Creating the Fabric

Where do the years go,
each one passing more quickly than the one before
Days drag, decades fly
small changes unnoticed
each moment bringing the next
never acknowledging
the passing of time

then we age
and look backward more than a few inches
the inches grow to feet
then yards
before we know it
we carry a thousand miles on our face

We yearn to live for the moment
and appreciate the now
without mourning the passing of time
and embrace the lessons that create the wrinkles
while hoping for a future
better than the past

There is comfort in knowing
that through it all
every moment, every yard
every mile and every day
we are alive
and able to wonder, able to question, able to move on

each moment may be great
or not
the accumulation of those moments
each one a thread in the story of our lives
strengthens the fabric
and leaves our imprint long after we are gone.

The Boy Who Talked to Dogs on Mr. Wilson

Martin McKenna is a bestselling author and Australian Dog Communicator.  His latest book, the boy who talked to dogs tells his story, and from what I have read it is an amazing one.

He wrote the following endorsement after reading an advance copy of my book, Mr. Wilson Makes it Home. 

Thank you, Martin for the kind words and for understanding the heart of the book. 

MR WILSON ENDORSEMENT by Martin McKenna

Michael Morse is a retired Rescue Captain from Providence, Rhode Island Fire Department and for years was the first to arrive at emergency scenes responding to desperate 911 calls – so he’s learned to recognize a miracle unfolding before his eyes when he sees one.

When Mr Wilson, a cute-looking schnoodle (schnauzer-cross-poodle) arrives across country from a dog rescue service – Michael has a powerful epiphany. As he holds this once abused dog in his arms for the first time, he realizes miracles may be small things that happen to you. It’s just that they manage to pierce through ordinary life and touch the soul profoundly.

As comically mustached Mr Wilson becomes part of their lives, he continues to work his instinctive dog wisdom on those around him. Suddenly the big dreams of fancy cars and lavish vacations that never happened aren’t worth mourning. The niggling issues in his relationship with his wife are unimportant. And the trauma Michael has been carrying around from his years as a Rescue Captain begins to feel lighter.

Ultimately, Michael and his wife come to realize their life together is a wonderful success in the deepest sense – they have lived a good life worth living. It just took Mr Wilson to help them see the truth.

This begins as a gentle book and grows more powerful with each chapter. It’s about how adopting a rescue dog can help transform your life into a thing of beauty you can be proud of, simply by changing the way you think. As you turn the pages, Mr Wilson and his unforgettably resilient humans will sneak inside your heart and teach you things – even while they ‘love you up!’

Footsteps in the Sand

I clip the leash onto his collar, his favorite one, even though his team is in last place.

"Maybe next year," I say, and his hair falls over the Red Sox logo. The air is crisp, a welcome relief from summer's humidity. This is the time of year we live for, the dogs and I. The oppressive heat is gone, I can add more clothes and be comfortable, the dogs can simply wear their coats without overheating. It's a long walk to where we're going, and Mr. Wilson leads the way. He knows the path now, and seldom veers from the course. He knows when to take a right, and when to take a left. He even knows well before I do if we're going to take the longer way or not.

The other dogs come and go; Zimba, the biggest of them all, half wolf, half Alaskan malamute, as regal as a prince, and just as pertinent. Lakota, the husky, her half blue-half brown eyes focused on whatever distracts her, and the distractions are many. A person, a car, a bunny or her favorite, a squirrel. She runs straight, so fast my eyes go out of focus before she starts breathing heavy, and has to turn around and come back to me. Shannon, the Irish Setter, her golden red hair as soft as a cats. She would take a bullet for me, and seldom leaves my side.

Mr. Wilson is oblivious of the others as we make our way to the beach, he's just happy to be alive, happy to be with me, and glad to be outside. Don't get me wrong, he likes nothing more than to sleep all day on the velvet chair, or his "bed on the bed," but say the magic word, "walk" and nothing else matters. I taught him to walk on the leash without pulling, and he pushes it to the end, and the slack tightens, and the second before he feels the pull on his neck he stops, and sits until I catch up, and we do it all over again.

I can smell the low tide long before the water peeks between the homes that line the shore, and so can the dogs. The pavement under my feet is sturdy, and makes walking easy. We leave no evidence of our passing as we make our way to the water's edge. The sand that waits will give as the weight of our footsteps lands on it, leaving marks of our journey behind us as we travel the shore.

At the bottom of a thirty foot drop, made easy to travel thanks to wooden steps buried in the sand by some soul long gone is Narraganset Bay. Mr. Wilson and me take our time navigating the tricky decline, the others are long gone, already exploring. Shannon will swim, Zimba and Lakota will race along the water's edge as if the devil himself were chasing them, then suddenly stop, turn around and come back to us. Shannon shakes her velvety hair and the five of us walk together along the shore. There are crabs in the sand, stranded by the tide, oyster shells, clams galore, seaweed, bugs and random sticks, perfectly sized for a game of fetch. I lean over and pick one up, it's heavier that I thought, and waterlogged. I throw it into the ocean and watch it float for a while.

The walk to and from the beach is far longer than the actual time spent there, unless I stop and sit on a log where last night some neighborhood kids had a fire. The log looks tempting, but movement more so, so I keep on trucking, Mr. Wilson by my side. He never asks to go off of the leash, content to stay next to me, and the six feet that the nylon cord gives him is enough. We have rounded the point, and a shorter span of beach waits. It's an invigorating walk, and it feels good to feel the salt air in the wind as it brushes my skin, and the warmth from the sun on my back. There's a break in the vegetation that protects the dunes, and we walk toward it, knowing that this is the way back to the road that will take us home.

Mr. Wilson stays with me as we leave the beach, and I look back at our footsteps, a man and a dog, side by side, two feet and four paws, over and over again. I don't have to call the others, they never leave me, and neither will Mr. Wilson.

Revisions

Working on the revisions to Mr. Wilson Makes it home has been an eye opening experience. I wrote the book last year, it took a while for me to be rejected a few dozen times before ultimately securing a reputable publisher that actually agreed to pay me to publish the book rather than having me pay them to do so. There seems to be an overabundance of people and companies out there who want nothing more than to take money out of my pockets and put it into theirs.

The amount of reading material available for free makes it kind of hard to get noticed by the book buying public, so I hope that our book manages to stand out. I do know that I was in an emotional place when I wrote the book, Mr. Wilson has a tendency to bring out the best in me, and I hope that I managed to convey all of the great things that have happened to my family since we decided to adopt a homeless dog.

Mr. Wilson is now firmly entrenched in our lives, and the raw emotion that was present for the first year that we had him has diminished, and he has helped us to remember our previous two dogs, Lakota and Zimba without the pain we felt after losing them.

I'm glad I wrote the book when I did, I don't think I could have done it now, things have settled, and the need to remember the painful loss while feeling  the happiness that Wilson brought has moved into the storage bin of my brain where it belongs. I still have pangs of regret and loss when I think of the dogs I've had to let go, but those feelings are fleeting, and I'm moving on with my life, and there is plenty of room now for new experiences.

Thanks for reading, it's time for a walk.

"Come on Wilson, there's a world out there waiting for us!"

Waking

He opens his eyes and sees that the people are sound asleep. He lays there for a moment in peaceful serenety. Gone are the days when he would sleep fitfully in a cold barn, wondering if the people would remember to feed him. Gone forever are the hurts that once plagued his ribs, his paws, his face. He's home now, and as the sun peeks through the blinds, and the big one stirs while the little one with the soft voice remains sleeping he remains still, and pretends to be sleeping, and hopes that this feeling will last forever.

For every dog who made it home there are thousands waiting. 9000 homeless pets are euthanized every day simply because nobody wants them.  Mr. Wilson is home, and here he will stay for the remainder of his days. There will be lots of those, and every one will be lived to the fullest, for somehow, some way, I truly believe that he knows just how fortunate he is.

And so do we.

Time to get up, little man, we've got a day to spend together.

The Spark

That red bandana that Mr. Wilson is wearing is more than a simple fashion accessory, it's his official Therapy Dogs International kerchief! We are now certified to go anywhere and offer pet therapy to people in nursing homes, or home alone and unable to have a dog in their lives, or have kids with difficulty reading sit with the big W and read him a story. From puppy mill to Therapy Dog, it's been quite a ride!

From Mr. Wilson Makes it Home, available February 3, 2015 

Chapter 17  The Spark

      Wilson was safely tucked away in the air-conditioned comfort of the Alpha Dog Transport trailer, along with a few dozen other homeless dogs, all headed for an uncertain future. We knew that great things were in store for Wilson, but he had no way of knowing what was happening; only that things had changed. Again.

     His life had been rife with changes until this point; we believe he was born in Arkansas in what has been described as a puppy mill. The internet is full of places that look fabulous on a computer screen, and come with lovely stories of rolling hills and fresh water streams, and puppies running through tall grass, lovingly followed by their doting parents, all under the watchful eye of a responsible breeder.

     Those places may well exist, but what definitely does exist is the anti-heaven so delightfully described by web designers. The reality is stark contrast to what we are shown, dark, excruciatingly hot trailers in the woods filled with animals who breed until they die, or can no longer provide a revenue stream for the people who own them. Conditions at these places are appalling, malnourished mothers giving birth to malnourished pups, four weeks later those pups being taken away from their moms, packed in crates and shipped off to unsuspecting buyers. The mom is put right back at it, and is impregnated as soon as possible, and if she barks metal rods are shoved down her throat to sever her vocal cords, and she lies in her own excretement and eats the floor sweepings from dog food companies that ship their waste in boxcars to people who buy it in bulk and feed it to their charges, not for nourishment, rather to keep them alive long enough to deliver another pile of cash.

     When the dogs have finished being productive they are shot in the head or clubbed to death and their body thrown in a fire, and one of her pups takes over pumping out four-legged money producers, and the cycle repeats itself.

     Ole Wilson and his sister were sold to a pet store, and then bought by, and then lived with a lady and her kids. He didn’t like living there much, and took every chance he had to escape. He would run wild, and I’m sure he had loads of fun, until he got hungry, or cold, or afraid of the bigger, wild animals that shared his roaming grounds. Then, the life of a vagabond freedom loving little dog got much more complicated, and being on his own not nearly as much fun as anticipated, and he would slink back to the only home he knew, and be punished, and reprimanded, and probably whacked, and made to feel like a bad, bad boy.

     A wonderful woman named Cheri took a liking to Wilson after seeing him running free with his sister too often. She had a feeling about him, and knew that he was special. And he is.

     All living things need to be nurtured. People, animals, plants, even bugs need some sort of interaction with other beings to thrive. Flowers need bees, bees need flowers, bugs need something to do, and other bugs to do it with, people need other people to take care of them, to love them, to feed them and educate them, and lead them toward their inherent tendency toward good. Left to fend for ourselves we would revert back to a single-minded cell that does whatever it takes to survive. A dog is no different. The survival instinct will take over if prodded, and he will never know what he could have been if given a chance.

     All too often a child’s creative spark never gets a chance to blossom into its potential for the simple yet cruel reason that nobody notices it. That creative fire burns brightly for a few years, and if stoked grows, and with the proper guidance is brought under control, and the gift is nurtured, and the child given the chance to be everything he is supposed to be.

     Or not. Far too often potential for greatness is overlooked, and before long even the child forgets just how great she is, and settles for existing rather than living.

     Much is the same for dogs. Wilson was headed for a life of being “trouble.” His free spirit was nearly extinguished because nobody saw that special something in him that Cheri saw. She knew, deep down that this dog needed a chance. He simply had to be given the love he needed to thrive, and grow, and be loved as much as his little heart could handle so that the love inside of him could be expressed, and given freely to anybody who asked for it. Or needed it.

Feel Good Friday

Things have been nutty here at Mr. Wilson's house, how it became his house is still a mystery, Lunabelle and Victoria Mae don't agree, but the fact of the matter is, he who has the most fun wins, and Old Mr. Wilson wins that contest hands down. There's not even a close second. He doesn't even need us or the cats to be fun, he'll find a bird to maim, a bug to chase, a mailman to bark at, another dog to completely lose his mind over or a chair to call his own at naptime.

The new book cover has been unveiled, it's not official yet so I can't share it, but I will as soon as I can.
In the meantime I wrote an article for Uniform Stories about a former US Marine, police officer and volunteer firefighter who brought Mr. Wilson home. Here's the link, give it a read if you have time, it's a feel good story, and we all can use as many of those as we can get. All except for Mr. Wilson, who just feels good.

http://uniformstories.com/stories/fire/what-s-next-after-leaving-your-job-behind