well known author of The I Hate to Housekeep Book, has clumped housekeepers into three types: spotless (won’t stop), spotful (won’t start), and random. I fall in to the random group – my heart is in the right place, but when it comes to housekeeping, I’d rather be doing nearly anything else, and generally am. Which explains my own personal invention for oven cleaning – simply let the run-overs bake on high until charcoaled and then vacuum.

But back to the dunging out dilemma – how do you know what can be eliminated and what should be saved for prosperity? Thoreau claims, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” But as I sort through the details of my life I, like Bracken and her housekeepers, have discovered there are three distinct categories: the obvious toss outs, the sentimental saves and those things that fall in the DMZ. You know, that no-man’s land of accumulated things – like golf balls found diving. You have no idea how or why you started collecting them. They will never serve any purpose in preparing you for life’s unexpected moments. But they sure do bring back a flood of memories as you attempt to toss the whole kit-and-caboodle into the trash.

And so here I sit, with the detritus of my life piled around me and I am reminded of what Stanley Kunitz once wrote, “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Golf balls definitely fall into the litter category – even if The Container Store can come up with a solution for stylishly storing them!

It’s not our things that change, it is we who change in relationship to them.