Please forgive our slightly under-the-weather physical state, but our mostly emotionally-hammered emotional scoreboard over the past 48 hours have finally thrown up a wall on my usual relentless writing pace in the short-term. Here’s what happened.
Thursday night, we were bitten at home by the apparently endless teeth of Hurricane Harvey. Our adult son Casey’s almost 10-year old Dachshund, Pluto, went outside for a duty call. Instead of coming back inside for bed time, Pluto found a new crawl space beneath our tilting back fence and decided to exit for a night on the town. By midnight of our first really cold evening in this new front, we had done all we could to find low moving blackness on a night of consuming blackness. We suspended our search until sunrise Friday.
None of us got much sleep that night. Casey was beside himself with the worst fears. He and Pluto have been through so much together, traveling through all the contiguous 48 states over the course of their early days together in West Texas, several working years in Houston, and, most recently, about 100,000 miles in a big rig that Casey drove for a delivery company based in Springfield, Missouri. Pluto was also like the canine grandson connection to the hearts of Norma and me too. Thursday night was tough.
To each his own. Norma and I turned to prayer. And, given our beliefs, Norma and I independently put St. Anthony (Patron Saint of the Lost) and St. Jude (Patron Saint of Lost Causes) on our spiritual speed dials to boot in our pleas for divine help beyond our limited human capacity for problem solving.
Early Friday morning turned light and our power line signs requesting help were up and blowing in the wind like the Fleet of Good Ships Hope that we hoped they would be. Meanwhile, I had to leave for a doctor’s appointment and didn’t get back to the neighborhood until about 11:30 AM. When I drove in the usual way, the urge hit me to bypass the normal first left turn to our house and to proceed straight for one block and then take a right into the neighborhood just east of us.
As soon as I did take the hunch course, I saw Pluto. He was walking in a yard to my right, but I wasn’t sure it was him. I didn’t recognize his blue collar. He also appeared smaller than our Pluto too, but I couldn’t be sure. I had to turn around and check him out more closely. By the time I turned around in the car, I also saw Casey outside his car – far down the same street. With one eye on the slow moving “Pluto”, I drove on to apprise Casey and get his help. We both turned around and went back.
Then Casey got out of his car and called Pluto by name. The two ran together like something out of a movie scene. Pluto jumped into Casey’s arms as they both fell in apparent relief to the ground in hugs and kisses. It was enough to water a stranger’s front lawn in tears of joy and relief.
The lessons here are many. And our personal beliefs begin with thanks to God and gratitude for the fact that we each now have the opportunity to absorb them this time without the permanent loss of our dear Pluto. Yet, we all know – the surrender of all physical attachments awaits all of us in some partial, temporary, or permanent form eventually. It is the Presence of True Eternal Love in our lives that never goes away. And that Love is available to all of us from the Power that is greater than us all. If we feel it from each other, it is because that Love is passing through each of us – to each other – and right down to the little canine smallest physical member of our little family. We are the network of attached family members through which the great river of Love flows. We rejoice in our connection. We mourn any loss. And we celebrate in quiet peace and gratitude all homecomings – especially the inexplicably miraculous kind that just unfolded with Pluto.
Thank you for your understanding.
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Bill McCurdy
Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Pecan Park Eagle
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 