NYT Essay: Everything I Know About Hope I Learned From My Dog
In memory of our beloved Jackson. This is so true.
Everything I Know About Hope I Learned From My Dog
By Margaret Renkl
Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South
..."When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” Hamlet’s perfidious stepfather observes, failing to note that his own crimes are to blame for the rotten state of Denmark. I can’t discover any way in which I am the source of my own pandemic sorrows, but I don’t need to search far to find others whose struggles are far worse. So with every new setback and every new worry, I remind myself to be grateful for what is going right, to stop enumerating all the things that are going wrong.
That coping strategy worked pretty well until my dog died....
Dogs regard any delicious smell emanating from the kitchen as a meal they can reasonably expect to share. An elderly dog may have been fed only kibble in all the years of his long life, but he will nevertheless haul his arthritic self to his feet and wander into the kitchen, confident that this time the lasagna setting up on the counter will be his.
Our lab mix, Scout, taught me that a dog who has never caught a squirrel will keep chasing squirrels the same way a dog who is not allowed on the bed will climb under the covers the second a bed is left unattended. Betty, a feist who had never been taken to school even once, would wait hopefully beside the back door every morning, just in case it was Take Your Dog To School Day at last. A UPS delivery driver once tossed a dog biscuit to Clark, our rangy old hound, as she turned the corner, and every day for years that dog would wait in the yard for his biscuit, no matter how many delivery trucks rounded the corner without a pause.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/opinion/hope-dogs.html?smid=em-share
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