Let the sun shine in

My friend's dog, Sunny, is very old. She is fifteen. She has been with him through so much and she is his very best friend in the world. She is no longer eating, and she shivers, and he knows it's time. He called me this morning so very sad, so sad that you could feel the emptiness in his heart. I don't know what I will do when this time comes for me but I do know that we need to believe in another better life, a life of sunny green pastures and bliss and rabbits to chase, and that without this, it all becomes a bit overwhelming.

I sat at breakfast today listening to a terribly nice woman tell me stories and I just kept saying "lovely" over and over and realizing that I sounded like a broken record. I wasn't trying not to be engaged, but I can't have been, because all I heard myself say was "lovely." I suppose we weren't what they like to call "connecting." And I suppose I'm getting too old to do a good job of pretending to be engaged. I am ashamed of this. I would really like to be a nicer person. So when Jack called and told me about Sunny, his dog, named, by the way after Sunny Von Bulow, "because nobody shakes Sunny," I just wanted to be with him and hold his hand while he goes through this awfulness. I look at Briar who is old and rickety and whose back is very thin (and Lucy says she's too thin but she has tummy problems and the meat just doesn't stick to her ribs anymore) but she still wags her nub at me when she sees me, and she still jumps on Noony's bed in the morning when I'm trying to wake him up, and stares at us with doleful eyes. We need to believe in a happier place. We have been heavy with the strain of pessimism and aggression and violence now for so many years; we've all forgotten the headiness of optimism and idealism, and the notion of possibility. We've given up on possibility.

I still watch the Superbowl and listen to the national anthem and cry. It's not even my national anthem and I didn't like the way Jordin Sparks messed with the tune so she could do the hand motion (flat palm moving left to right and then upwards, mimicking the voice). But I still got a lump in my throat. I know this puts me into the deep-dish fromage category.

I spent a rainy hour in Franklin Canyon with Dotsie yesterday. We sat for twenty minutes at the end of the lake and listened to the birds, the sparrows, partridge, duck, coot, woodpeckers. The rain came down on us, but we sat, both of us listening with every nerve in our bodies. There is such variety of sound in nature. So many textures. It's rather nice to listen for a few minutes without hearing a human or a car. And so later, when my friends who'd been to see Mary Oliver at UCLA told me that she feels her job in this world is to be an "observer of nature" I understood. And I understand too why people feel restored and renewed by it (nature) and why too we should be grateful for it. I think gratitude is creeping in more and more. Not sure why. I love that this is the listing for Mary Oliver in Wikipedia under Career - An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world."

I think it's important never to waste a minute. Here we are for our three score years and ten, or more likely our four score years and ten, thanks to medical science, and we need to live and breathe and feel every damn moment, with goodness and kindness, and letting the sun shine in. We really, really need the sun to shine in.