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Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be different? I wonder what it would like to be an optimist. What would it be like to believe in the best, rather than anticipating the worst? I think, maybe, I would have been an optimist. Maybe not. But, my father’s abandonment of us before I remember, followed by my mother’s death when I was six, sort of convinced me that the world wasn’t that safe or secure a place. While most children still believed the world was a good place, I knew better.
I had Anita loose her mother at age eight. Two more years than I had. They say that the earlier the trauma the greater the impact; potentially. There are always exceptions to the rule. But I’m having one of those days when I wonder. Wonder how different I would have been if I’d grown up believing the world was safe. Is that a melancholy thought, or just a thought?
I’m feeling a little melancholy tonight. The book isn’t going well. Oh, it’s going well. It reads just fine, but it’s slow. Slow, this close to the end of a book, when usually I’m racing to the end, makes me doubt. Was the book going faster before Jimmy died? Am I fooling myself that loosing my dog has made it harder to escape into my fictional world? Is it just an excuse? I can’t tell.
I know one thing for certain, I miss him curled up in the sunlight on his favorite dog bed in my office. He was the most devoted of the dogs to my work schedule. Towards the end, I carried him up stairs, or Jon did. We carried him up and we carried him down. His last day home he got to be in his favorite spot. He got to sleep in the sun, and only woke when I petted him awake. He was old, which meant he slept hard. So hard, that there were a few times when I couldn’t wake him that I thought he’d died in the sun, in his favorite bed, while I worked. But he waited to do it in the hospital, and he didn’t make us have to “help” him along. He went on his own. Am I allowed to say, I miss my dog, and the office seems empty without him, and this book isn’t nearly as much fun without him near by?